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Cromwell, price me by the yard!”
    And he would say, “Let me see,” and walk slowly around the cardinal; and saying, “May I?,” he would pinch a sleeve between an expert forefinger and thumb; and standing back, he would view him, to estimate his girth—year on year, the cardinal expands—and so come up with a figure. The cardinal would clap his hands, delighted. “Let the begrudgers behold us! On, on, on.” His procession would form up, his silver crosses, his sergeants at arms with their axes of gilt: for the cardinal went nowhere, in public, without a procession.
    So day by day, at his request and to amuse him, he would put a value on his master. Now the king has sent an army of clerks to do it. But he would like to take away their pens by force and write across their inventories: Thomas Wolsey is a man beyond price.
    â€œNow, Thomas,” the cardinal says, patting him. “Everything I have, I have from the king. The king gave it to me, and if it pleases him to take York Place fully furnished, I am sure we own other houses, we have other roofs to shelter under. This is not Putney, you know.” The cardinal holds on to him. “So I forbid you to hit anyone.” He affects to be pressing his arms by his sides, in smiling restraint. The cardinal’s fingers tremble.
    The treasurer Gascoigne comes in and says, “I hear Your Grace is to go straight to the Tower.”
    â€œDo you?” he says. “Where did you hear that?”
    â€œSir William Gascoigne,” the cardinal says, measuring out his name, “what do you suppose I have done that would make the king want to send me to the Tower?”
    â€œIt’s like you,” he says to Gascoigne, “to spread every story you’re told. Is that all the comfort you’ve got to offer—walk in here with evil rumors? Nobody’s going to the Tower. We’re going”—and the household waits, breath held, as he improvises—“to Esher. And your job,” he can’t help giving Gascoigne a little shove in the chest, “is to keep an eye on all these strangers and see that everything that’s taken out of here gets where it’s meant to go, and that nothing goes missing by the way, because if it does you’ll be beating on the gates of the Tower and begging them to take you in, to get away from me.”
    Various noises: mainly, from the back of the room, a sort of stifled cheer. It’s hard to escape the feeling that this is a play, and the cardinal is in it: the Cardinal and his Attendants. And that it is a tragedy.
    Cavendish tugs at him, anxious, sweating. “But Master Cromwell, the house at Esher is an empty house, we haven’t a pot, we haven’t a knife or a spit, where will my lord cardinal sleep, I doubt we have a bed aired, we have neither linen nor firewood nor . . . and how are we going to get there?”
    â€œSir William,” the cardinal says to Gascoigne, “take no offense from Master Cromwell, who is, upon the occasion, blunt to a fault; but take what is said to heart. Since everything I have proceeds from the king, everything must be delivered back in good order.” He turns away, his lips twitching. Except when he teased the dukes yesterday, he hasn’t smiled in a month. “Tom,” he says, “I’ve spent years teaching you not to talk like that.”
    Cavendish says to him, “They haven’t seized my lord cardinal’s barge yet. Nor his horses.”
    â€œNo?” He lays a hand on Cavendish’s shoulder: “We go upriver, as many as the barge will take. Horses can meet us at—at Putney, in fact—and then we will . . . borrow things. Come on, George Cavendish, exercise some ingenuity, we’ve done more difficult things in these last years than get the household to Esher.”
    Is this true? He’s never taken much notice of Cavendish, a sensitive sort of man who talks a