Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it's no good at all if you don't have a plan for tomorrow.’

      After supper he sits talking to Lady Shelton. Lady Bryan has gone to bed, then come down again to chivvy them along. ‘You'll be tired in the morning!’

      ‘Yes,’ Anne Shelton agrees, waving her away. ‘In the morning there'll be no doing anything with us. We'll throw our breakfasts on the floor.’

      They sit till the servants yawn off to another room, and the candles burn down, and they retreat into the house, to smaller and warmer rooms, to talk some more. You have given Mary good advice, she says, I hope she heeds it, I fear there are hard times ahead for her. She talks about her brother Thomas Boleyn, the most selfish man I ever knew, it is no wonder Anne is so grasping, all she has ever heard from him is talk of money, and how to gain a mean advantage over people, he would have sold those girls naked at a Barbary slave market if he had thought he would get a good price.

      He imagines himself surrounded by his scimitared retainers, placing a bid for Mary Boleyn; he smiles, and returns his attention to her aunt. She tells him Boleyn secrets; he tells her no secrets, though she thinks he has.

      Gregory is asleep when he comes in, but he turns over and says, ‘Dear father, where have you been, to bed with Lady Shelton?’

      These things happen: but not with Boleyns. ‘What strange dreams you must have. Lady Shelton has been thirty years married.’

      ‘I thought I could have sat with Mary after supper,’ Gregory murmurs. ‘If I didn't say the wrong thing. But then she is so sneery. I couldn't sit with such a sneery girl.’ He flounces over in the feather bed, and falls asleep again.

      When Fisher comes to his senses and asks pardon, the old bishop begs the king to consider that he is ill and infirm. The king indicates that the bill of attainder must take its course: but it is his habit, he says, to grant mercy to those who admit their fault.

      The Maid is to be hanged. He says nothing of the chair of human bones. He tells Henry she has stopped prophesying, and hopes that at Tyburn, with the noose around her neck, she will not make a liar out of him.

      When his councillors kneel before the king, and beg that Thomas More's name be taken out of the bill, Henry yields the point. Perhaps he has been waiting for this: to be persuaded. Anne is not present, or it might have gone otherwise.

      They get up and go out, dusting themselves. He thinks he hears the cardinal laughing at them, from some invisible part of the room. Audley's dignity has not suffered, but the duke looks agitated; when he tried to get up, elderly knees had failed him, and he and Audley had lifted him by the elbows and set him on his feet. ‘I thought I might be fixed there another hour,’ he says. ‘Entreating and entreating him.’

      ‘The joke is,’ he says to Audley, ‘More's still being paid a pension from the treasury. I suppose that had better stop.’

      ‘He has a breathing space now. I pray to God he'll see sense. Has he arranged his affairs?’

      ‘Made over what he can to the children. So Roper tells me.’

      ‘Oh, you lawyers!’ the duke says. ‘On the day I go down, who will look after me?’

      Norfolk is sweating; he eases his pace, and Audley checks too, so they are dawdling along, and Cranmer comes behind like an afterthought. He turns back and takes his arm. He has been at every sitting of Parliament: the bench of bishops, otherwise, conspicuously underpopulated.

      The Pope chooses this month, while he is rolling his great bills through Parliament, to give his judgment at last on Queen Katherine's marriage – a judgment so long delayed that he thought Clement meant to die in his indecision. The original dispensations, Clements finds, are sound; therefore the marriage is sound. The supporters of the Emperor let off fireworks in the streets of Rome. Henry is contemptuous, sardonic. He expresses these feelings by dancing. Anne can dance still, though her belly shows; she must take the summer quietly. He remembers the king's hand on Lizzie Seymour's waist. Nothing came of that, the young woman is no fool. Now it is little Mary Shelton he is whirling around, lifting her off her feet and tickling her and squeezing her and making her breathless with compliments. These things mean nothing; he sees Anne lift up her chin and avert her gaze and lean back in her chair, making some murmured comment, her expression arch; her veil brushing, for the briefest moment, against the jacket of that grinning cur Francis Weston. It is clear Anne thinks Mary Shelton must be tolerated, kept sweet even. It's safest to keep the king among cousins, if no sister is on hand. Where is Mary Boleyn? Down in the country, perhaps longing like him for warmer weather.

      And the summer arrives, with no intermission for spring, promptly on a Monday morning, like a new servant with a shining face: 13 April. They are at Lambeth – Audley, himself, the archbishop – the sun shining strongly through the windows. He stands looking down at the palace gardens. This is how the book Utopia begins: friends, talking in a garden. On the paths below, Hugh Latimer and some of the king's chaplains are play-fighting, pulling each other around like schoolboys, Hugh hanging around the necks of two of his clerical fellows so his feet swing off the floor. All they need is a football to make a proper holiday of it. ‘Master More,’ he says, ‘why don't you go out and enjoy the sunshine? And we'll call for you again in half an hour, and put the oath to you again: and you'll give us a different answer, yes?’

      He hears More's joints snap as he stands. ‘Thomas Howard went on his knees for you!’ he says. That seems like weeks ago. Late-night sittings and a fresh row every day have tired him, but sharpened his senses too, so he is aware that in the room behind him Cranmer is working himself into a terrible anxiety, and he wants More out of the room before the dam breaks.

      ‘I don't know what you think a half-hour will do for me,’ More says. His tone is easy, bantering. ‘Of course, it might do something for you.’

      More had asked to see a copy of the Act of Succession. Now Audley unrolls it; pointedly, he bends his head and begins reading, though he has read it a dozen times. ‘Very well,’ More says. ‘But I trust I have made myself clear. I cannot swear, but I will not speak against your oath, and I will not try to dissuade anyone else from it.’

      ‘That is not enough. And you know it is not.’

      More nods. He meanders towards the door, careering first into the corner of the table, making Cranmer flinch, his arm darting out to steady the ink. The door closes after him.

      ‘So?’

      Audley rolls up the statute. Gently he taps it on the table, looking at the place where More had stood. Cranmer says, ‘Look, this is my idea. What if we let him swear in secret? He swears, but we offer not to tell anybody? Or if he cannot take this oath, we ask him what oath he can take?’

      He laughs.

      ‘That would hardly meet the king's purpose,’ Audley sighs. Tap, tap, tap. ‘After all we did for him, and for Fisher. His name taken out of the attainder, Fisher fined instead of locked up for life, what more could they ask for? Our efforts flung back at us.’

      ‘Oh well. Blessed are the peacemakers,’ he says. He wants to strangle somebody.

      Cranmer says, ‘We will try again with More. At least, if he refuses, he should give his reasons.’

      He swears under his breath, turns from the window. ‘We know his reasons. All Europe knows them. He is against the divorce. He does not believe the king can be head of the church. But will he say that? Not he. I know him. Do you know what I hate? I hate to be part of this play, which is entirely devised by him. I hate the time it will take that could be better spent, I hate it that minds could be better employed, I hate to see our lives going by, because depend upon it, we will all be feeling our age before this pageant is played out. And what I hate most of all is that Master More sits in the audience and sniggers when I trip over my lines, for he has written all the parts. And written them these many years.’

      Cranmer, like a waiting-boy, pours him a cup of wine, edges towards him. ‘Here.’

      In the archbishop's