The Mirror and the Light полностью

Clément Janequin, his psalms. The duets of Francesco Spinacino, the saltarellos of Dalza the Milanese: the pavane alla venetiana, pavane alla ferrarese: a new toccata from Capirola, quickly rehearsed from a manuscript decorated at its edges with the images of apes and leaping hares. The galliard, the basse-dance, Chansons nouvelles en musique à quatre parties: four parties now dead, or dead in effect, and five if you count George Boleyn. On other light evenings, the musicians will ease themselves to the royal threshold: the jellies go out, and the fruits roasted in honey, and as the waiters depart, the consort arrives, one with lute in hand: a single note, shivering, is drawn from a string tightened to a seraph key. With Norris, Brereton, and Weston gone, other gentlemen, chosen by Thomas Cromwell, will take their places in the privy chamber, close to the person of the king. But old servants are the best, the ones who know when you need to sing and when you need to pray. Will death stop them jotting their names on the roster, pricking their names on the list: six weeks off and six weeks on? By the third week in May, their heads are in the street. Autumn will come, the days shortening, and the shade of Harry Norris will slide back to his tasks, bobbing in a corner like a spider on his silk. There is a place, a sequestered place in the imagination, where the eel boy is always waiting to be whipped, where George Boleyn is always in his prison room, always rising in welcome: Master Cromwell, I knew you would come. As George had stood, his hands held out, an image had stirred inside him, and he was elsewhere: in some other enclosed space, the light failing, as if a shutter had half-closed. Above him a shadow, like the outstretched wing of an angel; blood in his mouth, and the curve not of feathers but of stone: and a chill, a deep chill in the marrow. A stone arch, a cellar, a crypt, where someone is waiting in the dark: someone who has apprehended pain for so long that he walks towards it, arms open, relieved that it is here at last.

He remembers himself at eighteen years of age, a shattered creature crawling from the battlefield, creeping through Italy till he came to rest – or a halt, anyway – at the gate of the Frescobaldi banking house. He did not know then whose house it was, only that he needed shelter. He had seen the city’s saint drawn on walls – the city’s patron, one should say: Hercules as an infant, crushing a snake in his fist; Hercules as a hero cleaning out the Augean stables with his bucket and his rake. So when the gate opened to his knock he crawled inside. ‘My name?’ he told the steward. ‘My name is Ercole, I can labour.’

Now when he recalls himself, helpless on the cobbles, he sees himself blackened as he crawls, as if escaping from a burning building. He walks the rooms of the manor at Mortlake, Lord Cromwell on home ground, the wash of the river familiar as the waters of his mother’s womb. He douses his light at last, and sleeps, and dreams he stands, wrapped in his cloak of night, on a wharf where the burning boats have fired the quays.

Towards morning, banging at the gate wakes the household. He rises, prays briefly, and goes down to see what the noise is about. It is Richmond’s people, come from St James’s to say the young duke is dead.

He says, ‘Is someone on the road to tell the king?’ (For once, this is not his role: Mortlake to the Dover road, one has not wings.) ‘Alert my lord archbishop. He should be ready to go to the king’s side.’

He thinks, Henry will say this is God’s punishment on him, for allowing the bishops to make new articles of faith. For stripping the number of the sacraments away.

‘Ensure word goes up-country to my lady Clinton. Remember the feelings of a mother, tell her gently – not banging on the gate and shouting it to the skies.’

Seventeen years back, when the king’s son was born, he himself had not been at court or anywhere near it, and so he had to rely on others to tell him about those days. Francis Bryan saw Bessie Blount when she first came into the queen’s household, fair as a goddess and not yet fourteen. The king would not touch her at that age; the most lenient confessor would have shaken his jowls at it. Henry danced with her, and waited a year or two, always mindful of Charles Brandon bustling behind him, ready to snap her up. Then Queen Katherine had to watch her as her little maid of honour filled out, plump and smiling and sick every morning. Katherine said nothing, only praising her glowing skin. Why, she had said, I think our little Bessie is in love.