The Mirror and the Light: 2020’s highly anticipated conclusion to the best selling, award winning Wolf Hall series (The Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book 3)

by Hilary Mantel

  When he was a boy he used to go door to door offering to sharpen scissors and bodge pans. He would scrub out a henhouse or scour pewter or cut up a carcass if a housewife had come by half a pig unexpectedly. He called all his customers ‘my lady’. He saw how it brightened their day. Sometimes it earned him an apple or a halfpenny, and once a kiss: and these things were over and above the fee for his services.

  His father’s friends worked the river, piloting travellers and running ferries from bank to bank. So he did river work too: a hungry, ignorant boy. What did he want with a horn book? As soon as he needed to read, he could read. If there was something worth writing, he could scratch it out. He used to search for treasure in the riverine mud, and plenty treasure he found. Let a gentleman’s cap blow off and it will feed a family for a week: it is not the watermarked velvet that you trade, but his cap badge. It could be a gold Becket or Christopher; a flower with enamelled petals; or a jewelled cross, with a garnet where God’s head should be. He learned to hide his finds from Walter, and keep the profit for himself.

  One night, drunk, Walter said to him, hand slapping his own breast: ‘This boat is rowing and rowing, Thomas. I’m rowing to save my life.’

  Towards the end of June the Cromwells visit the Seymour household at Twickenham. Gifts are exchanged, they take pleasure trips on the river, and musicians play into the dusk: then by the scent and light of beeswax candles he makes his arrangements with Edward, the head of the house. Edward agrees with him that the young couple should have time together without being overlooked by their elders. They will marry in early August when he, the Privy Seal, sees a two-day gap in his schedule; two days when, we trust, the princes of Europe, instead of clashing in arms, sit with dreaming eyes in the shade, listening to water drop in marble basins.

  If Edward Seymour shared his sister’s mistake, he does not allude to it: neither of them do. Messages of congratulation pour in, a few of them sincere. Call-Me says, who would have thought Gregory would be so useful to you, as to unite you with the king’s family? I always said he would come to good. Once the paperwork is done, the match is as good as made; and with the short scented nights before them, there is no harm if the young couple go to bed. Try and make her happy, he tells Gregory, happier than an old earl ever could: then she never regrets it, never looks back and says, I could have been the Countess of Oxford.

  For his son’s first household he has ordered majolica ware from Venice, from the masters who work by the church of Barnaba. A rush job, but he looks forward to unpacking the crates, running his finger over the glaze. He has stipulated gods and goddesses: Danaë visited by Zeus, who arrives in the form of a cloudburst. This is no ordinary rain: the bride stands, complacent, as gold plummets down on her, and nuggets roll over her bare arms and thighs and pool as a pile of bullion around her ankles. Never was a lass so augmented; and no bruises either. Bess Seymour will recognise Danaë, and no doubt give her a nod.

  The faux-pas is forgotten, he thinks. No reason the girl should speak of it: it would make her seem a fool. He wishes Jenneke might come from Antwerp; he will write, or Gregory will write, but he does not know if she will stir. All the household is braced for celebration. The kitchen can build his major cake at last, topped with balls of gilded marzipan: the one he intended for Easter. They will eat Venetian cakes from the new dishes, some made with pine-nuts and ginger, and some with syrup of violets.

  By midsummer the Pilgrims are all dead: hanged or beheaded, along with those who assisted them, excused them, or fed them with money and hope. Bigod, Lord Darcy, and Captain Cobbler himself, the great rebel of Louth; the Abbot of Jervaux, the one-time Abbot of Fountains: some executed at Tyburn, some at the Tower, some sent to be killed in York or Hull. They say old Darcy spent his last days cursing Thomas Cromwell, when he should have been telling his beads. The recalcitrant monks of the London Charterhouse are chained up at Newgate, and in less than a week the plague takes five of them, leaves others dying: dispatched, it seems, by the hand of God.

  Harry Percy does not outlast the month of June. Rafe is at his deathbed, where he lies sans sight and speech, yellow as saffron and with belly blown. You would have pitied him, sir, Rafe says, and he says, I am sure I should. Did he mention his wife Mary Talbot?

  After a manner, Rafe says. When the onlookers reminded him he had made no provision for her he nodded that yes, he knew: but she was not his wife, never his wife, he was married to Anne Boleyn. And all this he showed them, Rafe says, by pushing away any papers they laid before him, and by a petulant sweep of his hand over his embroidered coverlet: his palm, damp with his last secretions, brushing the emblems of Percy rule, the blue lion and lozenges of gold.

  He says, ‘His memory was still good, despite his pain, if he remembered Anne Boleyn. I wonder if he remembered the night he walked in to arrest the cardinal?’

  The Percys’ noble house is now utterly undone. Harry Percy has no offspring, and the king is his heir. His brother Thomas has pre-deceased him, beheaded for treason in the late broils; his brother Ingram lies in the Tower, under threat of the same.

  And Robert Aske is dead. Norfolk supervises the execution. He is hanged in York, from the Clifford Tower, on a market day. Where now his tawny silk jacket with the velvet facings, his crimson satin doublet? Still in London at the Cardinal’s Hat. Aske begs to be full dead before he is cut up: the king concedes it.

  After that, his mercy appears exhausted. Among the traitors fetched to London is a woman, Margaret Cheney – known as wife to Sir John Bulmer, but really his concubine. It is indecent to cut a woman apart in public or strip her to draw out her entrails, so if guilty of high treason she is burned. He goes to Henry. Asking for quick deaths devolves to him, a duty inherited from the cardinal. For Anne Boleyn he procured not only the swifter end, but the Calais swordsman: she too could have died by fire.

  He says, ‘Sir, Bulmer’s woman is sent to suffer at Smithfield – I know the penalty is specified, but it is not often enforced.’

  Henry grunts.

  ‘Consider, sir, she made a guilty plea.’

  ‘She could hardly do other,’ the king says. ‘No, my lord, there is no help for it, she must endure – it will be an example to other women, should they incline to papistry and rebellion.’

  Margaret Cheney is beautiful. He has seen her. She is tender and young. He says, ‘Majesty, let me bring her where you can see her.’

  Her beauty might move him. He can be moved. We have seen it happen.

  Henry says, ‘I have no curiosity to see a traitor. Except Pole. I would be curious to see Pole, but you seem unable to get hold of him.’

  He bows, withdraws: a failure, twice a failure. He thinks, perhaps Cranmer and I, perhaps if we pleaded on our knees for him to stop the burning … But Cranmer is in the country. In times past, the king’s women might have appealed to him, for one of their own sex. But the Lady Mary has been warned stiffly, by him, not to speak for any rebel; and the queen, he supposes, has been told the same by her brother.

  He leans against the wall in the privy chamber. He thinks, do not falter, Master Secretary. Have no qualms, my lord Privy Seal; Baron Cromwell, do not fail. You must not soften now.

  A young man approaches: ‘May I offer you assistance, my lord?’

  ‘Tom Culpeper,’ he says. The young fellow bows. Doublet silk, manners honed: by blood, some sort of Howard. Is there no end to them?

  The young man says smoothly, ‘Messages from Calais, my lord.’

  ‘Lady Lisle is delivered at last?’

  ‘Ah, no, it is not yet her time.’

  ‘Then do not trouble the king. He looks every hour to hear Lisle has a son.’

  He brushes past Culpeper, hugging his folio of papers. You cannot falter, he thinks, and you must not. You must crunch up the enemy, flesh, bones and all. You cannot afford to fail, you must bring Henry good news, you must dredge it up from somewhere; he is outwa
rdly serene, but not serene or patient when he wakes in the night, not when his leg pains him in the small hours.

  The king has pulled Francis Bryan back from France, saying, ‘What’s the use? This ingrate Pole always eludes us.’ The difficulty is not how to seize his person – it is where. In the Low Countries, jurisdictions lie so close that a man may easily pass from France to Empire and back in a day; territory is so contested that the border can change while a traveller is hearing Mass or taking a nap. But Pole does not hover in mid-air, he is always in someone’s jurisdiction. Any violence involved in arresting him could be taken as a hostile act on foreign soil: a provocation to war, or an excuse for it.

  But where can Pole go next? Neither France nor the Low Countries will receive him, but they will not extradite him either. He says to Wriothesley, he will go to Italy now. He has missed his chance with our rebels. He will retreat to warmer climes, where his pedigree is applauded, and where with fellow prelates in scarlet he will pace on a white mule, while poor peasants throw money under the hooves.

  And that is our chance to kill him, he thinks. For in Italy who owns the night, who can patrol it?

  He says, ‘I wish I had the man who shot Packington. Were he the greatest papist alive, I would turn him, and send him after Reginald.’

  At the Charterhouse – the property now shuttered and barred – lights have appeared at night. Papists spread the word that ghosts walk abroad. ‘Probably thieves,’ he says to Wriothesley. ‘Tell them, set a good watch. All the movables belong to the king.’

  But the watchmen see who holds the lights; it is the plague-stricken brothers themselves, tiptoeing the cloisters in their stinking shrouds. They bring dispatches from the world beyond, apparently: they have seen the martyred Bishop Fisher, seated at the right hand of God.

  ‘What about Thomas More?’ he says. ‘Anybody seen him?’

  Revenues from the London Charterhouse should be £642.0s.4d. Riche has the figures. Take all the Carthusians’ houses together, and you are looking at the annual sum of £2,947.

  ‘And fifteen shillings, four pence, and one farthing,’ says Richard Riche.

  He says, ‘It seems to me, Sir Richard, that you have done service to the state. You can have the farthing, and spend it on your little pleasures.’

  The Lisles’ man, John Husee, is never away from his door, jostling with other petitioners and begging for ten minutes. When Richard Cromwell waves him in at last, he has his arms full of maps and account books, but he has the face of a downtrodden spaniel. ‘Sir,’ he says, ‘Lord Lisle’s promised abbey – he is desperate to get it signed over.’

  ‘I’ve said I’ll see to it, Husee, and I will. Give all those papers to Master Richard.’

  ‘With respect, sir, my lord – you have been promising to attend to it since last November. My lord is so beleaguered, you would not imagine how his creditors press. And Sir Richard Riche has brought in a delay at every turn. Without a fee Riche will do nothing. And my lord cannot pay his prices.’

  ‘Sit down, Husee,’ he says. ‘Shall we have a glass to keep up our strength?’

  Husee sits, but he shifts on his stool. ‘The abbey – my lord trusts to have the rents for the months he has been waiting?’

  He sighs. ‘I’ll talk to Riche. No more delays, I swear. But now, look, Husee, I have always known you for an honest man, so give me an honest answer. Only this morning at early Mass the queen asked me, how does my lady in Calais, is she not a mother yet? By my reckoning, she said, the child should be teething by now.’

  To his astonishment, tears fill Husee’s eyes. He says, ‘My lord, I do not dare to tell you.’

  ‘She has lost it?’ Richard says.

  ‘No.’ Husee looks wild. ‘It has gone away.’

  He says, ‘I know that prodigies and wonders have been seen in Calais this year. But a child does not vanish before its birth.’

  Richard says, ‘Is her belly down?’

  ‘No.’ Husee rubs his eyes. ‘She appears as ripe as ever woman was. But it comes not forth and it comes not forth, and now the midwives say they were in error.’

  ‘We thought she was carrying some fabulous beast,’ Richard says. ‘But she never conceived, is that not the truth?’

  A tear drops on a map of Lisle’s new property. He leans across. ‘Tell Lord Lisle we will pray his lady will amend.’

  ‘Oh, she must,’ Husee says. ‘Were she to die, how would we settle her debts? She has wept a salt ocean. My lord set so much store by his heir. But good gentleman that he is, he will love her no less, he only asks her to stop grieving. If I could tell her the abbey were signed over, it would do her heart good.’

  ‘Husee, go away,’ Richard says. He sounds tired.

  ‘I will, Master Richard. But by your favour, do not forget the abbey.’

  The door closes. ‘Christ,’ Richard says. ‘Who will tell the king?’

  ‘That lucky man sits not far from you.’ He lifts the topmost papers from the pile Husee has left. ‘If Lisle wants his abbey he needs to find money for the clerks’ fees, they will not give him credit.’ He scratches his chin. ‘I wish John Husee worked for me. He only gets eightpence a day with the Calais garrison, and I warrant Lisle never shows him gratitude. He is a tenacious man.’

  Richard says, ‘This will strike Henry to the heart.’

  He gets up, heavily. His feet seem reluctant to walk. ‘I’ll make sure he is sitting down, and help at hand.’

  Henry does not stagger at the news. He just stares, mute, his colour rising, till he says, ‘Gone? Gone where? St Gabriel help and guide us.’

  ‘I have never heard of such a case,’ he says, ‘nor I suppose have the physicians.’

  ‘Oh, have you not?’ Henry’s tone is savage. ‘If your memory were longer you would know that Katherine misled me in the same fashion. God punish these women, they are serpents!’

  ‘I did not know,’ he says. ‘I was not here then.’ He feels like Tom Thumb, an inch high.

  ‘We were but newly wed,’ Henry says. ‘What did I know of women and their schemes? She miscarried of one child, but kept her chamber, and claimed she was carrying its twin. Till the imposture was found out.’

  ‘Majesty, was it not an honest mistake?’

  ‘Women are the beginning of all mistakes. Read any of the divines, and they will tell you.’ Henry turns and looks at him. ‘Always you, Cromwell, with the bad news.’

  Tom Thumb is caught in a mousetrap. He is baked in a pudding. He is swallowed by what beast you please, not to emerge till it shits.

  ‘But then, no one else tells the truth,’ the king says. ‘So how does Lady Lisle now?’

  ‘Weeping.’

  ‘She may well. My poor uncle.’ A pause. ‘Send my doctors over.’

  Relieved, he bows again. ‘Lord Lisle will be indebted.’

  Henry says, ‘I want to know what is inside her. Some women carry dead flesh in their wombs, they call it a mole, it is not alive and it cannot be born. But sometimes it is sloughed off, it proves to have the features of a monster child, such as hair, or teeth.’

  When the king sees the mural Hans has painted, he says nothing. It is not for him to thank a mere artist. But he glitters: not merely augmented, but enhanced.

  The queen stands by him, and his hand steals out, and rests on her belly, as if testing what he finds there: as he has many times in the last few days, while she holds her breath and wonders why. On the advice of her brother, her ladies and the doctors, the news from Calais has been kept from her. And she has trained herself not to pull away, but to keep her frame steady and her face as immobile as the face of a marble Madonna. If she shrinks a little now, and averts her eyes, it is from the man on the wall: from his fist planted on his hip, from his hand on the pommel of his dagger, from his belligerent gaze; from his straddled legs, unbandaged calves bulging with muscle; from his bejewelled man
hood, with a bow tied on top.

  Jane stands herself, caught in her own gaze, crimson and tawny: her painted eyes resting beyond the frame. Behind her, our king’s gracious mother, in an old-fashioned hood with long lappets. And leaning on the altar which bears his son’s praises, the pale invader who carried his banners from the sea to the altar at Paul’s: narrow-faced, narrow of shoulder, his robe twitched across his person, his hand half-concealed by the ermine lining his great sleeve. Four-square in front of him, his son seems twice his girth; he could tuck mother and father both inside his jacket, he could swallow them whole.

  ‘By the saints you were right,’ Hans whispers, ‘when you said I should turn him to face us.’ He seems awed by his own creation. ‘Jesus Maria. He looks as if he would spring out of the frame and trample you.’

  ‘I wish France could see this,’ Henry tells the company. ‘Or the Emperor. Or the King of Scots.’

  ‘There can be copies, Majesty,’ Hans says, modestly. Mirrors of his lively image: ever larger, more active with every telling.

  ‘Come, Jane.’ The king plucks his eyes away. ‘We are done here. Time to be off to the country.’

  Like a cottager he takes his wife by the hand, and kisses her mouth. My dear darling, I to Esher, you to Hampton Court. I to pleasure, you to pain: but not just yet.

  August: the Lady Mary requests a greyhound to course with the royal party, and so before the sport begins he is taking her one: pure white, clean-limbed, with a small proud head and a green and white collar of plaited leather. Himself, Richard his nephew, Gregory his son – soon to be a happy bridegroom – and Edward Seymour, Lord Beauchamp – soon to be a happy brother-in-law. And as their escort, Dick Purser to lead the hound, and the boy Mathew, in his Cromwell livery coat; and a score of followers who have tagged along.