Wolf Hall: Shortlisted for the Golden Man Booker Prize

And when people say, is he? – recalling, as best they can, a man who seems peculiarly discreet; when they say, really? Your man Cromwell? the cardinal will shake his head and say, but I try to mend matters, of course. When he breaks the windows we just call in the glaziers and part with the cash. As for the procession of aggrieved young women … Poor creatures, I pay them off …

But tonight he is back to business; hands clasped on his desk, as if holding together the evening passed. ‘Come now, Thomas, you were telling me of a rumour.’

‘The women judge from orders to the silk merchants that the king has a new –’ He breaks off and says, ‘My lord, what do you call a whore when she is a knight's daughter?’

‘Ah,’ the cardinal says, entering into the problem. ‘To her face, “my lady.” Behind her back – well, what is her name? Which knight?’

He nods to where, ten minutes ago, Boleyn stood.

The cardinal looks alarmed. ‘Why did you not speak up?’

‘How could I have introduced the topic?’

The cardinal bows to the difficulty.

‘But it is not the Boleyn lady new at court. Not Harry Percy's lady. It is her sister.’

‘I see.’ The cardinal drops back in his chair. ‘Of course.’

Mary Boleyn is a kind little blonde, who is said to have been passed all around the French court before coming home to this one, scattering goodwill, her frowning little sister trotting always at her heels.

‘Of course, I have followed the direction of His Majesty's eye,’ the cardinal says. He nods to himself. ‘Are they now close? Does the queen know? Or can't you say?’

He nods. The cardinal sighs. ‘Katherine is a saint. Still, if I were a saint, and a queen, perhaps I would feel I could take no harm from Mary Boleyn. Presents, eh? What sort? Not lavish, you say? I am sorry for her then; she should seize her advantage while it lasts. It's not that our king has so many adventures, though they do say … they say that when His Majesty was young, not yet king, it was Boleyn's wife who relieved him of his virgin state.’

‘Elizabeth Boleyn?’ He is not often surprised. ‘This one's mother?’

‘The same. Perhaps the king lacks imagination in that way. Not that I ever believed it … If we were at the other side, you know,’ he gestures in the direction of Dover, ‘we wouldn't even try to keep track of the women. My friend King François – they do say he once oozed up to the lady he'd been with the night before, gave her a formal kiss of the hand, asked her name, and wished they might be better friends.’ He bobs his head, liking the success of his story. ‘But Mary won't cause difficulties. She's an easy armful. The king could do worse.’

‘But her family will want to get something out of it. What did they get before?’

‘The chance to make themselves useful.’ Wolsey breaks off and makes a note. He can imagine its content: what Boleyn can have, if he asks nicely. The cardinal looks up. ‘So should I have been, in my interview with Sir Thomas – how shall I put it – more douce?’

‘I don't think my lord could have been sweeter. Witness his face when he left us. The picture of soothed gratification.’

‘Thomas, from now on, any London gossip,’ he touches the damask cloth, ‘bring it right here to me. Don't trouble about the source. Let the trouble be mine. And I promise never to assault you. Truly.’

‘It is forgotten.’

‘I doubt that. Not if you've carried the lesson all these years.’ The cardinal sits back; he considers. ‘At least she is married.’ Mary Boleyn, he means. ‘So if she whelps, he can acknowledge it or not, as he pleases. He has a boy from John Blount's daughter and he won't want too many.’

Too large a royal nursery can be encumbering to a king. The example of history and of other nations shows that the mothers fight for status, and try to get their brats induced somehow into the line of succession. The son Henry acknowledges is known as Henry Fitzroy; he is a handsome blond child made in the king's own image. His father has created him Duke of Somerset and Duke of Richmond; he is not yet ten years old, and the senior nobleman in England.

Queen Katherine, whose boys have all died, takes it patiently: that is to say, she suffers.

When he leaves the cardinal, he is miserably angry. When he thinks back to his earlier life – that boy half-dead on the cobbles in Putney – he feels no tenderness for him, just a faint impatience: why doesn't he get up? For his later self – still prone to getting into fights, or at least being in the place where a fight might occur – he feels something like contempt, washed with a queasy anxiety. That was the way of the world: a knife in the dark, a movement on the edge of vision, a series of warnings which have worked themselves into flesh. He has given the cardinal a shock, which is not his job; his job, as he has defined it at this time, is to feed the cardinal information and soothe his temper and understand him and embellish his jokes. What went wrong was an accident of timing only. If the cardinal had not moved so fast; if he had not been so edgy, not knowing how he could signal to him to be less despotic to Boleyn. The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for ‘Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter.’ He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on.

In the year 1529, my lord cardinal newly disgraced, he will think back to that evening.

He is at Esher; it is the lightless, fireless night, when the great man has gone to his (possibly damp) bed, and there is only George Cavendish to keep his spirits alive. What happened next, he asked George, with Harry Percy and Anne Boleyn?

He knew the story only in the cardinal's chilly and dismissive rendition. But George said, ‘I shall tell you how it was. Now. Stand up, Master Cromwell.’ He does it. ‘A little to the left. Now, which would you like to be? My lord cardinal, or the young heir?’

‘Oh, I see, is it a play? You be the cardinal. I don't feel equal to it.’

Cavendish adjusts his position, turning him imperceptibly from the window, where night and bare trees are their audience. His gaze rests on the air, as if he were seeing the past: shadowy bodies, moving in this lightless room. ‘Can you look troubled?’ George asks. ‘As if you were brooding upon mutinous speech, and yet dare not speak? No, no, not like that. You are youthful, gangling, your head drooping, you are blushing.’ Cavendish sighs. ‘I believe you never blushed in your life, Master Cromwell. Look.’ Cavendish sets his hands, gently, on his upper arms. ‘Let us change roles. Sit here. You be the cardinal.’

At once he sees Cavendish transformed. George twitches, he fumbles, he all but weeps; he becomes the quaking Harry Percy, a young man in love. ‘Why should I not match with her?’ he cries. ‘Though she be but a simple maid –’

‘Simple?’ he says. ‘Maid?’

George glares at him. ‘The cardinal never said that!’

‘Not at the time, I agree.’

‘Now I am Harry Percy again. “Though she be but a simple maid, her father a mere knight, yet her lineage is good –”’

‘She's some sort of cousin of the king's, isn't she?’

‘Some sort of cousin?’ Cavendish again breaks up his role, indignant. ‘My lord cardinal would have their descent unfolded before him, all drawn up by the heralds.’

‘So what shall I do?’

‘Just pretend! Now: her forebears are not without merit, young Percy argues. But the stronger the boy argues, the more my lord cardinal waxes into a temper. The boy says, we have made a contract of matrimony, which is as good as a true marriage …’

‘Does he? I mean, did he?’

‘Yes, that was the sense of it. Good as a true marriage.’

‘And what did my lord cardinal do there?’

‘He said, good God, boy, what are you telling me? If you have involved yourself in any such false proceeding, the king must hear of it. I shall send for your father, and between us we will contrive to annul this folly of yours.’

‘And Harry Percy said?’

‘Not much. He hung his head.’

‘I wonder the girl had any respect for him.’

‘She didn't. She liked his title.’

‘I see.’

‘So then his father came down from the north – will you be the earl, or will you be the boy?’

‘The boy. I know how to do it now.’

He jumps to his feet and imitates penitence. It seems they had a long talk in a long gallery, the earl and the cardinal; then they had a glass of wine. Something strong, it must have been. The earl stamped the length of the gallery, then sat down, Cavendish said, on a bench where the waiting-boys used to rest between orders. He called his heir to stand before him, and took him apart in front of the servants.