Wolf Hall & Bring Up The Bodies: Two-Book Edition

The door opens; it is Alice bringing in lights. ‘This is your daughter?’

Rather than explain his family, he says, ‘This is my lovely Alice. This is not your job, Alice?’

She bobs, a small genuflection to a churchman. ‘No, but Rafe and the others want to know what you are talking about so long. They are waiting to know if there will be a dispatch to the cardinal tonight. Jo is standing by with her needle and thread.’

‘Tell them I will write in my own hand, and we will send it tomorrow. Jo may go to bed.’

‘Oh, we are not going to bed. We are running Gregory’s greyhounds up and down the hall and making a noise fit to wake the dead.’

‘I can see why you don’t want to break off.’

‘Yes, it is excellent,’ Alice says. ‘We have the manners of scullery maids and no one will ever want to marry us. If our aunt Mercy had behaved like us when she was a girl, she would have been knocked round the head till she bled from the ears.’

‘Then we live in happy times,’ he says.

When she has gone, and the door is closed behind her, Cranmer says, ‘The children are not whipped?’

‘We try to teach them by example, as Erasmus suggests, though we all like to race the dogs up and down and make a noise, so we are not doing very well in that regard.’ He does not know if he should smile; he has Gregory; he has Alice, and Johane and the child Jo, and in the corner of his eye, at the periphery of his vision, the little pale girl who spies on the Boleyns. He has hawks in his mews who move towards the sound of his voice. What has this man?

‘I think of the king’s advisers,’ Dr Cranmer says. ‘The sort of men who are about him now.’

And he has the cardinal, if the cardinal still thinks well of him after all that has passed. If he dies, he has his son’s sable hounds to lie at his feet.

‘They are able men,’ Cranmer says, ‘who will do anything he wants, but it seems to me – I do not know how it seems to you – that they are utterly lacking in any understanding of his situation … any compunction or kindness. Any charity. Or love.’