LITMIR.BIZ

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all slow, except us? Is that right?’

      Anne's face says, more or less, that is right. ‘Why do people marry?’

      ‘So there can be children.’

      ‘Horses don't marry. But there are foals.’

      ‘Most people,’ he says, ‘feel it increases their happiness.’

      ‘Oh, yes, that,’ Anne says. ‘May I choose my husband?’

      ‘Of course,’ he says; meaning, up to a point.

      ‘Then I choose Rafe.’

      For a minute, for two minutes together, he feels his life might mend. Then he thinks, how could I ask Rafe to wait? He needs to set up his own household. Even five years from now, Anne would be a very young bride.

      ‘I know,’ she says. ‘And time goes by so slowly.’

      It's true; one always seems to be waiting for something. ‘You seem to have thought it through,’ he says. You don't have to spell out to her, keep this to yourself, because she knows to do that; you don't have to lead this female child through a conversation with the little shifts and demurs that most women demand. She's not like a flower, a nightingale: she's like … like a merchant adventurer, he thinks. A look in the eye to skewer your intentions, and a deal done with a slap of the palm.

      She pulls off her cap; she twists the seed pearls in her fingers, and tugs at a strand of her dark hair, stretching it and pulling out its wave. She scoops up the rest of her hair, twists it and wraps it around her neck. ‘I could do that twice,’ she says, ‘if my neck were smaller.’ She sounds fretful. ‘Grace thinks I cannot marry Rafe because we are related. She thinks everybody who lives in a house must be cousins.’

      ‘You are not Rafe's cousin.’

      ‘Are you sure?’

      ‘I am sure. Anne … put your cap back on. What will your aunt say?’

      She makes a face. It is a face imitative of her aunt Johane. ‘Oh, Thomas,’ she murmurs, ‘you are always so sure!’

      He raises a hand to cover his smile. For a moment Johane seems less worrying. ‘Put your cap on,’ he says mildly.

      She squashes it back on to her head. She is so little, he thinks; but still, she'd be better suited by a helmet. ‘How did Rafe come here?’ she says.

      He came here from Essex, because that's where his father happened to be at the time. His father Henry was a steward to Sir Edward Belknap, who was a cousin of the Grey family, and so related to the Marquis of Dorset, and the marquis was Wolsey's patron, when the cardinal was a scholar at Oxford. So yes, cousins come into it; and the fact that, when he had only been back in England for a year or two, he was already somehow in the cardinal's affinity, though he had never set eyes on the great man himself; already he, Cromwell, was a man useful to employ. He worked for the Dorset family on various of their tangled lawsuits. The old marchioness had him tracking down bed hangings and carpets for her. Send that. Be here. To her, all the world was a menial. If she wanted a lobster or a sturgeon, she ordered it up, and if she wanted good taste she ordered it in the same way. The marchioness would run her hand over Florentine silks, making little squeaks of pleasure. ‘You bought it, Master Cromwell,’ she would say. ‘And very beautiful it is. Your next task is to work out how we pay for it.’

      Somewhere in this maze of obligations and duties, he met Henry Sadler, and agreed to take his son into his household. ‘Teach him all you know,’ Henry proposed, a little fearfully. He arranged to collect Rafe on his way back from business in his part of the country, but he picked a bad day for it: mud and drenching rain, clouds chasing in from the coast. It was not much after two when he splashed up to the door, but the light was already failing; Henry Sadler said, can't you stay, you won't make it to London before they close the gates. I ought to try to get home tonight, he said. I have to be in court, and then there'll be my Lady Dorset's debt collectors to see off, and you know how that is … Mistress Sadler glanced fearfully outside, and down at her child: from whom she must now part, trusting him, at the age of seven, to the weather and the roads.

      This is not harsh, this is usual. But Rafe was so small that he almost thought it harsh. His baby curls had been cropped and his ginger hair stood up at the crown. His mother and father knelt down and patted him. Then they swaddled and pulled and knotted him into multiple layers of over-wrapped padding, so that his slight frame swelled into the likeness of a small barrel. He looked down at the child and out at the rain and thought, sometimes I should be warm and dry like other men; how do they contrive it while I never can? Mistress Sadler knelt and took her son's face in her hands. ‘Remember everything we have told you,’ she whispered. ‘Say your prayers. Master Cromwell, please see he says his prayers.’

      When she looked up he saw that her eyes were blurred with tears and he saw that the child could not bear it, and was shaking inside his vast wrappings and about to howl. He threw his cloak around himself. A scatter of raindrops flew from it, baptised the scene. ‘Well, Rafe, what do you think? If you're man enough …’ He held out his gauntleted hand. The child's hand slotted into it. ‘Shall we see how far we get?’

      We'll do this fast so you don't look back, he thought. The wind and rain drove the parents back from the open door. He threw Rafe into the saddle. The rain came at them horizontally. On the outskirts of London the wind dropped. He lived at Fenchurch Street then. At the door a servant held out his arms in an offer to take Rafe, but he said, ‘We drowned men will stick together.’

      The child had become a dead weight in his arms, shrinking flesh inside seven sodden layers of interwrapped wool. He stood Rafe before the fire; vapours rose from him. Roused by the warmth, he put up small frozen fingers and tentatively began to unpick, to unravel himself. What place is this, he said, in a distinct, polite tone.

      ‘London,’ he said. ‘Fenchurch Street. Home.’

      He took a linen towel and gently blotted from his face the journey just passed. He rubbed his head. Rafe's hair stood up in spikes. Liz came in. ‘Heaven direct me: boy or hedgehog?’ Rafe turned his face to her. He smiled. He slept on his feet.

      When the sweat comes back this summer, 1528, people say, as they did last year, that you won't get it if you don't think about it. But how can you not? He sends the girls out of London; first to the Stepney house, and then beyond. This time the court is infected. Henry tries to outride the plague, moving from one hunting lodge to the next. Anne is sent to Hever. The fever breaks out there among the Boleyn family and the lady's father goes down first. He lives; her sister Mary's husband dies. Anne falls ill but within twenty-four hours she is reported back on her feet. Still, it can wreck a woman's looks. You don't know what outcome to pray for, he says to the cardinal.

      The cardinal says, ‘I am praying for Queen Katherine … and also for the dear Lady Anne. I am praying for King François's armies in Italy, that they may meet with success, and yet not so much success that they forget how they need their friend and ally King Henry. I am praying for the king's Majesty and all his councillors, and for the beasts in the field, and for the Holy Father and the Curia, may their decisions be guided from above. I am praying for Martin Luther, and for all those infected with his heresy, and for all who combat him, most especially the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, our dear friend Thomas More. Against all common sense and observation, I am praying for a good harvest, and for the rain to stop. I am praying for everybody. I am praying for everything. That is what it is, to be a cardinal. Only when I say to the Lord, “Now, about Thomas Cromwell –” does God say to me, “Wolsey, what have I told you? Don't you know when to give up?”’

      When the infection reaches Hampton Court, the cardinal seals himself off from the world. Only four servants are allowed to approach him. When he re-emerges, he does look as if he has been praying.

      At the end of the summer, when the girls come back to London, they have grown and Grace's hair has been bleached by the sun. She is shy of him and he wonders if now she can only associate him with that night when he carried her to bed, after she had been told her mother was dead. Anne says, next summer, whatever happens, I prefer to stay with

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