Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

whether matron or maid, and she can ruin a woman that way, look at Elizabeth Worcester.’
    ‘So now you can no longer forbear to speak out?’ Rafe says.
    ‘Now burst into tears, Wriothesley,’ he instructs.
    ‘Consider it done.’ Call-Me dabs his cheek.
    ‘What a play it makes.’ He sighs. ‘I wish now we could all take off our disguises and go home.’
    He is thinking, Sion Madoc, a boatman on the river at Windsor: ‘She goes to it with her brother.’
    Thurston, his cook: ‘They are standing in a line frigging their members.’
    He remembers what Thomas Wyatt told him: ‘That is Anne’s tactic, she says yes, yes, yes, then she says no…the worst of it is her hinting to me, her boasting almost, that she says no to me, but yes to others.’
    He had asked Wyatt, how many lovers do you think she has had? And Wyatt had answered, ‘A dozen? Or none? Or a hundred?’
    He himself thought Anne cold, a woman who took her maidenhead to market and sold it for the best price. But this coldness – that was before she was wed. Before Henry heaved himself on top of her, and off again, and she was left, after he had stumbled back to his own apartments, with the bobbing circles of candlelight on the ceiling, the murmurs of her women, the basin of warm water and the cloth: and Lady Rochford’s voice as she scrubs herself, ‘Careful, madam, do not wash away a Prince of Wales.’ Soon she is alone in the dark, with the scent of masculine sweat on the linen, and perhaps one useless maidservant turning and snuffling on a pallet: she is alone with the small sounds of river and palace. And she speaks, and no one answers, except the girl who mutters in her sleep: she prays, and no one answers; and she rolls on to her side, and smooths her hands over her thighs, and touches her own breasts.
    So what if, one day, it’s yes, yes, yes, yes, yes? To whoever happens to be standing by when the thread of her virtue snaps? Even if it’s her brother?
    He says to Rafe, to Call-Me, ‘I have heard such matter today as I never thought to hear in a Christian country.’
    They wait, the young gentlemen: their eyes on his face. Call-Me says, ‘Am I still a lady, or shall I take my seat and pick up my pen?’
    He thinks, what we do here in England, we send our children into other households when they are young, and so it is not rare for a brother and sister to meet, when they are grown, as if for the first time. Think how it must be then: this fascinating stranger whom you know, this mirror of you. You fall in love, just a little: for an hour, an afternoon. And then you make a joke of it; the residual drag of tenderness remains. It is a feeling that civilises men, and makes them behave better, to dependent women, than otherwise they might. But to go further, to trespass on forbidden flesh, to leap the great gap from a fleeting thought to action…Priests tell you that temptation slides into sin and you cannot put a hair between. But surely that is not true. You kiss the woman’s cheek, very well; then you bite her neck? You say, ‘Sweet sister,’ and then next minute you flip her back and cant her skirts up? Surely not. There is a room to be crossed and buttons to be undone. You don’t sleepwalk into it. You don’t fornicate inadvertently. You don’t fail to see the other party, who she is. She doesn’t hide her face.
    But then, it may be that Jane Rochford is lying. She has cause.
    ‘I am not often perplexed,’ he says, ‘about how to proceed, but I find I have to deal with a matter I hardly dare speak of. I can only partly describe it, so I do not know how to draw up a charge sheet. I feel like one of those men who shows a freak at a fair.’
    At a fair the drunken churls throw down their money, and then they disdain what you offer. ‘Call that a freak? That’s nothing to my wife’s mother!’
    And all their fellows slap them on the back and chortle.
    But then you say to them, well, neighbours, I showed you that only to test your mettle. Part with a penny more, and I shall show you what I have here in the back of the tent. It is a sight to make hardened men quail. And I guarantee that you have never seen devil’s work like it.
    And then they look. And then they throw up on their boots. And then you count the money. And lock it in your strongbox.
     
     
    Mark at Stepney. ‘He has brought his instrument,’ Richard says. ‘His lute.’
    ‘Tell him to leave it without.’
    If Mark was blithe before, he is suspicious