Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

shop. I wanted to see who would come to her whistle. And Lady Exeter has, and Bishop Fisher. And a score of monks and foolish priests whose names I know, and a hundred perhaps whose names I don't know yet.’

      ‘And will the king kill them all?’

      ‘Very few, I hope.’

      ‘You incline him to mercy?’

      ‘I incline him to patience.’

      ‘What will happen to her? Dame Eliza?’

      ‘We will frame charges.’

      ‘She will not go in a dungeon?’

      ‘No, I shall move the king to treat her with consideration, he is always – he is usually – respectful of any person in the religious life. But Alice,’ he sees that she is dissolving into tears, ‘I think this has all been too much for you.’

      ‘No, not at all. We are soldiers in your army.’

      ‘She has not been frightening you, talking about the devil's wicked offers?’

      ‘No, it's Thomas Rotherham's offers … he wants to marry me.’

      ‘So that's what's wrong with him!’ He is amused. ‘Could he not ask himself?’

      ‘He thought you would look at him in that way you have … as if you were weighing him.’

      Like a clipped coin? ‘Alice, he owns a fat slice of Bedfordshire, and his manors prosper very nicely since I have been looking after them. And if you like each other, how could I object? You are a clever girl, Alice. Your mother,’ he says softly, ‘and your father, they would be very pleased with you, if they were able to see.’

      This is why Alice is crying. She must ask her uncle's permission because this last year has left her orphaned. The day his sister Bet died, he was up-country with the king. Henry was receiving no messengers from London for fear of contagion, so she was dead and buried before he knew she was ill. When the news crept through at last, the king spoke to him with tenderness, a hand on his arm; he spoke of his own sister, the silver-haired lady like a princess in a book, removed from this life to gardens of Paradise, he had claimed, reserved for royal dead; for it is impossible, he had said, to think of that lady in any low place, any place of darkness, the barred charnel house of Purgatory with its flying cinders and sulphur reek, its boiling tar and roiling clouds of sleet.

      ‘Alice,’ he says, ‘dry your tears, find Thomas Rotherham, and end his pain. You need not come to Lambeth tomorrow. Jo can come, if she is as formidable as you say.’

      Alice turns in the doorway. ‘I will see her again, though? Eliza Barton? I should like to see her before …’

      Before they kill her. Alice is no innocent in this world. Just as well. Look how the innocent end; used by the sin-sodden and the cynical, pulped to their purpose and ground under their heels.

      He hears Alice running upstairs. He hears her calling, Thomas, Thomas … It is a name that will bring half the house out, tumbling from their bedside prayers, from their very beds: yes, are you looking for me? He pulls his furred gown around him and goes outside to look at the stars. The precincts of his house are kept well lit; the gardens by torchlight are the site of excavations, trenches dug out for foundations, earth banked up into barrows and mounds. The vast timber frame of a new wing juts against the sky; in the middle distance, his new planting, a city orchard where Gregory, one day, will pick the fruit, and Alice, and Alice's sons. He has fruit trees already, but he wants cherries and plums like the ones he has eaten abroad, and late pears to use in the Tuscan fashion, to match their crisp metallic flesh with winter's salt cod. Then next year he means to make another garden at the hunting lodge he has at Canonbury, make it a retreat from the city, a summer house in the fields. He has work in hand at Stepney too, expansion; John Williamson is looking after the builders for him. Strange, but like a miracle the family's prosperity seems to have cured him of his killing cough. I like John Williamson, he thinks, why ever did I, with his wife … Beyond the gate, cries and shouts, London never still or quiet; so many in the graveyards, but the living parading in the streets, drunken fighters pitching from London Bridge, sanctuary men stealing out to thieve, Southwark whores bawling out their prices like butchers selling dead flesh.

      He goes inside. His desk draws him back. In a small chest he keeps his wife's book, her book of hours. Inside it are prayers on loose papers which she has inserted. Say the name of Christ a thousand times and it keeps fever away. But it doesn't, does it? The fever comes anyway and kills you. Beside the name of her first husband, Thomas Williams, she has written his own name, but she never, he notices, crossed Tom Williams out. She has recorded the births of her children, and he has written in beside them the dates of his daughters' deaths. He finds a space where he will note the marriages of his sisters' children: Richard to Frances Murfyn, Alice to his ward.

      He thinks, perhaps I have got over Liz. It didn't seem possible that weight would ever shift from inside his chest, but it has lightened enough to let him get on with his life. I could marry again, he thinks, but is this not what people are always telling me? He says to himself, I never think of Johane Williamson now: not Johane as she was for me. Her body once had special meaning, but that meaning is now unmade; the flesh created beneath his fingertips, hallowed by desire, becomes just the ordinary substance of a city wife, a fading woman with no particular looks. He says to himself, I never think of Anselma now; she is just the woman in the tapestry, the woman in the weave.

      He reaches for his pen. I have got over Liz, he says to himself. Surely? He hesitates, the quill in his hand, weighted by ink. He holds the pages down flat, and strikes out the name of her first husband. He thinks, I've meant to do that for years.

      It is late. Upstairs he closes the shutter, where the moon gapes in hollow-eyed, like a drunk lost in the street. Christophe, folding garments, says, ‘Is there loups? In this kingdom?’

      ‘I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down. That howling you hear is only the Londoners.’

      Sunday: in rose-tinted light they set out from Austin Friars, his men in their new livery of grey marbled cloth collecting the party from the city house where the nun has been held. It would be convenient, he thinks, if I had Master Secretary's barge, instead of making ad hoc arrangements when we have to cross the river. He has already heard Mass; Cranmer insists they all hear another. He watches the girl and sees her tears flow. Alice is right; she is at the end of her invention.

      By nine o'clock she is unwinding the threads she has spent years ravelling up. She confesses in style, so hard and fast that Riche can hardly keep track, and she appeals to them as men of the world, as people with their way to make: ‘You know how it is. You mention something and people are at you, what do you mean, what do you mean? You say you've had a vision and they won't leave you alone.’

      ‘You can't disappoint people?’ he says; she agrees, that's it, you can't. Once you start you have to keep going. If you try to go back they'll slaughter you.

      She confesses that her visions are inventions. She never spoke to heavenly persons. Or raised the dead; that was all a fraud. She never had a hand in miracles. The letter from Mary Magdalene, Father Bocking wrote it, and a monk put gilding on the letters, in a minute she'll think of his name. The angels came out of her own invention, she seemed to see them but she knows now that they were just flashes of light against the wall. The voices she heard were not their voices, they were not distinct voices at all, just the sounds of her sisters singing in the chapel, or a woman in the road crying because she has been beaten and robbed, or perhaps the meaningless clatter of dishes from the kitchen; and those groans and cries, that seemed to come from the throats of the damned, it was someone above scraping a trestle across the floor, it was the whimper of a lost dog. ‘I know now, sirs, that those saints were not real. Not in the way you are real.’

      Something has broken inside her, and he wonders what that thing is.

      She says, ‘Is there any chance I could go home again to Kent?’

      ‘I'll see what can be arranged.’

      Hugh Latimer is sitting with them,