Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

‘Do you call this a fire? Do you call this a climate?’ Smoke from the wood eddies past them. ‘Smoke and smells and no heat!’
    ‘Get a stove. I’ve got stoves.’
    ‘Oh, yes,’ the ambassador moans, ‘but then the servants stuff them with rubbish and they blow up. Or the chimneys fall apart and you have to send across the sea for a man to fix them. I know all about stoves.’ He rubs his blue hands. ‘I told her chaplain, you know. When she is on her deathbed, I said, ask her whether Prince Arthur left her a virgin or not. All the world must believe a declaration made by a dying woman. But he is an old man. In his grief and trouble he forgot. So now we will never be sure.’
    That is a large admission, he thinks: that the truth may be other than what Katherine told us all these years. ‘But do you know,’ Chapuys says, ‘before I left her, she said a troubling thing to me. She said, “It might be all my fault. That I stood out against the king, when I could have made an honourable withdrawal and let him marry again.” I said to her, madam – because I was amazed – madam, what are you thinking, you have right on your side, the great weight of opinion, both lay and clerical – “Ah but,” she said to me, “to the lawyers there was doubt in the case. And if I erred, then I drove the king, who does not brook opposition, to act according to his worse nature, and therefore I partly share in the guilt of his sin.” I said to her, good madam, only the harshest authority would say so; let the king bear his own sins, let him answer for them. But she shook her head.’ Chapuys shakes his, distressed, perplexed. ‘All those deaths, the good Bishop Fisher, Thomas More, the sainted monks of the Charterhouse…“I am going out of life,” she said, “dragging their corpses.”’
    He is silent. Chapuys crosses the room to his desk and opens a little inlaid box. ‘Do you know what this is?’
    He picks up the silk flower, carefully in case it falls to dust in his fingers. ‘Yes. Her present from Henry. Her present when the New Year’s prince was born.’
    ‘It shows the king in a good light. I would not have believed him so tender. I am sure I would not have thought to do it.’
    ‘You are a sad old bachelor, Eustache.’
    ‘And you a sad old widower. What did you give your wife, when your lovely Gregory was born?’
    ‘Oh, I suppose…a gold dish. A gold chalice. Something to set up on her shelf.’ He hands back the silk flower. ‘A city wife wants a present she can weigh.’
    ‘Katherine gave me this rose as we parted,’ Chapuys says. ‘She said, it is all I have to bequeath. She told me, choose a flower from the coffer and go. I kissed her hand and took to the road.’ He sighs. He drops the flower on his desk and slides his hands into his sleeves. ‘They tell me the concubine is consulting diviners to tell the sex of her child, although she did that before and they all told her it was a boy. Well, the queen’s death has altered the position of the concubine. But not perhaps in the way she would like.’
    He lets that pass. He waits. Chapuys says, ‘I am informed that Henry paraded his little bastard about the court when he heard the news.’
    Elizabeth is a forward child, he tells the ambassador. But then you must remember that, when he was hardly a year older than his daughter is now, the young Henry rode through London, perched on the saddle of a warhorse, six feet from the ground and gripping the pommel with fat infant fists. You should not discount her, he tells Chapuys, just because she is young. The Tudors are warriors from their cradle.
    ‘Ah, well, yes,’ Chapuys flicks a speck of ash from his sleeve. ‘Assuming she is a Tudor. Which some people do doubt. And the hair proves nothing, Cremuel. Considering I could go out on the street and catch half a dozen redheads without a net.’
    ‘So,’ he says, laughing, ‘you consider Anne’s child could have been fathered by any passer-by?’
    The ambassador hesitates. He does not like to admit he has been listening to French rumours. ‘Anyway,’ he sniffs, ‘even if she is Henry’s child, she is still a bastard.’
    ‘I must leave you.’ He stands up. ‘Oh. I should have brought back your Christmas hat.’
    ‘You may have custody of it.’ Chapuys huddles into himself. ‘I shall be in mourning for some time. But do not wear it, Thomas. You will stretch it out of shape.’
     
     
    Call-Me-Risley comes straight from the