Back in the city their two households have been fraternising since a gusty autumn night when a fire started at the ambassador’s lodging, and his wailing attendants, soot-blackened and carrying all they could salvage, came banging at the gates of Austin Friars. The ambassador lost his furniture and his wardrobe; one could not help laughing at the sight of him, wrapped in a scorched curtain with only a shirt beneath. His entourage spent the night on pallets on the floor of the hall, brother-in-law John Williamson having quit his chamber to allow the unexpected dignitary to occupy it. Next day the ambassador suffered the embarrassment of going into company in borrowed clothes too large for him; it was either that, or take the Cromwell livery, a spectacle from which an ambassador’s career could never recover. He had set tailors to work at once. ‘I don’t know where we will replicate that violent flame-coloured silk you favour. But I’ll put the word out in Venice.’ Next day, he and Chapuys had walked over the ground together, under the blackened beams. The ambassador gave a low moan as he stirred with a stick the wet black sludge that had been his official papers. ‘Do you think,’ he had said, glancing up, ‘that the Boleyns did this?’

The ambassador has never acknowledged Anne Boleyn, never been presented to her; he must forgo that pleasure, Henry has decreed, till he is ready to kiss her hand and call her queen. His allegiance is to the other queen, the exile at Kimbolton; but Henry says, Cromwell, sometime we will practise to bring Chapuys face to face with the truth. I should like to see what he would do, the king says, if he were put in Anne’s path and could not avoid her.

Today the ambassador is wearing a startling hat. More like the sort that George Boleyn sports, than a hat for a grave councillor. ‘What do you think, Cremuel?’ He tilts it.

‘Very becoming. I must get one of those.’

‘Allow me to present you…’ Chapuys removes it from his head with a flourish, then reconsiders. ‘No, it would not fit your big head. I shall have one made for you.’ He takes his arm. ‘Mon cher, your household is a delight as always. But may we talk apart?’

In a private room, the ambassador attacks. ‘They say that the king will command priests to marry.’

He is caught off-guard; but he does not mean to be jolted out of his good humour. ‘There is some merit in it, for the avoiding of hypocrisy. But I can be clear with you, that will not happen. The king will not hear of it.’ He looks closely at Chapuys; has he perhaps heard that Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, has a secret wife? Surely he cannot know. If he did, he would denounce and ruin him. They hate Thomas Cranmer, these so-called Catholics, almost as much as they hate Thomas Cromwell. He indicates the best chair to the ambassador. ‘Will you not sit and take a glass of claret?’