‘What?’ she says. ‘That too? Is it necessary? Murder will not be enough?’
He bows and turns away. ‘No!’ She fetches him back. She is on her feet, detaining him, timidly touching his arm; as if it is not her release she wants, so much as his good opinion. ‘You do not believe these stories against me? I know in your heart you do not. Cremuel?’
It is a long moment. He feels himself on the edge of something unwelcome: superfluous knowledge, useless information. He turns, hesitates, and reaches out, tentative…
But then she raises her hands and clasps them at her breast, in the gesture Lady Rochford had showed him. Ah, Queen Esther, he thinks. She is not innocent; she can only mimic innocence. His hand drops to his side. He turns away. He knows her for a woman without remorse. He believes she would commit any sin or crime. He believes she is her father’s daughter, that never since childhood has she taken any action, coaxed or coerced, that might damage her own interests. But in one gesture, she has damaged them now.
She has seen his face change. She steps back, puts her hands around her throat: like a strangler she closes them around her own flesh. ‘I have only a little neck,’ she says. ‘It will be the work of a moment.’
Kingston hurries out to meet him; he wants to talk. ‘She keeps doing that. Her hands around her neck. And laughing.’ His honest gaoler’s face is dismayed. ‘I cannot see that it is any occasion for laughter. And there are other foolish sayings, which my wife has reported. She says, it will not stop raining till I am released. Or start raining. Or something.’
He casts a glance at the window and he sees only a summer shower. In a moment the sun will scorch the moisture from the stones. ‘My wife tells her,’ Kingston says, ‘to leave off such foolish talk. She said to me, Master Kingston, shall I have justice? I said to her, madam, the poorest subject of the king has justice. But she just laughs,’ Kingston says. ‘And she orders her dinner. And she eats it with a good appetite. And she says verses. My wife cannot follow them. The queen says they are verses of Wyatt’s. And she says, Oh, Wyatt, Thomas Wyatt, when shall I see you here with me?’
At Whitehall he hears Wyatt’s voice and walks towards it, attendants wheeling after him; he has more attendants than ever he did, some of them people he has never seen before. Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Charles Brandon big as a house: he is blocking Wyatt’s path, and they are yelling at one another. ‘What are you doing?’ he shouts, and Wyatt breaks off and says over his shoulder, ‘Making peace.’
He laughs. Brandon stumps away, grinning behind his vast beard. Wyatt says, ‘I have begged him, set aside your old enmity for me, or it will kill me, do you want that?’ He looks after the duke with disgust. ‘I suspect he does. This is his chance. He went to Henry long ago, blustering that he had suspicions of me with Anne.’
‘Yes, but if you recall, Henry kicked him back to the east country.’
‘Henry will listen now. He will find him easy to believe.’
He takes Wyatt by the arm. If he can move Charles Brandon, he can move anybody. ‘I am not going to dispute in a public place. I sent for you to come to my house, you fool, not to go raging about in public view and making people say, What, Wyatt, is he still at large?’
Wyatt puts a hand over his. He takes in a deep breath, trying to calm himself. ‘My father told me, get to the king, and stay with him day and night.’
‘That is not possible. The king is seeing no one. You must come to me at the Rolls House, but then –’
‘If I go to your house people will say I am arrested.’
He drops his voice. ‘No friend of mine will suffer.’
‘They are strange and sudden friends you have this month. Papist friends, Lady Mary’s people, Chapuys. You make common cause with them now, but what about afterwards? What will happen if they abandon you before you abandon them?’
‘Ah,’ he says equably, ‘so you think the whole house of Cromwell will come down? Trust me, will you? Well, you have no choice, really, have you?’
From Cromwell’s house, to the Tower: Richard Cromwell as escort, and the whole thing done so lightly, in such a spirit of friendliness, that you would think they were going out for a day’s hunting. ‘Beg the constable to do all honour to Master Wyatt,’ he tells Richard. And to Wyatt, ‘It is the only place you are safe. Once you are in the Tower no one can question you without my permission.’
Wyatt says, ‘If I go in I shall not come out. They want me sacrificed, your new friends.’
‘They will not want to pay the price,’ he says easily. ‘You know me, Wyatt. I know how much everyone has, I know what they can afford. And not only in cash. I have your enemies weighed and assessed. I know what they will pay and what they will baulk at, and believe me, the grief they will expend if they cross me in this matter, it will bankrupt them of tears.’
When Wyatt and Richard have gone on their way, he says to Call-Me-Risley, frowning: ‘Wyatt once said I was the cleverest man in England.’
‘He didn’t flatter,’ Call-Me says. ‘I learn much daily, from mere proximity.’
‘No, it is him. Wyatt. He leaves us all behind. He writes himself and then he disclaims himself. He jots a verse on some scrap of paper, and slips it to you, when you are at supper or praying in the chapel. Then he slides a paper to some other person, and it is the same verse, but a word is different. Then that person says to you, did you see what Wyatt wrote? You say yes, but you are talking of different things. Another time you trap him and say, Wyatt, did you really do what you describe in this verse? He smiles and tells you, it is the story of some imaginary gentleman, no one we know; or he will say, this is not my story I write, it is yours, though you do not know it. He will say, this woman I describe here, the brunette, she is really a woman with fair hair, in disguise. He will declare, you must believe everything and nothing of what you read. You point to the page, you tax him: what about this line, is this true? He says, it is poet’s truth. Besides, he claims, I am not free to write as I like. It is not the king, but metre that constrains me. And I would be plainer, he says, if I could: but I must keep to the rhyme.’
‘Someone should take his verses to the printer,’ Wriothesley says. ‘That would fix them.’
‘He would not consent to that. They are private communications.’
‘If I were Wyatt,’ Call-Me says, ‘I would have made sure no one misconstrued me. I would have stayed away from Caesar’s wife.’
‘That is the wise course.’ He smiles. ‘But it is not for him. It is for people like you and me.’
When Wyatt writes, his lines fledge feathers, and unfolding this plumage they dive below their meaning and skim above it. They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive; and you will deceive, and be deceived in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor. Now, if a man’s subject is deception, you are deceived if you think you grasp his meaning. You close your hand as it flies away. A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it. A quill, sharpened, can stir and rustle like the pinions of angels. Angels are messengers. They are creatures with a mind and a will. We do not know for a fact that their plumage is like the plumage of falcons, crows, peacocks. They hardly visit men nowadays. Though in Rome he knew a man, a turnspit in the papal kitchens, who had come face to face with an angel in a passage dripping with chill, in a sunken store room of the Vatican where cardinals never tread; and people bought him drinks to make him talk about it. He said the angel’s substance was heavy and smooth as marble, its expression distant and pitiless; its wings were carved from glass.
When the indictments come to his hand, he sees at once that, though the script is a clerk’s, the king has been at work. He can hear the king’s voice in every line: his outrage, jealousy, fear. It is not enough to say that she incited Norris to adultery with her in October 1533, nor Brereton in November the same year; Henry must imagine the ‘base conversations and kisses, touchings, gifts’. It is not enough to cite her conduct with F
rancis Weston, in May 1534, or to allege that she lay down for Mark Smeaton, a man of low degree, in April last year; it is necessary to speak of the lovers’ burning resentment of each other, of the queen’s furious jealousy of any other woman they look at. It is not enough to say that she sinned with her own brother: one must imagine the kisses, presents, jewels that passed between them, and how they looked when she was ‘alluring him with her tongue in the said George’s mouth, and the said George’s tongue in hers’. It is more like a conversation with Lady Rochford, or any other scandal-loving woman, than it is like a document one carries into court; but all the same, it has its merits, it makes a story, and it puts into the heads of those who will hear it certain pictures that will not easily be got out again. He says, ‘You must add at every point, and to every offence, “and several days before and after”. Or a similar phrase, that makes it clear the offences are numerous, perhaps more numerous than even the parties themselves recollect. For in that way,’ he says, ‘if there is specific denial of one date, one place, it will not be enough to injure the whole.’
And look what Anne has said! According to this paper, she has confessed, ‘she would never love the king in her heart’.
Never has. Does not now. And never could.
He frowns over the documents and then gives them out to be picked over. Objections are raised. Is Wyatt to be added? No, by no means. If he must be tried, he thinks, if the king goes so far, then he will be pulled away from this contaminated crew, and we will start again with a blank sheet; with this trial, with these defendants, there is no way but one, no exit, no direction except the scaffold.
And if there are discrepancies, visible to those who keep accounts of where the court resides on this day or that? He says, Brereton once told me he could be in two places at once. Come to think of it, so did Weston. Anne’s lovers are phantom gentlemen, flitting by night with adulterous intent. They come and go by night, unchallenged. They skim over the river like midges, flicker against the dark, their doublets sewn with diamonds. The moon sees them, peering from her hood of bone, and Thames water reflects them, glimmering like fish, like pearls.
His new allies, the Courtenays and the Pole family, profess themselves unsurprised by the charges against Anne. The woman is a heretic and so is her brother. Heretics, it is well known, have no natural limits, no constraints, fear neither the law of the land nor the law of God. They see what they want and they take it. And those who (foolishly) have tolerated heretics, out of laziness or pity, then discover at last what their true nature is.
Henry Tudor will learn harsh lessons from this, the old families say. Perhaps Rome will stretch out a hand to him in his trouble? Perhaps, if he creeps on his knees, then after Anne is dead the Pope will forgive him, and take him back?
And I? he asks. Oh, well, you, Cromwell…his new masters look at him with various expressions of bemusement or disgust. ‘I shall be your prodigal son,’ he says, smiling. ‘I shall be the sheep that was lost.’
At Whitehall, little huddles of men, muttering, drawn into tight circles, their elbows pointing backwards as hands caress the daggers at their waist. And among lawyers a subfusc agitation, conferences in corners.
Rafe asks him, could the king’s freedom be obtained, sir, with more economy of means? Less bloodshed?
Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.
When he, Cromwell, arrives to see Thomas Wyatt in prison, the constable Kingston is anxious to assure him that his word has been obeyed, that Wyatt has been treated with all honour.
‘And the queen, how is she?’
‘Restless,’ Kingston says. He looks uneasy. ‘I am used to all sorts of prisoners, but I have never had one like this. One moment she says, I know I must die. Next moment, much contrary to that. She thinks the king will come in his barge and take her away. She thinks a mistake has been made, that there is a misapprehension. She thinks the King of France will intervene for her.’ The gaoler shakes his head.
He finds Thomas Wyatt playing dice against himself: the kind of time-wasting pursuit old Sir Henry Wyatt reprehends. ‘Who’s winning?’ he asks.
Wyatt looks up. ‘That trolling idiot, my worst self, plays that canting fool, my best self. You can guess who wins. Still, there is always the possibility it will come up different.’
‘Are you comfortable?’
‘In body or spirit?’
‘I only answer for bodies.’
‘Nothing makes you falter,’ Wyatt says. He says it with a reluctant admiration that is close to dread. But he, Cromwell, thinks, I did falter but no one knows it, reports have not gone abroad. Wyatt did not see me walk away from Weston’s interrogation. Wyatt did not see me when Anne laid her hand on my arm and asked me what I believed in my heart.
He rests his eyes on the prisoner, he takes his seat. He says softly, ‘I think I have been training all my years for this. I have served an apprenticeship to myself.’ His whole career has been an education in hypocrisy. Eyes that once skewered him now kindle with simulated regard. Hands that would like to knock his hat off now reach out to take his hand, sometimes in a crushing grip. He has spun his enemies to face him, to join him: as in a dance. He means to spin them away again, so they look down the long cold vista of their years: so they feel the wind, the wind of exposed places, that cuts to the bone: so they bed down in ruins, and wake up cold. He says to Wyatt, ‘Any information you give me I will note, but I give you my word that I will destroy it once this thing is accomplished.’
‘Accomplished?’ Wyatt is querying his choice of word.
‘The king is informed his wife has betrayed him with various men, one her brother, one his closest friend, another a servant she says she hardly knows. The glass of truth has shattered, he says. So, yes, it would be an accomplishment to pick up the pieces.’
‘But you say he is informed, how is he informed? No one admits anything, except Mark. What if he is lying?’
‘When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function.’
‘But what is the evidence?’ Wyatt persists.
He smiles. ‘The truth comes to Henry’s door, wearing a cloak and hood. He lets it in because he has a shrewd idea of what lies beneath, it is not a stranger who comes calling. Thomas, I think he has always known. He knows if she was not false to him in body she was so in words, and if not in deeds then in dreams. He thinks she never esteemed or loved him, when he laid the world at her feet. He thinks he never pleased or satisfied her and that when he lay next to her she imagined someone else.’
‘That is common,’ Wyatt said. ‘Is it not usual? That is how marriage works. I never knew it was an offence in the eyes of the law. God help us. Half England will be in gaol.’
‘You understand that there are the charges that are written down in an indictment. And then there are the other charges, those we don’t commit to paper.’
‘If feeling is a crime, then I admit…’
‘Admit nothing. Norris admitted. He admitted he loved her. If what someone wants from you is an admission, it is never in your interest to give it.’
‘What does Henry want? I am honestly perplexed. I cannot see my way through it.’
‘He changes his mind, day to day. He would like to rework the past. He would like never to have seen Anne. He would like to have seen her, but to have seen through her. Mostly he wishes her dead.’
‘Wishing is not doing it.’
‘It is, if you are Henry.’
‘As I understand the law, a queen’s adultery is no treaso
n.’
‘No, but the man who violates her, he commits treason.’
‘You think they used force?’ Wyatt says drily.
‘No, it is just the legal term. It is a pretence, that allows us to think well of any disgraced queen. But as for her, she is a traitor too, she has said so out of her own mouth. To intend the king’s death, that is treason.’
‘But again,’ Wyatt says, ‘forgive my poor understanding, I thought Anne had said, “If he dies,” or some such words. So let me put a case to you. If I say “All men must die,” is that a forecast of the king’s death?’
‘It would be well not to put cases,’ he says pleasantly. ‘Thomas More was putting cases when he tipped into treason. Now let me come to the point with you. I may need your evidence against the queen. I will accept it in writing, I do not need it aired in open court. You once told me, when you visited my house, how Anne conducts herself with men: she says, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, no.”’ Wyatt nods; he recognises those words; he looks sorry he spoke them. ‘Now you may have to transpose one word of that testimony. Yes, yes, yes, no, yes.’
Wyatt does not answer. The silence extends, settles around them: a drowsy silence, as elsewhere leaves unfurl, may blossoms on the trees, water tinkles into fountains, young people laugh in gardens. At last Wyatt speaks, his voice strained: ‘It was not testimony.’
‘What was it then?’ He leans forward. ‘You know I am not a man with whom you can have inconsequential conversations. I cannot split myself into two, one your friend and the other the king’s servant. So you must tell me: will you write down your thoughts, and if you are requested, will you say one word?’ He sits back. ‘And if you can reassure me on this point, I will write to your father, to reassure him in turn. To tell him you will come out of this alive.’ He pauses. ‘May I do so?’
Wyatt nods. The smallest possible gesture, a nod to the future.