Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

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      ‘Three in March. My girl Catherine is five.’ Again she touches her lips, in consternation. ‘I'd forgotten … your wife died. How could I forget?’ How would you even know, he wonders, but she answers him at once. ‘Anne knows everything about people who work for the cardinal. She asks questions and writes the answers in a book.’ She looks up at him. ‘And you have children?’

      ‘Yes … do you know, no one ever asks me that either?’ He leans one shoulder against the panelling, and she moves an inch closer, and their faces soften, perhaps, from their habitual brave distress, and into the conspiracy of the bereft. ‘I have a big boy,’ he says, ‘he's at Cambridge with a tutor. I have a little girl called Grace; she's pretty and she has fair hair, though I don't … My wife was not a beauty, and I am as you see. And I have Anne, Anne wants to learn Greek.’

      ‘Goodness,’ she says. ‘For a woman, you know …’

      ‘Yes, but she says, “Why should Thomas More's daughter have the pre-eminence?” She has such good words. And she uses them all.’

      ‘You like her best.’

      ‘Her grandmother lives with us, and my wife's sister, but it's not … for Anne it's not the best arrangement. I could send her into some other household, but then … well, her Greek … and I hardly see her as it is.’ It feels like the longest speech, unless to Wolsey, that he's made for some time. He says, ‘Your father should be providing properly for you. I'll ask the cardinal to speak to him.’ The cardinal will enjoy that, he thinks.

      ‘But I need a new husband. To stop them calling me names. Can the cardinal get husbands?’

      ‘The cardinal can do anything. What kind of husband would you like?’

      She considers. ‘One who will take care of my children. One who can stand up to my family. One who doesn't die.’ She touches her fingertips together.

      ‘You should ask for someone young and handsome too. Don't ask, don't get.’

      ‘Really? I was brought up in the other tradition.’

      Then you had a different upbringing from your sister, he thinks. ‘In the masque, at York Place, do you remember … were you Beauty, or Kindness?’

      ‘Oh …’ she smiles, ‘that must be, what, seven years ago? I don't remember. I've dressed up so many times.’

      ‘Of course, you are still both.’

      ‘That's all I used to care about. Dressing up. I remember Anne, though. She was Perseverance.’

      He says, ‘Her particular virtue may be tested.’

      Cardinal Campeggio came here with a brief from Rome to obstruct. Obstruct and delay. Do anything, but avoid giving judgment.

      ‘Anne is always writing letters, or writing in her little book. She walks up and down, up and down. When she sees my lord father she holds up a palm to him, don't dare speak … and when she sees me, she gives me a little pinch. Like …’ Mary demonstrates an airy pinch, with the fingers of her left hand. ‘Like that.’ She strokes the fingers of her right hand along her throat, till she reaches the little pulsing dip above her collarbone. ‘There,’ she says. ‘Sometimes I am bruised. She thinks to disfigure me.’

      ‘I'll talk to the cardinal,’ he says.

      ‘Do.’ She waits.

      He needs to go. He has things to do.

      ‘I no longer want to be a Boleyn,’ she says. ‘Or a Howard. If the king would recognise my boy it would be different, but as it is I don't want any more of these masques and parties and dressing up as Virtues. They have no virtues. It's all show. If they don't want to know me, I don't want to know them. I'd rather be a beggar.’

      ‘Really … it doesn't have to come to that, Lady Carey.’

      ‘Do you know what I want? I want a husband who upsets them. I want to marry a man who frightens them.’

      There is a sudden light in her blue eyes. An idea has dawned. She rests one delicate finger on the grey velvet she so admires, and says softly, ‘Don't ask, don't get.’

      Thomas Howard for an uncle? Thomas Boleyn for a father? The king, in time, for a brother?

      ‘They'd kill you,’ he says.

      He thinks he shouldn't enlarge on the statement: just let it stand as fact.

      She laughs, bites her lip. ‘Of course. Of course they would. What am I thinking? Anyway, I'm grateful for what you have done already. For an interval of peace this morning – because when they're shouting about you, they're not shouting about me. One day,’ she says, ‘Anne will want to talk to you. She'll send for you and you'll be flattered. She'll have a little job for you, or she'll want some advice. So before that happens, you can have my advice. Turn around and walk the other way.’

      She kisses the tip of her forefinger and touches it to his lips.

      The cardinal does not need him that night, so he goes home to Austin Friars. His feeling is to put distance between himself and any Boleyns at all. There are some men, possibly, who would be fascinated by a woman who had been a mistress to two kings, but he is not one of them. He thinks about sister Anne, why she should take any interest in him; possibly she has information through what Thomas More calls ‘your evangelical fraternity’, and yet this is puzzling: the Boleyns don't seem like a family who think much about their souls. Uncle Norfolk has priests to do that for him. He hates ideas and never reads a book. Brother George is interested in women, hunting, clothes, jewellery and tennis. Sir Thomas Boleyn, the charming diplomat, is interested only in himself.

      He would like to tell somebody what occurred. There is no one he can tell, so he tells Rafe. ‘I think you imagined it,’ Rafe says severely. His pale eyes open wide at the story of the initials inside the heart, but he doesn't even smile. He confines his incredulity to the marriage proposal. ‘She must have meant something else.’

      He shrugs; it's hard to see what. ‘The Duke of Norfolk would fall on us like a pack of wolves,’ Rafe says. ‘He would come round and set fire to our house.’ He shakes his head.

      ‘But the pinching. What remedy?’

      ‘Armour. Evidently,’ says Rafe.

      ‘It might raise questions.’

      ‘Nobody's looking at Mary these days.’ He adds accusingly, ‘Except you.’

      With the arrival of the papal legate in London, the quasi-regal household of Anne Boleyn is broken up. The king does not want the issue confused; Cardinal Campeggio is here to deal with his qualms about his marriage to Katherine, which are quite separate, he will insist, from any feelings he may entertain about Lady Anne. She is packed off to Hever, and her sister goes with her. A rumour floats back to London, that Mary is pregnant. Rafe says, ‘Saving your presence, master, are you sure you only leaned against the wall?’ The dead husband's family says it can't be his child, and the king is denying it too. It's sad to see the alacrity with which people assume the king is lying. How does Anne like it? She'll have time to get over her sulks, while she's rusticated. ‘Mary will be pinched black and blue,’ Rafe says.

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