Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel Page B

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?”
    â€œOh, 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—”
    â€œSimple?” he says. “Maid?”
    George glares at him. “The cardinal never said that!”
    â€œNot at the time, I agree.”
    â€œNow I am Harry Percy again. ‘Though she be but a simple maid, her father a mere knight, yet her lineage is good—’ ”
    â€œShe’s some sort of cousin of the king’s, isn’t she?”
    â€œSome 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.”
    â€œSo what shall I do?”
    â€œJust 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 . . .”
    â€œDoes he? I mean, did he?”
    â€œYes, that was the sense of it. Good as a true marriage.”
    â€œAnd what did my lord cardinal do there?”
    â€œHe said, good God, boy, what are you telling me? If you have involved