Sir Henry levers himself upright. He is a portly man, though he lives on pottage and mashes. ‘Thomas, how did I get old?’

When they return to the hall it is to find a play in progress. Rafe is acting the part of Leontina and the household is roaring him on. It is not that the boys don't believe the lion tale; it is just that they like to put their own words to it. He extends a peremptory hand to Richard, who has been standing on a joint-stool, squealing. ‘You are jealous of Tom Wyatt,’ he says.

‘Ah, don't be out of temper with us, master.’ Rafe resumes human form and throws himself on to a bench. ‘Tell us about Florence. Tell us what else you did, you and Giovannino.’

‘I don't know if I should. You will make a play of it.’

Ah, do, they persuade him, and he looks around: Rafe encourages him with a purr. ‘Are we sure Call-Me-Risley is not here? Well … when we had a day off, we used to take down buildings.’

‘Take them down?’ Henry Wyatt says. ‘Did you so?’

‘What I mean is, blow them up. But not without the owner's permission. Unless we thought they were crumbling and a danger to passers-by. We only charged for explosive materials. Not for our expertise.’

‘Which was considerable, I suppose?’

‘It's a lot of digging for a few seconds of excitement. But I knew some boys who went into it as a profession. In Florence,’ he says, ‘it was just what you might do for your recreation. Like fishing. It kept us out of trouble.’ He hesitates. ‘Well, no, it didn't. Not really.’

Richard says, ‘Did Call-Me tell Gardiner? About your Cupid?’

‘What do you think?’

The king had said to him, I hear you antiqued a statue. The king was laughing, but perhaps also making a note; laughing because the joke's against clerics, against cardinals, and he's in the mood for such a joke.

Secretary Gardiner: ‘Statue, statute, not much difference.’

‘One letter is everything, in legislating. But my precedents are not faked.’

‘Stretched?’ Gardiner says.

‘Majesty, the Council of Constance granted your ancestor, Henry V, such control over the church in England as no other Christian king exercised in his realm.’

‘The concessions were not applied. Not with consistency. Why is that?’

‘I don't know. Incompetence?’

‘But we have better councillors now?’

‘Better kings, Your Majesty.’

Behind Henry's back, Gardiner makes a gargoyle face at him. He almost laughs.

The legal term closes. Anne says, come and eat a poor Advent supper with me. We'll use forks.

He goes, but he doesn't like the company. She has made pets of the king's friends, the gentlemen of his privy chamber: Henry Norris, William Brereton, those people, and her brother, of course, Lord Rochford. Anne is brittle in their company, and as ruthless with their compliments as a housewife snapping the necks of larks for the table. If her precise smile fades for a moment, they all lean forward, anxious to know how to please her. A bigger set of fools you would go far to seek.

For himself, he can go anywhere, he has been anywhere. Brought up on the table talk of the Frescobaldi family, the Portinari family, and latterly at the cardinal's table among the savants and wits, he is unlikely to find himself at a loss among the pretty people Anne gathers around her. God knows, they do their best, the gentlemen, to make him uncomfortable; he imports his own comfort, his calm, his exact and pointed conversation. Norris, who is a witty man, and not young, stultifies himself by keeping such company: and why? Proximity to Anne makes him tremble. It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.

After that first occasion, Norris follows him out, touches his sleeve, and brings him to a standstill, face to face. ‘You don't see it, do you? Anne?’

He shakes his head.

‘So what would be your idea? Some fat frau from your travels?’

‘A woman I could love, would be a woman in whom the king has no interest at all.’

‘If that is a piece of advice, tell it to your friend Wyatt's son.’

‘Oh, I think young Wyatt has worked it out. He is a married man. He says to himself, from your deprivations make a verse. Don't we all grow wiser, from pinpricks to the amour propre?’

‘Can you look at me,’ Norris says, ‘and think I grow wiser?’

He hands Norris his handkerchief. Norris mops his face and gives the handkerchief back. He thinks of St Veronica, swabbing with her veil the features of the suffering Christ; he wonders if, when he gets home, Henry's gentlemanly features will be imprinted on the cloth, and if so, will he hang the result on the wall? Norris turns away, with a little laugh: ‘Weston – young Weston, you know – he is jealous of a boy she brings in to sing for us some nights. He is jealous of the man who comes in to mend the fire, or the maid who pulls her stockings off. Every time she looks at you, he keeps count, he says, there, there, do you see, she is looking at that fat butcher, she looked at him fifteen times in two hours.’

‘It was the cardinal who was the fat butcher.’

‘To Francis, one tradesman's the same as the next.’

‘I quite see that. Give you good night.’

Night, Tom, Norris says, batting him on the shoulder, absent, distracted, almost as if they were equals, as if they were friends; his eyes are turned back to Anne, his steps are turned back to his rivals.

One tradesman the same as the next? Not in the real world. Any man with a steady hand and a cleaver can call himself a butcher: but without the smith, where does he get that cleaver? Without the man who works in metal, where are your hammers, your scythes, your sickles, scissors and planes? Your arms and armour, your arrowheads, your pikes and your guns? Where are your ships at sea and their anchors? Where are your grappling hooks, your nails, latches, hinges, pokers and tongs? Where are your spits, kettles, trivets, your harness rings, buckles and bits? Where are your knives?

He remembers the day they heard the Cornish army was coming. He was – what – twelve? He was in the forge. He had cleaned the big bellows and he was oiling the leather. Walter came over and looked at it. ‘Wants caulking.’

‘Right,’ he said. (This was the kind of conversation he had with Walter.)

‘It won't do itself.’

‘I said, right, right, I'm doing it!’

He looked up. Their neighbour Owen Madoc stood in the doorway. ‘They're on the march. Word's all down the river. Henry Tudor ready to fight. The queen and the little ones in the Tower.’

Walter wipes his mouth. ‘How long?’

Madoc says, ‘God knows. Those fuckers can fly.’

He straightens up. Into his hand has floated a four-pound hammer with an ash shaft.

The next few days they worked till they were ready to drop. Walter undertook body armour for his friends, and he to put an edge on anything that can cut, tear, lacerate rebel flesh. The men of Putney have no sympathy with these heathens. They pay their taxes: why not the Cornish? The women are afraid that the Cornishmen will outrage their honour. ‘Our priest says they only do it to their sisters,’ he says, ‘so you'll be all right, our Bet. But then again, the priest says they have cold scaly members like the devil, so you might want the novelty.’

Bet throws something at him. He dodges. It's always the excuse for breakages, in that house: I threw it at Thomas. ‘Well, I don't know what you like,’ he says.

That week, rumours proliferate. The Cornishmen work under the ground, so their faces are black. They are half-blind and so you can catch them in a net. The king will give you a shilling for each you catch, two shillings if it's a big one. Just how big are they? Because they shoot arrows a yard long.

Now all household objects are seen in a new light. Skewers, spits, larding needles: anything for defence at close quarters. The neighbours are paying out to Walter's other business, the brewery, as if they think the Cornishmen mean to drink England dry. Owen Madoc comes in and commissions a hunting knife, hand-guard, blood gutter and twelve-inch blade. ‘Twelve-inch?’ he says. ‘You'll be flailing around and cut your ear off.’

‘You'll not be so pert when the Cornish seize you. They spit children like you and roast them on bonfires.’

‘Can't you just slap them with an oar?’

‘I'll slap your jaw shut,’ Owen Madoc bellows. ‘You little fucker, you had a bad name before you were born.’

He shows Owen Madoc the knife he has made for himself, slung on a cord under his shirt: its stub of blade, like a single, evil tooth. ‘What do you think?’

‘Christ,’ Madoc says. ‘Be careful who you leave it in.’

He says to his sister Kat – just resting his four-pound hammer on her windowsill at the Pegasus – why did I have a bad name before I was born?

Ask Morgan Williams, she says. He'll tell you. Oh, Tom, Tom, she says. She grabs his head and kisses it. You don't put yourself out there. Let him fight.

She hopes the Cornish will kill Walter. She doesn't say so, but he knows it.