Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

summer? She is beginning to line.’
    ‘I don’t look at her, my lady. Well, no more than a subject ought.’
    ‘Oh, you don’t?’ She is amused. ‘Then I’ll tell you. She looks every day of her age and more. Faces are not incidental. Our sins are written on them.’
    ‘Jesus! What have I done?’
    She laughs. ‘Mr Secretary, that is what we all would like to know. But then, perhaps it is not always true. Mary Boleyn down in the country, I hear she blossoms like the month of May. Fair and plump, they say. How is it possible? A jade like Mary, through so many hands you can’t find a stable lad who hasn’t had her. But put the two side by side, and it is Anne who looks – how would you express it? Well-used.’
    Chattering, the other ladies flock into the room. ‘Have you left her alone?’ says Mary Shelton: as if Anne ought not to be alone. She picks up her skirts and flits back to the inner chamber.
    He takes his leave of Lady Rochford. But something is scuffling about his feet, impeding him. It is the dwarf woman, on all fours. She growls in her throat and makes as if to nip him. He just restrains himself from kicking her away.
    He goes about his day. He wonders, how can it be for Lady Rochford, to be married to a man who humiliates her, preferring to be with his whores and making no secret of it? He has no means of answering the question, he admits; no point of entry into her feelings at all. He knows he doesn’t like her hand on his arm. Misery seems to leak and seep from her pores. She laughs but her eyes never laugh; they flit from face to face, they take in everything.
    The day Purkoy came from Calais to the court, he had held Francis Bryan by the sleeve: ‘Where can I get one?’ Ah, for your mistress, that one-eyed devil had enquired: fishing for gossip. No, he had said, smiling, just for myself.
    Soon Calais was in an uproar. Letters flitting across the Narrow Sea. Master Secretary would like a pretty dog. Find him one, find him one quick, before someone else gets the credit. Lady Lisle, the governor’s wife, wondered if she should part with her own dog. By one hand and another, a half-dozen spaniels were whisked in. Each was parti-coloured and smiling, with a feathered tail and delicate miniature feet. Not one of them was like Purkoy, with his ears pricked, his habit of interrogation. Pourquoi?
    Good question.
     
     
    Advent: first the fast and then the feast. In the store rooms, raisins, almonds, nutmegs, mace, cloves, liquorice, figs and ginger. The King of England’s envoys are in Germany, holding talks with the League of Schmalkald, the confederation of Protestant princes. The Emperor is at Naples. Barbarossa is at Constantinople. The servant Anthony is in the great hall at Stepney, perched on a ladder and wearing a robe embroidered with the moon and stars. ‘All right, Tom?’ he shouts.
    The Christmas star sways above his head. He, Cromwell, stands looking up at its silvered edges: sharp as blades.
    It was only last month that Anthony joined the household, but it is hard to think of him as a beggar at the gate. When he had rode back from his visit to Katherine, the usual press of Londoners had gathered outside Austin Friars. They might not know him up-country, but they know him here. They come to stare at his servants, at his horses and their tack, at his colours flying; but today he rides in with an anonymous guard, a bunch of tired men coming from nowhere. ‘Where’ve you been, Lord Cromwell?’ a man bawls: as if he owes the Londoners an explanation. Sometimes he sees himself, in his mind’s eye, dressed in filched cast-offs, a soldier from a broken army: a starving boy, a stranger, a gawper at his own gate.
    They are about to pass into the courtyard, when he says, wait; a wan face bobs by his side; a little man has weaselled through the crowd, and catches at his stirrup. He is weeping, and so evidently harmless that no one even raises a hand to him; only he, Cromwell, feels his neck bristle: this is how you are trapped, your attention snared by some staged incident while the killer comes behind with the knife. But the men at arms are a wall at his back, and this bowed wretch is shaking so much that if he whipped out a blade he would peel his own knees. He leans down. ‘Do I know you? I saw you here before.’
    Tears trickle down the man’s face. He has no visible teeth, a state that would upset anyone. ‘God bless you, my lord. May he cherish you and increase your