He breaks the seal.
He too drops the letter. Then he picks it up and gives it to the boy Mathew to file. His mind travels the road, the river. There is banked filthy mud, there is snow on the ground, there is thaw water running and the Thames overstraining its banks: the cardinal is at Esher, the Parliament is planning to ruin him, and he, a square plain figure in worsted, tries to keep his hat on his head and his head down, while the black north wind plunders and beats him like a thief, and rolls him nightly, howling, in a ditch.
‘What time is it?’
Christophe looks at him in pity: ‘You hear the midnight bell?’
He thinks, if Jane had married me, she would be alive now; I would have managed it better.
When he gets back from court he walks into his workroom and sits unspeaking at his table. Mr Wriothesley says, ‘You seem angry, sir?’
Call-Me has arrived with scant ceremony, tossing his hat down on a stool and rummaging in a chest for papers. Rafe says, ‘Who would not be angry, at the loss of so fair a creature? My lord considers her keepers to have been negligent. He believes they suffered her to take cold, and eat such things as her fancy dictated.’
‘I wish I had been at Hampton Court,’ he says. ‘When they told me to stay away I should not have listened.’
Wriothesley says, ‘Perhaps, sir, you are angry because you wish you had kept Gregory in reserve, where his marriage could do you most good. As the prince’s uncle he will of course be of consequence, but if the queen had lived, and given the king more sons, then you and all your house would have been great men for ever.’
Call-Me knocks together his bundles of papers and nods himself out. ‘I am going to write to Tom Wyatt,’ he says, turning and holding the doorframe. ‘He had better see to his duties, for I cannot do my duty if I cover for him any more. And I shall give him notice his dispatches make my head ache – there is no need to put every triviality in cipher.’
‘Right,’ Rafe says. ‘Save it for the big lies?’
Wriothesley says, ‘Wyatt scrambles his wits without point or purpose. Everything is a plot, to him.’
Rafe calls, ‘Close the door.’
They wait till they hear he has gone downstairs. Rafe says, ‘We must forgive him. I wonder how he would be if his wife had died, and not his son.’
He says, ‘He looks older. Or am I imagining it?’
‘I am very sorry for him. I remember when my first Thomas died. But even so …’
Wriothesley has entered into public duties, where you cannot let your private sorrows show, not even by an increased hauteur with petitioners, or impatience with women and underlings: still less with the Lord Privy Seal. He shrugs it off. He says, ‘I give thanks that Helen is safely delivered, Rafe. And I hope your new son will live to serve his prince as you have served the king, so happily and well.’
For Rafe has slipped back to his place at the king’s side, drawing only a distant nod and ‘All better at home, Sadler?’ It was the king himself, solicitous for a mother-to-be, who had advised Rafe to send Helen to Kent, away from the pestilence: but now he has forgotten to ask after her. Rafe’s child is a boy, and they are calling him Edward, but all other Edwards are naught, in the king’s exultation at his heir: he stands over the cradle, marvelling at what God has bestowed. But then he remembers the queen, a husk now eviscerated by the embalmers, tapers burning day and night around her bier, the prayers never ceasing, the syllables pit-pattering, the sorrows and joys of Our Lady, her mysteries, her worship and praise.
Already Jane’s household is being broken up. Her brooches and bracelets, her jewelled buttons, girdles, pomanders, her miniature pictures set in tablets; the Wardrobe takes them back, or they are given to her friends. Her manors and farms, her woodlands, chases and parks, go back to the king from whom they came, and her body, after her embalming and lying in state, goes back to God her maker. It is a long time since I first saw her, the king says, a lily among roses: I consider all the time wasted, till I made her my bride.
