When he arrives back in Stepney torchlight spills out of the house, and the singing children, in a state of high excitement, are carolling in the garden; dogs are barking, black shapes bobbing against the snow, and a dozen mounds, ghostly white, tower over the frozen hedges. One, taller than the rest, wears a mitre; it has a stub of blue-tinged carrot for its nose, and a smaller stub for its cock. Gregory pitches towards him, a swirl of excitement: ‘Look, sir, we have made the Pope out of snow.’

‘First we made the Pope.’ The glowing face beside him belongs to Dick Purser, the boy who keeps the watchdogs. ‘We made the Pope, sir, and then he looked harmless by himself and so we made a set of cardinals. Do you like them?’

His kitchen boys swarm about him, frosted and dripping. The whole household has turned out, or at least everyone under thirty. They have lit a bonfire – well away from the snowmen – and appear to be dancing around it, led by his boy Christophe.

Gregory gets his breath. ‘We only did it for the better setting forth of the king’s supremacy. I do not think it is wrong, because we can blow a trumpet then kick them flat, and cousin Richard said we may, and he himself moulded the Pope’s head, and Master Wriothesley who was here looking for you thrust in the Pope’s little member and laughed at it.’

‘Such children you are!’ he says. ‘I like them very much. We will have the fanfare tomorrow when there’s more light, shall we?’

‘And can we fire a cannon?’

‘Where would I get a cannon?’

‘Speak to the king, sir.’ Gregory is laughing; he knows the cannon is a step too far.

Dick Purser’s sharp eye has fallen on the ambassador’s hat. ‘Might we borrow that? We have done ill with the Pope’s tiara, because we did not know how it should look.’

He spins the hat in his hand. ‘You’re right, this is more the sort of thing Farnese wears. But no. This hat is a sacred charge. I have to answer to the Emperor for it. Now, let me go,’ he says, laughing, ‘I must write letters, we look for great changes soon.’

‘Stephen Vaughan is here,’ Gregory says.

‘Is he? Ah. Good. I have a use for him.’

He tramps towards the house, firelight licking his heels. ‘Pity Master Vaughan,’ Gregory says. ‘I think he came for his supper.’

‘Stephen!’ A hasty embrace. ‘No time,’ he says. ‘Katherine is dying.’

‘What?’ his friend says. ‘I heard nothing of this in Antwerp.’

Vaughan is always in transit. He is about to be in transit again. He is Cromwell’s servant, he is the king’s servant, he is the king’s eyes and ears across the Narrow Sea; nothing passes with the Flemish merchants or the guilds at Calais that Stephen does not know and report. ‘I am bound to say, Master Secretary, you keep a disorderly household. One might as well eat supper in a field.’