Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

      ‘Don't prophet Amos me, man. She threatened the king. Foresaw his death.’

      ‘Foreseeing it is not the same as desiring it, still less plotting it.’

      ‘Ah, but she never foresaw anything that she didn't hope would happen. She sat down with the king's enemies and told them how it would be.’

      ‘If you mean Lord Exeter,’ the bishop says, ‘he is already pardoned, of course, and so is Lady Gertrude. If they were guilty, the king would have proceeded.’

      ‘That does not follow. Henry wishes for reconciliation. He finds it in him to be merciful. As he may be to you even yet, but you must admit your faults. Exeter has not been writing against the king, but you have.’

      ‘Where? Show me.’

      ‘Your hand is disguised, my lord, but not from me. Now you will publish no more.’ Fisher's glance shoots upwards. Delicately, his bones move beneath his skin; his fist grips his cane, the handle of which is a gilded dolphin. ‘Your printers abroad are working for me now. My friend Stephen Vaughan has offered them a better rate.’

      ‘It is about the divorce you are hounding me,’ Fisher says. ‘It is not about Elizabeth Barton. It is because Queen Katherine asked my counsel and I gave it.’

      ‘You say I am hounding you, when I ask you to keep within the law? Do not try to lead me away from your prophetess, or I will lead you where she is and lock you up next door to her. Would you have been so keen to believe her, if in one of her visions she had seen Anne crowned queen a year before it occurred, and Heaven smiling down on the event? In that case, I put it to you, you would have called her a witch.’

      Fisher shakes his head; he retreats into bafflement. ‘I always wondered, you know, it has puzzled me many a year, if in the gospels Mary Magdalene was the same Mary who was Martha's sister. Elizabeth Barton told me for a certainty she was. In the whole matter, she didn't hesitate.’

      He laughs. ‘Oh, she's familiar with these people. She's in and out of their houses. She's shared a bowl of pottage many a time with our Blessed Lady. Look now, my lord, holy simplicity was well enough in its day, but its day is over. We're at war. Just because the Emperor's soldiers aren't running down the street, don't deceive yourself – this is a war and you are in the enemy camp.’

      The bishop is silent. He sways a little on his stool. Sniffs. ‘I see why Wolsey retained you. You are a ruffian and so was he. I have been a priest forty years, and I have never seen such ungodly men as those who flourish today. Such evil councillors.’

      ‘Fall ill,’ he says. ‘Take to your bed. That's what I recommend.’

      The bill of attainder against the Maid and her allies is laid before the House of Lords on a Saturday morning, 21 February. Fisher's name is in it and so, at Henry's command, is More's. He goes to the Tower to see the woman Barton, to see if she has anything else to get off her conscience before her death is scheduled.

      She has survived the winter, trailed across country to her outdoor confessions, standing exposed on scaffolds in the cutting wind. He brings a candle in with him, and finds her slumped on her stool like a badly tied bundle of rags; the air is both cold and stale. She looks up and says, as if they were resuming a conversation, ‘Mary Magdalene told me I should die.’

      Perhaps, he thinks, she has been talking to me in her head. ‘Did she give you a date?’

      ‘You'd find that helpful?’ she asks. He wonders if she knows that Parliament, indignant over More's inclusion, could delay the bill against her till spring. ‘I'm glad you've come, Master Cromwell. Nothing happens here.’

      Not even his most prolonged, his most subtle interrogations had frightened her. To get Katherine pulled into it, he had tried every trick he knew: with no result. He says, ‘You are fed properly, are you?’

      ‘Oh yes. And my laundry done. But I miss it, when I used to go to Lambeth, see the archbishop, I liked that. Seeing the river. All the people bustling along, and the boats unloading. Do you know if I shall be burned? Lord Audley said I would be burned.’ She speaks as if Audley were an old friend.

      ‘I hope you can be spared that. It is for the king to say.’

      ‘I go to Hell these nights,’ she says. ‘Master Lucifer shows me a chair. It is carved of human bones and padded with cushions of flame.’

      ‘Is it for me?’

      ‘Bless you, no. For the king.’

      ‘Any sightings of Wolsey?’

      ‘The cardinal's where I left him.’ Seated among the unborn. She pauses; a long drifting pause. ‘They say it can take an hour for the body to burn. Mother Mary will exalt me. I shall bathe in the flames, as one bathes in a fountain. To me, they will be cool.’ She looks into his face but at his expression she turns away. ‘Sometimes they pack gunpowder in the wood, don't they? Makes it quick then. How many will be going with me?’

      Six. He names them. ‘It could have been sixty. Do you know that? Your vanity brought them here.’

      As he says it he thinks, it is also true that their vanity brought her: and he sees that she would have preferred sixty to die, to see Exeter and the Pole family pulled down to disgrace; it would have sealed her fame. That being so, why would she not name Katherine as party to the plot? What a triumph that would be for a prophet, to ruin a queen. There, he thinks, I shouldn't have been so subtle after all; I should have played on her greed to be infamous. ‘Shall I not see you again?’ she says. ‘Or will you be there, when I suffer?’

      ‘This throne,’ he says. ‘This chair of bones. It would be as well to keep it to yourself. Not to let the king hear of it.’

      ‘I think he ought. He should have warning of what is waiting for him after death. And what can he do to me, worse than he already plans?’

      ‘You don't want to plead your belly?’

      She blushes. ‘I'm not with child. You're laughing at me.’

      ‘I would advise anyone to get a few more weeks of life, by any means they can. Say you have been ill-used on the road. Say your guards have dishonoured you.’

      ‘But then I would have to say who did it, and they would be taken before a judge.’

      He shakes his head, pitying her. ‘When a guard despoils a prisoner, he doesn't leave her his name.’

      Anyway, she doesn't like his idea, that's plain. He leaves her. The Tower is like a small town and its morning routine clatters on around him, the guards and the men from the Mint greet him, and the keeper of the king's beasts trots up to say it's dinner time – they eat early, the beasts – and does he want to see them fed? I take it very kindly, he says, waiving the pleasure; unbreakfasted himself, slightly nauseous, he can smell stale blood and from the direction of their cages hear their truffling grunts and smothered roars. High up on the walls above the river, out of sight, a man is whistling an old tune, and at the refrain breaks into song; he is a jolly forester, he sings. Which is most certainly untrue.

      He looks around for his boatmen. He wonders whether the Maid is ill, and whether she will live to be killed. She was never harmed in his custody, only harassed; kept awake a night or two, but no longer than the king's business keeps him awake, and you don't, he thinks, find me confessing to anything. It's nine o'clock; by ten o'clock dinner, he has to be with Norfolk and Audley, who he hopes will not scream and smell, like the beasts. There is a tentative, icy sun; loops of vapour coil across the river, a scribble of mist.

      At Westminster, the duke chases out the servants. ‘If I want a drink I'll get it for myself. Go on, out, out you go. And shut the door! Any lurking at the keyhole, I'll skin you alive and salt you!’ He turns, swearing under his breath, and takes his chair with a grunt. ‘What if I begged him?’ he says. ‘What if I went down on my knees, said, Henry for the Lord's sake, take Thomas More out of the attainder?’

      ‘What if we all begged him,’ Audley says, ‘on our knees?’