He has been able to maintain some residue of sardonic detachment, but it is done away with by the visitation of Henry. At first he takes the vision for another of his ghosts, but the king is too vital to dissipate against a wall, too broad to look away from. Henry leaves no room for doubt as to what one is seeing. The king stands in the doorway of the room in the Tower where he, Cromwell, has been waiting—waiting for the end, for a reprieve, for Henry—and blots out the sun, where it poured, dilute, into the room.

It has not been so very long, but it has felt like wasting away: a motionless marathon, an endurance plod.

There is a susurration of cloth as he makes his genuflection. He does not intend to fall on his knees, but it happens. The resignation and dignity he has sought to cultivate throughout his confinement dissolves like wet sugar in the face of that which he has held out for, despite himself, despite all that he knows about the workings of the King of England, which is everything. Or so he has thought, often, and never correctly.

The rationalizations he held trade in when the case against him was still fomenting rise back to the surface of his mind: This too shall pass, because I am indispensable and he still has need for me. Others outlasted their use, but Cromwell is infinitely useful. The king is not so wealthy as to destroy the finest of his goods.

How desperate he sounds. He is never pleased to be made aware of having given into self-delusion; he has enough tales to tell other people, he cannot spare them for himself. And yet.

The door thuds shut. Henry moves quietly, despite the slight shuffle from his poisoned leg.

“You always have looked so solid, like no one or nothing could take you anywhere against your will. I suppose some part of me did not believe it, even when they told me of the arrest.”

There is a Henry who would have said this in a spirit of joviality, as one big man to another. His voice now is soft and delicate. Ashamed.

Anger rises like bile in the throat, but he swallows it, uncaring of how unpleasant it make his stomach on the way down.

“Did Your Grace imagine I had bewitched the spectators? What a trick that would be.”

“You have many tricks an ordinary man would neither think of, nevermind carry out.”

Is he to be accused of witchcraft, next? But Henry’s tone is still gentle and not without humour. Pitying, one might say, but for his certainty that Henry’s capacity for that feeling as concerns a wretch such as himself is quite negligible. He looks on Cromwell in the manner of—he knows not what.

He has not risen to his feet, though even this is something unfathomable to himself. Good God, man, there is a chair in here, should you not think it wise to stand eye-to-eye.

If I could just see him, he has thought countless times since he came here. Has said so, in varying phrasings, to friend and foe alike. Let me speak to the king. So certain that an hour with Henry, face to face—ten minutes, two—would turn the game in his favour. He has taken it as confirmation, how steadfastly they have kept him from doing so. They know his power.

He was mistaken, he thinks. Henry has only come because his heart is hardened, and he no longer possesses the capacity to be turned. He wants to be certain that his servant has been snuffed out, and he cannot witness the headsman do the deed himself. He must view the body before it becomes the body, and be satisfied.

“Your grace knows that I have only ever striven to serve and elevate him.”

He expects—what? For this to be the moment where Henry’s mood turns, and he declares his servant Cromwell a traitor, as he already has in law?

The king speaks: “Yes, Crumb.” Henry is close now. An enormous paw settles on his cheek. The hand is intimate, debasing, as the hand of one patting the side of a dog at one’s knee.

He loves him, still. He has never understood the Cardinal so well as this. How impossible it is, not to love him.

He leans in, closer. Fumbling for laces, part of his mind still calculating the worth of the weave under his fingers by the yard.

He supposes this is the typical occupation of prisoners; the Tower being unlike the common gaol for sequestering its inmates apart from one another, where opportunities for sin are reduced. There are few sins he would not commit now, and he will have chances for all the repenting necessary.

That great paw is unsteady. He wonders if he is to be pushed away. He cannot bring himself to regret his presumption, even if this is the case; it can scarcely worsen his situation.

These things are not mysteries to the king, he knows. Anne had her French tricks; Cromwell has tricks from everywhere.

So the king allows himself to be served, dutifully, as ever he has been served. It takes some effort to rouse him, though he is not impotent, just getting old, as are they all. Another man's prick is surely not a sight that brings him to sentimentality, now or ever, but it is a sight which forces the acknowledgement that Henry is a man, tender and vulnerable, with a mushroom-shaped head and a dank, salty taste in the mouth.

His knees ache on the stone. His eyes drift closed, periodically, and he fights to keep them open, staring at the places his blunt fingernails crush indents in the velvet. The things to come will be easier for him to bear if some remnant will linger here on Henry's person, if only for so long as it takes one of the countless others that grasp at Henry's affection to brush it out. It was real, this life of his; at his very lowest, he touched the King of England.