Cranmer shrinks. ‘Norfolk? Why would we?’

‘For reconciliation,’ he says breezily. ‘I fear that on the day of the king’s accident, I may have, um, slighted his pretensions. In a tent. When he raced in. Well-founded pretensions,’ he adds reverently. ‘For is he not our senior peer? No, I pity the duke from the bottom of my heart.’

‘What did you do, Cromwell?’ The archbishop is pale. ‘What did you do in that tent? Did you lay violent hands upon him, as I hear you did recently with the Duke of Suffolk?’

‘What, Brandon? I was only moving him.’

‘When he was not of a mind to be moved.’

‘It was for his own good. If I had left him there in the king’s presence, Charles would have talked himself into the Tower. He was slandering the queen, you see.’ And any slander, any doubt, he thinks, must come from Henry, out of his own mouth, and not from mine, or any other man’s. ‘Please, please,’ he says, ‘let us have a dinner. You must give it at Lambeth, Norfolk will not come to me, he will think I plan to put a sleeping draught in the claret and convey him on board ship to be sold into slavery. He will like to come to you. I will supply the venison. We will have jellies in the shape of the duke’s major castles. It will be no cost to you. And no trouble to your cooks.’

Cranmer laughs. At last, he laughs. It has been a hard-fought campaign, to get him even to smile. ‘As you wish, Thomas. We shall have a dinner.’

The archbishop sets his hands on his upper arms, kisses him right and left. The kiss of peace. He does not feel soothed, or assuaged, as he returns to his own rooms through the palace unnaturally quiet: no music from distant rooms, perhaps the murmur of prayer. He tries to imagine the lost child, the manikin, its limbs budding, its face old and wise.

Few men have seen such a thing. Certainly he has not. In Italy, once, he stood holding up a light for a surgeon, while in a sealed room draped in shadows he sliced a dead man apart to see what made him work. It was a fearful night, the stench of bowel and blood clogging the throat, and the artists who had jostled and bribed for a place tried to elbow him away: but he stood firm, for he had guaranteed to do so, he had said he would hold the light. And so he was among the elect of that company, the luminaries, who saw muscle stripped from bone. But he has never seen inside a woman, still less a gravid corpse; no surgeon, even for money, would perform that work for an audience.

He thinks of Katherine, embalmed and entombed. Her spirit cut free, and gone to seek out her first husband: wandering now, calling his name. Will Arthur be shocked to see her, she such a stout old woman, and he still a skinny child?