VIII

cheeks look creamy, her eyes darker than usual and shining. I put my hand under the covers and lay it on her belly; I like to feel the child moving. She says, “Where do you think we should have him brought up?”
    “Half here, half in France. The people must know him in all his territories – not feel he is a foreigner.”
    “I meant which house! Perhaps, Eltham or Richmond… Oh, don’t send him away too young, will you?”
    I smile and prop myself up on my elbow. “I see how it’s going to be. He’ll have you twisted round his little finger.”
    “Absolutely,” says Catherine. “In Spain they say the English hate their children; beat them too much, and pack them off to live in other men’s houses.”
    “Do they? Funny, that. In England we say that the Spaniards are thieves, the Germans are tipplers, the French unchaste, the Scots perfidious, the Danes bloodthirsty…”
    A fine linen pillow hits me full in the face. I grab it from her. “What? Isn’t that right? Maybe the Spaniards are tipplers, the Germans unchaste—”
    We’re both laughing now – well, she’s growling and laughing, and trying to tug the pillow back out of my grasp. Suddenly she stops with a small gasp, and rolls away from me.
    “What?” I say. She doesn’t move. I can only see a jumble of nightdress and bedclothes and hair. “Don’t sulk.”
    “No, it’s not that.” She’s curled up; her voice is muffled.
    “What, then?”
    “Hal.” She turns and looks at me bleakly. “I’m bleeding.”

 
♦  ♦  ♦  XII   ♦  ♦  ♦
     
     
    “Benedixit, deditque discipulis suis, dicens: Accipite, et bibite ex eo omnes, hic est enim calix Sanguinis mei… ”
    He blessed it, and gave it to His disciples, saying: Take and drink ye all of this, for this is the chalice of my blood…
    Beyond the small grille-window of the partition, the priest’s voice rises and falls in its familiar pattern, intoning the words of the morning Mass. I’m in my private closet, the one adjoining my Privy Chamber. Beside me, Wolsey sits making rapid notes in the margin of a dispatch. There’s a pile of discarded papers at my feet.
    Wolsey says, “How is the Queen?”
    “Fine.”
    Stupid answer. She’s not fine at all. She lost the child – a boy. They said the half-grown thing was formed enough that you could see its face. But her body is healing. And I have next season’s invasion of France to think about.
    “Remind me of the original proposal.”
    “Sir?”
    “The treaty with Spain. Come on, I want to go hunting as soon as Mass is over.”
    Wolsey nods. “It is proposed that King Ferdinand will invade Guyenne or Aquitaine—”
    “Before next June.”
    “Yes. With fifteen thousand foot soldiers, one and a half thousand heavy-armed cavalry, one and a half thousand light-armed cavalry and twenty-five pieces of artillery. Of which twelve will be large, and thirteen small.”
    He’s reeling this off without reference to notes. His memory, I reflect – not for the first time – is prodigious. I say, “And all land he takes will be handed over to us.”
    “Exactly.”
    “Money?”
    “You contribute twenty thousand gold crowns a month, from the point when he starts fighting.”
    “Meanwhile, we invade Picardy or Normandy – also before June – and each of us puts a fleet to sea before the end of April.”
    “Yes.”
    “My God, he ought to be happy with that. It’s more than generous. What’s his problem?”
    Wolsey raises his eyebrows, inhaling deeply. “He wants to enlist six thousand German mercenaries, and asks that you bear the cost of their transport and, before the beginning of June, send a year’s pay for them, at twenty thousand crowns per month.”
    “As a lump sum? That’s outrageous.” I think for a moment. “Could we do it?”
    “We’d need to raise a tax. Sir—” Wolsey gestures towards my kneeling desk, which stands in front of the grille-window.
    I kneel in silence while the priest takes communion. Then I cross myself and stand up. “What else?”
    Wolsey draws a paper out of the stack beside him. “Just one more thing. Our agents in Rome report that, now that the Pope wants everyone’s hands free for a crusade against the Turk, His Holiness plans to ask you to renounce your claim to France.”
    “When I’m just about to conquer it? The answer is no.”
    “And, in return for this, he will,” he reads from the document, “‘let the King of England have the rule of Scotland, which