Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

Cromwell…his new masters look at him with various expressions of bemusement or disgust. ‘I shall be your prodigal son,’ he says, smiling. ‘I shall be the sheep that was lost.’
    At Whitehall, little huddles of men, muttering, drawn into tight circles, their elbows pointing backwards as hands caress the daggers at their waist. And among lawyers a subfusc agitation, conferences in corners.
    Rafe asks him, could the king’s freedom be obtained, sir, with more economy of means? Less bloodshed?
    Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.
     
     
    When he, Cromwell, arrives to see Thomas Wyatt in prison, the constable Kingston is anxious to assure him that his word has been obeyed, that Wyatt has been treated with all honour.
    ‘And the queen, how is she?’
    ‘Restless,’ Kingston says. He looks uneasy. ‘I am used to all sorts of prisoners, but I have never had one like this. One moment she says, I know I must die. Next moment, much contrary to that. She thinks the king will come in his barge and take her away. She thinks a mistake has been made, that there is a misapprehension. She thinks the King of France will intervene for her.’ The gaoler shakes his head.
    He finds Thomas Wyatt playing dice against himself: the kind of time-wasting pursuit old Sir Henry Wyatt reprehends. ‘Who’s winning?’ he asks.
    Wyatt looks up. ‘That trolling idiot, my worst self, plays that canting fool, my best self. You can guess who wins. Still, there is always the possibility it will come up different.’
    ‘Are you comfortable?’
    ‘In body or spirit?’
    ‘I only answer for bodies.’
    ‘Nothing makes you falter,’ Wyatt says. He says it with a reluctant admiration that is close to dread. But he, Cromwell, thinks, I did falter but no one knows it, reports have not gone abroad. Wyatt did not see me walk away from Weston’s interrogation. Wyatt did not see me when Anne laid her hand on my arm and asked me what I believed in my heart.
    He rests his eyes on the prisoner, he takes his seat. He says softly, ‘I think I have been training all my years for this. I have served an apprenticeship to myself.’ His whole career has been an education in hypocrisy. Eyes that once skewered him now kindle with simulated regard. Hands that would like to knock his hat off now reach out to take his hand, sometimes in a crushing grip. He has spun his enemies to face him, to join him: as in a dance. He means to spin them away again, so they look down the long cold vista of their years: so they feel the wind, the wind of exposed places, that cuts to the bone: so they bed down in ruins, and wake up cold. He says to Wyatt, ‘Any information you give me I will note, but I give you my word that I will destroy it once this thing is accomplished.’
    ‘Accomplished?’ Wyatt is querying his choice of word.
    ‘The king is informed his wife has betrayed him with various men, one her brother, one his closest friend, another a servant she says she hardly knows. The glass of truth has shattered, he says. So, yes, it would be an accomplishment to pick up the pieces.’
    ‘But you say he is informed, how is he informed? No one admits anything, except Mark. What if he is lying?’
    ‘When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function.’
    ‘But what is the evidence?’ Wyatt persists.
    He smiles. ‘The truth comes to Henry’s door, wearing a cloak and hood. He lets it in because he has a shrewd idea of what lies beneath, it is not a stranger who comes calling. Thomas, I think he has always known. He knows if she was not false to him in body she was so in words, and if not in deeds then in dreams. He thinks she never esteemed or loved him, when he laid the world at her feet. He thinks he never pleased or satisfied her and that when he lay next to her she imagined someone else.’
    ‘That is common,’ Wyatt said. ‘Is it not usual? That is how marriage works. I never knew it was an offence in the