Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

what excuse did Brandon make?’ the cardinal says. ‘“Oh, Your Majesty, your sister Mary cried. How she did cry and beg me to marry her myself! I never saw woman cry so!” So he dried her tears and got himself up to a dukedom! And now he talks as if he's held his title since the Garden of Eden. Listen, Thomas, if men of sound learning and good disposition come to me – as Bishop Tunstall comes, as Thomas More comes – and plead that the church must be reformed, why then I listen. But Brandon! To talk about proud prelates! What was he? The king's horsekeeper! And I've known horses with more wit.’

      ‘My lord,’ Cavendish pleads, ‘be more temperate. And Charles Brandon, you know, was of an ancient family, a gentleman born.’

      ‘Gentleman, he? A swaggering braggart. That's Brandon.’ The cardinal sits down, exhausted. ‘My head aches,’ he says. ‘Cromwell, go to court and bring me better news.’

      Day by day he takes his instructions from Wolsey at Richmond, and rides to wherever the king is. He thinks of the king as a terrain into which he must advance, with no sea coast to supply him.

      He understands what Henry has learned from his cardinal: his floating diplomacy, his science of ambiguity. He sees how the king has applied this science to the slow, trackless, dubious ruin of his minister. Every kindness, Henry matches with a cruelty, some further charge or forfeiture. Till the cardinal moans, ‘I want to go away.’

      ‘Winchester,’ he suggests, to the dukes. ‘My lord cardinal is willing to proceed to his palace there.’

      ‘What, so near the king?’ Brandon says. ‘We are not fools to ourselves, Master Cromwell.’

      Since he, the cardinal's man, is with Henry so often, rumours have run all over Europe that Wolsey is about to be recalled. The king is cutting a deal, people say, to have the church's wealth in exchange for Wolsey's return to favour. Rumours leak from the council chamber, from the privy chamber: the king does not like his new set-up. Norfolk is found ignorant; Suffolk is accused of having an annoying laugh.

      He says, ‘My lord won't go north. He is not ready for it.’

      ‘But I want him north,’ Howard says. ‘Tell him to go. Tell him Norfolk says he must be on the road and out of here. Or – and tell him this – I will come where he is, and I will tear him with my teeth.’

      ‘My lord.’ He bows. ‘May I substitute the word “bite”?’

      Norfolk approaches him. He stands far too close. His eyes are bloodshot. Every sinew is jumping. He says, ‘Substitute nothing, you misbegotten –’ The duke stabs a forefinger into his shoulder. ‘You … person,’ he says; and again, ‘you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer.’

      He stands there, pushing away, like a baker pressing the dimples into a batch of manchet loaves. Cromwell flesh is firm, dense and impermeable. The ducal finger just bounces off.

      Before they left Esher, one of the cats that had been brought in to kill the vermin gave birth to a litter in the cardinal's own rooms. What presumption, in an animal! But wait – new life, in the cardinal's suite? Could that be an omen? One day, he fears, there will be an omen of another sort: a dead bird will fall down that smoking chimney, and then – oh, woe is us! – he'll never hear the last of it.

      But for the while the cardinal is amused, and puts the kittens on a cushion in an open chest, and watches as they grow. One of them is black and hungry, with a coat like wool and yellow eyes. When it is weaned he brings it home. He takes it from under his coat, where it has been sleeping curled against his shoulder. ‘Gregory, look.’ He holds it out to his son. ‘I am a giant, my name is Marlinspike.’

      Gregory looks at him, wary, puzzled. His glance flinches; his hand pulls away. ‘The dogs will kill it,’ he says.

      Marlinspike goes down to the kitchen, to grow stout and live out his beastly nature. There is a summer ahead, though he cannot imagine its pleasures; sometimes when he's walking in the garden he sees him, a half-grown cat, lolling watchful in an apple tree, or snoring on a wall in the sun.

      Spring 1530: Antonio Bonvisi, the merchant, invites him to supper at his fine tall house on Bishopsgate. ‘I won't be late,’ he tells Richard, expecting that it will be the usual tense gathering, everyone cross and hungry: for even a rich Italian with an ingenious kitchen cannot find a hundred ways with smoked eel or salt cod. The merchants in Lent miss their mutton and malmsey, their nightly grunt in a featherbed with wife or mistress; from now till Ash Wednesday their knives will be out for some cut-throat intelligence, some mean commercial advantage.

      But it is a grander occasion than he thought; the Lord Chancellor is there, amongst a company of lawyers and aldermen. Humphrey Monmouth, whom More once locked up, is seated well away from the great man; More looks at his ease, holding the company captive with one of his stories about that great scholar Erasmus, his dear friend. But when he looks up and sees him, Cromwell, he falls silent halfway through a sentence; he casts his eyes down, and an opaque and stony look grows on his face.

      ‘Did you want to talk about me?’ he asks. ‘You can do it while I'm here, Lord Chancellor. I have a thick skin.’ He knocks back a glass of wine and laughs. ‘Do you know what Brandon is saying? He can't fit my life together. My travels. The other day he called me a Jewish peddler.’

      ‘And was that to your face?’ his host asks politely.

      ‘No. The king told me. But then my lord cardinal calls Brandon a horsekeeper.’

      Humphrey Monmouth says, ‘You have the entrée these days, Thomas. And what do you think, now you are a courtier?’

      There are smiles around the table. Because, of course, the idea is so ridiculous, the situation so temporary. More's people are city people, no grander; but he is sui generis, a scholar and a wit. And More says, ‘Perhaps we should not press the point. There are delicate issues here. There is a time to be silent.’

      An elder of the drapers' guild leans across the table and warns, his voice low: ‘Thomas More said, when he took his seat, that he won't discuss the cardinal, or the Lady either.’

      He, Cromwell, looks around at the company. ‘The king surprises me, though. What he will tolerate.’

      ‘From you?’ More says.

      ‘I mean Brandon. They're going to hunt: he walks in and shouts, are you ready?’

      ‘Your master the cardinal found it a constant battle,’ Bonvisi says, ‘in the early years of the reign. To stop the king's companions becoming too familiar with him.’

      ‘He wanted only himself to be familiar,’ More suggests.

      ‘Though, of course, the king may raise up whom he will.’

      ‘Up to a point, Thomas,’ Bonvisi says; there is some laughter.

      ‘And the king enjoys his friendships. That is good, surely?’

      ‘A soft word, from you, Master Cromwell.’

      ‘Not at all,’ Monmouth says. ‘Master Cromwell is known as one who does everything for his friends.’

      ‘I think …’ More stops; he looks down at the table. ‘In all truth, I am not sure if one can regard a prince as a friend.’

      ‘But surely,’ Bonvisi says, ‘you've known Henry since he was a child.’

      ‘Yes, but friendship should be less exhausting … it should be restorative. Not like …’ More turns to him, for the first time, as if inviting comment. ‘I sometimes feel it is like … like Jacob wrestling with the angel.’

      ‘And who knows,’ he says, ‘what that fight was about?’

      ‘Yes, the text is silent. As with Cain and Abel. Who knows?’

      He senses a little disquiet around the table, among the more pious, the less sportive; or just those keen for the next course. What will it be? Fish!

      ‘When you speak