Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

He uses me to make his sermon on. Well, let him make his next sermon on the block.’

      The evening before Fisher is to die, he visits More. He takes a strong guard with him, but he leaves them in the outer chamber and goes in alone. ‘I've got used to the blind drawn,’ More says, almost cheerfully. ‘You don't mind sitting in the twilight?’

      ‘You need not be afraid of the sun. There is none.’

      ‘Wolsey used to boast that he could change the weather.’ He chuckles. ‘It's good of you to visit me, Thomas, now that we have no more to say. Or have we?’

      ‘The guards will come for Bishop Fisher early tomorrow. I am afraid they will wake you.’

      ‘I should be a poor Christian if I could not keep vigil with him.’ His smile has seeped away. ‘I hear the king has granted him mercy as to the manner of his death.’

      ‘He being a very old man, and frail.’

      More says, with tart pleasantness, ‘I'm doing my best, you know. A man can only shrivel at his own rate.’

      ‘Listen.’ He reaches across the table, takes his hand, wrings it: harder than he meant. My blacksmith's grip, he thinks: he sees More flinch, feels his fingers, the skin dry as paper over the bones. ‘Listen. When you come before the court, throw yourself at that instant on the king's mercy.’

      More says, wonderingly, ‘What good will that do me?’

      ‘He is not a cruel man. You know that.’

      ‘Do I? He used not to be. He had a sweet disposition. But then he changed the company he kept.’

      ‘He is susceptible always to a plea for mercy. I do not say he will let you live, the oath unsworn. But he may grant you the same mercy as Fisher.’

      ‘It is not so important, what happens to the body. I have led in some ways a blessed life. God has been good and not tested me. Now he does I cannot fail him. I have been vigilant over my heart, and I have not always liked what I have found there. If it comes into the hands of the hangman at the last, so be it. It will be in God's hands soon enough.’

      ‘Will you think me sentimental, if I say I do not want to see you butchered?’ No reply. ‘Are you not afraid of the pain?’

      ‘Oh yes, I am very much afraid, I am not a bold and robust man such as yourself, I cannot help but rehearse it in my mind. But I will only feel it for a moment, and God will not let me remember it afterwards.’

      ‘I am glad I am not like you.’

      ‘Undoubtedly. Or you would be sitting here.’

      ‘I mean, my mind fixed on the next world. I realise you see no prospect of improving this one.’

      ‘And you do?’

      Almost a flippant question. A handful of hail smacks itself against the window. It startles them both; he gets up, restless. He would rather know what's outside, see the summer in its sad blowing wreckage, than cower behind the blind and wonder what the damage is. ‘I once had every hope,’ he says. ‘The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one's solitary soul like a flame under a glass. The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain – the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in a man's eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives? Last week the people were rioting in York. Why would they not, with wheat so scarce, and twice the price of last year? I must stir up the justices to make examples, I suppose, otherwise the whole of the north will be out with billhooks and pikes, and who will they slaughter but each other? I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better. I should be a better man if I lived in a commonwealth where the sun shone and the citizens were rich and free. If only that were true, Master More, you wouldn't have to pray for me nearly as hard as you do.’

      ‘How you can talk,’ More says. Words, words, just words. ‘I do, of course, pray for you. I pray with all my heart that you will see that you are misled. When we meet in Heaven, as I hope we will, all our differences will be forgot. But for now, we cannot wish them away. Your task is to kill me. Mine is to keep alive. It is my role and my duty. All I own is the ground I stand on, and that ground is Thomas More. If you want it you will have to take it from me. You cannot reasonably believe I will yield it.’

      ‘You will want pen and paper to write out your defence. I will grant you that.’

      ‘You never give up trying, do you? No, Master Secretary, my defence is up here,’ he taps his forehead, ‘where it will stay safe from you.’

      How strange the room is, how empty, without More's books: it is filling with shadows. ‘Martin, a candle,’ he calls.

      ‘Will you be here tomorrow? For the bishop?’

      He nods. Though he will not witness the moment of Fisher's death. The protocol is that the spectators bow their knee and doff their hats to mark the passing of the soul.

      Martin brings a pricket candle. ‘Anything else?’ They pause while he sets it down. When he is gone, they still pause: the prisoner sits hunched over, looking into the flame. How does he know if More has begun on a silence, or on preparation for speech? There is a silence which precedes speech, there is a silence which is instead of speech. One need not break it with a statement, one can break it with a hesitation: if … as it may be … if it were possible … He says, ‘I would have left you, you know. To live out your life. To repent of your butcheries. If I were king.’

      The light fades. It is as if the prisoner has withdrawn himself from the room, leaving barely a shape where he should be. A draught pulls at the candle flame. The bare table between them, clear now of More's driven scribblings, has taken on the aspect of an altar; and what is an altar for, but a sacrifice? More breaks his silence at last: ‘If, at the end and after I am tried, if the king does not grant, if the full rigour of the penalty … Thomas, how is it done? You would think when a man's belly were slashed open he would die, with a great effusion of blood, but it seems it is not so … Do they have some special implement, that they use to pith him while he is alive?’

      ‘I am sorry you should think me expert.’

      But had he not told Norfolk, as good as told him, that he had pulled out a man's heart?

      He says, ‘It is the executioner's mystery. It is kept secret, to keep us in awe.’

      ‘Let me be killed cleanly. I ask nothing, but I ask that.’ Swaying on his stool, he is seized, between one heartbeat and the next, in the grip of bodily agitation; he cries out, shudders from head to foot. His hand beats, weakly, at the clean tabletop; and when he leaves him, ‘Martin, go in, give him some wine’ – he is still crying out, shuddering, beating the table.

      The next time he sees him will be in Westminster Hall.

      On the day of the trial, rivers breach their banks; the Thames itself rises, bubbling like some river in Hell, and washes its flotsam over the quays.

      It's England against Rome, he says. The living against the dead.

      Norfolk will preside. He tells him how it will be. The early counts in the indictment will be thrown out: they concern sundry words spoken, at sundry times, about the act and the oath, and More's treasonable conspiracy with Fisher – letters went between the two of them, but it seems those letters are now destroyed. ‘Then on the fourth count, we will hear the evidence of the Solicitor General. Now, Your Grace, this will divert More, because he cannot see young Riche without working himself into a fit about his derelictions when he was a boy –’ The duke raises an eyebrow. ‘Drinking. Fighting. Women. Dice.’

      Norfolk rubs his bristly chin. ‘I have noticed, a soft-looking lad like that, he always does fight. To make a