As dusk steals over the woods and fields, servants will be out looking for the stir of the black plume against darkening grass, or the glint of his hunter’s badge, a gold St Hubert with sapphire eyes.Īlready you can feel the autumn. The king refused all offers of substitutes. Early in the day he lost his hat, so by custom all the hunting party were obliged to take off theirs. He stands looking about him, inhaling horse sweat, a broad, brick-red streak of sunburn across his forehead. Though the day is over, Henry seems disinclined to go indoors. When the king has gone to bed, his working night will begin. At supper with the Seymours, he will defer to any stories his hosts wish to tell: to anything the king may venture, tousled and happy and amiable as he seems tonight.
Sometime before noon, clouds scudded in from the west and rain fell in big scented drops but the sun re-emerged with a scorching heat, and now the sky is so clear you can see into Heaven and spy on what the saints are doing.Īs they dismount, handing their horses to the grooms and waiting on the king, his mind is already moving to paperwork: to dispatches from Whitehall, galloped down by the post routes that are laid wherever the court shifts. And for a few days at least, the sun has shone on Henry. When they look down they see nothing but their prey, and the borrowed plumes of the hunters: they see a flittering, flinching universe, a universe filled with their dinner.Īll summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment, fur and feather flying the beating off and the whipping in of hounds, the coddling of tired horses, the nursing, by the gentlemen, of contusions, sprains and blisters.
Weightless, they glide on the upper currents of the air. These dead women, their bones long sunk in London clay, are now transmigrated. Tomorrow his wife and two sisters will go out. They are tired the sun is declining, and they ride back to Wolf Hall with the reins slack on the necks of their mounts. Later, Henry will say, ‘Your girls flew well today.’ The hawk Anne Cromwell bounces on the glove of Rafe Sadler, who rides by the king in easy conversation. Her breast is gore-streaked and flesh clings to her claws. But the sounds she makes then, the rustle of feathers and the creak, the sigh and riffle of pinion, the small cluck-cluck from her throat, these are sounds of recognition, intimate, daughterly, almost disapproving. She is silent when she takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist. He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze.
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