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‘I told you,’ Call-Me says. ‘Mary’s people. Already.’
‘And by the way,’ Richard says, ‘the cat’s out again.’
He hurries to the window, letter in hand. ‘Where is she?’
Call-Me beside him: ‘What am I looking for?’
He breaks the seal. ‘There! She’s running up the tree.’
He glances down at the letter. Sir Nicholas seeks a meeting.
‘Is that a cat?’ Wriothesley is amazed. ‘That striped beast?’
‘She has come all the way from Damascus in a box. I bought her from an Italian merchant for a price you would not believe. She is supposed to stay indoors, or she will breed with the London cats. I must look out for a striped husband for her.’ He opens the window. ‘Christophe! She’s up the tree!’
What Carew proposes is a gathering of the dynasts: the Courtenay family, with the Marquis of Exeter leading them, and the Pole family, where Lord Montague will represent his kin. These are the families nearest the throne, descendants of old King Edward and his brothers. They claim to speak for the king’s daughter Mary, to represent her interests. If they cannot rule England themselves, as Plantagenets once did, they mean to rule through the king’s daughter. It is her bloodline they admire, the inheritance from her Spanish mother Katherine. For the sad little girl herself, they care much less; and when I see Mary, he thinks, I will tell her so. Her safety does not lie that way, with men who live on fantasies of the past.
Carew, the Courtenays, the Poles, they are papists every one. Carew was the king’s old comrade-in-arms, and Queen Katherine’s friend too, in the days when those positions were compatible. He sees himself as the mirror of chivalry, and a favourite of fortune. To Carew, to the Poles, to the Courtenays and their supporters, the Boleyns were a crass blunder, an error now cancelled by the headsman. No doubt they assume Thomas Cromwell can be cancelled too, reduced to the clerk he used to be: a useful man for getting money in, but dispensable, a slave that you trample as you stride up the stairway to glory.
‘Call-Me is right,’ he says to Richard. ‘Sir Nicholas is taking a lofty tone with me.’ He holds the letter up. ‘These people, they expect me to come to their whistle.’
Wriothesley says, ‘They expect your service. Or they will break you.’
Below the window, all the young persons at Austin Friars are milling, cooks and clerks and boys of every sort. He says, ‘I think my son has taken leave of his senses. Gregory,’ he calls down, ‘you cannot catch a cat in a net. She has seen you now – back away.’
‘Look at Christophe shaking the tree,’ Richard says. ‘Stupid little fucker.’
‘Take heed of this, sir,’ Call-Me begs. ‘Because this last week …’
‘It is natural she keeps escaping,’ he says to Richard. ‘She is tired of her celibate life. She wants to find a prince. Yes, Call-Me? This last week, what?’
‘People have been talking of the cardinal. They say, look at what Cromwell has wreaked, in two years, on Wolsey’s enemies. Thomas More is dead. Anne the queen is dead. They look at those who slighted him, in his lifetime – Brereton, Norris – though Norris was not the worst …’
Norris, he thinks, was good to my lord – to his face. A taker and a user, was Gentle Norris: a hypocrite. He says, ‘If I wanted revenge on Wolsey’s enemies, I would have to strike down half the nation.’
‘I only report what people are saying.’
‘Young Dick Purser’s here,’ Richard says. He leans out of the window. ‘Get hold of her, boy, before we lose her in the dark.’
‘They ask,’ Wriothesley says, ‘who was the greatest of the cardinal’s enemies? They answer, the king. So, they ask – when chance serves, what revenge will Thomas Cromwell seek on his sovereign, his prince?’
Below in the darkening garden, the cat-hunters raise their arms as if imploring the moon. High in the tree, the cat is a soft shape visible only to the educated eye: limbs dangling, she is perfectly at one with the branch on which she lies. He thinks of Marlinspike, the cardinal’s cat. He had brought him to Austin Friars when he was still small enough to carry in a pocket. But when Marlinspike came of age, he ran away to make his fortune.
I have risen above this, he thinks: this day, this waning light, these snares. I am the Damascene cat. I have travelled so far to get here, and nothing they do disturbs me now, nor disquiets me, high on my branch.
And yet Wriothesley’s question seeps into him, and leaves in his mind a chilly trickle of dismay, like water creeping into a cellar. He is shocked: first, that the question can be asked. Second, because of who asks it. Third, that he does not know the answer.
Richard turns back into the room: ‘Sir, what’s Christophe saying below?’
He translates: the boy’s argot is not easy. ‘Christophe swears that in France they always catch cats in a net, any child can do it, he will be pleased to demonstrate if we give him full attention.’ He says to Wriothesley, ‘This question of yours –’
‘Do not take it ill –’
‘– does it come from Gardiner?’
‘Because,’ Richard says, ‘who but the bloody buggering Bishop of Winchester would come up with a question like that?’
Call-Me says, ‘If I report Winchester’s words, that is all I do. I do not speak for him, or on his behalf.’
‘Good,’ Richard says, ‘because otherwise, I’d have to pull your head off, and cast it up the tree with the cat.’
‘Richard, believe me,’ Wriothesley says, ‘if I were the bishop’s partisan, I would be with him on his embassy, not here with you.’ Tears well into his eyes. ‘I am trying to make some sense of what Master Secretary intends. But all you care about is the cat, and trying to frighten me. You are making me pick my way through thorns.’
‘I see the wounds,’ he says gently. ‘When you write to Stephen Gardiner, tell him I will see what I can get him by way of spoils. George Boleyn had a grant of two hundred pounds a year out of the revenues of Winchester. For a start, he can have that back.’
He thinks, that will not mollify the bishop. It’s just a token of goodwill for a disappointed man. Stephen hoped that when Anne Boleyn fell she would take me with her.
‘You talk of the cardinal’s enemies,’ Richard says. ‘Now I would put Bishop Gardiner among them. Yet he is not harmed, is he?’
‘He thinks he is harmed,’ Wriothesley says. ‘After all, he was the cardinal’s confidant, till Master Cromwell shouldered him aside. He was Secretary to the king, till Master Cromwell whipped his office from under his feet. The king sent him out of the realm, and he knows Master Cromwell contrived it.’
True. All true. Gardiner knows how to do damage, even from France. He knows how to scratch the skin and poison the body politic. He says, ‘Any notion that I hold a grudge against my sovereign – it is some fantasy out of the bishop’s sick brain. What have I, but what my king gives me? Who am I, but who he has made me? All my trust is in him.’
Wriothesley says, ‘But shall I carry a message to Nicholas Carew? Will you meet him? I think you ought.’
‘Placate him?’ Richard says. ‘No.’ He draws the window shut. ‘My money is on Purser to catch her.’
‘Mine is on the cat.’ He imagines the world below her: through the prism of her great eye, the limbs of agitated men unfurl like ribbons, yearning through the darkness. Perhaps she thinks they are praying to her. Perhaps she thinks she has climbed up to the stars. Perhaps the darkness falls away from her in flecks and sparks of light, the roofs and gables like shadows in water; and when she studies the net there is no net, only the spaces between.
‘I think we should have a drink,’ he tells Wriothesley. ‘We will have lights. And a fire, by and by. Send Christophe in, when he comes from the garden. He will show us how the French start a blaze. Perhaps we will burn Carew’s letter, Mr Wriothesley, what do you think?’
‘What do I think?’ It is almost a snarl worthy of Gardiner himself. ‘I think, Norfolk is against you, the bishop is against you, and now you are going to take on the old families as well. God help you, sir. You are my master. You have my service, and you have my prayers. But by the holy bones! Do you think these people brought the Boleyns down so you could be cock of the walk?’
‘Yes,’ Richard says. ‘That’s exactly what we think. It may not have been their intention. But we aim to make that the result.’
How steady Richard’s arm, stretching to hand him the glass. How steady his own, accepting it. ‘Lord Lisle sends this wine from Calais,’ he says.
‘Confusion to our enemies,’ Richard says. ‘Good luck to our friends.’
Wriothesley says, ‘I hope you can tell them apart.’
‘Call-Me, warm your poor shaking heart.’ He casts a glance at the window, sees a faint fogged outline of himself. ‘You can write to Gardiner and tell him he has money coming. Then we have ciphers to break.’
Someone has brought a torch into the garden below. A dusky flicker fills the panes. His shadow in the window raises a hand; he inclines his head to it. ‘Drink my health.’
That night he dreams the death of Anne Boleyn, in panels. In the first he stands watching as she walks to the scaffold, wearing her clumsy gable hood. In the second she kneels in a white cap while the Frenchman raises his sword. In the last, her severed head, smothered in linen, bleeds its image into the weave.
He wakes as the cloth is shaken out. If her face is imprinted, he is too dazed to see it. It is 20 May 1536.
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