Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

interested in women, hunting, clothes, jewellery and tennis. Sir Thomas Boleyn, the charming diplomat, is interested only in himself.

      He would like to tell somebody what occurred. There is no one he can tell, so he tells Rafe. ‘I think you imagined it,’ Rafe says severely. His pale eyes open wide at the story of the initials inside the heart, but he doesn't even smile. He confines his incredulity to the marriage proposal. ‘She must have meant something else.’

      He shrugs; it's hard to see what. ‘The Duke of Norfolk would fall on us like a pack of wolves,’ Rafe says. ‘He would come round and set fire to our house.’ He shakes his head.

      ‘But the pinching. What remedy?’

      ‘Armour. Evidently,’ says Rafe.

      ‘It might raise questions.’

      ‘Nobody's looking at Mary these days.’ He adds accusingly, ‘Except you.’

      With the arrival of the papal legate in London, the quasi-regal household of Anne Boleyn is broken up. The king does not want the issue confused; Cardinal Campeggio is here to deal with his qualms about his marriage to Katherine, which are quite separate, he will insist, from any feelings he may entertain about Lady Anne. She is packed off to Hever, and her sister goes with her. A rumour floats back to London, that Mary is pregnant. Rafe says, ‘Saving your presence, master, are you sure you only leaned against the wall?’ The dead husband's family says it can't be his child, and the king is denying it too. It's sad to see the alacrity with which people assume the king is lying. How does Anne like it? She'll have time to get over her sulks, while she's rusticated. ‘Mary will be pinched black and blue,’ Rafe says.

      People all over town tell him the gossip, without knowing quite how interested he is. It makes him sad, it makes him dubious, it makes him wonder about the Boleyns. Everything that passed between himself and Mary he now sees, hears, differently. It makes his skin creep, to think that if he had been flattered, susceptible, if he had said yes to her, he might soon have become father to a baby that looked nothing like a Cromwell and very like a Tudor. As a trick, you must admire it. Mary may look like a doll but she's not stupid. When she ran down the gallery showing her green stockings, she had a sharp eye out for prey. To the Boleyns, other people are for using and discarding. The feelings of others mean nothing, or their reputations, their family name.

      He smiles, at the thought of the Cromwells having a family name. Or any reputation to defend.

      Whatever has happened, nothing comes of it. Perhaps Mary was mistaken, or the talk was simply malice; God knows, the family invite it. Perhaps there was a child, and she lost it. The story peters out, with no definite conclusion. There is no baby. It is like one of the cardinal's strange fairy tales, where nature itself is perverted and women are serpents and appear and disappear at will.

      Queen Katherine had a child that disappeared. In the first year of her marriage to Henry, she miscarried, but the doctors said that she was carrying twins, and the cardinal himself remembers her at court with her bodices loosened and a secret smile on her face. She took to her rooms for her confinement; after a time, she emerged tight-laced, with a flat belly, and no baby.

      It must be a Tudor speciality.

      A little later, he hears that Anne has taken the wardship of her sister's son, Henry Carey. He wonders if she intends to poison him. Or eat him.

      New Year 1529: Stephen Gardiner is in Rome, issuing certain threats to Pope Clement, on the king's behalf; the content of the threats has not been divulged to the cardinal. Clement is easily panicked at the best of times, and it is not surprising that, with Master Stephen breathing sulphur in his ear, he falls ill. They are saying that he is likely to die, and the cardinal's agents are around and about in Europe, taking soundings and counting heads, chinking their purses cheerfully. There would be a swift solution to the king's problem, if Wolsey were Pope. He grumbles a little about his possible eminence; the cardinal loves his country, its May garlands, its tender birdsong. In his nightmares he sees squat spitting Italians, a forest of nooses, a corpse-strewn plain. ‘I shall want you to come with me, Thomas. You can stand by my side and move quick if any of those cardinals tries to stab me.’

      He pictures his master stuck full of knives, as St Sebastian is stuck full of arrows. ‘Why does the Pope have to be in Rome? Where is it written?’

      A slow smile spreads over the cardinal's face. ‘Bring the Holy See home. Why not?’ He loves a bold plan. ‘I couldn't bring it to London, I suppose? If only I were Archbishop of Canterbury, I could hold my papal court at Lambeth Palace … but old Warham does hang on and on, he always baulks me …’

      ‘Your Grace could move to your own see.’

      ‘York is so remote. I couldn't have the papacy in Winchester, you don't think? Our ancient English capital? And nearer the king?’

      What an unusual regime this will turn out to be. The king at supper, with the Pope, who is also his Lord Chancellor … Will the king have to hand him his napkin, and serve him first?

      When news comes of Clement's recovery, the cardinal doesn't say, a glorious chance lost. He says, Thomas, what shall we do next? We must open the legatine court, it can be no longer delayed. He says, ‘Go and find me a man called Anthony Poynes.’

      He stands, arms folded, waiting for further and better particulars.

      ‘Try the Isle of Wight. And fetch me Sir William Thomas, whom I believe you will find in Carmarthen – he's elderly, so tell your men to go slowly.’

      ‘I don't employ anyone slow.’ He nods. ‘Still, I take the point. Don't kill the witnesses.’

      The trial of the king's great matter is approaching. The king intends to show that when Queen Katherine came to him she was not a virgin, having consummated her marriage with his brother Arthur. To that end he is assembling the gentlemen who attended the royal couple after their wedding at Baynard's Castle, then later at Windsor, where the court moved in November that year, and later at Ludlow, where they were sent to play at Prince and Princess of Wales. ‘Arthur,’ Wolsey says, ‘would have been about your age, Thomas, if he had lived.’ The attendants, the witnesses, are at least a generation older. And so many years have gone by – twenty-eight, to be precise. How good can their memories be?

      It should never have come to this – to this public and unseemly exposure. Cardinal Campeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king's will, accept that her marriage is invalid and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will become a nun: if the king will become a monk.

      Meanwhile she presents reasons why the legatine court should not try the issue. It is still sub judice at Rome, for one thing. For another, she is a stranger, she says, in a strange country; she ignores the decades in which she's been intimate with every twist and turn of English policy. The judges, she claims, are biased against her; certainly, she has reason to believe it. Campeggio lays hand on heart, and assures her he would give an honest judgment, even if he were in fear of his life. Katherine finds him too intimate with his co-legate; anyone who has spent much time with Wolsey, she thinks, no longer knows what honesty is.

      Who is advising Katherine? John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. ‘Do you know what I can't endure about that man?’ the cardinal says. ‘He's all skin and bone. I abhor your skeletal prelate. It makes the rest of us look bad. One looks … corporeal.’

      He is in his corporeal pomp, his finest scarlet, when the king and queen are summoned before the two cardinals at Blackfriars. Everyone had supposed that Katherine would send a proxy, but instead she appears in person. The whole bench of bishops is assembled. The king answers to his name, in a full, echoing voice, speaking out of his big bejewelled chest. He, Cromwell, would have advised a motion of the hand, a murmur, a dip of the head to the court's authority. Most humility, in his view, is pretence; but the pretence can be winning.

      The hall is packed. He and Rafe are far-off spectators. Afterwards, when the queen has made her statement – a few men have been seen to cry – they come out into the sunshine. Rafe says, ‘If we had been nearer, we could have seen whether the king could meet her eye.’

      ‘Yes.