LITMIR.BIZ

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how I have reduced the nobility, and so forth – they are making a book called – what will they call it? – “Twenty Years of Insults”? They are brewing some stewpot into which they are pouring the dregs of every slight, as they conceive it, by which they mean every piece of truth I have told them …’ He takes a great rattling breath, and looks at the ceiling, which is embossed with the Tudor rose.

      ‘There will be no such stewpots in Your Grace's kitchen,’ he says. He gets up. He looks at the cardinal, and all he can see is more work to be done.

      ‘Liz Wykys,’ Mercy says, ‘wouldn't have wanted her girls dragged about the countryside. Especially as Anne, to my knowledge, cries if she does not see you.’

      ‘Anne?’ He is amazed. ‘Anne cries?’

      ‘What did you think?’ Mercy asks, with some asperity. ‘Do you think your children don't love you?’

      He lets her make the decision. The girls stay at home. It's the wrong decision. Mercy hangs outside their door the signs of the sweating sickness. She says, how has this happened? We scour, we scrub the floors, I do not think you will find in the whole of London a cleaner house than ours. We say our prayers. I have never seen a child pray as Anne does. She prays as if she's going into battle.

      Anne falls ill first. Mercy and Johane shout at her and shake her to keep her awake, since they say if you sleep you will die. But the pull of the sickness is stronger than they are, and she falls exhausted against the bolster, struggling for breath, and falls further, into black stillness, only her hand moving, the fingers clenching and unclenching. He takes it in his own and tries to still it, but it is like the hand of a soldier itching for a fight.

      Later she rouses herself, asks for her mother. She asks for the copybook in which she has written her name. At dawn the fever breaks. Johane bursts into tears of relief, and Mercy sends her away to sleep. Anne struggles to sit up, she sees him clearly, she smiles, she says his name. They bring a basin of water strewn with rose petals, and wash her face; her finger reaches out, tentative, to push the petals below the water, so each of them becomes a vessel shipping water, a cup, a perfumed grail.

      But when the sun comes up her fever rises again. He will not let them begin it again, the pinching and pummelling, the shaking; he gives her into God's hands, and asks God to be good to him. He talks to her but she makes no sign that she hears. He is not, himself, afraid of contagion. If the cardinal can survive this plague four times, I am sure I am in no danger, and if I die, I have made my will. He sits with her, watching her chest heaving, watching her fight and lose. He is not there when she dies – Grace has already taken sick, and he is seeing her put to bed. So he is out of the room, just, and when they usher him in, her stern little face has relaxed into sweetness. She looks passive, placid; her hand is already heavy, and heavy beyond his bearing.

      He comes out of the room; he says, ‘She was already learning Greek.’ Of course, Mercy says: she was a wonderful child, and your true daughter. She leans against his shoulder and cries. She says, ‘She was clever and good, and in her way, you know, she was beautiful.’

      His thought had been: she was learning Greek: perhaps she knows it now.

      Grace dies in his arms; she dies easily, as naturally as she was born. He eases her back against the damp sheet: a child of impossible perfection, her fingers uncurling like thin white leaves. I never knew her, he thinks; I never knew I had her. It has always seemed impossible to him that some act of his gave her life, some unthinking thing that he and Liz did, on some unmemorable night. They had intended the name to be Henry for a boy, Katherine for a girl, and, Liz had said, that will do honour to your Kat as well. But when he had seen her, swaddled, beautiful, finished and perfect, he had said quite another thing, and Liz had agreed. We cannot earn grace. We do not merit it.

      He asks the priest if his elder daughter can be buried with her copybook, in which she has written her name: Anne Cromwell. The priest says he has never heard of such a thing. He is too tired and angry to fight.

      His daughters are now in Purgatory, a country of slow fires and ridged ice. Where in the Gospels does it say ‘Purgatory’?

      Tyndale says, now abideth faith, hope and love, even these three; but the greatest of these is love.

      Thomas More thinks it is a wicked mistranslation. He insists on ‘charity’. He would chain you up, for a mistranslation. He would, for a difference in your Greek, kill you.

      He wonders again if the dead need translators; perhaps in a moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything they need to know.

      Tyndale says, ‘Love never falleth away.’

      October comes in. Wolsey presides, as usual, over the meetings of the king's council. But in the law courts, as Michaelmas term opens, writs are moved against the cardinal. He is charged with success. He is charged with the exercise of power. Specifically, he is charged with asserting a foreign jurisdiction in the king's realm – that is to say, with exercising his role as papal legate. What they mean to say is this: he is alter rex. He is, he has always been, more imperious than the king. For that, if it is a crime, he is guilty.

      So now they swagger into York Place, the Duke of Suffolk, the Duke of Norfolk: the two great peers of the realm. Suffolk, his blond beard bristling, looks like a pig among truffles; a florid man, he remembers, turns my lord cardinal sick. Norfolk looks apprehensive, and as he turns over the cardinal's possessions, it is clear that he expects to find wax figures, perhaps of himself, perhaps with long pins stuck through them. The cardinal has done his feats by a compact with the devil; that is his fixed opinion.

      He, Cromwell, sends them away. They come back. They come back with further and higher commissions and better signatures, and they bring with them the Master of the Rolls. They take the Great Seal from my lord cardinal.

      Norfolk glances sideways at him, and gives him a fleeting, ferrety grin. He doesn't know why.

      ‘Come and see me,’ the duke says.

      ‘Why, my lord?’

      Norfolk turns down his mouth. He never explains.

      ‘When?’

      ‘No hurry,’ Norfolk says. ‘Come when you've mended your manners.’

      It is 19 October 1529.

       III Make or Mar All Hallows 1529

      Halloween: the world's edge seeps and bleeds. This is the time when the tally-keepers of Purgatory, its clerks and gaolers, listen in to the living, who are praying for the dead.

      At this time of year, with their parish, he and Liz would keep vigil. They would pray for Henry Wykys, her father; for Liz's dead husband, Thomas Williams; for Walter Cromwell, and for distant cousins; for half-forgotten names, long-dead half-sisters and lost step-children.

      Last night he kept the vigil alone. He lay awake, wishing Liz back; waiting for her to come and lie beside him. It's true he is at Esher with the cardinal, not at home at the Austin Friars. But, he thought, she'll know how to find me. She'll look for the cardinal, drawn through the space between worlds by incense and candlelight. Wherever the cardinal is, I will be.

      At some point he must have slept. When daylight came, the room felt so empty it was empty even of him.

      All Hallows Day: grief comes in waves. Now it threatens to capsize him. He doesn't believe that the dead come back; but that doesn't stop him from feeling the brush of their fingertips, wing-tips, against his shoulder. Since last night they have been less individual forms and faces than a solid aggregated mass, their flesh slapping and jostling together, their texture dense like sea creatures, their faces sick with an undersea sheen.

      Now he stands in a window embrasure, Liz's prayer book in hand. His daughter Grace liked to look at it, and today he can feel the imprint of her small fingers under his own. These are Our Lady's prayers for the canonical hours, the pages illuminated by a dove, a vase of lilies.

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