Around the king’s person there is a smell of liniment and incense. Henry is propped by a mound of pillows, his bandaged leg bulky beneath a damask cover. His cheeks are fallen in and his colour bad. He blinks: ‘Cromwell, there you are.’ His voice is weak. ‘In your absence, I fear we took a tumble.’
The royal ‘we’. No other person was involved.
‘Have you any letters from Wyatt?’ Henry pushes the covers off. His leg is fatly bandaged. ‘I have nothing this week. And nothing from Hutton in Brussels either. Is someone stopping our messengers, or are they reporting straight to you these days? Who is the king, you or me?’
Our sovereign lord is back, he thinks; for an hour speechless and choking, but now imperious: the mirror of all rulers, his flickering light scarcely visible against the sunlight of a May morning.
Henry says, ‘Cromwell, I remember Greenwich. When I. When you.’ He cannot easily speak of his death. ‘I do not remember the fall. Only blackness. I thought myself extinct. My senses were stopped. I believe I saw angels.’
He thinks, at the time you said not.
Inside a tent the king was stretched out his full length, pale as paper. Henry Norris was intoning the prayers for the dead. The Duke of Suffolk was bawling like a teething babe. Outside the Boleyns were shouting their own names, and Uncle Norfolk was bellowing that he was in charge now: ‘
‘Yesterday,’ the king says, ‘you were far away, and I thought I should die alone.’
He recalls the howling surge of servants and lords, his bellowing for quiet; his palm on the king’s chest, the pounding of his own heart. Then beneath the horsehair padding of the king’s jacket, a fibrillation, like a scamper of shrews’ paws. After a second, Henry gasped; he groaned; he coughed violently, and uttered, ‘Thomas Cromwell.’ The shocked lords wailed, ‘Lie down, lie down!’ but Henry levered himself upright; his eyes turned, and took in the scene. Alive again, he looked at England. He saw her dark valleys and green fields, her broad silver waters, her nightingale woods. He saw her just laws, her free people, he heard their prayers.
Dr Butts is back, a urine flask in hand. ‘Majesty, you must not think of transacting business today.’
‘No?’ Henry says. ‘Then who will rule, Dr Butts?’
It sounds like a civil enquiry. But it makes the doctor step back.
‘We are talking of my fall at Greenwich,’ Henry says. ‘Reminiscing.’ He spits the word out.
Butts says, ‘God protect your Majesty.’
‘He did,’ Henry says. ‘I heard every man in that tent believed I was dead, except Cromwell. He stood over me and felt the beating of my heart, when others had given me up.’
He thinks, I could not allow you to be dead. Who had we for sovereign? Mary, a papist, who would have killed all your ministers? Eliza, still in the cradle? The unborn child in Anne’s womb? And how is it better now? I still have no plan, I have no route out, I have no affinity, I have no backers, I have no troops, no right, no claim. He thinks, Henry should give me the regency, give it me now. Set it down and seal it: multiple copies.
The king says, ‘I suppose now the embassies will be spreading it to the world that I am dead again.’
‘If you will spare me, I will go back to Westminster. I will visit the ambassadors in person and assure them I have seen you alive with my own eyes.’
‘Oh, and they’ll believe
‘The poisoned vapours from the wound rose right up to my brain,’ Henry says. ‘But tell them – I don’t know – tell them I had a megrim. A fall. A fright. Tell them I will be back in the saddle within days.’
Henry raises a hand to dismiss him. Versions multiply as soon as a tale is told. He knows his own story: at Greenwich the royal heart fluttering, faint as a god’s breath in a glass bubble. He recalls himself praying, but others recall him doubling his fist and pounding the king’s chest hard enough to split his ribcage. And Christophe, who was at his side all that wretched hour, claims he bounced the king’s person up and down by the shoulders; that he seized him by the ears and bellowed into his face: ‘Breathe, you fucker, breathe!’
May comes, and the king is planning a dynasty. ‘If I could get Madame de Longueville, I am sure she would give me a house full of sons, which would be a great comfort to England, if anything but good came to Edward. Our first son together would be Duke of York. The next would be Duke of Gloucester. Our third, I think, Duke of Somerset.’
Fitzwilliam says, ‘Have you forgotten she is pledged to Scotland?’
Henry never forgets anything. But sometimes he believes a king’s caprice can alter reality.
The King of France, it is said, is proceeding to Nice, where he will meet the Emperor. It seems the only way to break their amity is for Henry to choose a bride from one party, thereby insulting the other.
