Free Wolf Hall: Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

she was queen. Or else her old lover Harry Percy –’
    ‘Percy’s in his own country, is he not?’
    Thurston rolls his eyes. ‘Distance don’t stop her. If she wants him down from Northumberland she just whistles and whips him down on the wind. Not that she stops at Harry Percy. They say she has all the gentlemen of the king’s privy chamber, one after another. She don’t like delay so they all stand in a line frigging their members, till she shouts, “Next.”’
    ‘And in they troop,’ he says. ‘One and then another.’ He laughs. Eats the final currant from his palm.
    ‘Welcome home,’ Thurston says. ‘London, where we believe anything.’
    ‘After she was crowned, I remember she called her whole household together, men and maids, and she sermonised them on how they should behave, no gambling except for tokens, no loose language and no flesh on show. It’s slid a bit from there, I agree.’
    ‘Sir,’ Thurston says, ‘you’ve got flour on your sleeve.’
    ‘Well, I must go upstairs and sit down in council. Don’t let supper be late.’
    ‘When is it ever?’ Thurston dusts him tenderly. ‘When is it ever?’
     
     
    This is his household council, not the king’s; his familiar advisers, the young men, Rafe Sadler and Richard Cromwell, quick and ready with figures, quick to twist an argument, quick to seize a point. And also Gregory. His son.
    This season young men carry their effects in soft pale leather bags, in imitation of the agents for the Fugger bank, who travel all over Europe and set the fashion. The bags are heart-shaped and so to him it always looks as if they are going wooing, but they swear they are not. Nephew Richard Cromwell sits down and gives the bags a sardonic glance. Richard is like his uncle, and keeps his effects close to his person. ‘Here’s Call-Me,’ he says. ‘Will you look at the feather in his hat?’
    Thomas Wriothesley comes in, parting from his murmuring retainers; he is a tall and handsome young man with a head of burnished copper hair. A generation back, his family were called Writh, but they thought an elegant extension would give them consequence; they were heralds by office, so they were well-placed for reinvention, for the reworking of ordinary ancestors into something more knightly. The change does not go by without mockery; Thomas is known at Austin Friars as Call-Me-Risley. He has grown a trim beard recently, has fathered a son, and is accreting dignity each year. He drops his bag on the table and slides into his place. ‘And how is Gregory?’ he asks.
    Gregory’s face opens in delight; he admires Call-Me, and he hardly hears the note of condescension. ‘Oh, I am well. I have been hunting all summer and now I will be back to William Fitzwilliam’s household to join in his train, for he is a gentleman close to the king and my father thinks I can learn from him. Fitz is good to me.’
    ‘Fitz.’ Wriothesley snorts with amusement. ‘You Cromwells!’
    ‘Well,’ Gregory says, ‘he calls my father Crumb.’
    ‘I suggest you don’t take that up, Wriothesley,’ he says amiably. ‘Or at least, Crumb me behind my back. Though I’ve just been out to the kitchens and Crumb is nothing to what they call the queen.’
    Richard Cromwell says, ‘It’s the women who keep the poison pot stirred. They don’t like man-stealers. They think Anne should be punished.’
    ‘When we left for the progress she was all elbows,’ Gregory says, unexpectedly. ‘Elbows and points and spikes. She looks more plush now.’
    ‘So she does.’ He is surprised the boy has noticed such a thing. The married men, experienced, watch Anne for signs of fattening as keenly as they watch their own wives. There are glances around the table. ‘Well, we shall see. They have not been together the whole summer, but as I judge, enough.’
    ‘It had better be enough,’ Wriothesley says. ‘The king will grow impatient with her. How many years has he waited, for a woman to do her