Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

as you might hire a man for the harvest. Christ's sacrifice was done on Calvary; it is not done in the Mass. Priests cannot help you to Heaven; you need no priest to stand between you and your God. No merits of yours can save you: only the merits of the living Christ.

      March: Lucy Petyt, whose husband is a master grocer and a member of the Commons, comes to see him at Austin Friars. She is wearing black lambskin – imported, at a guess – and a modest grey worsted gown; Alice receives her gloves and surreptitiously slides in a finger to appraise the silk lining. He rises from his desk and takes her hands, drawing her to the fire and pressing upon her a cup of warm spiced wine. Her hands shake as she cradles the cup and she says, ‘I wish John had this. This wine. This fire.’

      It was snowing at dawn on the day of the raid on Lion's Quay, but soon a wintery sun was up, scouring windowpanes and casting the panelled rooms of city houses into sharp relief, ravines of shadows and cold floods of light. ‘That is what I cannot get out of my mind,’ Lucy says, ‘the cold.’ And More himself, his face muffled in furs, standing at the door with his officers, ready to search the warehouse and their own rooms. ‘I was the first there,’ she says, ‘and I kept him hovering with pleasantries – I called up, my dear, here is the Lord Chancellor come on parliamentary business.’ The wine floods into her face, loosens her tongue. ‘I kept saying, have you breakfasted, sir, are you sure, and the servants were weaving under his feet, impeding him’ – she gives a little, mirthless, whooping laugh – ‘and all the time John was stowing his papers behind a panel –’

      ‘You did well, Lucy.’

      ‘When they walked upstairs John was ready for him – oh, Lord Chancellor, welcome to my poor house – but the poor hapless man, he had cast his Testament under his desk, my eye went straight to it, I wonder their eyes didn't follow mine.’

      An hour's search realised nothing; so are you sure, John, the Chancellor said, that you have none of these new books, because I was informed you had? (And Tyndale lying there, like a poison stain on the tiles.) I don't know who could have told you that, said John Petyt. I was proud of him, Lucy says, holding out her cup for more wine, I was proud that he spoke up. More said, it is true I have found nothing today, but you must go with these men. Mr Lieutenant, will you take him?

      John Petyt is not a young man. At More's direction he sleeps on a pad of straw laid on the flagstones; visitors have been admitted only so that they can take back to his neighbours the news of how ill he looks. ‘We have sent food and warm clothes,’ Lucy says, ‘and been turned away on the Lord Chancellor's orders.’

      ‘There's a tariff for bribes. You pay the gaolers. You need ready money?’

      ‘If I do I shall come to you.’ She puts the cup down on his desk. ‘He cannot lock us all up.’

      ‘He has prisons enough.’

      ‘For bodies, yes. But what are bodies? He can take our goods, but God will prosper us. He can close the booksellers, but still there will be books. They have their old bones, their glass saints in windows, their candles and shrines, but God has given us the printing press.’ Her cheeks glow. She glances down to the drawings on his desk. ‘What are these, Master Cromwell?’

      ‘The plans for my garden. I am hoping to buy some of the houses at the back of here, I want the land.’

      She smiles. ‘A garden … It is the first pleasant thing I have heard of in a while.’

      ‘I hope you and John will come and enjoy it.’

      ‘And this … You are going to build a tennis court?’

      ‘If I get the ground. And here, you see, I mean to plant an orchard.’

      Tears well into her eyes. ‘Speak to the king. We count on you.’

      He hears a footstep: Johane's. Lucy's hand flies to her mouth. ‘God forgive me … For a moment I took you for your sister.’

      ‘The mistake is made,’ Johane says. ‘And sometimes persists. Mistress Petyt, I am very sorry to hear your husband is in the Tower. But you have brought this on yourselves. You people were the first to throw calumnies at the late cardinal. But now I suppose you wish you had him back.’

      Lucy goes out without a further word, only one long look over her shoulder. Outside he hears Mercy greet her; she will get a more sisterly word there. Johane walks to the fire and warms her hands. ‘What does she think you can do for her?’

      ‘Go to the king. Or to Lady Anne.’

      ‘And will you? Do not,’ she says, ‘do not do it.’ She scrubs away a tear with her knuckle; Lucy has upset her. ‘More will not rack him. Word will get out, and the city would not have it. But he may die anyway.’ She glances up at him. ‘She is quite old, you know, Lucy Petyt. She ought not to wear grey. Do you see how her cheeks have fallen in? She won't have any more children.’

      ‘I get the point,’ he says.

      Her hand clenches on her skirt. ‘But what if he does? What if he does rack him? And he gives names?’

      ‘What's that to me?’ He turns away. ‘He already knows my name.’

      He speaks to Lady Anne. What can I do? she asks, and he says, you know how to please the king, I suppose; she laughs and says, what, my maidenhead for a grocer?

      He speaks to the king when he is able, but the king gives him a blank stare and says the Lord Chancellor knows his business. Anne says, I have tried, I myself as you know have put Tyndale's books into his hand, his royal hand; could Tyndale, do you think, come back into this kingdom? In winter they negotiated, letters crossing the Channel. In spring, Stephen Vaughan, his man in Antwerp, set up a meeting: evening, the concealing dusk, a field outside the city walls. Cromwell's letter put into his hand, Tyndale wept: I want to come home, he said, I am sick of this, hunted city to city and house to house. I want to come home and if the king would just say yes, if he would say yes to the scriptures in our mother tongue, he can choose his translator, I will never write more. He can do with me what he pleases, torture me or kill me, but only let the people of England hear the gospel.

      Henry has not said no. He had not said, never. Though Tyndale's translation and any other translation is banned, he may, one day, permit a translation to be made by a scholar he approves. How can he say less? He wants to please Anne.

      But summer comes, and he, Cromwell, knows he has gone to the brink and must feel his way back. Henry is too timid, Tyndale too intransigent. His letters to Stephen sound a note of panic: abandon ship. He does not mean to sacrifice himself to Tyndale's truculence; dear God, he says, More, Tyndale, they deserve each other, these mules that pass for men. Tyndale will not come out in favour of Henry's divorce; nor, for that matter, will the monk Luther. You'd think they'd sacrifice a fine point of principle, to make a friend of the King of England: but no.

      And when Henry demands, ‘Who is Tyndale to judge me?’ Tyndale snaps a message back, quick as word can fly: one Christian man may judge another.

      ‘A cat may look at a king,’ he says. He is cradling Marlinspike in his arms, and talking to Thomas Avery, the boy he's teaching his trade. Avery has been with Stephen Vaughan, so he can learn the practice among the merchants over there, but any boat may bring him to Austin Friars with his little bag, inside it a woollen jerkin, a few shirts. When he comes clattering in he shouts out for Mercy, for Johane, for the little girls, for whom he brings comfits and novelties from street traders. On Richard, on Rafe, on Gregory if he's about, he lands a few punches by way of saying I'm back, but always he keeps his bag tucked under his arm.

      The boy follows him into his office. ‘Did you never feel homesick, master, when you were on your travels?’

      He shrugs: I suppose if I'd had a home. He puts the cat down, opens the bag. He fishes up on his finger a string of rosary beads; for show, says Avery, and he says, good boy. Marlinspike leaps on to his desk; he peers into the bag, dabbing with a paw. ‘The only mice in there are sugar ones.’ The boy pulls the cat's ears, tussles with him. ‘We don't have any little pets in Master Vaughan's house.’

      ‘He's