‘What was it then?’ He leans forward. ‘You know I am not a man with whom you can have inconsequential conversations. I cannot split myself into two, one your friend and the other the king’s servant. So you must tell me: will you write down your thoughts, and if you are requested, will you say one word?’ He sits back. ‘And if you can reassure me on this point, I will write to your father, to reassure him in turn. To tell him you will come out of this alive.’ He pauses. ‘May I do so?’

Wyatt nods. The smallest possible gesture, a nod to the future.

‘Good. Afterwards, for your trouble, to compensate you for this detention, I will arrange for you to have a sum of money.’

‘I don’t want it.’ Wyatt turns his face away, deliberately: like a child.

‘Believe me, you do. You are still trailing debts from your time in Italy. Your creditors come to me.’

‘I’m not your brother. You’re not my keeper.’

He looks about him. ‘I am, if you think about it.’

Wyatt says, ‘I hear Henry wants an annulment too. To kill her and be divorced from her, all in one day. That is how she is, you see. Everything is ruled by extremes. She would not be his mistress, she must be queen of England; so there is breaking of faith and making of laws, so the country is set in an uproar. If he had such trouble to get her, what must it cost him to be rid? Even after she is dead, he had better make sure to nail her down.’

He says curiously, ‘Have you no tenderness left for her?’

‘She has exhausted it,’ Wyatt says shortly. ‘Or perhaps I never had any, I do not know my own mind, you know it. I dare say men have felt many things for Anne, but no one except Henry has felt tenderness. Now he thinks he’s been taken for a fool.’

He stands up. ‘I shall write some comfortable words to your father. I will explain you must stay here a little space, it is safest. But first I must…we thought Henry had dropped the annulment, but now, as you say, he revives it, so I must…’

Wyatt says, as if relishing his discomfort, ‘You’ll have to go and see Harry Percy, won’t you?’

It is now almost four years since, with Call-Me-Risley at his heels, he had confronted Harry Percy at a low inn called Mark and the Lion, and made him understand certain truths about life: the paramount truth being, that he was not, whatever he thought, married to Anne Boleyn. On that day he had slammed his hand on the table and told the young man that if he did not get himself out of the way of the king, he would be destroyed: that he, Thomas Cromwell, would let his creditors loose to destroy him, and rip away his earldom and his lands. He had slammed his hand on the table and told him that, further, if he did not forget Anne Boleyn and any claim he made on her, her uncle the Duke of Norfolk would find out where he hid and bite his bollocks off.