A/N: This is a kind of 'goes nowhere' chapter, in which Cromwell bitches about his work and we're introduced to my amusing cast of random, anonymous clerks, but is kind of necessary for setting up the groundwork for future PLOT (because believe it or not, there will actually be something at least resembling that at some point!). So I hope people will bear with me on this. Apologies for the continuing absence of Anne, which I'm hoping to remedy soon.
As ever, thanks for reading, and if you felt like reviewing, that would be awesome too.
6.
He does not sleep.
In what is becoming something of a routine for him, Cromwell rises shortly after he hears the clock across the courtyard strike three, and makes his way by touch through into his study. Some habits are harder to break than others, and to save his candles he opens the inner shutters on the window over his desk so that a wash of moonlight illuminates the contents of his bureau. It is a good night for this.
Approximately a quarter of a mile away, in the velvet-lined darkness of the Queen's Apartments, Anne is awoken by the first stirrings of the child in her belly. She lies half-beneath the coverlet, one arm crooked at an angle under the twist of her body, the other resting limply where the tender ridge of her hip curves into her thigh. It is with this hand that she explores the curious swelling of her stomach with her fingertips, so familiar to her and yet still so infinitely alien. The tiny life responds as if to her touch, jumping against where she lays her palm flat.
"Hello, my prince," she whispers.
She will not sleep.
"Coffee?"
"Thank you, Chapman."
It suffices as a 'Good morning'. Chapman is apparently restricted to two syllables an hour before sunrise. During the winter, he is even less communicable. He has worked in the chancellery for at least a thousand years, has seen the passing of both of Wolsey and More, along with countless other personages that he surely cares to neither name nor remember, and has never ascended beyond the rank of Chief Clerk. It is entirely possible that he does not wish to. When Cromwell was first appointed Chancellor, he thought that he detected a distinct rancorousness in the old man's manner, a certain belligerence in his shuffling to and from the records room, his ancient, domed back bent even further under the weight of stacks of documents, huffing in apparent discontent as he deposited them on Cromwell's desk. Cromwell was largely horrified at the idea of putting the old workhorse to such relentless activity, particularly when the likelihood appeared to increase day by day of Chapman falling subject to some violent apoplexy, but his underlings remained bafflingly philosophical when he ventured to voice his concerns about it.
"Old Arthur's been through Agincourt and out the other side - " Cromwell suspected that this, at least, was not entirely true - "He's been lugging them books around for as long as he's had legs. Don't worry about him, sir."
It was not exactly comforting.
He was also unsettled by Chapman's apparent resistance to conversation. Cromwell himself was not inclined towards idle chatter during the working day (during any part of the day, for that matter), nor did he encourage or condone it amongst his men, but he had been rather taken aback once having enquired after the health of Chapman's family (the fellow had a wife, he knew, at the least), only to receive in return a long, baleful stare from beneath fearsomely grizzled eyebrows, before Chapman creaked in an about-face and limped off. Puzzled and inexplicably hurt by the snub, Cromwell could only conclude that a certain recalcitrant mutiny was afoot.
Yet it came about that one evening several months ago, Cromwell had returned to his office following a particularly troubling encounter with the King. He was aware that Chapman was the only other clerk to have remained behind (nothing out of the ordinary in itself), but he determined to try his best to ignore the old man's presence, expecting Chapman to do the same. He had not been in a frame of mind for conversation, anyway; after settling at his desk, he had spent several minutes attempting to still the trembling in his hands, pretending that he was deeply absorbed in the bills for the new parliament and all the while focusing on the unsteady rhythm of his breathing, willing himself back into clarity and trying to subdue the malicious part of his imagination that kept presenting to him multifarious images of his own imminent demise by noose, axe or stake.
But his nerves had remained stubbornly disarrayed, to the point where he was almost distracted with frustration with himself. He was aware of Chapman leaving the room and had felt himself relax a little in gratitude for the privacy in which he might at least attempt to pull himself together.
But almost straight away, the old man had returned. This time, instead of stacks of bills, or armfuls of reports, he had been bearing a small hip-flask, holding it in both hands as though he expected to unbalance at any moment and spill its contents.
He reached Cromwell's side and regarded him wordlessly for several seconds. He seemed to undergo a small internal debate with himself, during which either the better or the worse side of him won, and he proffered the flask.
"Drink this." Or else?
Cromwell had briefly considered the possibility of being poisoned, but that had seemed too eccentric an act even for Chapman. He had accepted the flask, albeit tentatively, and with one last enquiring glance up at Chapman, who had nodded once like a father overseeing his son's first incompetent attempts at Leviticus, put his lips to the mouth of the bottle and took a small sip.
It was brandy, and a good one at that. He had felt its warmth coursing the length of his throat as he swallowed, a certain ferocity in its aftertaste that made him grimace and enough of a kick to bring him to the verge of a shiver.
"I'd keep it, if I was you," Chapman had said when Cromwell tried to give the flask back to him. It was the first time Cromwell had heard him utter a complete sentence.
"I couldn't - "
"I think you need it more than I do."
He had wanted to repay the old man's generosity, had attempted to again and again, but even when he had tried to make a small addition to Chapman's pay-packet from his own pocket that December, he had gone into to work the next morning only to find the coins stacked neatly on his desk. Such wilful extension of charity, such fierce adherence to pride…such foolishness…was not something Cromwell had ever encountered before. He was deeply touched by it, and it took him a long time to fully come to terms with the idea that Chapman neither expected nor desired recompense. In Cromwell's world, there was no such thing as a free act of virtue.
Nothing changed, of course, from that moment; or at least, Chapman continued in very much the way he always had, and was neither more or less communicative, or in any way more familiar in his manner towards Cromwell. As for Cromwell, once he had reconciled himself to the idea that he had accidentally become the recipient of a random act of kindness, he determined to at least attempt to live with the disquieting sense of indebtedness that he had been left with. He wasn't entirely sure whether it made Chapman's general demeanour easier or more difficult to bear, but at least his fears of sedition had been somewhat allayed.
Still, he had never quite been able to bring himself to finish the brandy. Its remaining contents found themselves shared out and enjoyed amongst the members of Cromwell's small household. An early Christmas present.
Chapman brings the coffee. It isn't customary, Cromwell knows, but this early in the morning he finds the medicinal benefits of the black, usually foul-tasting liquid far outweigh the peculiar looks he gets whilst drinking it. His men have resigned him to a certain eccentricity by now. Cromwell has estimated that on mornings when he has a headache as ferocious as the one he is presently inflicted with that it should take around two cups of the vile stuff to reduce the sharp pain that settles behind his left eye to a dull murmur, and possibly another half a cup to similarly render the throbbing at the base of his skull to something only a little more than a tiresome irritation. By now, Chapman has become rather a dab hand at not just preparing the mixture, but at detecting by way of some mysterious power of intuition precisely when his master will be requiring it. Or maybe, Cromwell thinks grimly as he pulls his chair up to his desk, he just looks so terrible this morning that even the King himself would have offered to run to the apothecary.
He takes a sip and sifts through the first batch of reports that have found their way onto his desk since last night. Or earlier this morning. Or whenever it was that he finally surrendered himself to an hour or so's fruitless staring at the canopy of his bed. Three from Haines up in Clitheroe already. Dammit. He knows there is a good deal of popular discontent over the imminent auction of the abbey there, but Haines's neurotic insistence on sending back the minutiae of the locals' every breath and nose blow is starting to get ridiculous.
Not to mention - he slits Haines's most recent epistle open and scans it resentfully - extremely tiresome.
It alludes to one of the new parliamentary bills. He eventually locates it beneath a stack of pamphlets that he is supposed to approve for public distribution, and searches for the relevant passage. There. The proposal that certain of the religious houses' former occupants be allowed to remain in residence as tenanted custodians, provided they pay annual rent to the Crown. Doubtless a controversial proposal, and one entirely liable to be abused by unscrupulous churchmen who would inevitably find themselves mysterious beneficiaries of the rent-roll. The people of Clitheroe are wise to be suspicious, as Haines has already told him. Several times.
He takes out paper and quill to pen a reply, his head throbbing in protest at the smell of the ink. He's fairly confident that he's developing some sort of physical aversion to it. He takes intermittent sips of coffee as he writes, the scratch of the quill-nib a feverish staccato in the quiet room. He fills a page, takes another, refreshes his quill, begins again.
Byrne is in, just as he is signing his name. "More reports for you, sir." He deposits them on the desk apologetically.
Cromwell pauses, blinks a speck of blurriness from his left eye, pinches the bridge of his nose with his forefinger and thumb.
"See that this is despatched post-haste to Lancashire," he says, blowing the sand from his drying signature. Byrne watches him as he makes a fold in the letter sharp enough to cut fingertips and stamps the seal into the hot wax.
"Haines, sir?"
"Who else?"
"Doom-mongering again?"
"I would expect no less of him."
"Has the north actually fallen to the Infidel yet or do we have a couple of days in hand?"
Cromwell smiles thinly. "I should be glad to favour such enthusiasm amongst my officers."
"Just not on a Monday, eh?" Byrne says cheerily. He makes a fleeting half-bow - "Thank you, sir" - and spirits the letter away, his step inexplicably jaunty.
Cromwell sighs as he puts the quill back in its holder. He's on his second cup of coffee and wonders about the wisdom of having a third. His headache has not so much lessened as retreated to somewhere near the back of his head, as though he has been firmly thumped there and can expect a lump the size of a small fist to materialise at some point in the near future. He rubs his eyes with his fingers and rests his elbows on the desk a moment, hands still over his face, considering his next move. Either stay here and work through the rest of the reports, or go and see if he can find Hulbert and extract from him the prints for the new wing block His Majesty has expressed an interest in seeing built.
He chooses, brief, freedom.
When he gets back to his office, Hulbert having proved to be especially elusive that morning, Thomas Wyatt is already waiting for him.
"Loitering with intent again, Mr Wyatt?" he says. Wyatt laughs as he turns to follow him through the arch and past the partition screen into the inner section of Cromwell's office. Cromwell gestures to one of his clerks to bring wine, and the man bobs in acknowledgement before ducking from the room.
"I tried to pick a day when I thought I might at least stand a chance of catching you momentarily liberated from the accounts books," Wyatt says. He is holding a suspiciously meticulous-looking envelope in his hand. That can only mean one thing.
"Another disgruntled exclamation from the provinces?" Cromwell nods at the envelope, raising a wryly expectant eyebrow. Wyatt shakes his head in mock-disapproval.
"You're no fun anymore, you know," he says. This elicits a dark chuckle from Cromwell, who gestures to the chair opposite his desk before sitting down himself. The temporary respite from his desk has done a little to clear his head, but now his back aches in protest at being folded into the chair again. Damn it all, but he's getting old…
"Explain yourself, Tom," he says, rolling his shoulders back in an attempt to at least loosen some of the painful tension that is running across the breadth of his back and up into the sinews of his neck. A joint cracks forbodingly.
"It's not what you're thinking," Wyatt says as he sits down.
"Really." Cromwell is not convinced.
"No." Wyatt's hands move to open the already broken seal on the envelope. "No fretful priests this time. Agnes Seward has been in contact again." As he speaks he unfolds the broadsheet of the letter, folded over onto itself like a tablecloth and feasibly large enough to serve as one, crossed from top to bottom, left to right, with a cramped, unsteady hand, the author attempting to pack as much information into the already generous space as possible. Clearly she has a lot to say for herself. "You know she was recently widowed?"
"Yes." Cromwell frowns as he tries to precisely place the name, sorting through the cluttered list of widows, lay-offs and sundry other plaintiffs who come to the Treasury with a plight, a household of empty bellies and no apparent solution every day without fail. Agnes Seward only stands out insofar as Cromwell has met her husband, a bricklayer, several times, had liked him, and had made a mental note to himself to provide the fellow with work at some point in the future. As events conspired, it had slipped his mind (he seems to correlate it somehow with the Italian emissary, a coronet of sapphires mistakenly intended for the Dowager Princess but intercepted by the Queen's household in her new capacity, and a potentially flammable diplomatic situation that arose from it all). In-between soothing ruffled foreign feathers and reassuring fractious ambassadorial tempers, the death of Richard Seward, brick-layer and pleasant fellow, had gone unfortunately unnoticed.
"Apparently she and her twelve children - " Wyatt pauses to let the number of this particular gaping nestful sink in, his eyes finding Cromwell's with a mixture of amusement and dismay - "are entirely dependent on her late husband's pension of fifteen pounds a year, but his employer is refusing to own up with it."
"Has she not consulted with the constable of the parish?"
"From what I hear the fellow Seward worked for has - " Wyatt pauses a moment, visibly searching for a word to assist his description. "Useful connections," is the cryptic phrase he settles on.
The clerk is back, and Cromwell waits while wine is poured and Wyatt makes his customary remark about the inadequacy of the Crown's cellar while encouraging the clerk to fill his goblet to the brim.
Once they are alone again, Cromwell laces his fingers and regards the younger man across the desk. There is something Wyatt is not telling him.
"And what of Seward's employer?"
A flicker of unease passes across Wyatt's face. He has always been hopelessly transparent in hiding his emotions.
"Ah." He looks down at the letter, fingering its crisp edges, giving an entirely convincing performance of a schoolboy reluctant to confess to a misdeed. "That might be considered a small complication."
"Meaning?" Whether it be through experience, a certain cynicism of nature, or just plain old fashioned paranoia, Cromwell has the distinct impression that he isn't going to like this.
"Meaning you might be familiar with the name."
"Mr Wyatt…" He is already tired of the intrigue; tiny fingers of apprehension are tracing their way up his spine.
Wyatt sighs, the muscles in his jaw flexing as he briefly clenches his teeth. "In his capacity as a bricklayer, and also in other various, less clearly defined roles, Richard Seward worked for one Stephen Abelard, of Wandsworth, Greater London."
"I know where it is," Cromwell hears himself snapping, because he knows the name and the knows the man. Even before Wyatt had finished speaking, he knew.
There is a small silence. The poet is tentatively searching Cromwell's face, his eyes asking the question before he even dares open his mouth again.
"So it's true then?" he says, eventually, his voice careful, gently enquiring, as though he expects Cromwell to react with some passion to any other sort of prompt.
"If you mean, is it true that I knew the man…then, yes, it is true." He finds himself not quite wanting to meet Wyatt's eyes. Always, always his past stalks after him, the tenacious ghost at his heels that he will never quite allay. "Or at least, it is true that my father knew him." It feels like a confession, one that will sully him and everything he touches from hereafter. He wants that man, his father, nowhere near any of this, damn him…
"So old Stephen has something of a name for himself?" He knows Wyatt doesn't mean it the way it sounds, but it still smarts to hear the connection made.
He isn't interested in speculating. Nor is it remotely useful in this case. "What do you mean by 'less clearly defined roles'?"
"Exactly that. Apparently, Seward did some unofficial work for Abelard on the side. I've done some asking around and no one seems to know precisely what it was. Or at least no one wanted to tell me. All I know at the moment is that Seward supplemented his income with a few errands here and there, none of which were ever specified, and which all tended to be for the benefit of his old governor. Seems like he had to, really, with all the spare mouths to feed." Wyatt makes a small, disbelieving moue. "Almost makes a case for coitus interruptus, really."
He should know, of course. Cromwell has never liked to enquire as to quite how diligently, and unofficially, Wyatt has helped to repopulate the land over the years.
"What does Mrs Seward say on the matter?" he asks.
Wyatt shakes his head. "I don't think she knew. From how she writes, you'd think her husband was as clean as they come."
Cromwell wordlessly puts out his hand for the letter and Wyatt gives it to him without query. It is good paper, perhaps the finest Agnes Seward could buy, and it seems almost unbearably poignant to think that the woman has spent a precious amount of her meagre funds just in order to make a good impression on the Treasury. The very place that she is now reduced to begging.
"I want you to go to Wandsworth," he says, looking back up at Wyatt. "Find out as much as you can about Seward's activities there, these errands. But under no circumstances are you to tell anyone that you are on business from me."
Wyatt nods, visibly unknotting the qualification behind the instruction. "What about Abelard?"
Cromwell's expression is grim as he meets Wyatt's eyes. "Leave him to me."
Once Wyatt has gone, he puts the letter inside his bureau and locks it. He wants time alone to read it, as many times as needs be, and to think about it, and he has none of that time now. Then he goes next door to Melville's office and tells him to cancel all of Cromwell's appointments for the following morning. Melville obliges without question, but his small eyes are alive with curiosity.
Back in his own office, Cromwell tries to apply himself to what the rest of the day demands of him. Everything else will be dealt with in time, he tells himself, but he cannot concentrate. He thinks of the King, awaiting the discovery of his place of secrecy so that he might take a step further towards making the lady Seymour his queen. Of the present Queen, planning for the future of a prince and a kingdom that might never exist, at least not for her. He thinks of Agnes Seward and her letter on twelve shilling paper.
"Damn it to hell," he whispers.
A/N: Yep, Cromwell's a coffee-junkie. As hideously anachronistic as that probably is, coffee, along with tea and chocolate, was used primarily for medicinal purposes in the sixteenth century, as I've kind of implied in this chapter. So maybe it's not too outlandish.
Next time: '"Please, Mr Cromwell," she says sharply, her smile mirthless. "Do me the service of not pretending to be a fool. It does not become you."'