Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

now, tentative. On the threshold, ‘I thought, sir, I was to entertain you?’
    ‘Make no doubt of it.’
    ‘I had thought there would be a great company, sir.’
    ‘You know my nephew, Master Richard Cromwell?’
    ‘Still, I am happy to play for you. Perhaps you want me to hear your singing children?’
    ‘Not today. In the circumstances you might be tempted to overpraise them. But will you sit down, and take a cup of wine with us?’
    ‘It would be a charity if you could put us in the way of a rebec player,’ Richard says. ‘We have but the one, and he is always running off to Farnham to see his family.’
    ‘Poor boy,’ he says in Flemish, ‘I think he is homesick.’
    Mark looks up. ‘I did not know you spoke my language.’
    ‘I know you did not. Or you would not have used it to be so disrespectful of me.’
    ‘I am sure, sir, I never meant any harm.’ Mark can’t remember, what he’s said or not said about his host. But his face shows he recalls the general tenor of it.
    ‘You forecast I should be hanged.’ He spreads his arms. ‘Yet I live and breathe. But I am in a difficulty, and although you do not like me, I have no choice but to come to you. So I ask your charity.’
    Mark sits, his lips slightly parted, his back rigid, and one foot pointing to the door, showing he would very much like to be out of it.
    ‘You see.’ He puts his palms together: as if Mark were a saint on a plinth. ‘My master the king and my mistress the queen are at odds. Everybody knows it. Now, my dearest wish is to reconcile them. For the comfort of the whole realm.’
    Give the boy this: he is not without spirit. ‘But, Master Secretary, the word about the court is, you are keeping company with the queen’s enemies.’
    ‘For the better to find out their practices,’ he says.
    ‘If I could believe that.’
    He sees Richard shift on his stool, impatient.
    ‘These are bitter days,’ he says. ‘I do not remember such a time of tension and misery, not since the cardinal came down. In truth I do not blame you, Mark, if you find it hard to trust me, there is such ill-feeling at court that no one trusts anyone else. But I come to you because you are close to the queen, and the other gentlemen will not help me. I have the power to reward you, and will make sure you have everything you deserve, if only you can give me some window into the queen’s desires. I need to know why she is so unhappy, and what I can do to remedy it. For it is unlikely she will conceive an heir, while her mind is unquiet. And if she could do that: ah, then all our tears would be dried.’
    Mark looks up. ‘Why, it is no wonder she is unhappy,’ he says. ‘She is in love.’
    ‘With whom?’
    ‘With me.’
    He, Cromwell, leans forward, elbows on the table: then puts a hand up to cover his face.
    ‘You are amazed,’ Mark suggests.
    That is only part of what he feels. I thought, he says to himself, that this would be difficult. But it is like picking flowers. He lowers his hand and beams at the boy. ‘Not so amazed as you might think. For I have watched you, and I have seen her gestures, her eloquent looks, her many indications of favour. And if these are shown in public, then what in private? And of course it is no surprise any woman would be drawn to you. You are a very handsome young man.’
    ‘Though we thought you were a sodomite,’ Richard says.
    ‘Not I, sir!’ Mark turns pink. ‘I am as good a man as any of them.’
    ‘So the queen would give a good account of you?’ he asks, smiling. ‘She has tried you and found you to her liking?’
    The boy’s glance slides away, like a piece of silk over glass. ‘I cannot discuss it.’
    ‘Of course not. But we must draw our own conclusions. She is not an inexperienced woman, I think, she would not be interested in a less than masterly performance.’
    ‘We poor men,’ Mark says, ‘poor men born, are in no wise inferior in that way.’
    ‘True,’ he says. ‘Though gentlemen keep that fact from ladies, if they can.’
    ‘Otherwise,’ Richard says, ‘every duchess would be frolicking in a copse with a woodcutter.’
    He cannot help laugh. ‘Only there are so few duchesses and so many woodcutters. There must be competition between them, you would think.’
    Mark looks at him as if he is profaning a sacred mystery. ‘If you mean she has other lovers, I have never asked her, I would not ask her, but I know they are jealous of me.’
    ‘Perhaps she has tried them and