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with half a smile. Head bowed, she had taken his hand between her own. ‘My father has spoken very warmly of you. Of how you have been courteous to him and how you have been vehement – which he accounts no less a favour. He says he believes you understand him. As he understands you.’

      ‘Meg? Surely you can look at me?’

      Another face bowed under the weight of a gable hood: Meg twitches her veils about her, as if she were out in a gale and they would provide protection.

      ‘I can hold the king off for a day or two. I don't believe he wishes to see your father in the Tower, every moment he looks for some sign of …’

      ‘Surrender?’

      ‘Support. And then … no honour would be too high.’

      ‘I doubt the king can offer the sort of honour he cares for,’ Will Roper says. ‘Unfortunately. Come on, Meg, let's go home. We need to get your mother on the river before she starts a brawl.’ Roper holds out his hand. ‘We know you are not vengeful, sir. Though God knows, he has never been a friend to your friends.’

      ‘There was a time you were a Bible man yourself.’

      ‘Men may change opinions.’

      ‘I agree entirely. Tell your father-in-law that.’

      It was a sour note to part on. I shall not indulge More, he thinks, or his family, in any illusion that they understand me. How could that be, when my workings are hidden from myself?

      He makes a note: Richard Cromwell to present himself to the Abbot of Westminster, to escort Sir Thomas More, prisoner, to the Tower.

      Why do I hesitate?

      Let's give him one more day.

      It is 15 April 1534. He calls in a clerk to tidy and file his papers, ready for tomorrow, and lingers by the fire, chatting; it is midnight, and the candles are burned down. He takes one and goes upstairs; Christophe, snoring, sprawls across the foot of his wide and lonely bed. Dear God, he thinks, my life is ridiculous. ‘Wake up,’ he says, but in a whisper; when Christophe does not respond, he lays hands on him and rolls him up and down, as if he were the lid for a pie, till the boy wakes up, expostulating in gutter French. ‘Oh by the hairy balls of Jesus.’ He blinks violently. ‘My good master, I didn't know it was you, I was dreaming I was a pastry. Forgive me, I am completely drunk, we have been celebrating the conjunction of the beautiful Helen with the fortunate Rafe.’ He raises a forearm, curls up his fist, makes a gesture of the utmost lewdness; his arm falls limp across his body, his eyelids slide ineluctably towards his cheeks, and with a final hiccup he subsides into sleep.

      He hauls the boy to his pallet. Christophe is heavy now, a rotund bulldog pup; he grunts, he mutters, but he does not wake again.

      He lays aside his clothes and says his prayers. He puts his head on the pillow: 7 sheets 2 pillows 1 bolster. He sleeps as soon as the candle is out. But his daughter Anne comes to him in a dream. She holds up her left hand, sorrowful, to show him she wears no wedding ring. She twists up her long hair and wraps it around her neck like a noose.

      Midsummer: women hurry to the queen's apartments with clean linen folded over their arms. Their faces are blank and shocked and they walk so quickly you know not to stop them. Fires are lit within the queen's apartments to burn what has bled away. If there is anything to bury, the women keep it a secret between themselves.

      That night, huddled in a window embrasure, the sky lit by stars like daggers, Henry will tell him, it is Katherine I blame. I believe she ill-wishes me. The truth is her womb is diseased. All those years she deceived me – she couldn't carry a son, and she and her doctors knew it. She claims she still loves me, but she is destroying me. She comes in the night with her cold hands and her cold heart, and lies between me and the woman I love. She puts her hand on my member and her hand smells of the tomb.

      The lords and ladies give the maids and midwives money, to say what sex the child was, but the women give different answers each time. Indeed, what would be worse: for Anne to have conceived another girl, or to have conceived and miscarried a boy?

      Midsummer: bonfires are lit all over London, burning through the short nights. Dragons stalk the streets, puffing out smoke and clattering their mechanical wings.

       II The Map of Christendom 1534–1535

      ‘Do you want Audley's post?’ Henry asks him. ‘It's yours if you say so.’

      The summer is over. The Emperor has not come. Pope Clement is dead, and his judgments with him; the game is to play again, and he has left the door open, just a chink, for the next Bishop of Rome to hold a conversation with England. Personally, he would slam it shut; but these are not personal matters.

      Now he thinks carefully: would it suit him to be Chancellor? It would be good to have a post in the legal hierarchy, so why not at the top? ‘I have no wish to disturb Audley. If Your Majesty is satisfied with him, I am too.’

      He remembers how the post tied Wolsey to London, when the king was elsewhere. The cardinal was active in the law courts; but we have lawyers enough.

      Henry says, only tell me what you deem best. Abased, like a lover, he cannot think of the best presents. He says, Cranmer bids me, listen to Cromwell, and if he needs a post, a tax, an impost, a measure in Parliament or a royal proclamation, give it to him.

      The post of Master of the Rolls is vacant. It is an ancient judicial office, it commands one of the kingdom's great secretariats. His predecessors will be those men, bishops for the most part, eminent in learning: those who lie down on their tombs, with their virtues in Latin engraved beneath. He is never more alive than when he twists the stem of this ripe fruit and snaps it from the tree.

      ‘You were also right about Cardinal Farnese,’ Henry says.

      ‘Now we have a new Pope – Bishop of Rome, I should say – I have collected on my bets.’

      ‘You see,’ he says, smiling. ‘Cranmer is right. Be advised by me.’ The court is amused to hear how the Romans have celebrated Pope Clement's death. They have broken into his tomb, and dragged his naked body through the streets.

      The Master's house in Chancery Lane is the most curious house he has ever entered. It smells of must, mould and tallow, and behind its crooked facade it meanders back, a warren of little spaces with low doorways; were our forebears all dwarves, or were they not perfectly certain how to prop up a ceiling?

      This house was founded three hundred years ago, by the Henry that was then; he built it as a refuge for Jews who wished to convert. If they took this step – advisable if they wished to be preserved from violence – they would forfeit all their possessions to the Crown. This being so, it was just that the Crown should house and feed them for their natural lives.

      Christophe runs ahead of him, into the depths of the house. ‘Look!’ He trails his finger through a vast spider's web.

      ‘You've broken up her home, you heartless boy.’ He examines Ariane's crumbling prey: a leg, a wing. ‘Let's be gone, before she comes back.’

      Some fifty years after Henry had endowed the house, all Jews were expelled from the realm. Yet the refuge was never quite empty; even today two women live here. I shall call on them, he says.

      Christophe is tapping the walls and beams, for all the world as if he knew what he was looking for. ‘Wouldn't you run,’ he says with relish, ‘if someone tapped back?’

      ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Christophe crosses himself. ‘I expect a hundred men have died here, Jews and Christians both.’

      Behind this wainscot, it is true, he can sense the tiny bones of mice: a hundred generations, their articulated forefeet folded in eternal rest. Their descendants, thriving, he can smell in the air. This is a job for Marlinspike, he says, if we can catch him. The cardinal's cat is feral now, ranging at will through

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