Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

A lamp is lit. A door pushed ajar. Cranmer's wife is lying in a little cot. He says to Helen, ‘Here is a lady who needs your compassion. You see her situation. She does not speak English. In any case, you need not ask her name.’

      ‘Here is Helen,’ he says. ‘She has two children of her own. She will help you.’

      Mistress Cranmer, her eyes closed, merely nods and smiles. But when Helen places a gentle hand on her, she reaches out and strokes it.

      ‘Where is your husband?’

      ‘Er betet.’

      ‘I hope he is praying for me.’

      The day of Frith's burning he is hunting with the king over the country outside Guildford. It is raining before dawn, a gusty, tugging wind bending the treetops: raining all over England, soaking the crops in the fields. Henry's mood is not to be dented. He sits down to write to Anne, left back at Windsor. After he has twirled his quill in his fingers, turned his paper about and about, he loses the will: you write it for me, Cromwell. I'll tell you what to put.

      A tailor's apprentice is going to the stake with Frith: Andrew Hewitt.

      Katherine used to have relics brought to her, Henry says, for when she was in labour with her children. A girdle of the Blessed Virgin. I hired it.

      I don't think the queen will want that.

      And special prayers to St Margaret. These are women's things.

      Best left to them, sir.

      Later he will hear that Frith and the boy suffered, the wind blowing the flames away from them repeatedly. Death is a japester; call him and he will not come. He is a joker and he lurks in the dark, a black cloth over his face.

      There are cases of the sweat in London. The king, who embodies all his people, has all the symptoms every day.

      Now Henry stares at the rain falling. Cheering himself up, he says, it may abate, Jupiter is rising. Now, tell her, tell the queen …

      He waits, his pen poised.

      No, that's enough. Give it to me, Thomas, I will sign it.

      He waits to see if the king will draw a heart. But the frivolities of courtship are over. Marriage is a serious business. Henricus Rex.

      I think I have a stomach cramp, the king says. I think I have a headache. I feel queasy, and there are black spots before my eyes, that's a sign, isn't it?

      If Your Majesty will rest a little, he says. And take courage.

      You know what they say about the sweat. Merry at breakfast, dead by dinner. But do you know it can kill you in two hours?

      He says, I have heard that some people die of fear.

      By afternoon the sun is struggling out. Henry, laughing, spurs away his hunter under the dripping trees. At Smithfield Frith is being shovelled up, his youth, his grace, his learning and his beauty: a compaction of mud, grease, charred bone.

      The king has two bodies. The first exists within the limits of his physical being; you can measure it, and often Henry does, his waist, his calf, his other parts. The second is his princely double, free-floating, untethered, weightless, which may be in more than one place at a time. Henry may be hunting in the forest, while his princely double makes laws. One fights, one prays for peace. One is wreathed in the mystery of his kingship: one is eating a duckling with sweet green peas.

      The Pope now says his marriage to Anne is void. He will excommunicate him if he does not return to Katherine. Christendom will slough him off, body and soul, and his subjects will rise up and eject him, into ignominy, exile; no Christian hearth will shelter him, and when he dies his corpse will be dug with animal bones into a common pit.

      He has taught Henry to call the Pope ‘The Bishop of Rome’. To laugh when his name is mentioned. If it is uncertain laughter, it is better than his former genuflection.

      Cranmer has invited the prophetess, Elizabeth Barton, to a meeting at his house in Kent. She has seen a vision of Mary, the former princess, as queen? Yes. Of Gertrude, Lady Exeter, as queen? Yes. He says gently, both cannot be true. The Maid says, I only report what I see. He writes that she is bouncing and full of confidence; she is used to dealing with archbishops, and she takes him for another Warham, hanging on her every word.

      She is a mouse under the cat's paw.

      Queen Katherine is on the move, her household much reduced, to the Bishop of Lincoln's palace at Buckden, an old red-brick house with a great hall and gardens that run out into copses and fields and so into the fenland landscape. September will bring her the first fruits of autumn, as October will bring the mists.

      The king demands that Katherine give up for his coming child the robes in which the child Mary was christened. When he hears Katherine's answer, he, Thomas Cromwell, laughs. Nature wronged Katherine, he says, in not making her a man; she would have surpassed all the heroes of antiquity. A paper is put before her, in which she is addressed as ‘Princess Dowager’; shocked, they show him how her pen has ripped through it, as she scores out the new title.

      Rumours crop in the short summer nights. Dawn finds them like mushrooms in the damp grass. Members of Thomas Cromwell's household have been seeking a midwife in the small hours of the morning. He is hiding a woman at some country house of his, a foreign woman who has given him a daughter. Whatever you do, he says to Rafe, don't defend my honour. I have women like that all over the place.

      They will believe it, Rafe says. The word in the city is that Thomas Cromwell has a prodigious …

      Memory, he says. I have a very large ledger. A huge filing system, in which are recorded (under their name, and also under their offence) the details of people who have cut across me.

      All the astrologers say that the king will have a son. But you are better not to deal with these people. A man came to him, months ago, offering to make the king a philosopher's stone, and when he was told to make himself scarce he turned rude and contrary, as these alchemists do, and now gives it out that the king will die this year. Waiting in Saxony, he says, is the eldest son of the late King Edward. You thought him a rattling skeleton beneath the pavements of the Tower, only his murderers know where: you are deceived, for he is a man grown, and ready to claim his kingdom.

      He counts it up: King Edward V, were he living, would be sixty-four this November coming. He's a bit late to the fight, he says.

      He puts the alchemist in the Tower, to rethink his position.

      No more from Paris. Whatever Maître Guido's up to, he's very quiet about it.

      Hans Holbein says, Thomas, I've got your hands done but I haven't paid much attention to your face. I promise this autumn I'll finish you off.

      Suppose within every book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.

      Lord Mountjoy, Katherine's Chamberlain, has sent him a list of all the necessities for the confinement of a Queen of England. It amuses him, the smooth and civil handover; the court and its ceremonies roll on, whoever the personnel, but it is clear Lord Mountjoy takes him as the man in charge of everything now.

      He goes down to Greenwich and refurbishes the apartments, ready for Anne. Proclamations (undated) are prepared, to go out to the people of England and the rulers of Europe, announcing the birth of a prince. Just leave a little gap, he suggests, at the end of ‘prince’, so if need be you can squash in … But they look at him as if he's a traitor, so he leaves off.

      When a woman withdraws to give birth the sun may be shining but the shutters of her room are closed so she can make her own weather. She is kept in the dark so she can dream. Her dreams drift her far away, from terra firma to a marshy tract of land, to a landing stage, to a river where a mist closes over the further bank, and earth