Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

the days following he follows Henry's eyes, as they rest on various ladies of the court. Nothing in them, perhaps, except the speculative interest of any man; it's only Cranmer who thinks that if you look twice at a woman you have to marry her. He watches the king dancing with Lizzie Seymour, his hand lingering on her waist. He sees Anne watching, her expression cold, pinched.

      Next day, he lends Edward Seymour some money on very favourable terms.

      In the damp autumn mornings, when it is still half-light, his household are out early, in the damp and dripping woods. You don't get torta di funghi unless you pick the raw ingredients.

      Richard Riche arrives at eight o'clock, his face astonished and alarmed. ‘They stopped me at your gate, sir, and said, where's your bag of mushrooms? No one comes in here without mushrooms.’ Riche's dignity is affronted. ‘I don't think they would have asked the Lord Chancellor for mushrooms.’

      ‘Oh, they would, Richard. But in an hour you will eat them with eggs baked in cream, and the Lord Chancellor will not. Shall we get down to work?’

      Through September he has been rounding up the priests and monks who have been close to the Maid. He and Sir Purse sift the papers and conduct the interrogations. The clerics are no sooner under lock and key than they begin to deny her, and deny each other: I never believed in her, it was Father So-and-So who convinced me, I never wanted any trouble. As for their contacts with Exeter's wife, with Katherine, with Mary – each disclaims his own involvement and rushes to implicate his brother-in-Christ. The Maid's people have been in constant contact with the Exeter household. She herself has been at many of the chief monastic houses of the realm – Syon Abbey, the Charterhouse at Sheen, the Franciscan house at Richmond. He knows this because he has many contacts among disaffected monks. In every house there are a few, and he seeks out the most intelligent. Katherine herself has not met the nun. Why should she? She has Fisher to act as a go-between, and Gertrude, Lord Exeter's wife.

      The king says, ‘It is hard for me to believe Henry Courtenay would betray me. A Garter knight, a great man in the lists, my friend since I was a boy. Wolsey tried to part us, but I wouldn't have it.’ He laughs. ‘Brandon, do you remember Greenwich, that Christmas, which year was it? Remember the snowball fight?’

      This is the whole difficulty of dealing with them, men who are always talking about ancient pedigrees, and boyhood friendships, and things that happened when you were still trading wool on the Antwerp exchange. You put the evidence under their noses, and they start getting teary over snowball fights. ‘Look,’ Henry says, ‘it is Courtenay's wife that is to blame. When he knows the whole of her practices he will want to be rid of her. She is fickle and weak like all her sex, easily led into scheming.’

      ‘So forgive her,’ he says. ‘Write her a pardon. Put these people under a debt of gratitude to you, if you want them to leave off their foolish sentiment towards Katherine.’

      ‘You think you can buy hearts?’ Charles Brandon says. He sounds as if he would be sad if the answer were yes.

      He thinks, the heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale. ‘It is not a price in money we are offering. I have enough to put the Courtenay family on trial, all Exeter's people. If we forbear to do it, we are offering their freedom and their lands. We are giving them a chance to recoup the honour of their name.’

      Henry says, ‘His grandfather left Crookback for my father's service.’

      ‘If we forgive them they will play us for fools,’ Charles says.

      ‘I think not, my lord. Everything they do from now on, they do under my eye.’

      ‘And the Poles, Lord Montague: what do you propose there?’

      ‘He should not assume he will be pardoned.’

      ‘Make him sweat, eh?’ Charles says. ‘I am not sure I like your way of dealing with noblemen.’

      ‘They get their deserts,’ the king says. ‘Hush, my lord, I need to think.’

      A pause. Brandon's position is too complicated for him to sustain. He wants to say, pay them out as traitors, Cromwell: but mind you butcher them respectfully. Suddenly his face clears. ‘Ah, now I remember Greenwich. The snow was knee-deep that year. Ah, we were young then, Harry. You don't get snow any more, like you did when we were young.’

      He gathers up his papers and begs to be excused. Reminiscence is setting in for the afternoon and there is work to be done. ‘Rafe, ride over to West Horsley. Tell Exeter's wife the king thinks all women fickle and weak – though I should have thought he has plenty of evidence to the contrary. Tell her to set down in writing that she has not the wit of a flea. Tell her to claim she is exceptionally easy to mislead, even for a woman. Tell her to grovel. Advise her on the wording. You know how to do it. Nothing can be too humble for Henry.’

      This is the season for humility. The word from the talks in Marseilles is that King Francis has fallen at the Pope's feet and kissed his slippers. When the news comes, Henry bellows an obscenity and shreds the dispatch in his hands.

      He collects up the pieces, lays it out on a table and reads it. ‘Francis has kept faith with you after all,’ he says. ‘Surprisingly.’ He has persuaded the Pope to suspend his bull of excommunication. England has a breathing space.

      ‘I wish Pope Clement in his grave,’ Henry says. ‘God knows he is a man of filthy life, and he is always ailing, so he ought to die. Sometimes,’ he says, ‘I pray that Katherine might be translated into glory. Is that wrong?’

      ‘If you snap your fingers, Majesty, a hundred priests will come running to tell you right from wrong.’

      ‘It seems I prefer to hear it from you.’ Henry broods, in a sulky twitching silence. ‘If Clement dies, who will be the next rogue in office?’

      ‘I've put my money on Alessandro Farnese.’

      ‘Really?’ Henry sits up. ‘One lays bets?’

      ‘But the odds are short. He has thrown about such bribes to the Roman mob all these years, that they will put the cardinals in terror when the time comes.’

      ‘Remind me how many children has he.’

      ‘Four I know of.’

      The king is looking into the tapestry on the near wall, where white-shouldered women walk barefoot on a carpet of spring flowers. ‘I may have another child soon.’

      ‘The queen has spoken to you?’

      ‘Not yet.’ But he sees, we all do, the flare of colour in Anne's cheeks, the silk sleekness of her person, the tone of command ringing in her voice as she hands out favours and rewards to the people around her. This last week, there are more rewards than black looks, and Stephen Vaughan's wife, who is in the Bedchamber, says she has missed her courses. The king says, ‘She has missed her …’ and then he stops, blushing like a schoolboy. He crosses the room, flings open his arms and embraces him, shining like a star, his great hands with their blazing rings seizing hand-fuls of the black velvet of his jacket. ‘This time for sure. England is ours.’

      Archaic, that cry from his heart: as if he were standing on the battlefield between the bloodied banners, the crown in a thorn bush, his enemies dead at his feet.

      He disengages himself gently, smiling. He uncrumples the memorandum he had clenched in his fist when the king seized him; because is that not how men embrace, they knead each other with big fists, as if to knock each other down? Henry squeezes his arm and says, ‘Thomas, it is like hugging a sea wall. What are you made of?’ He takes the paper. He gapes. ‘Is this what we must do this morning? This list?’

      ‘Not more than fifty items. We shall soon work through.’

      For the rest of the day he cannot stop smiling. Who cares for Clement and his bulls? He might as well stand on Cheap and let the populace pelt him. He might as well stand under the Christmas garlands – which we dust with flour in years when there is no snow – and sing, ‘Hey nonny no, Fa-la-la, Under the