Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

Secretary? Perhaps something we have not yet imagined.’
    He looks at him, exasperated. ‘You are not going to begin on that witchcraft business?’
    ‘No. But. If she says she is not worthy, she is saying she is guilty. Or so it seems to me. But I do not know guilty of what.’
    ‘Remind me what I said. What kind of truth do we want? Did I say, the whole truth?’
    ‘You said, only the truth we can use.’
    ‘I reiterate the point. But you know, Call-Me, I shouldn’t have to. You’re quick on the uptake. Once should be enough.’
    It is a warm evening, and he sits by an open window, his nephew Richard for company. Richard knows when to keep silence and when to talk; it is a family trait, he supposes. Rafe Sadler is the only other company he would have liked, and Rafe is with the king.
    Richard looks up. ‘I had a letter from Gregory.’
    ‘Oh yes?’
    ‘You know Gregory’s letters.’
    ‘“The sun is shining. We have had good hunting and great cheer. I am well, how are you? And now no more for lack of time.”’
    Richard nods. ‘He doesn’t change, Gregory. Though he does, I suppose. He wants to come here to you. He should be with you, he thinks.’
    ‘I was trying to spare him.’
    ‘I know. But perhaps you should let him. You cannot keep him a child.’
    He broods. If his son is to become accustomed to the king’s service, perhaps he should know what it involves. ‘You can leave me,’ he says to Richard. ‘I might write to him.’
    Richard pauses to shut out the night air. Outside the door his voice runs on, giving kindly commands: bring down my uncle’s furred gown, he may want it, and take in to him more lights. He is sometimes surprised if he knows someone cares for him, cares enough to think of his bodily comfort: except for his servants, who are paid to do it. He wonders how the queen finds herself, amid her new Tower household: Lady Kingston has been set among her attendants, and though he has placed women of the Boleyn family around her, they might not be those she would have chosen for herself. They are women of experience, who will know how the tide is running. They will listen keenly to weeping and laughter, and any words like, ‘It is too good for me.’
    He believes he understands Anne, as Wriothesley does not. When she said the queen’s lodgings were too good for her, she did not mean to admit her guilt, but to say this truth: I am not worthy, and I am not worthy because I have failed. One thing she set out to do, this side of salvation: get Henry and keep him. She has lost him to Jane Seymour, and no court of law will judge her more harshly than she judges herself. Since Henry rode away from her yesterday, she has been an impostor, like a child or a court fool, dressed in the costumes of a queen and now ordered to live in the queen’s rooms. She knows adultery is a sin and treason a crime, but to be on the losing side is a greater fault than these.
    Richard puts his head back in and says, ‘Your letter, shall I write it for you? Save your eyes?’
    He says, ‘Anne is dead to herself. We shall have no trouble with her now.’

     
    He has asked the king to keep to his privy chamber, admit as few people as possible. He has strictly instructed the guards to turn away petitioners, whether men or women. He does not want the king’s judgement contaminated, as it can be, by the last person he talked to; he does not want Henry persuaded or cajoled or pushed off course. Henry seems inclined to obey him. These last years, the king has tended to retire from public view: at first because he wanted to be with his concubine Anne, and then because he wanted to be without her. Behind his privy chamber, he has his secret lodgings; and sometimes, after he has been put into his great bed and the bed has been blessed, after the candles have been snuffed, he pushes away the damask counterpane and slides from the mattress and pads into a secret chamber, where he creeps into another, unofficial bed, and sleeps like a natural man, naked and alone.
    So it is in the muffled silence of these secret rooms, hung with tapestries of the Fall of Man, that the king says to him, ‘Cranmer has sent a letter from Lambeth. Read it to me, Cromwell. I have had it read once, but do you read it again.’
    He takes the paper. You can feel Cranmer shrinking as he writes, hoping the ink will run and the words blur. Anne the queen has favoured him, Anne has listened to him and promoted the cause of the gospel;