Bring Up the Bodies

If someone said to Lady Rochford, ‘It’s raining,’ she would turn it into a conspiracy; as she passed the news on, she would make it sound somehow indecent, unlikely, but sadly true.

[…] ‘I suppose [the pregnancy] is to be expected,’ Jane Rochford says. ‘She was with the king for much of the summer, was she not? A week here, a week there. And when he was not with her, he would write her love letters, and send them by the hand of Harry Norris.’

[…] [Cromwell] is moving too fast to make much of her last sentence: though, as he will admit later, the detail will affix itself and adhere to certain sentences of his own, not yet formed. Phrases only. Elliptic. Conditional. As everything is conditional now. Anne blossoming as Katherine fails. He pictures them, […] playing teeter-totter with a plank balanced on a stone.

He remembers what Thomas Wyatt told him: ‘That is Anne’s tactic, she says yes, yes, yes, then she says no…the worst of it is her hinting to me, her boasting almost, that she says no to me, but yes to others.’

[…] He himself thought Anne cold, a woman who took her maidenhead to market and sold it for the best price. But this coldness was before she was wed. Before Henry heaved himself on top of her, and off again, and she was left, after he had stumbled back to his own apartments, with the bobbing circles of candlelight on the ceiling, […] and Lady Rochford’s voice as she scrubs herself, ‘Careful, madam, do not wash away a Prince of Wales.’

So what if, one day, it’s yes, yes, yes, yes, yes? To whoever happens to be standing by when the threat of her virtue snaps?

[Cromwell] did not relish the topic; he sensed in Jane Rochford’s tone the peculiar cruelty of women. They fight with the poor weapons God has bestowed – spite, guile, skillful deceit – and it is likely that in conversations between themselves they trespass in places where a man would never trust his footing. The king’s body is borderless, fluent, like his realm: it is an island building itself or eroding itself, its substance washed out into the waters salt and fresh; it has its shores of polder, its marshy tracts, its reclaimed margins; it has tidal waters, emissions and effusions, quags that slough in and out of the conversation of Englishwomen, and dark mires where only priests should wade, rush lights in their hands.