It is only two summers past that the king held her hand in the garden at Wolf Hall, her small paw swallowed in his palm: two summers since he, my lord Privy Seal, greeted her in a slippery dawn light, stiff and timid in her new carnation gown. This winter he will see the carnation cloth again, worn by Gregory’s wife, as she lets out her bodices to accommodate her growing child. Bess says she is not afraid. Jane was lucky and unlucky, she says: lucky to become queen of England, unlucky to die of it. They will always make ballads about her, Bess says. And the king will give her a magnificent tomb, he says, in which he may lie with her in time to come. But I would rather be alive, Bess says, than have a great name: would not you, Lord Cromwell?
Gregory says, ‘My lord father, who will you let the king marry next?’
PART FOUR
I
Nonsuch
‘My lord?’ a boy says. ‘A gravedigger is here.’
He looks up from his papers. ‘Tell him to come back for me in ten years.’
The boy is flustered. ‘He’s brought a sack, sir. I’ll send him up.’
His neighbours at Austin Friars think he is in charge of everything, from framing the laws to propping cellars and cleaning drains. Go to the city surveyors, he says: but they say, Yes, sir, but if you would just walk around the corner and cast an eye? For I swear my boundary stone has been moved, my foundations are cracking, my lights are obscured.
Today’s will be a problem of bodies stacking up, the ground too hard to dig. You should try not to die at the turn of the year. Hang on through the season of marzipan and mulled ale. You might even see spring.
The visitor pulls off his cap. He stares around; he sees a low-lit expanse, with nothing in it but Lord Cromwell before the barber gets to him, the Queen of Sheba hanging on the wall behind. Painted on the ceiling, the stars in their courses; on his desk, like a low winter sun, a dried orange.
The gravedigger has left the door open to a rising babble from below. ‘It sounds as if you’ve brought the whole street with you. What’s in your sack?’
The man huddles it against him. He wants to tell his tale and tell it in order. ‘My lord, I woke up this morning about four o’clock. I had such a wambling in my belly …’
Lord Cromwell settles himself inside his furs, with a soft grunt like a heavy cat. He unwinds in his imagination the sexton’s morning. The sloth with which he pushes off his blanket and rises from pallet bed. The odiferous splash of his urine. The icy shock of water to his face. His mumbled prayers,
In the churchyard a dozen neighbours are gathered. ‘Get over here with that shovel,’ they shout. One poor torch gives a wavering light. The parish clerk is pulling and tugging at a bundle, half in and half out of the ground.
The sexton hastens over. One swipe and he has the thing out. It is a winding sheet, muddied and torn. ‘We took it for a babe, my lord,’ he says. ‘New-born and scantly buried.’
‘That is not the infant, in your sack?’
Clods of earth shake to the floor as the man lays the sack on the table. He opens its neck and, like a witch midwife, extracts a baby, naked and cold to the touch. It is life-sized and made of wax.
Lord Cromwell rises. ‘Let me see it.’ His palm follows the curve of the skull. The face is a blank slope, as if its features have been sheared off. He touches the blunt hands, the toeless feet like tiny hooves. Below the slope of the belly the wax has been crudely scooped and scrolled to make a cock and balls. Iron nails have been forced into the flesh where heart and lungs would be. They have been skewered deep, leaving a friable rim around each entry point.
The man is afraid. ‘Turn it about, sir.’
Into the back’s broad plane, its maker has ripped a Tudor rose.
‘It is the prince,’ the sexton says. His voice is awed. ‘It is his image. It is made to waste and kill him.’
‘You know conjurers, then?’
‘Not I, sir. I am an honest man.’
He goes to the door. ‘Christophe! Is Mr Wriothesley out of bed? My compliments to him, and will he go with this fellow and see where this thing was discovered, and find out who put it there?’
He pulls the sack over the babe’s head. Says to the sexton, ‘Spread word no further.’
Christophe comes in. ‘Half London knows. You hear the
‘Give them bread and ale, and get them back to their occupations.’
‘I can see the monster?’ Christophe peers into the sack. He makes a face.
He, Lord Cromwell, goes to the window, opens the shutter. A diffident area of grey; you cannot call it light. ‘Christophe?’ he says. ‘Tell Mr Wriothesley to wrap up warm.’
