Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

laughed.’
    He looks doubtful. Even the fullest disclosure, even a complete and detailed admission of guilt, it would not help her, not now, though it might have helped before the trial. The king doesn’t want to think about her lovers, past or present. He has wiped them out of his mind. And her too. She would not credit the extent to which Henry has erased her. He said yesterday, ‘I hope these arms of mine will soon receive Jane.’
    Cranmer says, ‘She cannot imagine that the king has abandoned her. It is not yet a month since he made the Emperor’s ambassador bow to her.’
    ‘I think he did that for his own sake. Not for hers.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Cranmer says. ‘I thought he loved her. I thought there was no estrangement between them, up until the last. I am forced to think I don’t know anything. Not about men. Not about women. Not about my faith, nor the faith of others. She said to me, “Shall I go to Heaven? Because I have done many good deeds in my time.”’
    She has made the same enquiry of Kingston. Perhaps she is asking everybody.
    ‘She talks of works.’ Cranmer shakes his head. ‘She says nothing of faith. And I hoped she understood, as I now understand, that we are saved, not by our works, but only through Christ’s sacrifice, and through his merits, not our own.’
    ‘Well, I do not think you should conclude that she was a papist all this time. What would it have availed her?’
    ‘I am sorry for you,’ Cranmer says. ‘That you should have the responsibility of uncovering it all.’
    ‘I did not know what I would find, when I began. That is the only reason I could do it, because I was surprised at every turn.’ He thinks of Mark’s boasting, of the gentlemen before the court twitching away from each other, and evading each other’s eyes; he has learned things about human nature that even he never knew. ‘Gardiner in France is clamouring to know the details, but I find I do not want to write the particulars, they are so abominable.’
    ‘Draw a veil over it,’ Cranmer agrees. Though the king himself, he does not shrink from the details, it seems. Cranmer says, ‘He is taking it around with him, the book he has written. He showed it the other evening, at the Bishop of Carlisle’s house, you know Francis Bryan has the lease there? In the midst of Bryan’s entertainments, the king took out this text, and began to read it aloud, and press it on all the party. Grief has unhinged him.’
    ‘No doubt,’ he says. ‘Anyway, Gardiner will be content. I have told him he will be the gainer, when the spoils are given out. The offices, I mean, and the pensions and payments that now revert to the king.’
    But Cranmer is not listening. ‘She said to me, when I die, shall I not be the king’s wife? I said, no, madam, for the king would have the marriage annulled, and I have come to seek your consent to that. She said, I consent. She said to me, but will I still be queen? And I think, under statute, she will be. I did not know what to say to her. But she looked satisfied. But it seemed so long. The time I was with her. One moment she was laughing, and then praying, and then fretting…She asked me about Lady Worcester, the child she is carrying. She said she thought the child was not stirring as it should, the lady being now in her fifth month or so, and she thinks it is because Lady Worcester has taken fright, or is sorrowing for her. I did not like to tell her that this lady had given a deposition against her.’
    ‘I will enquire,’ he says. ‘About my lady’s health. Though not of the earl. He glared at me. I do not know for what cause.’
    A number of expressions, all of them unfathomable, chase themselves across the archbishop’s face. ‘Do you not know why? Then I see the rumour is not true. I am glad of it.’ He hesitates. ‘You really do not know? The word at court is that Lady Worcester’s child is yours.’
    He is dumbfounded. ‘Mine?’
    ‘They say you have spent hours with her, behind closed doors.’
    ‘And that is proof of adultery? Well, I see that it would be. I am paid out. Lord Worcester will run me through.’
    ‘You do not look afraid.’
    ‘I am afraid, but not of Lord Worcester.’
    More of the times that are coming. Anne climbing the marble steps to Heaven, her good deeds like jewels weighting wrists and neck.
    Cranmer says, ‘I do not know why, but she thinks there is still hope.’
     
     
    All these days he is not alone. His allies are