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Grace.”
    â€œMyself, My Grace. What am I going to do about it? I tell you what I might do. I might send Master Stephen to Rome to sound out the Curia. But then I need him here . . .”
    Wolsey looks at his expression, and laughs. Squabbling underlings! He knows quite well that, dissatisfied with their original parentage, they are fighting to be his favorite son. “Whatever you think of Master Stephen, he is well grounded in canon law, and a very persuasive fellow, except when he tries to persuade you. I will tell you—” He breaks off; he leans forward, he puts his great lion’s head in his hands, the head that would indeed have worn the papal tiara, if at the last election the right money had been paid out to the right people. “I have begged him,” the cardinal says. “Thomas, I sank to my knees and from that humble posture I tried to dissuade him. Majesty, I said, be guided by me. Nothing will ensue, if you wish to be rid of your wife, but a great deal of trouble and expense.”
    â€œAnd he said . . . ?”
    â€œHe held up a finger. In warning. ‘Never,’ he said, ‘call that dear lady my wife, until you can show me why she is, and how it can be so. Till then, call her my sister, my dear sister. Since she was quite certainly my brother’s wife, before going through a form of marriage with me.’ ”
    You will never draw from Wolsey a word that is disloyal to the king. “What it is,” he says, “it’s . . .” He hesitates over the word. “It’s, in my opinion . . . preposterous. Though my opinion, of course, does not go out of this room. Oh, don’t doubt it, there were those at the time who raised their eyebrows over the dispensation. And year by year there were persons who would murmur in the king’s ear; he didn’t listen, though now I must believe that he heard. But you know the king was the most uxorious of men. Any doubts were quashed.” He places a hand, softly and firmly, down on his desk. “They were quashed and quashed.”
    But there is no doubt of what Henry wants now. An annulment. A declaration that his marriage never existed. “For eighteen years,” the cardinal says, “he has been under a mistake. He has told his confessor that he has eighteen years’ worth of sin to expiate.”
    He waits, for some gratifying small reaction. His servant simply looks back at him: taking it for granted that the seal of the confessional is broken at the cardinal’s convenience.
    â€œSo if you send Master Stephen to Rome,” he says, “it will give the king’s whim, if I may—”
    The cardinal nods: you may so term it.
    â€œâ€”an international airing?”
    â€œMaster Stephen may go discreetly. As it were, for a private papal blessing.”
    â€œYou don’t understand Rome.”
    Wolsey can’t contradict him. He has never felt the chill at the nape of the neck that makes you look over your shoulder when, passing from the Tiber’s golden light, you move into some great bloc of shadow. By some fallen column, by some chaste ruin, the thieves of integrity wait, some bishop’s whore, some nephew-of-a-nephew, some monied seducer with furred breath; he feels, sometimes, fortunate to have escaped that city with his soul intact.
    â€œPut simply,” he says, “the Pope’s spies will guess what Stephen’s about while he is still packing his vestments, and the cardinals and the secretaries will have time to fix their prices. If you must send him, give him a great deal of ready money. Those cardinals don’t take promises; what they really like is a bag of gold to placate their bankers, because they’re mostly run out of credit.” He shrugs. “I know this.”
    â€œI should send you,” the cardinal says, jolly. “You could offer Pope Clement a loan.”
    Why not? He knows the money markets; it could probably be