And why indeed should it ever run out, was her next thought. This was no ordinary coin or common gold. This money is like love, she thought at once. Once you have some, once it has come into being, it can go on multiplying, each part dividing itself, doubling and doubling like the cells of an embryo.
She glanced down at her paper wedding ring. I could get a real one, she said to herself. Her spirits rose. She picked up a wad of notes and pressed it to her cheek. And they say it’s the root of all evil. Well, Protestants say that. Catholics know better.
She replaced the money, bit by bit, each sheaf nestling against its fellow; then she drew up the string and put the whole carefully into the bottom of her Gladstone bag. Then she took the letter from the pillow and folded it, and put that in too. It was quite clear, if anyone should challenge her; the gold is yours, it said.
She stood at the washbasin and watched hot water gush from the taps; she took her flannel and wetted it and squeezed it, and washed herself all over with scented soap and then let the water out, and refilled the basin, and washed herself again with water that was clear and almost cold. People live like this, she thought. Every morning they can get up and do this if they want.
She dressed herself. There was only the costume to put on. She had become used to it. After all, she thought, there are more important things to worry you than what other people think.
She made the bed; then she sat down on it and cried for five minutes. She timed it by the clock; she felt it was as much as she should be allowed. Because she had known he would leave her; she did not imagine it could have been different.
When her five minutes were up she went to the washbasin for a last time, ran a corner of the flannel under the cold tap, and bathed her eyes. She straightened up and looked at herself in the mirror. She tied on her checked headscarf; public opinion might not matter, but she told herself that it would be a pity if she were taken up and sent to an asylum. Then she drew back the curtains. A great wave of sunlight poured into the room and washed over the wardrobe and the tallboy and the newly made bed. She stepped back and looked at it in astonishment.
Then, timidly, she quit the room and crept down the corridor; past the large windows curtained with grease and soot, and then with greying net, with crimson velvet drapes restrained by gold ropes and tassels, like a cardinal’s hat in a coat of arms. She descended the wide stone staircase and approached the mahogany altar, behind which the personage stood and gave her a civil greeting. She offered to settle the bill: to which the personage, much surprised, said that the doctor had already done that. Where was the doctor, he wanted to know? Already left, she said.
Oh, I see, then we’d better have you out of here right away, Mrs. Fludd, the man said. She noticed that his manner had changed and become markedly less civil; but she simply said, mildly, that she was leaving at once, did he not see that she had her bag? Oh you could have called a porter, Madam, the personage said, you wouldn’t want to strain yourself: and when she had handed him the key and was crossing the slippery expanse of the foyer, that waste of marble like an iced lake, she heard him say to some colleague of his, well, would you credit it, Tommy, I thought I could spot one a mile off, I’ve never seen such a bloody strange-looking tart in twenty years in the hotel trade.
It was one of those days, rare in the north of England, when a pale sun picks out every black twig of a winter tree; when a ground-frost forms a gilded haze over the pavements; and great buildings, the temples of commerce, shimmer as if their walls were made of air and smoke. Then the city casts off its grim arctic character, and its denizens their sourness and thrift; the grace of affability dawns on their meagre features, as if the pale sun had warmth in it, and power to kindle hearts. Then office workers long to hear Mozart, and eat Viennese pastries, and drink coffee scented with figs. Cleaning women hum behind their mops, and click their stout heels like flamenco dancers. Canaletto pauses on Blackfriars Bridge to take a perspective; gondoliers ply their trade on the Manchester Ship Canal.
Roisin O’Halloran hurried to the station. She passed under the great advertisers’ hoardings that wound their way up London Road, and if anyone noticed her blue serge suit and her black plimsolls, they took them as part of the novelty of the day. Her eyes stung and her cheeks burned; but it was an exhilarating cold, and everything about her—the gilded pavements, the faces of Mancunians, the coloured pictures above her head—seemed to her to have been freshly created—made overnight, manufactured by some new and ingenious process that left them clean and hard-edged and resplendent, faces immaculate, hoardings immaculate, pavements without a stain. I could go anywhere, she thought. Back to Ireland. On a boat. If I liked. Or not.
When she entered London Road Station, its clamorous darkness full of smoke and steam, its railway noises breaking like waves against the roof, she put her bag down carefully, between her feet, and looked up at the destination boards. Then she picked one out.
Father Angwin woke late; Miss Dempsey brought him tea in bed, the first time in all their years together that she had ever done such a thing. The Children of Mary would be scandalized, she thought, if they knew I was in a priest’s bedroom while the priest was in his bed. Perhaps I would be drummed out, and disgraced for ever.
Anyway, it would prepare him to face what the day must bring: questions, circumventions, realizations. The time will come, she thought, when we will look back on what has occurred and account it an Age of Miracles. She touched the spot where her wart used to be; these last two days, whenever she passed a looking-glass-and she had plans to hang many more—she would pause, and gaze at herself, and smile.
Meanwhile there were the police to be dealt with. At nine o’clock the Chief Constable came in person. He was a modern policeman, fresh-faced and cold-eyed, and he liked nothing better than to tear around the county in his big black car.
You are familiar, no doubt, with Sebastiano del Piombo’s huge painting The Raising of Lazarus, which hangs in the National Gallery in London, having been purchased in the last century from the Angerstein collection. Against a background of water, arched bridges, and a hot blue sky, a crowd of people—presumably the neighbours—cluster about the risen man. Lazarus has turned rather yellow in death, but he is a muscular, well-set-up type. His graveclothes are draped like a towel over his head, and people lean towards him solicitously, and seem to confer; what he most resembles is a boxer in his corner. The expressions of those around are puzzled, mildly censorious. Here—in the very act of extricating his right leg from a knot of the shroud—one feels his troubles are about to begin again. A woman—Mary, or maybe Martha—is whispering behind her hand. Christ points to the revenant, and holds up his other hand, fingers outstretched: so many rounds down, five to go.
NOTE
The Church in this story bears some but not much resemblance to the Roman Catholic Church in the real world, c. 1956. The village of Fetherhoughton is not to be found on a map.
The real Fludd (1574-1637) was a physician, scholar, and alchemist. In alchemy, everything has a literal and factual description, and in addition a description that is symbolic and fantastical.
ALSO BY HILARY MANTEL
Every Day Is Mother’s Day
Vacant Possession
A Place of Greater Safety
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
A Change of Climate
An Experiment in Love
The Giant, O’Brien
In paintings, there are various guises in which angels come to make their annunciation. Some have bird-bones and tiny feet, and wings that shimmer like a kingfisher’s back. Others, with delicate, crimped gold hair, have the demure expression of music-mistresses. Some angels appear more masculine. Their feet, huge and simian, dig into the marble pavements. Their wings have the wet solidity of large marine animals.
There is a painting, a Virgin and Child, by Ambrosio Bergognone. The woman has a silvery pallor; her child is plump and well-doing, the kind of baby, ready to walk if it were not so idle,
that makes your arms ache. She supports him with one hand; his feet are set upon a deep green cloth.
On either side of her is an open window, giving out on to a dusty street. Life goes on; in the distance is a bell-tower. Approaching, a figure carries a basket. Walking away from us are two other figures, absorbed in conversation, and following them closely is a small white dog with a plumed tail. The infant plays with a string of rosary beads: coral, perhaps.
An open book is propped before the woman. She is reading the First Psalm, with its message of utter reassurance: “For the Lord knoweth the ways of the just; and the ways of the wicked shall perish.”
The Virgin’s expression, at first sight, seems unfathomably sad. It is only on closer observation that one notices the near-smirk on her dimpled mouth, and the expression of satisfaction in her long, duncoloured eyes.
Copyright © 1989 by Hilary Mantel
All rights reserved.
First published in hardcover in the United Kingdom in 1989 by Viking UK
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p. cm.
1. Fludd, Robert, 1574—1637—Fiction. 2. Alchemists—England—Fiction. 3. Reincarnation—Fiction. 4. Catholic Church—England—Clergy—Fiction.
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Wolf Hall
www.picadorusa.com/wolfhall
In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favor and ascend to the heights of political power.
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.
Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.
Bring Up the Bodies
www.henryholt.com/bringupthebodies
The sequel to Hilary Mantel’s 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller Wolf Hall delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn.
Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice.
At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over three terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle. Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies follows the dramatic trial of the queen and her suitors for adultery and treason. To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally with his natural enemies, the papist aristocracy. What price will he pay for Anne's head?
Fludd Page 18
