Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

step-daughter, the elder child of his wife Helen. She is wearing the peacock wings he made long ago for Grace.
    Long ago? It is not ten years, not nearly ten. The feathers’ eyes gleam; the day is dark, but banks of candles pick out threads of gold, the scarlet splash of holly berries bound on the wall, the points of the silver star. That night, as snowflakes float to earth, Gregory asks him, ‘Where do the dead live now? Do we have Purgatory or not? They say it still exists, but no one knows where. They say we do no good by praying for the suffering souls. We cannot pray them out, as once we could.’
    When his family died, he had done everything as was the custom in those days: offerings, masses. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘The king will not allow preaching on Purgatory, it is so contentious. You can talk to Archbishop Cranmer.’ A twist of his mouth. ‘He’ll tell you the latest thinking.’
    ‘I take it very hard if I cannot pray for my mother. Or if they let me pray but say I am wasting my breath because nobody hears me.’
    Imagine the silence now, in that place which is no-place, that anteroom to God where each hour is ten thousand years long. Once you imagined the souls held in a great net, a web spun by God, held safe till their release into his radiance. But if the net is cut and the web broken, do they spill into freezing space, each year falling further into silence, until there is no trace of them at all?
    He takes the child to a looking glass so she can see her wings. Her steps are tentative, she is in awe at herself. Mirrored, the peacock eyes speak to him. Do not forget us. As the year turns, we are here: a whisper, a touch, a feather’s breath from you.
     
     
    Four days later, Eustache Chapuys, the ambassador of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, arrives in Stepney. He comes in to a warm welcome from the household, who approach him and wish him well in Latin and French. Chapuys is a Savoyard, speaks some Spanish but English hardly at all, though he is beginning to understand more than he speaks.
    Back in the city their two households have been fraternising since a gusty autumn night when a fire started at the ambassador’s lodging, and his wailing attendants, soot-blackened and carrying all they could salvage, came banging at the gates of Austin Friars. The ambassador lost his furniture and his wardrobe; one could not help laughing at the sight of him, wrapped in a scorched curtain with only a shirt beneath. His entourage spent the night on pallets on the floor of the hall, brother-in-law John Williamson having quit his chamber to allow the unexpected dignitary to occupy it. Next day the ambassador suffered the embarrassment of going into company in borrowed clothes too large for him; it was either that, or take the Cromwell livery, a spectacle from which an ambassador’s career could never recover. He had set tailors to work at once. ‘I don’t know where we will replicate that violent flame-coloured silk you favour. But I’ll put the word out in Venice.’ Next day, he and Chapuys had walked over the ground together, under the blackened beams. The ambassador gave a low moan as he stirred with a stick the wet black sludge that had been his official papers. ‘Do you think,’ he had said, glancing up, ‘that the Boleyns did this?’
    The ambassador has never acknowledged Anne Boleyn, never been presented to her; he must forgo that pleasure, Henry has decreed, till he is ready to kiss her hand and call her queen. His allegiance is to the other queen, the exile at Kimbolton; but Henry says, Cromwell, sometime we will practise to bring Chapuys face to face with the truth. I should like to see what he would do, the king says, if he were put in Anne’s path and could not avoid her.
    Today the ambassador is wearing a startling hat. More like the sort that George Boleyn sports, than a hat for a grave councillor. ‘What do you think, Cremuel?’ He tilts it.
    ‘Very becoming. I must get one of those.’
    ‘Allow me to present you…’ Chapuys removes it from his head with a flourish, then reconsiders. ‘No, it would not fit your big head. I shall have one made for you.’ He takes his arm. ‘ Mon cher , your household is a delight as always. But may we talk apart?’
    In a private room, the ambassador attacks. ‘They say that the king will command priests to marry.’
    He is caught off-guard; but he does not mean to be jolted out of his good humour. ‘There is some merit in it,