Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

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      ‘He is still busy with the French envoys,’ Kratzer says. ‘De Dinteville wants to take his picture home with him when he gets his recall …’

      There is some laughter at the expense of the French ambassador, always doing his packing and having to undo it again, as his master commands him to stay where he is. ‘Anyway, I hope he does not take it too quick,’ Hans says, ‘because I mean to show it and get commissions off it. I want the king to see it, indeed I want to paint the king, do you think I can?’

      ‘I will ask him,’ he says easily. ‘Let me choose the time.’ He looks down the table to see Vaughan glow with pride, like Jupiter on a painted ceiling.

      After they get up from the table his guests eat ginger comfits and candied fruits, and Kratzer makes some drawings. He draws the sun and the planets moving in their orbits according to the plan he has heard of from Father Copernicus. He shows how the world is turning on its axis, and nobody in the room denies it. Under your feet you can feel the tug and heft of it, the rocks groaning to tear away from their beds, the oceans tilting and slapping at their shores, the giddy lurch of Alpine passes, the forests of Germany ripping at their roots to be free. The world is not what it was when he and Vaughan were young, it is not what it was even in the cardinal's day.

      The company has left when his niece Alice comes in, past his watchmen, wrapped up in a cloak; she is escorted by Thomas Rotherham, one of his wards who lives in the house. ‘Never fear, sir,’ she says, ‘Jo is sitting up with Dame Elizabeth, and nothing gets by Jo.’

      Does it not? That child perpetually in tears over her spoiled sewing? That grubby little girl sometimes found rolling under a table with a wet dog, or chasing a peddler down the street? ‘I would like to talk to you,’ Alice says, ‘if you have time for me?’ Of course, he says, taking her arm, folding her hand in his; Thomas Rotherham turns pale – which puzzles him – and slides away.

      Alice sits down in his office. She yawns. ‘Excuse me – but she is hard work and the hours are long.’ She tucks a strand of hair into her hood. ‘She is ready to break,’ she says. ‘She is brave to your faces, but she cries at night, because she knows she is a fraud. And even while she is crying, she peeps under her eyelids to see what effect she is making.’

      ‘I want it over with now,’ he says. ‘For all the trouble she has caused, we do not find ourselves an edifying spectacle, three or four of us learned in the law and the scriptures, convening day after day to try to trip one chit of a girl.’

      ‘Why did you not bring her in before?’

      ‘I didn't want her to shut the prophecy shop. I wanted to see who would come to her whistle. And Lady Exeter has, and Bishop Fisher. And a score of monks and foolish priests whose names I know, and a hundred perhaps whose names I don't know yet.’

      ‘And will the king kill them all?’

      ‘Very few, I hope.’

      ‘You incline him to mercy?’

      ‘I incline him to patience.’

      ‘What will happen to her? Dame Eliza?’

      ‘We will frame charges.’

      ‘She will not go in a dungeon?’

      ‘No, I shall move the king to treat her with consideration, he is always – he is usually – respectful of any person in the religious life. But Alice,’ he sees that she is dissolving into tears, ‘I think this has all been too much for you.’

      ‘No, not at all. We are soldiers in your army.’

      ‘She has not been frightening you, talking about the devil's wicked offers?’

      ‘No, it's Thomas Rotherham's offers … he wants to marry me.’

      ‘So that's what's wrong with him!’ He is amused. ‘Could he not ask himself?’

      ‘He thought you would look at him in that way you have … as if you were weighing him.’

      Like a clipped coin? ‘Alice, he owns a fat slice of Bedfordshire, and his manors prosper very nicely since I have been looking after them. And if you like each other, how could I object? You are a clever girl, Alice. Your mother,’ he says softly, ‘and your father, they would be very pleased with you, if they were able to see.’

      This is why Alice is crying. She must ask her uncle's permission because this last year has left her orphaned. The day his sister Bet died, he was up-country with the king. Henry was receiving no messengers from London for fear of contagion, so she was dead and buried before he knew she was ill. When the news crept through at last, the king spoke to him with tenderness, a hand on his arm; he spoke of his own sister, the silver-haired lady like a princess in a book, removed from this life to gardens of Paradise, he had claimed, reserved for royal dead; for it is impossible, he had said, to think of that lady in any low place, any place of darkness, the barred charnel house of Purgatory with its flying cinders and sulphur reek, its boiling tar and roiling clouds of sleet.

      ‘Alice,’ he says, ‘dry your tears, find Thomas Rotherham, and end his pain. You need not come to Lambeth tomorrow. Jo can come, if she is as formidable as you say.’

      Alice turns in the doorway. ‘I will see her again, though? Eliza Barton? I should like to see her before …’

      Before they kill her. Alice is no innocent in this world. Just as well. Look how the innocent end; used by the sin-sodden and the cynical, pulped to their purpose and ground under their heels.

      He hears Alice running upstairs. He hears her calling, Thomas, Thomas … It is a name that will bring half the house out, tumbling from their bedside prayers, from their very beds: yes, are you looking for me? He pulls his furred gown around him and goes outside to look at the stars. The precincts of his house are kept well lit; the gardens by torchlight are the site of excavations, trenches dug out for foundations, earth banked up into barrows and mounds. The vast timber frame of a new wing juts against the sky; in the middle distance, his new planting, a city orchard where Gregory, one day, will pick the fruit, and Alice, and Alice's sons. He has fruit trees already, but he wants cherries and plums like the ones he has eaten abroad, and late pears to use in the Tuscan fashion, to match their crisp metallic flesh with winter's salt cod. Then next year he means to make another garden at the hunting lodge he has at Canonbury, make it a retreat from the city, a summer house in the fields. He has work in hand at Stepney too, expansion; John Williamson is looking after the builders for him. Strange, but like a miracle the family's prosperity seems to have cured him of his killing cough. I like John Williamson, he thinks, why ever did I, with his wife … Beyond the gate, cries and shouts, London never still or quiet; so many in the graveyards, but the living parading in the streets, drunken fighters pitching from London Bridge, sanctuary men stealing out to thieve, Southwark whores bawling out their prices like butchers selling dead flesh.

      He goes inside. His desk draws him back. In a small chest he keeps his wife's book, her book of hours. Inside it are prayers on loose papers which she has inserted. Say the name of Christ a thousand times and it keeps fever away. But it doesn't, does it? The fever comes anyway and kills you. Beside the name of her first husband, Thomas Williams, she has written his own name, but she never, he notices, crossed Tom Williams out. She has recorded the births of her children, and he has written in beside them the dates of his daughters' deaths. He finds a space where he will note the marriages of his СКАЧАТЬ