Hilary Mantel Collection. Hilary Mantel

on Anne. ‘I have dispatches.’

      ‘He won't look at them till sundown.’

      ‘He will not be occupied then?’

      ‘She is selling herself by the inch. The gentlemen all say you are advising her. She wants a present in cash for every advance above her knee.’

      ‘Not like you, Mary. One push backwards and, good girl, here's fourpence.’

      ‘Well. You know. If kings are doing the pushing.’ She laughs. ‘Anne has very long legs. By the time he comes to her secret part he will be bankrupt. The French wars will be cheap, in comparison.’

      Anne has knocked away Mistress Shelton's offer of another bow. She stalks towards them across the grass. The golden caul that holds her hair glitters with diamond points. ‘What's this, Mary? Another assault on Master Cromwell's reputation?’ There is some giggling from the group. ‘Have you any good news for me?’ she asks him. Her voice softens, and her look. She puts a hand on his arm. The giggling stops.

      In a north-facing closet, out of the glare, she tells him, ‘I have news for you, in fact. Gardiner is to get Winchester.’

      Winchester was Wolsey's richest bishopric; he carries all the figures in his head. ‘The preference may render him amenable.’

      She smiles: a twist of her mouth. ‘Not to me. He has worked to get rid of Katherine, but he would rather I did not replace her. Even to Henry he makes no secret of that. I wish he were not Secretary. You –’

      ‘Too soon.’

      She nods. ‘Yes. Perhaps. You know they have burned Little Bilney? While we have been in the woods playing thieves.’

      Bilney was taken before the Bishop of Norwich, caught preaching in the open fields and handing out to his audience pages of Tyndale's gospels. The day he was burned it was windy, and the wind kept blowing the flames away from him, so it was a long time before he died. ‘Thomas More says he recanted when he was in the fire.’

      ‘That is not what I hear from people who saw it.’

      ‘He was a fool,’ Anne says. She blushes, deep angry red. ‘People must say whatever will keep them alive, till better times come. That is no sin. Would not you?’ He is not often hesitant. ‘Oh, come, you have thought about it.’

      ‘Bilney put himself into the fire. I always said he would. He recanted before and was let go, so he could be granted no more mercy.’

      Anne drops her eyes. ‘How fortunate we are, that we never come to the end of God's.’ She seems to shake herself. She stretches her arms. She smells of green leaves and lavender. In the dusk her diamonds are as cool as raindrops. ‘The King of Outlaws will be home. We had better go and meet him.’ She straightens her spine.

      The harvest is getting in. The nights are violet and the comet shines over the stubble fields. The huntsmen call in the dogs. After Holy Cross Day the deer will be safe. When he was a child this was the time for the boys who had been living wild on the heath all summer to come home and make their peace with their fathers, stealing in on a harvest supper night when the parish was in drink. Since before Whitsun they had lived by scavenging and beggars' tricks, snaring birds and rabbits and cooking them in their iron pot, chasing any girls they saw back screaming to their houses, and on wet and cold nights sneaking into outhouses and barns, to keep warm by singing and telling riddles and jokes. When the season was over it was time for him to sell the cauldron, taking it door-to-door and talking up its merits. ‘This pot is never empty,’ he would claim. ‘If you've only some fish-heads, throw them in and a halibut will swim up.’

      ‘Is it holed?’

      ‘This pot is sound, and if you don't believe me, madam, you can piss in it. Come, tell me what you will give me. There is no pot to equal this since Merlin was a boy. Toss in a mouse from your trap and the next thing you know it's a spiced boar's head with the apple ready in its mouth.’

      ‘How old are you?’ a woman asks him.

      ‘That I couldn't say.’

      ‘Come back next year, and we can lie in my feather bed.’

      He hesitates. ‘Next year I'm run away.’

      ‘You're going on the road as a travelling show? With your pot?’

      ‘No, I thought I'd be a robber on the heath. Or a bear-keeper's a steady job.’

      The woman says, ‘I hope it keeps fine for you.’

      That night, after his bath, his supper, his singing, his dancing, the king wants a walk. He has country tastes, likes what you call hedge wine, nothing strong, but these days he knocks back his first drink quickly and nods to signal for more; so he needs Francis Weston's arm to steady him as he leaves the table. A heavy dew has fallen, and gentlemen with torches squelch over the grass. The king takes a few breaths of damp air. ‘Gardiner,’ he says. ‘You don't get on.’

      ‘I have no quarrel with him,’ he says blandly.

      ‘Then he has a quarrel with you.’ The king vanishes into blackness; next he speaks from behind a torch flame, like God out of the burning bush. ‘I can manage Stephen. I have his measure. He is the kind of robust servant I need, these days. I don't want men who are afraid of controversy.’

      ‘Your Majesty should come inside. These night vapours are not healthy.’

      ‘Spoken like the cardinal.’ The king laughs.

      He approaches on the king's left hand. Weston, who is young and lightly built, is showing signs of buckling at the knees. ‘Lean on me, sir,’ he advises. The king locks an arm around his neck, in a sort of wrestling hold. Bear-keeper's a steady job. For a moment he thinks the king is crying.

      He didn't run away the next year, for bear-keeping or any other trade. It was next year that the Cornishmen came roaring up the country, rebels bent on burning London and taking the English king and bending him to their Cornish will. Fear went before their army, for they were known for burning ricks and ham-stringing cattle, for firing houses with the people inside, for slaughtering priests and eating babies and trampling altar bread.

      The king lets him go abruptly. ‘Away to our cold beds. Or is that only mine? Tomorrow you will hunt. If you are not well mounted we will provide. I will see if I can tire you out, though Wolsey said it was a thing impossible. You and Gardiner, you must learn to pull together. This winter you must be yoked to the plough.’

      It is not oxen he wants, but brutes who will go head-to-head, injure and maim themselves in the battle for his favour. It's clear his chances with the king are better if he doesn't get on with Gardiner than if he does. Divide and rule. But then, he rules anyway.

      Though Parliament has not been recalled, Michaelmas term is the busiest he has ever known. Fat files of the king's business arrive almost hourly, and the Austin Friars fills up with city merchants, monks and priests of various sorts, petitioners for five minutes of his time. As if they sense something, a shift of power, a coming spectacle, small groups of Londoners begin to gather outside his gate, pointing out the liveries of the men who come and go: the Duke of Norfolk's man, the Earl of Wiltshire's servant. He looks down on them from a window and feels he recognises them; they are sons of the men who every autumn stood around gossiping and warming themselves by the door of his father's forge. They are boys like the boy he used to be: restless, waiting for something to happen.

      He looks down at them and arranges his face. Erasmus says that you must do this each morning before you leave your house: ‘put on a mask, as it were.’ He applies that to each place, each castle or inn or nobleman's seat, where he finds himself waking up. He sends some money to Erasmus, as the cardinal used to do. ‘To buy him his gruel,’ he used to say, ‘and keep the poor soul in quills and ink.’ Erasmus is surprised; he has heard only bad things of Thomas Cromwell.

      From the day he was sworn into the king's council, he has had his face arranged. He has spent the early months of the year watching the faces of other people, to see when they register doubt,