Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

Anne arranged this, and it must have given her an intense and secret pleasure; vengeance deferred, for herself, for her old lover, once berated by the cardinal and sent packing from the court. He says, ‘How did he look? Harry Percy?’

      ‘He was shaking from head to foot.’

      ‘And my lord?’

      ‘Demanded his warrant, his commission. Percy said, there are items in my instructions you may not see. So, said my lord, if you will not show it, I shall not surrender to you, so here's a pretty state of affairs, Harry. Come, George, my lord said to me, we will go into my rooms, and have some conference. They followed him on his heels, the earl's party, so I stood in the door and I barred the way. My lord cardinal walked into his chamber, mastering himself, and when he turned he said, Cavendish, look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.’

      He, Cromwell, walks away so that he does not have to see the man's distress. He looks at the wall, at the panelling, at his new linenfold panelling, and runs his index finger across its grooves. ‘When they took him from the house, the townspeople were assembled outside. They knelt in the road and wept. They asked God to send vengeance on Harry Percy.’

      God need not trouble, he thinks: I shall take it in hand.

      ‘We were riding south. The weather was closing in. At Doncaster it was late when we arrived. In the street the townsfolk were packed shoulder to shoulder, and each person holding up a candle against the dark. We thought they would disperse, but they stood all night in the road. And their candles burned down. And it was daylight, of a sort.’

      ‘It must have put heart into him. Seeing the crowds.’

      ‘Yes, but by then – I did not say, I should have told you – he had gone a week without eating.’

      ‘Why? Why did he do that?’

      ‘Some say he meant to destroy himself. I cannot believe it, a Christian soul … I ordered him a dish of warden pears, roasted with spices – did I do right?’

      ‘And he ate?’

      ‘A little. But then he put his hand to his chest. He said, there is something cold inside me, cold and hard like a whetstone. And that was where it began.’ Cavendish gets up. Now he too walks about the room. ‘I called for an apothecary. He made a powder and I had him pour it into three cups. I drank off one. He, the apothecary, he drank another. Master Cromwell, I trusted nobody. My lord took his powder and presently the pain eased, and he said, there, it was wind, and we laughed, and I thought, tomorrow he will be better.’

      ‘Then Kingston came.’

      ‘Yes. How could we tell my lord, the Constable of the Tower is here to fetch you? My lord sat down on a packing case. He said, William Kingston? William Kingston? He kept on saying his name.’

      And all that time a weight in his chest, a whetstone, a steel, a sharpening knife in his gut.

      ‘I said to him, now take it cheerfully, my lord. You will come before the king and clear your name. And Kingston said the same, but my lord said, you are leading me into a fool's paradise. I know what is provided for me, and what death is prepared. That night we did not sleep. My lord voided black blood from his bowels. The next morning he was too weak to stand, and so we could not ride. But then we did ride. And so we came to Leicester.

      ‘The days were very short, the light poor. On Monday morning at eight he woke. I was just then bringing in the small wax lights, and setting them along the cupboard. He said, whose is that shadow that leaps along the wall? And he cried your name. God forgive me, I said you were on the road. He said, the ways are treacherous. I said, you know Cromwell, the devil does not delay him – if he says he is on the road he will be here.’

      ‘George, make this story short, I cannot bear it.’

      But George must have his say: next morning at four, a bowl of chicken broth, but he would not eat it. Is this not a meatless day? He asked for the broth to be taken away. By now he had been ill for eight days, continually voiding his bowels, bleeding and in pain, and he said, believe me, death is the end of this.

      Put my lord in a difficulty, and he will find a way; with his craft and cunning, he will find a way, an exit. Poison? If so, then by his own hand.

      It was eight next morning when he drew his last breath. Around his bed, the click of rosary beads; outside the restive stamp of horses in their stalls, the thin winter moon shining down on the London road.

      ‘He died in his sleep?’ He would have wished him less pain. George says, no, he was speaking to the last. ‘Did he speak of me again?’

      Anything? A word?

      I washed him, George says, laid him out for burial. ‘I found, under his fine holland shirt, a belt of hair … I am sorry to tell you, I know you are not a lover of these practices, but so it was. I think he never did this till he was at Richmond among the monks.’

      ‘What became of it? This belt of hair?’

      ‘The monks of Leicester kept it.’

      ‘God Almighty! They'll make it pay.’

      ‘Do you know, they could provide nothing better than a coffin of plain boards?’ Only when he says this does George Cavendish give way; only at this point does he swear and say, by the passion of Christ, I heard them knocking it together. When I think of the Florentine sculptor and his tomb, the black marble, the bronze, the angels at his head and foot … But I saw him dressed in his archbishop's robes, and I opened his fingers to put into his hand his crozier, just as I thought I would see him hold it when he was enthroned at York. It was only two days away. Our bags were packed and we were ready for the road; till Harry Percy walked in.

      ‘You know, George,’ he says, ‘I begged him, be content with what you have clawed back from ruin, go to York, be glad to be alive … In the course of things, he would have lived another ten years, I know he would.’

      ‘We sent for the mayor and all the city officials, so that they could see him in his coffin, so there could be no false rumours that he was living and escaped to France. Some made remarks about his low birth, by God I wish you had been there –’

      ‘I too.’

      ‘For to your face, Master Cromwell, they had not done it, nor would they dare. When the light failed we kept vigil, with the tapers burning around his coffin, till four in the morning, which you know is the canonical hour. Then we heard Mass. At six we laid him in the crypt. There left him.’

      Six in the morning, a Wednesday, the feast of St Andrew the Apostle. I, a simple cardinal. There left him and rode south, to find the king at Hampton Court. Who says to George, ‘I would not for twenty thousand pounds that the cardinal had died.’

      ‘Look, Cavendish,’ he says, ‘when you are asked what the cardinal said in his last days, tell them nothing.’

      George raises his eyebrows. ‘I already have. Told them nothing. The king questioned me. My lord Norfolk.’

      ‘If you tell Norfolk anything, he will twist it into treason.’

      ‘Still, as he is Lord Treasurer, he has paid me my back wages. I was three-quarters of the year in arrears.’

      ‘What were you paid, George?’

      ‘Ten pounds a year.’

      ‘You should have come to me.’

      These are the facts. These are the figures. If the Lord of the Underworld rose up tomorrow in the privy chamber, and offered a dead man back, fresh from the grave, fresh from the crypt, the miracle of Lazarus for £20,000 – Henry Tudor would be pushed to scrape it together. Norfolk as Lord Treasurer? Fine; it doesn't matter who holds the title, who holds the clanking keys to the empty chests.

      ‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘if the cardinal could say, as he used to say to me, Thomas, what would you like for a New Year's gift, I would say, I would like sight of the nation's accounts.’

      Cavendish hesitates;