Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

last. Am I to be married to you?’
    ‘I must forgo that prospect. I am too old for you, Jane. I could be your father.’
    ‘Could you?’ Jane says wonderingly. ‘Well, stranger things have happened at Wolf Hall. I didn’t even realise you knew my mother.’
    A fleeting smile and she vanishes, leaving him looking after her. We could be married at that, he thinks; it would keep my mind agile, wondering how she might misconstrue me. Does she do it on purpose?
    Though I can’t have her till Henry’s finished with her. And I once swore I would not take on his used women, did I not?
    Perhaps, he had thought, I should scribble an aide-memoire for the Seymour boys, so they are clear on what presents Jane should and should not accept. The rule is simple: jewellery yes, money no. And till the deal is done, let her not take off any item of clothing in Henry’s presence. Not even, he will advise, her gloves.
     
     
    Unkind people describe his house as the Tower of Babel. It is said he has servants from every nation under the sun, except Scotland; so Scots keep applying to him, in hope. Gentlemen and even noblemen from here and abroad are pressing him to take their sons into his household, and he accepts all he thinks he can train. On any given day at Austin Friars a group of German scholars will be deploying the many varieties of their tongue, frowning over the letters of evangelists from their own territories. At dinner young Cambridge men exchange snippets of Greek; they are the scholars he has helped, now come to help him. Sometimes a company of Italian merchants come in for supper, and he chats with them in those languages he learned when he worked for the bankers in Florence and Venice. The retainers of his neighbour Chapuys loll about drinking at the expense of the Cromwell buttery, and gossip in Spanish, in Flemish. He himself speaks in French to Chapuys, as it is the ambassador’s first language, and employs French of a more demotic sort to his boy Christophe, a squat little ruffian who followed him home from Calais, and who is never far from his side; he doesn’t let him far from his side, because around Christophe fights break out.
    There is a summer of gossip to catch up on, and accounts to go through, receipts and expenses of his houses and lands. But first he goes out to the kitchen to see his chief cook. It’s that early-afternoon lull, dinner cleared, spits cleaned, pewter scoured and stacked, a smell of cinnamon and cloves, and Thurston standing solitary by a floured board, gazing at a ball of dough as if it were the head of the Baptist. As a shadow blocks his light, ‘Inky fingers out!’ the cook roars. Then, ‘Ah. You, sir. Not before time. We had great venison pasties made against your coming, we had to give them out to your friends before they went bad. We’d have sent some up to you, only you move around so fast.’
    He holds out his hands for inspection.
    ‘I beg pardon,’ Thurston says. ‘But you see I have young Thomas Avery down here fresh from the account books, poking around the stores and wanting to weigh things. Then Master Rafe, look Thurston, we have some Danes coming, what can you make for Danes? Then Master Richard crashing in, Luther has sent his messengers, what sort of cakes do Germans like?’
    He gives the dough a pinch. ‘Is this for Germans?’
    ‘Never mind what it is. If it works, you’ll eat it.’
    ‘Did they pick the quinces? It can’t be long before we have frost. I can feel it in my bones.’
    ‘Listen to you,’ Thurston says. ‘You sound like your own grandam.’
    ‘You didn’t know her. Or did you?’
    Thurston chuckles. ‘Parish drunk?’
    Probably. What sort of woman could have suckled his father Walter Cromwell, and not turned to drink? Thurston says, as if it’s just struck him, ‘Mind you, a man has two grandams. Who were your mother’s people, sir?’
    ‘They were northerners.’
    Thurston grins. ‘Come out of a cave. You know young Francis Weston? He that waits on the king? His people are giving out that you’re a Hebrew.’ He grunts; he’s heard that one before. ‘Next time you’re at court,’ Thurston advises, ‘take your cock out and put it on the table and see what he says to that.’
    ‘I do that anyway,’ he says. ‘If the conversation flags.’
    ‘Mind you…’ Thurston hesitates. ‘It’s true, sir, you are a Hebrew because you lend money at interest.’
    Mounting, in Weston’s case. ‘Anyway,’ he says. He gives