Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

you can go anywhere, it will be necessary for you to make public acknowledgement of your imposture. Public confession.’

      ‘She's not shy of crowds, are you?’ These many years she's been on the road, a travelling show, and will be again, though now the nature of the show has changed; he means to display her, repentant, at Paul's Cross, and perhaps outside London too. He feels that she will take to the role of fraud, with the same relish with which she took to her role as saint.

      He says to Riche, Niccolò tells us unarmed prophets always fail. He smiles and says, I mention this, Ricardo, because I know you like to have it by the book.

      Cranmer leans forward and says to the Maid, these men about you, Edward Bocking and the rest, which of them were your lovers?

      She is shocked: perhaps because the question has come from him, the sweetest of her interrogators. She just stares at him, as if one of them were stupid.

      He says, murmuring, she may think lovers is not the word.

      Enough. To Audley, to Latimer, to Riche, he says, ‘I shall begin bringing in her followers, and her leaders. She has ruined many, if we care to press for their ruin. Fisher certainly, Margaret Pole perhaps, Gertrude and her husband for sure. Lady Mary the king's daughter, quite possibly. Thomas More no, Katherine no, but a fat haul of Franciscans.’

      The court rises, if court is what you call it. Jo stands up. She has been sewing – or rather, unsewing, teasing out the pomegranate border from a crewel-work panel – these remnants of Katherine, of the dusty kingdom of Granada, linger in England still. She folds her work, dropping her scissors into her pocket, pinching up her sleeve and feeding her needle into the fabric for later use. She walks up to the prisoner and puts a hand on her arm. ‘We must say adieu.’

      ‘William Hawkhurst,’ the girl says, ‘I remember the name now. The monk who gilded the letter from Mary Magdalene.’

      Richard Riche makes a note.

      ‘Do not say any more today,’ Jo advises.

      ‘Will you come with me, mistress? Where I am going?’ ‘Nobody will come with you,’ Jo says. ‘I do not think you have the sense of it, Dame Eliza. You are going to the Tower, and I am going home to my dinner.’

      This summer of 1533 has been a summer of cloudless days, of strawberry feasts in London gardens, the drone of fumbling bees, warm evenings to stroll under rose arbours and hear from the allées the sound of young gentlemen quarrelling over their bowls. The grain harvest is abundant even in the north. The trees are bowed under the weight of ripening fruit. As if he has decreed that the heat must continue, the king's court burns bright through the autumn. Monseigneur the queen's father shines like the sun, and around him spins a smaller but still blazing noonday planet, his son George Rochford. But it is Brandon who leads the dancing, galloping through the halls towing his new bride, whose age is fourteen. She is an heiress, and was betrothed to his son, but Charles thought an experienced man like him could turn her to better use.

      The Seymours have put their family scandal behind them, and their fortunes are mending. Jane Seymour says to him, looking at her feet, ‘Master Cromwell, my brother Edward smiled last week.’

      ‘That was rash of him, what made him do so?’

      ‘He heard his wife is sick. The wife he used to have. The one that my father, you know.’

      ‘Is she likely to die?’

      ‘Oh, very likely. Then he will get a new one. But he will keep her at his house in Elvetham, and never let her come within a mile of Wolf Hall. And when my father visits Elvetham, she will be locked in the linen room till he has gone again.’

      Jane's sister Lizzie is at court with her husband, the Governor of Jersey, who is some connection of the new queen's. Lizzie comes packaged into her velvet and lace, her outlines as firm as her sister's are indefinite and blurred, her eyes bold and hazel and eloquent. Jane whispers in her wake; her eyes are the colour of water, where her thoughts slip past, like gilded fishes too small for hook or net.

      It is Jane Rochford – whose mind, in his view, is underoccupied – who sees him watching the sisters. ‘Lizzie Seymour must have a lover,’ she says, ‘it cannot be her husband who puts that glow in her cheeks, he is an old man. He was old when he was in the Scots wars.’ The two sisters are just a little alike, she points out; they have the same habit of dipping their head and drawing in their underlip. ‘Otherwise,’ she says, smirking, ‘you would think their mother had been up to the same tricks as her husband. She was a beauty in her day, you know, Margery Wentworth. And nobody knows what goes on down in Wiltshire.’

      ‘I'm surprised you don't, Lady Rochford. You seem to know everyone's business.’

      ‘You and me, we keep our eyes open.’ She lowers her head, and says, as if directing the words inward, to her own body, ‘I could keep my eyes open, if you like, in places you cannot go.’

      Dear God, what does she want? It can't be money, surely? The question comes out colder than he means: ‘Upon what possible inducement?’

      She lifts her eyes to his. ‘I should like your friendship.’

      ‘No conditions attach to that.’

      ‘I thought I might help you. Because your ally Lady Carey has gone down to Hever now to see her daughter. She is no longer wanted since Anne is back on duty in the bedchamber. Poor Mary.’ She laughs. ‘God dealt her a good enough hand but she never knew how to play it. Tell me, what will you do if the queen does not have another child?’

      ‘There is no reason to fear it. Her mother had a child a year. Boleyn used to complain it kept him poor.’

      ‘Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife?

      And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad.’

      ‘It's the same in the gospels. The stony ground gets the blame.’

      The stony places, the thorny unprofitable waste. Jane Rochford is childless after seven years of marriage. ‘I believe my husband wishes I would die.’ She says it lightly. He does not know how to answer. He has not asked for her confidence. ‘If I do die,’ she says, in the same bright tone, ‘have my body opened. I ask you this in friendship. I am afraid of poison. My husband and his sister are closeted together for hours, and Anne knows all manner of poisons. She has boasted that she will give Mary a breakfast she will not recover from.’ He waits. ‘Mary the king's daughter, I mean. Though I am sure if it pleased Anne she would not scruple to make away with her own sister.’ She glances up again. ‘In your heart, if you are honest, you would like to know the things I know.’

      She is lonely, he thinks, and breeding a savage heart, like Leon-tina in her cage. She imagines everything is about her, every glance or secret conversation. She is afraid the other women pity her, and she hates to be pitied. He says, ‘What do you know of my heart?’

      ‘I know where you have disposed it.’

      ‘It is more than I know myself.’

      ‘That is not uncommon among men. I can tell you who you love. Why do you not ask for her, if you want her? The Seymours are not rich. They will sell you Jane, and be glad of the bargain.’

      ‘You are mistaken in the nature of my interest. I have young gentlemen in my house, I have wards, their marriages are my business.’

      ‘Oh, fal la la,’ she says. ‘Sing another song. Tell it to infants in the nursery. Tell it to the House of Commons, you do most usually lie to them. But do not think you can deceive me.’

      ‘For a lady who offers friendship, you have rough manners.’

      ‘Get used to them, if you want my information. You go into Anne's rooms now, and what do you see? The queen at her priedieu. The queen sewing a smock for a beggar woman, wearing pearls the size of chickpeas.’

      It is hard not