Serpentello

Cromwell is here in his capacity as the king’s most dutiful servant; he is here to serve. The gentlemen of the privy chamber have hunted and dined, but at the moment their sovereign does not want them; thus excused, they are dicing, most likely, or licking their amorous wounds. If it were not Cromwell summoned here, it would be one of them doing the honors of disrobing his master, of stripping the layers of garments away from the royal person like the rind off a Spanish orange. No doubt the king’s men are spittingly angry at the usurpation of their privilege; tonight he, Cromwell, has been invited to lay hands on the person of the king of England.

To hunt with the king is its own privilege and affords its own elevated intimacy — to watch the king as he watches his quarry, and to follow the unspoken gestures of his body as he tramps here and there. So it is in nature. In late summer the harts are in their love, well-greased and rowdy through the Feast of the Holy Rood; when the strongest of them is at last exhausted by jealousy and copulation, the rest will all jostle to strike him down, even those reckoned by men as squires not a month earlier. It was one of these luckless lesser squires that Cromwell’s bolt had struck, in an act of sympathy.

To hunt is to enter the schoolroom of the world: the book of the chase asks how is it that hunting makes men more joyful than any other pastime. A man who hunts is out under the sky in clear weather, eating little, breathing fresh air and exercising his strength; a man who’s busy hunting isn’t gambling or whoring. In the company of men, he avoids the temptations of women and the perils of the town. A man who has hunted returns home exhausted but content, too spent for sin. The man who wrote the book of the chase killed his eldest son with a knife. He’d have done better to take his own advice.

To retire from the field is to rejoin civilization. Cromwell is not unconscious of their solitude here; he has penetrated deeper into Henry’s warren of private rooms than any man of low birth might expect to go. Perhaps it is royal custom to keep at least two beds in every house; perhaps it eases Henry’s conscience to scorn his ceremonial coverlet of pured minever with its gilt tassels and sleep under silk in a lesser bed. To Henry, stepping into this room must feel like a descent into humility.

“Lady Anne is so small,” Henry says, “that I think I could fit both of her feet into my hand.” Cromwell thinks that this is unlikely. “They are perfect. My jewelers all remark on the littleness of her hands. By God, she is so cruel — she digs her little fingers into my heart and tears it to pieces. Has she not the smallest fingers?”

His gown is pile-on-pile murrey velvet done up in a print of pomegranates — the sort of material that is called soprariccio measured out by the ell. Its stiff burr under Cromwell’s fingers is pleasingly sturdy and he sets it aside with the dignity it is due. Each of these garments is laid up in a chest when not in use, scented with lavender and bays, and each layer pulled away stirs up another layer of scent — closer in shades to the civet warmth of Henry’s own body. The king’s doublet-front is tied together with gilt-tipped points; Henry rakes the knots open but it is on Cromwell to tug them loose.

As Cromwell’s fingers loosen the silk cords, Henry lowers his head. “And her waist — well, you have seen her.”

The king gives him a nudge with his eyes. Cromwell maintains an expression of watchful neutrality. He has seen Lady Anne’s figure as it is fully attired, stiffened in buckram and cord. Its enigmas are safe even from Cromwell’s imagination. Henry cannot want him to imagine — Henry has never struck him as a particularly imaginative man.

“Not the way you have. Not like a man in love.”

Henry has held a vision of Anne Boleyn’s naked body for a half-dozen years now, and what he sees is haloed in expectation.

“Her figure is smooth and trim like a maiden untouched.” His voice changes, as if he is bringing Cromwell into a confidence. “Consider her breasts. I wish I could show you them, they are so perfectly made — her nipples are like rosewood, so little and so dark but blushing. Don’t think I am being vulgar — every part of her is perfect. But she has such sweet virgin bosoms…”

Cromwell does not enjoy being used for an index of Lady Anne’s qualities; it seems doubly obscene. If this is a test of his own modesty, or of Henry’s princely prerogative, it seems tremendously pointless. Henry’s skirts brush against his own body with a muted rasp of silk on silk.

“Does she?”

This is not the thing to say, under the circumstances, but Henry takes no notice of it. How much of this is a considered account of actual events and how much is a lover’s feverish imagining is not clear. Henry is not so drunk nor so exhausted that he doesn’t know what he’s saying; it’s as if he enjoys tumbling into a different register and speaking with his councillor as if he is another one of the earnest young blades he surrounds himself with. As if they are both younger men, and without such cares and matters as they carry around with them now to Whitehall and Austin Friars like so much dirty linen.

“She does. I wish I were touching her right now,” Henry says. “Holding her, feeling her.” There is a perfect thumbprint of color in each of the king’s cheeks, a maiden blush. “I went to her tonight, and she closed the door in my face. I heard it lock. She saves herself for me.”

The strain is audible in his voice and lends it a plaintive quaver. No one is supposed to acknowledge that the king’s voice is quite high, for such a big man, but at this moment it elicits a terrible tumble of affection from somewhere Cromwell cannot identify, a great cascade of tender goodwill.

Henry’s shirt has perfect geometrical figures picked out in black at cuff and collar; Cromwell draws off the sleeves of his doublet and lets the linen hang in folds. The lines of the king’s body are legible beneath their adornment — the breadth of his shoulder, the socket of his arm. His body is written on a grand scale — not only height but breadth, not only muscle but bone.

The smell of his body is always about him; it is generally the smell of sweat. Clean sweat under fresh linen, but a man’s sweat, all the same. Picture him on a battlefield, with the salt in his eyes, blinding him.

Henry is a mass of warmth, a center of heat in a room furnished with braziers to take away the coolness of late summer. As a man he is marvelously well-fashioned, lacking nothing, or at least nothing obvious. If he were to possess any defect below the waist yet above the knee, Cromwell would be the first to know about it, after Mary Boleyn. Where has Mary got to, exactly? Is she conferring with her sister, behind a locked door?

The king’s pleasure is evident; it strains the structural integrity of his laces. Cromwell tries not to look at it.

“Help me with my laces,” the king says, without looking down. “Go on.”

Cromwell looks down. His mouth is very dry.

Henry the king is the pattern of a Christian prince — he is high-minded and chaste, and prudent as a housewife. Henry the king has waited some number of years for the promise of satisfaction. Cromwell considers. Just now he is needed. He is needed for what he can provide — discretion, most of all.

Henry envelops him with a roughness, pressing his face into the king’s shoulder at an awkward angle — his stockiness, flush against Henry’s grandeur. If he should fall, Cromwell thinks, am I permitted to pick him up? Fall into bed, more like. A less sturdy man might topple under the force of such an embrace. Cromwell is not so easily felled.

The pallet room is past the threshold of ceremony; it is the smaller plainer ground where the king’s own body rests, where it lies alone. Cromwell guides him down.

The king has much of the influence of Venus in his natal chart if you put stock in that sort of thing; draw up a chart for that, if you can, the effect of the long-tailed comet on the king of England’s carnal passions. The king of England on his back, with his gold-tipped laces all undone and his cropped head shining —The king is vain of his hairline and his barber has compensated with discreet adjustments. There are gray hairs there among the red gold, to which Cromwell can only turn a tender eye.

Henry’s big hand grasps the back of his arm.

Cromwell does not say, “that’s enough”. He draws back, making his face as still as a stone. It is for Henry to say what is enough, to forbid him, to rebuke him, or to say please.

Henry’s grip tightens, extending pressure past the brushed wool sleeve to flesh and bone.

“Stay.”

The soft rise of his eyebrows furrows his forehead. When the Spanish Katherine could still be called a great beauty, and King Henry was in his youth, it is said that even ambassadors of other countries would stand and admire him at tennis, hoping to catch a glimpse of white flesh at the peeling-away of a shirt. Men praise the king’s immaculate complexion, his glancing eye and ruddy lip, his fine skin, his golden beard.

Thomas can study the barbered line of Henry’s throat, like a line of printed type — the stark edge where the bristles halt their progress. The king’s barber is held to a strict standard of the company he may keep — it wouldn’t do for the man who holds a blade to the king’s throat every morning to fall into debt or to associate with wanton women. There is a shining hollow at the base of Henry’s throat, and the rise of his stomach heaves with every breath. Where his shirt has come away untucked, his naked thighs are thick with golden hairs.

in England buggery is a vice quarantined to monasteries and charity schools; in Florence, it is practiced everywhere, by painters and men of letters and butchers and porters. As a young man, in Italy, Cromwell had been conversant in the language of rough trade — as a last resort in foreign parts it was not so unpleasant. His youth and coarseness had marked him off, more than any other sign or gesture; he had been available for purchase at any time and in any place, whether kneeling in church or loitering in the public square or down a dark alley.

The men who seek the favors of young men both rough and wild do not call on those same men twenty years later. But he is not some boy confounded by what is asked of him; he has not been a boy for many years. He has fallen out of practice. Cromwell takes the king in his hand.

“I want her so much I’m afraid I might die from it,” Henry breathes. There is a sticking sound in his throat, like an audible dryness, and a perfume of hedge wine. “Her, Anne. I get no relief with other women — it’s like a sickness, I burn. If you loved me, you would help me.”

Henry does not appeal to Cromwell the lawyer; he does not even know to whom he appeals. Cromwell’s desires must roll and turn like the stars in their spheres — and Henry’s eyes are handsome gashes in a handsome face. The king does not want to be reproached. He wants to be humored. He wants to be given what he wants. What Cromwell wants is no object. If the two happen to coincide, it is a happy accident.

Cromwell has wanted the sunshine warmth of Henry’s pleasure, he has looked on him with the libidinal envy of an ugly man. He has no illusions. He has missed the touch of flesh, and the warmth of another body; he has savored the king’s affection like fine weather, always knowing it might turn. This is some miracle or a strange sign. A tailed comet, bending away from the sun.

Cromwell works him with a slow hand, gentling at him encouragingly like a man handling a spooked horse. There can be no doubt that Henry disapproves of solitary pollution as vehemently as sodomy and commonplace fornication. This is no more than a Christian prince must do, but what they are doing together now is not fornication, no one is being buggered, and Henry is not alone.

Even so, he, Cromwell, is making a mental draft of excuses. His king has had a dream, his king is sick, his king has some other extraordinary private requirement that necessitates a late-night visit without attendants. How much linen for each of the king’s shirts? Liz would know the yardage, and Katherine — how to cut for greater length and breadth than the common man, allowances for all that pleating and smocking and all the little snips of cabbage-cloth that go into reinforcing seams. Anne farms out the king’s shirts to her seamstress, and Cromwell knows only the price.

Henry’s cock fills his hand; it swells redly between his thumb and first finger, with a dry ruddy head like fine-grained velvet. When Cromwell strokes, a bead of come draws up at the tip like a pearl.

“I can’t be without her for much longer,” Henry murmurs as Thomas’ hands make brisk motions in his lap. Henry’s eyes shine with tears; they are soft and very blue. “I can’t bear it. Have you ever been in love, Cromwell? I can’t imagine you ever have.”

“You needn’t worry about that,” Cromwell says, and spits into his palm.

He steadies the big man, and brings him off as sweetly as he can, so many years out of practice. The malleable heat of him can be drawn out and teased to its edge; the crook of one hand steadies, and the other pulls at the king’s instrument in long sweet strokes, spreading the slickness of his enthusiasm.

Henry sighs, trembles, twitches up his hips. It is Anne he thinks of, at a distance; Cromwell is only the soft crevice and the welcoming hand. When Cromwell runs his thumb over the tether of flesh beneath the head of his prick Henry makes a soft sound, little more than a breath, and shuts his eyes. No reproach comes.

In Italy, Thomas had picked up a snake for a bet and held it in his hand to the count of ten. From the moment that coiling body had first touched his fingers, sun-hot and burnished, he had known the snake would bite him. It had only been a matter of when.

Cromwell tries for a change to think of Anne — to hold her in his mind like a memory exercise and to see her as Henry must see her when he kisses her breasts or spans her white unseen thigh with one hand. (This is assuming he has, and that his campaign from pretty foot to pretty ankle has not been halted at her ladyship’s pretty knee.) Or begin at the other frontier, with the head and hair, drawn back in dark swaths from a fierce white forehead.

Cromwell breathes the sweetness of his sovereign and works diligently, but the press of King Henry’s thighs against him and the soft quaking of his chest has brought about an embarrassing state of affairs, better ignored. Anne again.

Consider the brightness of her feline eyes, the flushed parting of her lips — he cannot make a mental picture of Anne in a state of abandon, not even pieced together from however many women he has known. He cannot tell Henry whether she will shut her eyelids or open them or let them flutter halfway, whether the color will rise to her face or whether it stops at her breasts like a sunburn. Whether she will sigh for him, or screw up her face, or make some sound — whether she will wince and dig in with her heels or take a more active part, astride like St. George. Whether she will—

Henry’s finish spoils his linen, expansively and expensively. There is no delicate way of going about cleaning up under these circumstances, with the certain knowledge that Henry Norris will make a note of it in the morning. When Cromwell searches for a place to wipe his sticky hands, Henry laughs.

Cromwell’s own arousal is nearly an afterthought, it is a thing he could just as easily forget. But Henry says, “Let me,” and presses past his laces to bring him off with his hand.

*

Afterward, Henry presses him in his sweet-smelling arms and holds him there like a lover. He, Cromwell, is mildly stunned, as if from a blow. The solidity of his own belly spares him the difficulty of imagining how Mary Boleyn must feel nestled under the king’s arm. Henry has shed his shirt at some point in the proceedings, but Cromwell still wears his shoes and hose, his drawers and shirt, his doublet in gray velvet. He will be the one to skulk out once some decent time has passed, and to trace his steps backward through the king’s chambers, to make his escape. Henry is golden, and soft, and naked.

“Was your horse to your liking today?”

“It didn’t throw me.”

Henry frowns. “I thought you did well.”

They don’t hunt the hart in Putney. “Thank you.”

“You know, I’m thinking of giving Anne a gift — the hart I killed today, the hart with the great thick tines.”

Let that signify what it will. “Ladies do appreciate such things.”

“Would you mind if I sent her yours as well? It’s only that you don’t have a sweetheart of your own.”

“Not at all.” They’ve got so much game coming in at Austin Friars that they don’t know what to do with it. “It would be my pleasure. Give her my compliments.”

His pleasure to please Lady Anne, and to pleasure King Henry. Henry will not speak to her of this, not by his own choice, but if she presses him — and why would she press him? She has enough to worry about without turning her suspicions here and there.

Henry inclines his head, furrowing again. “Do you think she’ll like my New Year’s presents? I’ve had them commissioned for months, but now I’m not certain…”

In addition to other nice articles, the king has commissioned a bed. The significance will be lost on exactly nobody, Katherine least of all; the headboard bears some prepossessing scene, so that the children begotten in it will be beautiful. The artisan is dragging his feet, and Henry worries that the work will not be finished in time to achieve the effect he desires.

“And for Mary?”

Henry frowns. “I didn’t think of her. There must be something.”

This is more familiar ground, that of buying and selling, commissions and bills. When Cromwell departs, he might as well be creeping on his knees — they are master and man again.