‘Well, she did become,’ says young Surrey. ‘Didn’t she, my lord father?’

‘I think it’s she who’s wasting me away,’ the duke says. ‘She knows all about powders. They say she keeps poisoners in her house. You know what she did to old Bishop Fisher.’

‘What did she do?’ young Surrey says.

‘Do you know nothing, boy? Fisher’s cook was paid to put a powder in the broth. It nigh killed him.’

‘That would have been no loss,’ the boy says. ‘He was a traitor.’

‘Yes,’ Norfolk says, ‘but in those days his treason stood still to be proved. This is not Italy, boy. We have courts of law. Well, the old fellow pulled around, but he was never well after. Henry had the cook boiled alive.’

‘But he never confessed,’ he says: he, Cromwell. ‘So we cannot say for sure the Boleyns did it.’

Norfolk snorts. ‘They had motive. Mary had better watch herself.’

‘I agree,’ he says. ‘Though I do not think poison is the chief danger to her.’

‘What then?’ Surrey says.

‘Bad advice, my lord.’

‘You think she should listen to you, Cromwell?’ Young Surrey now lays down his knife and begins to complain. Noblemen, he laments, are not respected as they were in the days when England was great. The present king keeps about himself a collection of men of base degree, and no good will come of it. Cranmer creeps forward in his chair, as if to intervene, but Surrey gives him a glare that says, you’re exactly who I mean, archbishop.

He nods to a boy to refill the young man’s glass. ‘You do not suit your talk to your audience, sir.’

‘Why should I?’ Surrey says.

‘Thomas Wyatt says you are studying to write verse. I am fond of poems, as I passed my youth among the Italians. If you would favour me, I would like to read some.’

‘No doubt you would,’ Surrey says. ‘But I keep them for my friends.’

When he gets home his son comes out to greet him. ‘Have you heard what the queen is doing? She has risen from her childbed and things incredible are spoken of her. They say she was seen toasting cobnuts over the fire in her chamber, tossing them about in a latten pan, ready to make poisoned sweetmeats for the Lady Mary.’

‘It would be someone else with the latten pan,’ he says, smiling. ‘A minion. Weston. That boy Mark.’

Gregory sticks stubbornly by his version: ‘It was herself. Toasting. And the king came in, and frowned to see her at the occupation, for he didn’t know what it meant, and he has suspicions of her, you see. What are you at, he asked, and Anne the queen said, oh my lord, I am but making sweetmeats to reward the poor women who stand at the gate and call out their greetings to me. The king said, is it even so, sweetheart? Then bless you. And so he was utterly misled, you see.’