Bring Up the Bodies

His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze. Grace Cromwell hovers in thin air. She is silent when she takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist.

[…] Later, Henry will say, ‘Your girls flew well today.’ […] These dead women, their bones long sunk in London clay, are now transmigrated. Weightless, they glide on the upper currents of the air. They pity no one. They answer to no one. Their lives are simple. When they look down they see nothing but their prey, and the borrowed plumes of the hunters: they see a fluttering, flinching universe, a universe filled with their dinner.

[Cromwell] is preparing a bill for Parliament to give employment to men without work, to get them waged and out mending the roads, making the harbors, building walls against the Emperor or any other opportunist. We could pay them, he calculated, if we levied an income tax on the rich; we could provide shelter, doctors if they needed them, their subsistence; we would have all the fruits of their work, and their employment would keep them from becoming bawds or pickpockets or highway robbers, all of which men will do if they see no other way to eat. What if their fathers before them were bawds, pickpockets or highway robbers? That signifies nothing. Look at him. Is he Walter Cromwell? In a generation everything can change.

‘But how do we stop [the Emperor]?’ Gregory looks desperate. ‘Must we not have Queen Katherine back?’

Call-Me laughs. ‘Gregory begins to perceive the difficulties of our trade, sir.’

‘I liked it better when we talked of the present queen,’ Gregory says in a low voice. ‘And I got the credit for observing she was fatter.’

Call-Me says kindly, ‘I should not laugh. You have the right of it, Gregory. All our laborers, are sophistry, all our learning both acquired or pretended; the stratagems of state, the lawyers’ decrees, the churchmen’s curses, and the grave resolutions of judges, sacred and secular: all and each can be defeated by a woman’s body, and may not? God should have made their bellies transparent, and saved us the hope and fear. But perhaps what grows in there has to grow in the dark.’

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.

‘Henry will never abandon me. He waited for me long enough. I have made the wait worth his while. And if he turns his back on me he will turn his back on the great and marvelous work done in this realm since I became queen – I mean the work for the gospel. Henry will never return to Rome. He will never bow his knee. Since my coronation there is a new England. It cannot subsist without me.’

Not so, madam, [Cromwell] thinks. If need be, I can separate you from history.

[Cromwell] turns his eyes to the child dressed as an angel: it is Rafe’s stepdaughter, the elder child of his wife Helen. She is wearing the peacock wings he made long ago for Grace.

[…] When his family died, he had done everything as was the custom in those days: offerings, masses. […] Once you imagined the souls held in a great net, a web spun by God, held safe till their release into his radiance. But if the net is cut and the web broken, do they spill into freezing space, each year falling further into silence, until there is no trace of them at all?

He takes the child to a looking glass so she can see her wings. Her steps are tentative, she is in awe at herself. Mirrored, the peacock eyes speak to him. Do not forget us. As the year turns, we are here.

Cromwell remains a nobody. The king gives him titles that no one abroad understands, and jobs that no one at home can do. He multiplies offices, duties pile on him: plain Master Cromwell goes out at morning, plain Master Cromwell comes in at night. […] And he will not give up that post. It doesn’t matter if it gives him a lesser status. It doesn’t matter if the French don’t comprehend. Let them judge by results. Brandon can make a racket, unreproved, near the royal person; he can slap the king on the back and call him Harry; he can chuckle with him over ancient jest and tilt-yard escapades. But chivalry’s day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the money lender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.

Christophe comes to him, whispering: ‘Sir, they are saying on the streets that Katherine was murdered. They are saying that the king locked her in a room and starved her to death. They are saying that he sent her almonds, and she ate, and was poisoned. They are saying that you sent two murderers with knives, and that they cut out her heart, and that when it was inspected, you name was branded there in big black letters.’

‘What? On her heart? “Thomas Cromwell?”’

Christophe hesitates. ‘Alors…Perhaps just your initials.’

What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumor, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

[…] He writes:

Anthony’s teeth.

Question: what happened to them?

Anthony’s testimony, in answer to me, Thomas Cromwell: They were knocked out by his brutal father.

[…] To Richard Riche: He lost them in a dispute with a man who impugned the powers of Parliament.

[…] To Thurston: He had an enemy who was a cook. And this enemy painted a batch of stone to look like hazelnuts, and invited him to a handful.

There is a correspondence between the score sheet and the human body, in that the paper has divisions marked off, for the head and the torso. A touch on the breastplate is recorded, but not fractured ribs. A touch on the helm is recorded, but not a cracked skull. You can pick up the score sheets afterwards and read back a record of the day, but the marks on paper do not tell you about the pain of a broken ankle or the efforts of a suffocating man not to vomit inside his helmet. As the combatants will always tell you, you really needed to see it, you had to be there.

He tries to imagine the lost child, the manikin, its limbs budding, its face old and wise.

Few men have seen such a thing. Certainly he has not. In Italy, once, he stood holding up a light for a surgeon, while in a sealed room draped in shadows he sliced a dead man apart to see what made him work. It was a fearful night, the stench of bowel and blood clogging the throat, and the artists who had jostled and bribed for a place tried to elbow him away: but he stood firm, for he had guaranteed to do so, he had said he would hold the light. And so he was among the elect of that company, the luminaries, who saw muscle stripped from bone. But he has never seen inside a woman, still less a gravid corpse; no surgeon, even for money, would perform that work for an audience.

But there is no need for these lessons. All his life Rafe has been training for this. […] He knows how to watch. He knows how to listen. He knows how to send a message encrypted, or a message so secret that no message appears to be there; a piece of information so solid that its meaning seems to be stamped out in the earth, yet its form so fragile that it seems to be conveyed by angels. Rafe knows his master; Henry is his master. But Cromwell is his father and his friend.

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it’s like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you’re thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.

Henry is convulsing with rage. ‘I really believe, Cromwell, that you think you are king, and I am the blacksmith’s boy.’

[…] He steps back; he knows his face shows nothing, neither repentance nor regret nor fear. He thinks, you could never be the blacksmith’s boy. Walter would not have had you in his forge. Brawn is not the whole story. In the flames you need a cool head, when sparks are flying to the rafters you must note when they fall on you and knock the fire away with one swat of your hard palm: a man who panics is no use in a shop full of molten metal.

Now that he can handle, at his whim, the finest texts in the king’s library, the prayer book seems a poor thing; where is the gold leaf? But the essence of Elizabeth is in this book, his poor wife with her white cap, her blunt manner, her sideways smile and busy craftswoman’s fingers. Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hands she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn’t see how it worked. ‘Slow down,’ he said, ‘so I can see how you do it,’ but she’d laughed and said, ‘I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it at all.’

‘I remember,’ Wriothesley says, ‘a certain play at court, after the cardinal came down. I remember Sexton, the jester, dressed in scarlet robes, in the character of the cardinal, and how four devils bore him off to Hell, each seizing an extremity. And they were masked. And I wondered, was George –’

‘Right forepaw,’ he says.

‘Ah,’ says Call-Me-Risley.

[…] [Cromwell] remembers it: an evening of feral stench, as the flower of chivalry became hunting dogs, baying for blood, the whole court hissing and jeering as the figure of the cardinal was dragged and bounced across the floor. Then a voice called out from the hall: ‘Shame on you!’ He asks Wriothesley, ‘That was not you who spoke?’

‘No.’ Call-Me will not lie. ‘I think perhaps it was Thomas Wyatt.’

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.

‘Now listen to me, Crumb. If I say I need to see the Tudor, no blacksmith’s boy will say me nay.’

‘He may weld you, my lord,’ Richard Riche says. They had not noticed him slip aboard. ‘He may take upon him to beat and reshape your head. Master Secretary has skills you have never imagined.’

A sort of giddiness has seized them, a reaction to the horrible sight they have left behind on the quay. ‘He may pound you into a different shape entirely,’ Audley says. ‘You may wake up a duke and by noon you may be curved into a horseboy.’

‘He may melt you,’ Fitzwilliam says. ‘You begin as a duke and end as a leaden drip.’

‘You may live out your days as a trivet,’ Riche says. ‘Or a hinge.’

‘You ought to know,’ the king insists. ‘Her nature. How ill she has behaved to me, when I gave her everything. All men should know and be warned about what women are. Their appetites are unbounded. I believe she has committed adultery with a hundred men.’

Henry looks, for a moment, like a hunted creature: hounded by women’s desire, dragged down and shredded.

‘I must take your mind back. I do not ask you to remember the manifold favors you received at the cardinal’s hands. I only asked you to recall an entertainment, a certain interlude played at court. It was a play in which the late cardinal was set upon by demons and carried down to Hell.’

He sees Norris’s eyes move, as the scene rises before him: the firelight, the heat, the baying spectators. Himself and Boleyn grasping the victim’s hands, Brereton and Weston laying hold of him by his feet. The four of them tossing the scarlet figure, tumbling him and kicking him. Four men, who for a joke turned the cardinal into a beast.

[…] Would Norris understand if he spelled it out? He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.

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.

He is the overlord of the spaces and the silences, the gaps and the erasures, what is missed or misconstrued or simply mistranslated, as the news slips from English to French and perhaps via Latin to Castilian and the Italian tongues, and through Flanders to the Emperor’s eastern territories, over the borders of the German principalities and out to Bohemia and Hungary and the snowy realms beyond, by merchant men under sail to Greece and the Levant; to India, where they have never heard of Anne Boleyn, let alone her lovers and her brother; along the silk routes to China where they have never heard of Henry the eighth of that name or, or any other Henry, and even the existence of England is to them a dark myth, a place where men have their mouths and their bellies and women can fly.

Gregory nods. He seems to understand, but perhaps seeming is as far as it goes. When Gregory says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did they do it?’ But when [Cromwell] says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did the court find them so?’ The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away. It was a triumph, in a small way, to unknot the entanglement of thighs and tongues, to take that mass of heaving flesh and smooth it on to white paper: as the body, after the climax, lies back on white linen.

The queen is alone now, as alone as she has ever been in her life. She says, Christ have mercy, Jesus have mercy, Christ receive my soul. […] There is a groan, one single sound from the whole crowd. Then a silence, and into that silence, a sharp sigh or a sound like a whistle through a keyhole: the body exsanguinates, and its flat little presence becomes a puddle of gore.

The Duke of Suffolk is still standing. Richmond too. The executioner has turned away, modestly, and already handed over his sword. His assistant is approaching the corpse but the four women are there first, blocking him with their bodies. One of them says fiercely, ‘We do not want men to handle her.’

[Cromwell] has laws to write, measures to take, the good of the Commonwealth to serve, and his king: he has titles and honors still to attain, houses to build, books to read, and who knows, perhaps children to father, and Gregory to dispose in marriage. It would be some compensation for the children lost, to have a grandchild. He imagined standing in a daze of light, holding up a small child so the dead can see it.

[…] When the time comes I may vanish before the ink is dry. I will leave behind me a great mountain of paper, and those who come after me – let us say it is Rafe, let us say it is Wriothesley, let us say it is Riche – they will sift through what remains and remark, here’s an old deed, an old draft, an old letter from Thomas Cromwell’s time: they will turn the page over, and write.