LITMIR.BIZ

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‘Queen Katherine does. Still.’

      ‘The Dowager Katherine. Come down.’

      She hops down to the rushes, giving her skirts a shake. ‘Even now after all that has passed between them. She sent a new parcel last week.’

      ‘I thought the king had forbidden her.’

      ‘Anne says they should be torn up and used for, well, you know what for, in a jakes. He was angry. Possibly because he doesn't like the word “jakes”.’

      ‘No more does he.’ The king deprecates coarse language, and not a few courtiers have been frozen out for telling some dirty story. ‘Is it true what Mary says? That the queen is afraid?’

      ‘For now he is sighing over Mistress Shelton. Well, you know that. You have observed.’

      ‘But surely that is harmless? A king is obliged to be gallant, till he reaches the age when he puts on his long gown and sits by the fire with his chaplains.’

      ‘Explain it to Anne, she doesn't see it. She wanted to send Shelton away. But her father and her brother would not have it. Because the Sheltons are their cousins, so if Henry is going to look elsewhere, they want it to be close to home. Incest is so popular these days! Uncle Norfolk said – I mean, His Grace –’

      ‘It's all right,’ he says, distracted, ‘I call him that too.’

      Jane puts a hand over her mouth. It is a child's hand, with tiny gleaming nails. ‘I shall think of that when I am in the country and have nothing to amuse me. And then does he say, dear nephew Cromwell?’

      ‘You are leaving court?’ No doubt she has a husband in view: some country husband.

      ‘I hope that when I have served another season I might be released.’

      Mary rips into the room, snarling. She juggles two embroidered cushions above the bulk of her child, a bulk which now seems evident; she has a hand free for her gilt basin, in which is her poetry book. She throws down the cushions, opens her fist and scatters a handful of silver buttons, which rattle into the basin like dice. ‘Shelton had these. Curse her for a magpie.’

      ‘It is not as if the queen likes me,’ Jane says. ‘And it is a long time since I saw Wolf Hall.’

      For the king's new-year gift he has commissioned from Hans a miniature on vellum, which shows Solomon on his throne receiving Sheba. It is to be an allegory, he explains, of the king receiving the fruits of the church and the homage of his people.

      Hans gives him a withering look. ‘I grasp the point.’ Hans prepares sketches. Solomon is seated in majesty. Sheba stands before him, unseen face raised, her back to the onlooker.

      ‘In your own mind,’ he says, ‘can you see her face, even though it's hidden?’

      ‘You pay for the back of her head, that's what you get!’ Hans rubs his forehead. He relents. ‘Not true. I can see her.’

      ‘See her like a woman you meet in the street?’

      ‘Not quite like that. More like someone you remember. Like some woman you used to know when you were a child.’

      They are seated in front of the tapestry the king gave him. The painter's eyes stray to it. ‘This woman on the wall. Wolsey had her, Henry had her, now you.’

      ‘I assure you, she has no counterpart in real life.’ Well, not unless Westminster has some very discreet and versatile whore.

      ‘I know who she is.’ Hans nods emphatically, lips pressed together, eyes bright and taunting, like a dog who steals a handkerchief so you will chase it. ‘They talk about it in Antwerp. Why don't you go over and claim her?’

      ‘She is married.’ He is taken aback, to think that his private business is common talk.

      ‘You think she would not come away with you?’

      ‘It's years. I have changed.’

      ‘Ja. Now you are rich.’

      ‘But what would be said of me, if I enticed away a woman from her husband?’

      Hans shrugs. They are so matter-of-fact, the Germans. More says the Lutherans fornicate in church. ‘Besides,’ Hans says, ‘there is the matter of the –’

      ‘The what?’

      Hans shrugs: nothing. ‘Nothing! You are going to hang me up by my hands till I confess?’

      ‘I don't do that. I only threaten to do it.’

      ‘I meant only,’ Hans says soothingly, ‘there is the matter of all the other women who want to marry you. The wives of England, they all keep secret books of whom they are going to have next when they have poisoned their husbands. And you are the top of everyone's list.’

      In his idle moments – in the week there are two or three – he has been picking through the records of the Rolls House. Though the Jews are forbidden the realm, you cannot know what human flotsam will be washed up by the tide of fortune, and only once, for a single month in these three hundred years, has the house been empty. He runs his eye over the accounts of the successive wardens, and he handles, curious, the receipts for their relief given by the dead inhabitants, written in Hebrew characters. Some of them spent fifty years within these walls, flinching from the Londoners outside. When he walks the crooked passages, he feels their footsteps under his.

      He goes to see the two who remain. They are silent and vigilant women of indeterminate age, and the names they go by are Katherine Wheteley and Mary Cook.

      ‘What do you do?’ With your time, he means.

      ‘We say our prayers.’

      They watch him for evidence of his intentions, good or ill. Their faces say, we are two women with nothing left but our life stories. Why should we part with them to you?

      He sends them presents of fowl but he wonders if they eat flesh from gentile hands. Towards Christmas, the prior of Christchurch in Canterbury sends him twelve Kentish apples, each one wrapped in grey linen, of a special kind that is good with wine. He takes these apples to the converts, with wine he has picked out. ‘In the year 1353,’ he says, ‘there was only one person in the house. I am sorry to think she lived here without company. Her last domicile was the city of Exeter, but I wonder where before that? Her name was Claricia.’

      ‘We know nothing of her,’ says Katherine, or possibly Mary. ‘It would be surprising if we did.’ Her fingertip tests the apples. Possibly she does not recognise their rarity, or that they are the best present the prior could find. If you don't like them, he says, or if you do, I have stewing pears. Somebody sent me five hundred.

      ‘A man who meant to get himself noticed,’ says Katherine or Mary, and the other says, ‘Five hundred pounds would have been better.’

      The women laugh, but their laughter is cold. He sees he will never be on terms with them. He likes the name Claricia and he wishes he had suggested it for the gaoler's daughter. It is a name for a woman you might dream of: one you could see straight through.

      When the king's new-year present is done Hans says, ‘It is the first time I have made his portrait.’

      ‘You shall make another soon, I hope.’

      Hans knows he has an English bible, a translation almost ready. He puts a finger to his lips; too soon to talk about it, next year maybe. ‘If you were to dedicate it to Henry,’ Hans says, ‘could he now refuse it? I will put him on the title page, displayed in glory, head of the church.’ Hans paces, growls out a few figures. He is thinking of paper and printer's costs, estimating his profits. Lucas Cranach draws title pages for Luther. ‘Those pictures of Martin and his wife, he has sold prints by the basketful. And Cranach makes everybody look like a pig.’

      True. Even those silvery nudes he paints have sweet pig-faces, and labourer's feet, and gristly ears. ‘But if I paint Henry, I must flatter, I suppose. Show him how he was five years ago.

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