Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

she has given up communing with nimble young gentlemen? Riddles and verses and songs in praise of her, do you suppose she has given them up?’

      ‘She has the king to praise her.’

      ‘Not a good word will she hear from that quarter till her belly is big again.’

      ‘And what will hinder that?’

      ‘Nothing. If he is up to it.’

      ‘Be careful.’ He smiles.

      ‘I never knew it was treason to say what passes in a prince's bed. All Europe talked about Katherine, what body part was put where, was she penetrated, and if she was did she know?’ She sniggers. ‘Harry's leg pains him at night. He is afraid the queen will kick him in the throes of her passion.’ She puts her hand before her mouth, but the words creep out, narrow between her fingers. ‘But if she lies still under him he says, what, madam, are you so little interested in making my heir?’

      ‘I do not see what she is to do.’

      ‘She says she gets no pleasure with him. And he – as he fought seven years to get her, he can hardly admit it has staled so soon. It was stale before they came from Calais, that is what I think.’

      It's possible; maybe they were battle-weary, exhausted. Yet he gives her such magnificent presents. And they quarrel so much. Would they quarrel so much, if they were indifferent?

      ‘So,’ she goes on, ‘between the kicking and the sore leg, and his lack of prowess, and her lack of desire, it will be a wonder if we ever have a Prince of Wales. Oh, he is good man enough, if he had a new woman each week. If he craves novelty, who is to say she does not? Her own brother is in her service.’

      He turns to look at her. ‘God help you, Lady Rochford,’ he says.

      ‘To fetch his friends her way, I mean. What did you think I meant?’ A little, grating laugh.

      ‘Do you know what you mean yourself? You have been at court long enough, you know what games are played. It is no matter if any lady receives verses and compliments, even though she is married. She knows her husband writes verses elsewhere.’

      ‘Oh, she knows that. At least, I know. There is not a minx within thirty miles who has not had a set of Rochford's verses. But if you think the gallantry stops at the bedchamber's door, you are more innocent than I took you for. You may be in love with Seymour's daughter, but you need not emulate her in having the wit of a sheep.’

      He smiles. ‘Sheep are maligned in that way. Shepherds say they can recognise each other. They answer to their names. They make friends for life.’

      ‘And I will tell you who is in and out of everyone's bedchamber, it is that sneaking little boy Mark. He is the go-between for them all. My husband pays him in pearl buttons and comfit boxes and feathers for his hat.’

      ‘Why, is Lord Rochford short of ready money?’

      ‘You see an opportunity for usury?’

      ‘How not?’ At least, he thinks, there is one point on which we concur: pointless dislike of Mark. In Wolsey's house he had duties, teaching the choir children. Here he does nothing but stand about, wherever the court is, in greater or lesser proximity to the queen's apartments. ‘Well, I can see no harm in the boy,’ he says.

      ‘He sticks like a burr to his betters. He does not know his place. He is a jumped-up nobody, taking his chance because the times are disordered.’

      ‘I suppose you could say the same of me, Lady Rochford. And I am sure you do.’

      Thomas Wyatt brings him baskets of cobnuts and filberts, bushels of Kentish apples, jolting up himself to Austin Friars on the carrier's cart. ‘The venison follows,’ he says, jumping down. ‘I come with the fresh fruit, not the carcases.’ His hair smells of apples, his clothes are dusty from the road. ‘Now you will have words with me,’ he says, ‘for risking a doublet worth –’

      ‘The carrier's yearly earnings.’

      Wyatt looks chastened. ‘I forget you are my father.’

      ‘I have rebuked you, so now we can fall to idle boyish talk.’ Standing in a wash of chary autumn sun, he holds an apple in his hand. He pares it with a thin blade, and the peel whispers away from the flesh and lies among his papers, like the shadow of an apple, green on white paper and black ink. ‘Did you see Lady Carey when you were in the country?’

      ‘Mary Boleyn in the country. What dew-fresh pleasures spring to mind. I expect she's rutting in some hayloft.’

      ‘Just that I want to keep hold of her, for the next time her sister is hors de combat.’

      Wyatt sits down amid the files, an apple in his hand. ‘Cromwell, suppose you'd been away from England for seven years? If you'd been like a knight in a story, lying under an enchantment? You would look around you and wonder, who are they, these people?’

      This summer, Wyatt vowed, he would stay down in Kent. He would read and write on wet days, hunt when it is fine. But the fall comes, and the nights deepen, and Anne draws him back and back. His heart is true, he believes: and if she is false, it is difficult to pick where the falsehood lies. You cannot joke with Anne these days. You cannot laugh. You must think her perfect, or she will find some way to punish you.

      ‘My old father talks about King Edward's days. He says, you see now why it's not good for the king to marry a subject, an Englishwoman?’

      The trouble is, though Anne has remade the court, there are still people who knew her before, in the days when she came from France, when she set herself to seduce Harry Percy. They compete to tell stories of how she is not worthy. Or not human. How she is a snake. Or a swan. Una candida cerva. One single white doe, concealed in leaves of silver-grey; shivering, she hides in the trees, waiting for the lover who will turn her back from animal to goddess. ‘Send me back to Italy,’ Wyatt says. Her dark, her lustrous, her slanting eyes: she haunts me. She comes to me in my solitary bed at night.

      ‘Solitary? I don't think so.’

      Wyatt laughs. ‘You're right. I take it where I can.’

      ‘You drink too much. Water your wine.’

      ‘It could have been different.’

      ‘Everything could.’

      ‘You never think about the past.’

      ‘I never talk about it.’

      Wyatt pleads, ‘Send me away somewhere.’

      ‘I will. When the king needs an ambassador.’

      ‘Is it true that the Medici have offered for the Princess Mary's hand?’

      ‘Not Princess Mary, you mean the Lady Mary. I have asked the king to think about it. But they are not grand enough for him. You know, if Gregory showed any interest in banking, I would look for a bride for him in Florence. It would be pleasant to have an Italian girl in the house.’

      ‘Send me back there. Deploy me where I can be useful, to you or the king, as here I am useless and worse than useless to myself, and necessary to no one's pleasure.’

      He says, ‘Oh, by the bleached bones of Becket. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.’

      Norfolk has his own view of the queen's friends. He rattles a little while he expresses it, his relics clinking, his grey disordered eyebrows working over wide-open eyes. These men, he says, these men who hang around with women! Norris, I thought better of him! And Henry Wyatt's son! Writing verse. Singing. Talk-talk-talking. ‘What's the use of talking to women?’ he asks earnestly. ‘Cromwell, you don't talk to women, do you? I mean, what would be the topic? What would you find to say?’

      I'll speak to Norfolk, he decides when he comes back from France; ask him to incline Anne to caution. The French are meeting the Pope in Marseilles, and in default of his own attendance Henry must be represented by his most senior peer. Gardiner is already there. For me every