This spring, 1531, he makes it his business to be cheerful. The cardinal was a great grumbler, but he always grumbled in some entertaining way. The more he complained, the more cheerful his man Cromwell became; that was the arrangement.

The king is a complainer too. He has a headache. The Duke of Suffolk is stupid. The weather is too warm for the time of year. The country is going to the dogs. He's anxious too; afraid of spells, and of people thinking bad thoughts about him in any specific or unspecific way. The more anxious the king becomes, the more tranquil becomes his new servant, the more hopeful, the more staunch. And the more the king snips and carps, the more do his petitioners seek out the company of Cromwell, so unfailing in his amiable courtesy.

At home, Jo comes to him looking perplexed. She is a young lady now, with a womanly frown, a soft crinkle of flesh on her forehead, which Johane her mother has too. ‘Sir, how shall we paint our eggs at Easter?’

‘How did you paint them last year?’

‘Every year before this we gave them hats like the cardinal's.’ She watches his face, to read back the effect of her words; it is his own habit exactly, and he thinks, not only your children are your children. ‘Was it wrong?’

‘Not at all. I wish I'd known. I would have taken him one. He would have liked it.’

Jo puts her soft little hand into his. It is still a child's hand, the skin scuffed over the knuckles, the nails bitten. ‘I am of the king's council now,’ he says. ‘You can paint crowns if you like.’

This piece of folly with her mother, this ongoing folly, it has to stop. Johane knows it too. She used to make excuses, to be where he was. But now, if he's at Austin Friars, she's at the house in Stepney.

‘Mercy knows,’ she murmurs in passing.

The surprise is it took her so long, but there is a lesson here; you think people are always watching you, but that is guilt, making you jump at shadows. But finally, Mercy finds she has eyes in her head, and a tongue to speak, and picks a time when they can be alone. ‘They tell me that the king has found a way around at least one of his stumbling blocks. I mean, the difficulty of how he can marry Lady Anne, when her sister Mary has been in his bed.’

‘We have had all the best advice,’ he says easily. ‘Dr Cranmer at my recommendation sent to Venice, to a learned body of rabbis, to take opinions on the meaning of the ancient texts.’

‘So it is not incest? Unless you have actually been married to one sister?’

‘The divines say not.’

‘How much did that cost?’

‘Dr Cranmer wouldn't know. The priests and the scholars go to the negotiating table, then some less godly sort of man comes after them, with a bag of money. They don't have to meet each other, coming in or going out.’

‘It hardly helps your case,’ she says bluntly.

‘There is no help in my case.’

‘She wants to talk to you. Johane.’

‘What's there to say? We all know –’ We all know it can go nowhere. Even though her husband John Williamson is still coughing: one is always half listening for it, here and at Stepney, the annunciatory wheezing on a stairway or in the next room; one thing about John Williamson, he'll never take you by surprise. Dr Butts has recommended him country air, and keeping away from fumes and smoke. ‘It was a moment of weakness,’ he says. Then … what? Another moment. ‘God sees all. So they tell me.’

‘You must listen to her.’ Mercy's face, when she turns back, is incandescent. ‘You owe her that.’

*

‘The way it seems to me, it seems like part of the past.’ Johane's voice is unsteady; with a little twitch of her fingers she settles her half-moon hood and drifts her veil, a cloud of silk, over one shoulder. ‘For a long time, I didn't think Liz was really gone. I expected to see her walk in one day.’

It has been a constant temptation to him, to have Johane beautifully dressed, and he has dealt with it by, as Mercy says, throwing money at the London goldsmiths and mercers, so the women of Austin Friars are bywords among the city wives, who say behind their hands (but with a worshipful murmur, almost a genuflection), dear God, Thomas Cromwell, the money must be flowing in like the grace of God.

‘So now I think,’ she says, ‘that what we did because she was dead, when we were shocked, when we were sorry, we have to leave off that now. I mean, we are still sorry. We will always be sorry.’

He understands her. Liz died in another age, when the cardinal was still in his pomp, and he was the cardinal's man. ‘If,’ she says, ‘you would like to marry, Mercy has her list. But then, you probably have your own list. With nobody on it we know.’

‘If, of course,’ she says, ‘if John Williamson had – God forgive me but every winter I think it is his last – then of course I, without question, I mean, at once, Thomas, as soon as decent, not clasping hands over his coffin … but then the church wouldn't allow it. The law wouldn't.’

‘You never know,’ he says.

She throws out her hands, words flood out of her. ‘They say you intend to, what you intend, to break the bishops and make the king head of the church and take away his revenues from the Holy Father and give them to Henry, then Henry can declare the law if he likes and put off his wife as he likes and marry Lady Anne and he will say what is a sin and what not and who can be married. And the Princess Mary, God defend her, will be a bastard and after Henry the next king will be whatever child that lady gives him.’

‘Johane … when Parliament meets again, would you like to come down and tell them what you've just said? Because it would save a lot of time.’

‘You can't,’ she says, aghast. ‘The Commons will not vote it. The Lords will not. Bishop Fisher will not allow it. Archbishop Warham. The Duke of Norfolk. Thomas More.’

‘Fisher is ill. Warham is old. Norfolk, he said to me only the other day, “I am tired” – if you will permit his expression – “of fighting under the banner of Katherine's stained bedsheet, and if Arthur could enjoy her, or if he couldn't, who gives a – who cares any more?”’ He is rapidly altering the duke's words, which were coarse in the extreme. ‘“Let my niece Anne come in,” he said, “and do her worst.”’

‘What is her worst?’ Johane's mouth is ajar; the duke's words will be rolling down Gracechurch Street, rolling to the river and across the bridge, till the painted ladies in Southwark are passing them mouth to mouth like ulcers; but that's the Howards for you, that's the Boleyns; with or without him, news of Anne's character will reach London and the world.

‘She provokes the king's temper,’ he says. ‘He complains Katherine never in her life spoke to him as Anne does. Norfolk says she uses language to him you wouldn't use to a dog.’

‘Jesu! I wonder he doesn't whip her.’

‘Perhaps he will, when they're married. Look, if Katherine were to withdraw her suit from Rome, if she were to submit to judgment of her case in England, or if the Pope were to concede to the king's wishes, then all this – everything you've said, it won't happen, it will be just –’ His hand makes a smooth, withdrawing motion, like the rolling up of a parchment. ‘If Clement were to come to his desk one morning, not quite awake, and sign with his left hand some piece of paper he's not read, well, who could blame him? And then I leave him, we leave him, undisturbed, in possession of his revenues, in possession of his authority, because now Henry only wants one thing, and that is Anne in his bed; but time marches on and he is beginning to think, believe me, of other things he might want.’

‘Yes. Like his own way.’

‘He's a king. He's used to it.’

‘And if the Pope is still stubborn?’

‘He'll go begging for his revenue.’

‘Will the king take the money of Christian people? The king is rich.’

‘There you are wrong. The king is poor.’

‘Oh. Does he know it?’