Teeter-totter.

The rumour in the country is that Master Secretary has brought a woman back from his recent trip to Hertfordshire, or Bedfordshire, and set her up in his house at Stepney, or at Austin Friars, or at King’s Place in Hackney, which he is rebuilding for her in lavish style. She is the keeper of an inn, and her husband has been seized and locked up, for a new crime invented by Thomas Cromwell. The poor cuckold is to be charged and hanged at the next assize; though, by some reports, he has already been found dead in his prison, bludgeoned, poisoned, and with his throat cut.

III

Angels

STEPNEY AND GREENWICH,
CHRISTMAS 1535–NEW YEAR 1536

Christmas morning: he comes hurtling out in pursuit of whatever trouble is next. A huge toad blocks his path. ‘Is that Matthew?’

From the amphibian mouth, a juvenile chortle. ‘Simon. Merry Christmas, sir, how do you?’

He sighs. ‘Overworked. Did you send your duties to your mother and father?’

The singing children go home in the summer. At Christmas, they are busy singing. ‘Will you be going to see the king, sir?’ Simon croaks. ‘I bet their plays at court are not so good as ours. We are playing Robin Hood, and King Arthur is in it. I play Merlin’s toad. Master Richard Cromwell plays the Pope and has a begging bowl. He cries “Mumpsimus sumpsimus, hocus pocus.” We give him stones for alms. He threatens us with Hell.’

He pats Simon’s warty skin. The toad clears his path with a ponderous hop.

Since his return from Kimbolton, London has closed around him: late autumn, her fading and melancholy evenings, her early dark. The sedate and ponderous arrangements of the court have enfolded him, entrapped him into desk-bound days prolonged by candlelight into desk-bound nights; sometimes he would give a king’s ransom to see the sun. He is buying land in the lusher parts of England, but he has no leisure to visit it; so these farms, these ancient manors in their walled gardens, these watercourses with their little quays, these ponds with their gilded fish rising to the hook; these vineyards, flower gardens, arbours and walks, remain to him flat, each one a paper construct, a set of figures on a page of accounts: not sheep-nibbled margins, nor meadows where kine stand knee-deep in grass, not coppices nor groves where a white doe shivers, a hoof poised; but parchment domains, leases and freeholds delimited by inky clauses, not by ancient hedges or boundary stones. His acres are notional acres, sources of income, sources of dissatisfaction in the small hours, when he wakes up and his mind explores their geography: in these waking nights before sullen or frozen dawns, he thinks not of the freedom his holdings allow, but of the trampling intrusion of others, their easements and rights of way, their fences and vantage points, that allow them to impinge on his boundaries and interfere with his quiet possession of his future. Christ knows, he is no country boy: though where he grew up, in the streets near the quays, Putney Heath was at his back, a place to go missing. He spent long days there, running with his brethren, boys as rough as himself: all of them in flight from their fathers, from their belts and fists, and from the education they were threatened with if they ever stood still. But London pulled him to her urban gut; long before he sailed the Thames in Master Secretary’s barge, he knew the currents and the tide, and he knew how much could be picked up, casually, at watermen’s trades, by unloading boats and running crates in barrows uphill to the fine houses that lined the Strand, the houses of lords and bishops: the houses of men with whom, daily, he now sits down at the council board.