Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

you are comfortable.’

      More says, ‘I hear you have sworn my fool, Henry Pattinson.’ He laughs.

      ‘Whereas the men who died yesterday had followed your example, and refused to swear.’

      ‘Let me be clear. I am no example. I am just myself, alone. I say nothing against the act. I say nothing against the men that made it. I say nothing against the oath, or against any man that swears it.’

      ‘Ah, yes,’ he sits down on the chest where More keeps his possessions, ‘but all this saying nothing, it won't do for a jury, you know. Should it come to a jury.’

      ‘You have come to threaten me.’

      ‘The Emperor's feats of arms shorten the king's temper. He means to send you a commission, who will want a straight answer as to his title.’

      ‘Oh I'm sure your friends will be too good for me. Lord Audley? And Richard Riche? Listen. Ever since I came here I have been preparing for my death, at your hands – yes, yours – or at the hands of nature. All I require is peace and silence for my prayers.’

      ‘You want to be a martyr.’

      ‘No, what I want is to go home. I am weak, Thomas. I am weak as we all are. I want the king to take me as his servant, his loving subject, as I have never ceased to be.’

      ‘I have never understood where the line is drawn, between sacrifice and self-slaughter.’

      ‘Christ drew it.’

      ‘You don't see anything wrong with the comparison?’

      Silence. The loud, contentious, quality of More's silence. It's bouncing off the walls. More says he loves England, and he fears all England will be damned. He is offering some kind of bargain to his God, his God who loves slaughter: ‘It is expedient that one man shall die for the people.’ Well, I tell you, he says to himself. Bargain all you like. Consign yourself to the hangman if you must. The people don't give a fourpenny fuck. Today is 5 May. In two days' time the commission will visit you. We will ask you to sit, you will decline. You will stand before us looking like a desert father, and we snugly wrapped against the summer chill. I will say what I say. You will say what you say. And maybe I will concede you have won. I will walk away and leave you, the king's good subject if you say so, till your beard grows down to your knees and the spiders weave webs across your eyes.

      Well, that's his plan. Events overtake it. He says to Richard, has any damnable bishop of Rome in the history of his pox-ridden jurisdiction ever done anything so stupidly ill-timed as this? Farnese has announced England is to have a new cardinal: Bishop Fisher. Henry is enraged. He swears he will send Fisher's head across the sea to meet his hat.

      The third of June: himself to the Tower, with Wiltshire for the Boleyn interest, and Charles Brandon, looking as if he would as soon be fishing. Riche to make notes; Audley to make jokes. It's wet again, and Brandon says, this must be the worst summer ever, eh? Yes, he says, good thing His Majesty isn't superstitious. They laugh: Suffolk, a little uncertainly.

      Some said the world would end in 1533. Last year had its adherents too. Why not this year? There is always somebody ready to claim that these are the end times, and nominate his neighbour as the Antichrist. The news from Münster is that the skies are falling fast. The besiegers are demanding unconditional surrender; the besieged are threatening mass suicide.

      He leads the way. ‘Christ, what a place,’ Brandon says. Drips are spoiling his hat. ‘Doesn't it oppress you?’

      ‘Oh, we're always here.’ Riche shrugs. ‘One thing or another. Master Secretary is wanted at the Mint or the jewel house.’

      Martin lets them in. More's head jerks up as they enter.

      ‘It's yes or no today,’ he says.

      ‘Not even good day and how do you.’ Somebody has given More a comb for his beard. ‘Well, what do I hear from Antwerp? Do I hear Tyndale is taken?’

      ‘That is not to the point,’ the Lord Chancellor says. ‘Answer to the oath. Answer to the statute. Is it a lawfully made statute?’

      ‘They say he strayed outside and the Emperor's soldiers have seized him.’

      He says coldly, ‘Had you prior knowledge?’

      Tyndale has been, not just taken, but betrayed. Someone tempted him out of his haven, and More knows who. He sees himself, a second self, enacting another rainy morning just like this: in which he crosses the room, hauls the prisoner to his feet, beats out of him the name of his agent. ‘Now, Your Grace,’ he says to Suffolk, ‘you are wearing a violent expression, pray be calm.’

      Me? Brandon says. Audley laughs. More says, ‘Tyndale's devil will desert him now. The Emperor will burn him. And the king will not lift a finger to save him, because Tyndale would not support his new marriage.’

      ‘Perhaps you think he showed sense there?’ Riche says.

      ‘You must speak,’ Audley says, gently enough.

      More is agitated, words tumbling over each other. He is ignoring Audley, speaking to him, Cromwell. ‘You cannot compel me to put myself in hazard. For if I had an opinion against your Act of Supremacy, which I do not concede, then your oath would be a two-edged sword. I must put my body in peril if I say no to it, my soul if I say yes to it. Therefore I say nothing.’

      ‘When you interrogated men you called heretics, you did not allow evasion. You compelled them to speak and racked if they would not. If they were made to answer, why not you?’

      ‘The cases are not the same. When I compel an answer from a heretic, I have the whole body of law behind me, the whole might of Christendom. What I am threatened with here is one particular law, one singular dispensation of recent make, recognised here but in no other country –’

      He sees Riche make a note. He turns away. ‘The end is the same. Fire for them. Axe for you.’

      ‘If the king grants you that mercy,’ Brandon says.

      More quails; he curls up his fingers on the tabletop. He notices this, detached. So that's a way in. Put him in fear of the more lingering death. Even as he thinks it, he knows he will not do it; the notion is contaminating. ‘On numbers I suppose you have me beat. But have you looked at a map lately? Christendom is not what it was.’

      Riche says, ‘Master Secretary, Fisher is more a man than this prisoner before us, for Fisher dissents and takes the consequences. Sir Thomas, I think you would be an overt traitor, if you dared.’

      More says softly, ‘Not so. It is not for me to thrust myself on God. It is for God to draw me to him.’

      ‘We take note of your obstinacy,’ Audley says. ‘We spare you the methods you have used on others.’ He stands up. ‘It is the king's pleasure that we move to indictment and trial.’

      ‘In the name of God! What ill can I effect from this place? I do nobody harm. I say none harm. I think none harm. If this be not enough to keep a man alive –’

      He cuts in on him, incredulous. ‘You do nobody harm? What about Bainham, you remember Bainham? You forfeited his goods, committed his poor wife to prison, saw him racked with your own eyes, you locked him in Bishop Stokesley's cellar, you had him back at your own house two days chained upright to a post, you sent him again to Stokesley, saw him beaten and abused for a week, and still your spite was not exhausted: you sent him back to the Tower and had him racked again, so that finally his body was so broken that they had to carry him in a chair when they took him to Smithfield to be burned alive. And you say, Thomas More, that you do no harm?’

      Riche begins to gather More's papers from the table. It is suspected he has been passing letters to Fisher upstairs: which is not a bad thing, if collusion in Fisher's treason can be shown. More drops his hand on them, fingers spread; then shrugs, and yields them. ‘Have them if you must. You read all I write.’

      He says, ‘Unless we hear soon of a change of heart, we must take away your