Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

child is fighting down pain. Her mother is fighting down grief and anger, and disgust and fear. ‘I expected this,’ she says, ‘but I did not expect he would send a man like you to tell me.’ He frowns: does she think it would come better from Norfolk? ‘They say you had a trade as a blacksmith; is that correct?’

      Now she will say, shoe a horse?

      ‘It was my father's trade.’

      ‘I begin to understand you.’ She nods. ‘The blacksmith makes his own tools.’

      Half a mile of chalk walls, a mirror for the glare, bounce at him a white heat. In the shadow of a gateway, Gregory and Rafe are jostling and pushing, insulting each other with culinary insults he has taught them: Sir, you are a fat Fleming, and spread butter on your bread. Sir, you are a Roman pauper, may your offspring eat snails. Master Wriothesley is leaning in the sun and watching them, with a lazy smile; butterflies garland his head.

      ‘Oh, it's you,’ he says. Wriothesley looks gratified. ‘You look fit to be painted, Master Wriothesley. A doublet of azure, and a shaft of light precisely placed.’

      ‘Sir? Katherine says?’

      ‘She says our precedents are fake.’

      Rafe: ‘Does she understand that you and Dr Cranmer sat up all night over them?’

      ‘Oh, wild times!’ Gregory says. ‘Seeing the dawn in, with Dr Cranmer!’

      He throws an arm around Rafe's bony little shoulders and squeezes him; it is a liberation to be away from Katherine, from the girl flinching like a whipped bitch. ‘Once I myself, with Giovannino – well, with some boys I knew –’ He stops: what is this? I don't tell stories about myself.

      ‘Please …’ Wriothesley says.

      ‘Well, we had a statue made, a smirking little god with wings, and then we beat it with hammers and chains to make it antique, and we hired a muleteer and drove it to Rome and sold it to a cardinal.’ Such a hot day, when they were ushered into his presence: hazy, thunder in the distance, and white dust from building sites hanging in the air. ‘I remember he had tears in his eyes when he paid us. “To think that on these charming little feet and these sweet pinions, the gaze of the Emperor Augustus may have rested.” When the Portinari boys set off for Florence they were staggering under the weight of their purses.’

      ‘And you?’

      ‘I took my cut and stayed on to sell the mules.’

      They head downhill through the inner courts. Emerging into the sun, he shades his eyes as if to see through the tangle of tree-tops that runs into the distance. ‘I told the queen, let Henry go in peace. Or he might not let the princess move with her up-country.’

      Wriothesley says, surprised, ‘But it is decided. They are to be separated. Mary is to go to Richmond.’

      He did not know. He hopes his hesitation is not perceptible. ‘Of course. But the queen had not been told, and it was worth a try, yes?’

      See how useful Master Wriothesley is. See how he brings us intelligence from Secretary Gardiner. Rafe says, ‘It is harsh. To use the little girl against her mother.’

      ‘Harsh, yes … but the question is, have you picked your prince? Because that is what you do, you choose him, and you know what he is. And then, when you have chosen, you say yes to him – yes, that is possible, yes, that can be done. If you don't like Henry, you can go abroad and find another prince, but I tell you – if this were Italy, Katherine would be cold in her tomb.’

      ‘But you swore,’ Gregory says, ‘that you respected the queen.’

      ‘So I do. And I would respect her corpse.’

      ‘You would not work her death, would you?’

      He halts. He takes his son's arm, turns him to look into his face. ‘Retrace our steps through this conversation.’ Gregory pulls away. ‘No, listen, Gregory. I said, you give way to the king's requests. You open the way to his desires. That is what a courtier does. Now, understand this: it is impossible that Henry should require me or any other person to harm the queen. What is he, a monster? Even now he has affection for her; how could he not? And he has a soul he hopes may be saved. He confesses every day to one or other of his chaplains. Do you think the Emperor does so much, or King Francis? Henry's heart, I assure you, is a heart full of feeling; and Henry's soul, I swear, is the most scrutinised soul in Christendom.’

      Wriothesley says, ‘Master Cromwell, he is your son, not an ambassador.’

      He lets Gregory go. ‘Shall we get on the river? There might be a breeze.’

      In the Lower Ward, six couples of hunting dogs stir and yelp in the cages on wheels which are going to carry them across country. Tails waving, they are clambering over each other, twisting ears and nipping, their yaps and howls adding to the sense of nearpanic that has taken over the castle. It's more like the evacuation of a fort than the start of a summer progress. Sweating porters are heaving the king's furnishings on to carts. Two men with a studded chest have got wedged in a doorway. He thinks of himself on the road, a bruised child, loading wagons to get a lift. He wanders over. ‘How did this happen, boys?’

      He steadies one corner of the chest and backs them off into the shadows; adjusts the degree of rotation with a flip of his hand; a moment's fumbling and slipping, and they burst into the light, shouting ‘Here she goes!’ as if they had thought of it themselves. Be packing for the queen next, he says, for the cardinal's palace at the More, and they say, surprised, is that so, master, and what if the queen won't go? He says, then we will roll her up in a carpet and put her on your cart. He hands out coins: ease up, it's too hot to work so hard. He saunters back to the boys. A man leads up horses ready for harnessing to the hounds' wagons, and as soon as they catch their scent the dogs set up an excited barking, which can still be heard as they get on the water.

      The river is brown, torpid; on the Eton bank, a group of listless swans glides in and out of the weeds. Their boat bobs beneath them; he says, ‘Is that not Sion Madoc?’

      ‘Never forget a face, eh?’

      ‘Not when it's ugly.’

      ‘Have you seen yourself, bach?’ The boatman has been eating an apple, core and all; fastidious, he flicks the pips over the side.

      ‘How's your dad?’

      ‘Dead.’ Sion spits the stalk out. ‘Any of these yours?’

      ‘Me,’ Gregory says.

      ‘That's mine.’ Sion nods to the opposite oar, a lump of a lad who reddens and looks away. ‘Your dad used to shut up shop in this weather. Put the fire out and go fishing.’

      ‘Lashing the water with his rod,’ he says, ‘and punching the lights out of the fish. Jump in and drag them gasping out of the green deep. Fingers through the gills: “What are you looking at, you scaly whoreson? Are you looking at me?”’

      ‘He not being one to sit and enjoy the sunshine,’ Madoc explains. ‘I could tell you stories, about Walter Cromwell.’

      Master Wriothesley's face is a study. He does not understand how much you can learn from boatmen, their argot blasphemous and rapid. At twelve he spoke it fluently, his mother tongue, and now it flows back into his mouth, something natural, something dirty. There are tags of Greek he has mastered, which he exchanges with Thomas Cranmer, with Call-Me-Risley: early language, unblighted, like tender fruit. But never does a Greek scholar pin back your ears as Sion does now, with Putney's opinion of the fucking Bullens. Henry goes to it with the mother, good luck to him. He goes to it with the sister, what's a king for? But it's got to stop somewhere. We're not beasts of the field. Sion calls Anne an eel, he calls her a slippery dipper from the slime, and he remembers what the cardinal had called her: my serpentine enemy. Sion says, she goes to it with her brother; he says, what, her brother George?

      ‘Any brother she's got. Those kind keep it in the family. They do filthy French