Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

the king turned his mind to Anne, he thought that, knowing how things are done in France, she might accept a … a certain position, in the court. And in his heart, as he put it. He said he would give up all other mistresses. The letters he has written, in his own hand …’

      ‘Really?’

      The cardinal always says that you can never get the king to write a letter himself. Even to another king. Even to the Pope. Even when it might make a difference.

      ‘Yes, since last summer. He writes and then sometimes, where he would sign Henricus Rex …’ She takes his hand, turns up his palm, and with her forefinger traces a shape. ‘Where he should sign his name, instead he draws a heart – and he puts their initials in it. Oh, you mustn't laugh …’ She can't keep the smile off her face. ‘He says he is suffering.’

      He wants to say, Mary, these letters, can you steal them for me?

      ‘My sister says, this is not France, and I am not a fool like you, Mary. She knows I was Henry's mistress and she sees how I'm left. And she takes a lesson from it.’

      He is almost holding his breath: but she's reckless now, she will have her say.

      ‘I tell you, they will ride over Hell to marry. They have vowed it. Anne says she will have him and she cares not if Katherine and every Spaniard is in the sea and drowned. What Henry wants he will have, and what Anne wants she will have, and I can say that, because I know them both, who better?’ Her eyes are soft and welling with tears. ‘So that is why,’ she says, ‘why I miss William Carey, because now she is everything, and I am to be swept out after supper like the old rushes. Now I'm no one's wife, they can say anything they like to me. My father says I'm a mouth to feed and my uncle Norfolk says I'm a whore.’

      As if he didn't make you one. ‘Are you short of money?’

      ‘Oh, yes!’ she says. ‘Yes, yes, yes, and no one has even thought about that! No one has even asked me that before. I have children. You know that. I need …’ She presses her fingers against her mouth, to stop it trembling. ‘If you saw my son … well, why do you think I called him Henry? The king would have owned him as his son, just as he has owned Richmond, but my sister forbade it. He does what she says. She means to give him a prince herself, so she doesn't want mine in his nursery.’

      Reports have been sent to the cardinal: Mary Boleyn's child is a healthy boy with red-gold hair and lively appetites. She has a daughter, older, but in the context that's not so interesting, a daughter. He says, ‘What age is your son now, Lady Carey?’

      ‘Three in March. My girl Catherine is five.’ Again she touches her lips, in consternation. ‘I'd forgotten … your wife died. How could I forget?’ How would you even know, he wonders, but she answers him at once. ‘Anne knows everything about people who work for the cardinal. She asks questions and writes the answers in a book.’ She looks up at him. ‘And you have children?’

      ‘Yes … do you know, no one ever asks me that either?’ He leans one shoulder against the panelling, and she moves an inch closer, and their faces soften, perhaps, from their habitual brave distress, and into the conspiracy of the bereft. ‘I have a big boy,’ he says, ‘he's at Cambridge with a tutor. I have a little girl called Grace; she's pretty and she has fair hair, though I don't … My wife was not a beauty, and I am as you see. And I have Anne, Anne wants to learn Greek.’

      ‘Goodness,’ she says. ‘For a woman, you know …’

      ‘Yes, but she says, “Why should Thomas More's daughter have the pre-eminence?” She has such good words. And she uses them all.’

      ‘You like her best.’

      ‘Her grandmother lives with us, and my wife's sister, but it's not … for Anne it's not the best arrangement. I could send her into some other household, but then … well, her Greek … and I hardly see her as it is.’ It feels like the longest speech, unless to Wolsey, that he's made for some time. He says, ‘Your father should be providing properly for you. I'll ask the cardinal to speak to him.’ The cardinal will enjoy that, he thinks.

      ‘But I need a new husband. To stop them calling me names. Can the cardinal get husbands?’

      ‘The cardinal can do anything. What kind of husband would you like?’

      She considers. ‘One who will take care of my children. One who can stand up to my family. One who doesn't die.’ She touches her fingertips together.

      ‘You should ask for someone young and handsome too. Don't ask, don't get.’

      ‘Really? I was brought up in the other tradition.’

      Then you had a different upbringing from your sister, he thinks. ‘In the masque, at York Place, do you remember … were you Beauty, or Kindness?’

      ‘Oh …’ she smiles, ‘that must be, what, seven years ago? I don't remember. I've dressed up so many times.’

      ‘Of course, you are still both.’

      ‘That's all I used to care about. Dressing up. I remember Anne, though. She was Perseverance.’

      He says, ‘Her particular virtue may be tested.’

      Cardinal Campeggio came here with a brief from Rome to obstruct. Obstruct and delay. Do anything, but avoid giving judgment.

      ‘Anne is always writing letters, or writing in her little book. She walks up and down, up and down. When she sees my lord father she holds up a palm to him, don't dare speak … and when she sees me, she gives me a little pinch. Like …’ Mary demonstrates an airy pinch, with the fingers of her left hand. ‘Like that.’ She strokes the fingers of her right hand along her throat, till she reaches the little pulsing dip above her collarbone. ‘There,’ she says. ‘Sometimes I am bruised. She thinks to disfigure me.’

      ‘I'll talk to the cardinal,’ he says.

      ‘Do.’ She waits.

      He needs to go. He has things to do.

      ‘I no longer want to be a Boleyn,’ she says. ‘Or a Howard. If the king would recognise my boy it would be different, but as it is I don't want any more of these masques and parties and dressing up as Virtues. They have no virtues. It's all show. If they don't want to know me, I don't want to know them. I'd rather be a beggar.’

      ‘Really … it doesn't have to come to that, Lady Carey.’

      ‘Do you know what I want? I want a husband who upsets them. I want to marry a man who frightens them.’

      There is a sudden light in her blue eyes. An idea has dawned. She rests one delicate finger on the grey velvet she so admires, and says softly, ‘Don't ask, don't get.’

      Thomas Howard for an uncle? Thomas Boleyn for a father? The king, in time, for a brother?

      ‘They'd kill you,’ he says.

      He thinks he shouldn't enlarge on the statement: just let it stand as fact.

      She laughs, bites her lip. ‘Of course. Of course they would. What am I thinking? Anyway, I'm grateful for what you have done already. For an interval of peace this morning – because when they're shouting about you, they're not shouting about me. One day,’ she says, ‘Anne will want to talk to you. She'll send for you and you'll be flattered. She'll have a little job for you, or she'll want some advice. So before that happens, you can have my advice. Turn around and walk the other way.’

      She kisses the tip of her forefinger and touches it to his lips.

      The cardinal does not need him that night, so he goes home to Austin Friars. His feeling is to put distance between himself and any Boleyns at all. There are some men, possibly, who would be fascinated by a woman who had been a mistress to two kings, but he is not one of them. He thinks about sister Anne, why she should take any interest in him; possibly she has information through what Thomas More calls ‘your evangelical fraternity’, and yet this is puzzling: the Boleyns don't seem like a family who think