Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

his office in the church dignifies him. A bishop like Gardiner; he may be of dubious provenance, but by his office he is Stephen Winchester, incumbent of England’s richest see. But Cremuel remains a nobody. The king gives him titles that no one abroad understands, and jobs that no one at home can do. He multiplies offices, duties pile on him: plain Master Cromwell goes out at morning, plain Master Cromwell comes in at night. Henry had offered him the Lord Chancellor’s post; no, don’t disturb Lord Audley, he had said. Audley does a good job; Audley, in fact, does as he’s told. Perhaps, though, he should have agreed? He sighs, at the thought of wearing the chain. You cannot, surely, be both Lord Chancellor and Master Secretary? And he will not give up that post. It doesn’t matter if it gives him a lesser status. It doesn’t matter if the French don’t comprehend. Let them judge by results. Brandon can make a racket, unreproved, near the royal person; he can slap the king on the back and call him Harry; he can chuckle with him over ancient jests and tilt-yard escapades. But chivalry’s day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.
    Last thing, he opens the shutter to say good night to the Pope. He hears a drip from a drainage spout above, he hears the deep groan as snow slides across the tiles above him, and falls in a clean sheet of white that for a second obliterates his view. His eyes follow it; with a little puff like white smoke, the fallen snow joins the trodden slush on the ground. He was right about the wind on the river. He draws the shutter closed. The thaw has begun. The great spoiler of souls, with his conclave, is left dripping in the dark.
     
     
    At New Year he visits Rafe in his new house at Hackney, three storeys of brick and glass by St Augustine’s church. On his first visit at summer’s end, he had noted everything in place for Rafe’s happy life: pots of basil on the kitchen sills, garden plots seeded and the bees in their hives, the doves in their cote and the frames in place for the roses that will climb them; the pale oak-panelled walls gleaming in expectation of paint.
    Now the house is settled, bedded in, scenes from the gospels glowing on the wall: Christ as fisher of men, a startled steward tasting the good wine at Cana. In an upper room reached by the steep steps from the parlour, Helen reads Tyndale’s gospel as her maids sew: ‘…by grace are ye saved.’ St Paul may not suffer a woman to teach, but it is not exactly teaching. Helen has put off the poverty of her early life. The husband who beat her is dead, or gone so far away that we count him dead. She can become Sadler’s wife, a rising man in Henry’s service; she can become a serene hostess, a learned woman. But she cannot lose her history. One day the king will say, ‘Sadler, why do you not bring your wife to court, is she very ugly?’
    He will interrupt: ‘No sir; very beautiful.’ But Rafe will add, ‘Helen is lowly born and does not know court manners.’
    ‘Why did you wed her?’ Henry will demand. And then his face will soften: Ah, I see, for love.
    Now Helen takes his hands and wishes him a continuance of good fortune. ‘I pray to God every day for you, for you were the origin of my happiness when you took me into your house. I pray him send you health and good luck and the king’s listening ear.’
    He kisses her and holds her close as if she were his daughter. His godson is howling in the next room.
    On Twelfth Night the last marzipan moon is eaten up. The star is taken down, Anthony supervising. Its wicked points are fitted into their sleeves, and it is carried carefully to its store room. The peacock wings sigh into their linen shroud, and are hung on their peg behind the door.
    Reports come from Vaughan that the old queen is better. Chapuys thinks so well of her that he is on the road back to London. He found her wasted, so weak that she could not sit up. But now she is eating again, taking comfort in the company of her friend Maria de Salinas; her gaolers were forced to admit this lady, after she suffered an accident under the very walls.
    But later he, Cromwell, will hear of how on the evening of 6 January – just about the time, he thinks, that we were seeing our Christmas into store – Katherine grew restless. She felt herself