Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies
hours.’
‘Dogs, sometimes. Hunting dogs, their breeding and virtues. Fortresses. Building them. Artillery. The range of it. Cannon foundries. Dear God.’ He runs his hand through his hair. ‘We sometimes say, we will have a day out together, ride down to Kent, to the weald, to see the ironmasters there, study their operations, and propose them new ways of casting cannon. But we never do it. Something is always in our way.’
He feels irredeemably sad. As if he has been plunged into mourning. And at the same time he feels, if someone tossed a feather bed into the room (which is unlikely) he would throw Bess on to it, and have to do with her.
‘Well, that’s that,’ Jane says, her tone resigned. ‘I could not found a cannon to save my life. I am sorry to have taken your time, Master Secretary. You had better get back to Wales.’
He knows what she means.
Next day, the king’s love letter is brought to Jane, with a heavy purse. It is a scene staged before witnesses. ‘I must return this purse,’ Jane says. (But she does not say it before she has weighed it, fondled it, in her tiny hand.) ‘I must beg the king, if he wishes to make me a present of money, to send it again when I should contract an honourable marriage.’
Given the king’s letter, she declares she had better not open it. For well she knows his heart, his gallant and ardent heart. For herself, her only possession is her womanly honour, her maidenhead. So – no, really – she had better not break the seal.
And then, before she returns it to the messenger, she holds it in her two hands: and places, on the seal, a chaste kiss.
‘She kissed it!’ Tom Seymour cries. ‘What genius possessed her? First his seal. Next,’ he sniggers, ‘his sceptre!’
In a fit of joy, he knocks his brother Edward’s hat off. He has been playing this joke for twenty years or more, and Edward has never been amused. But just this once, he fetches up a smile.
When the king gets the letter back from Jane, he listens closely to what his messenger has to tell him, and his face lights up. ‘I see I was wrong to send it. Cromwell here has spoken to me of her innocence and her virtue, and with good reason, as it appears. From this point I will do nothing that will offend her honour. In fact, I shall only speak to her in the presence of her kin.’
If Edward Seymour’s wife were to come to court, they could make a family party, with whom the king could take supper without any affront to Jane’s modesty. Perhaps Edward should have a suite in the palace? Those rooms of mine at Greenwich, he reminds Henry, that communicate directly with yours: what if I were to move out and let the Seymours move in? Henry beams at him.
He has been studying the Seymour brothers intently since the visit to Wolf Hall. He will have to work with them; Henry’s women come trailing families, he does not find his brides in the forest hiding under a leaf. Edward is grave, serious, yet he is ready to unfold his thoughts to you. Tom is close, that’s what he thinks; close and cunning, brain busily working beneath that show of bonhomie. But it’s perhaps not the best brain. Tom Seymour will give me no trouble, he thinks, and Edward I can carry with me. His mind is already moving ahead, to a time when the king indicates his pleasure. Gregory and the Emperor’s ambassador, between them, have suggested the way forward. ‘If he can annul twenty years with his true wife,’ Chapuys has said to him, ‘I am sure it is not beyond your wit to find some grounds to free him from his concubine. No one has ever believed the marriage was good in the first place, except those who are employed to say yes to him.’
He wonders, though, about the ambassador’s ‘no one’. No one in the Emperor’s court, perhaps: but all England has sworn to the marriage. It is not a light matter, he tells his nephew Richard, to undo it legally, even if the king commanded it. We shall wait a little, we will not go to anyone, let them come to us.
He asks for a document to be drawn up, showing all grants to the Boleyns since 1524. ‘Such a thing would be good to have at my hand, in case the king calls for it.’
He does not mean to take anything away. Rather, enhance their holdings. Load them with honours. Laugh at their jokes.
Though you must be careful what you laugh at. Master Sexton, the king’s jester, has jested about Anne and called her a ribald. He thought he had licence, but Henry lumbered
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