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

  He thinks of how tomorrow will be. By rank he is above Hungerford, so he will die first. The king’s decision has spared him much agony and shame. He will pray for a clean stroke. He thinks of Anne Boleyn, ordering up her coronation clothes: ‘Thomas must go into crimson.’

  On the scaffold he will praise the king: his mercy, his grace, his care for all his people. It is expected of him, and he has a duty to those left behind. He will say, I am not a heretic, I die a member of the universal church; and let the crowd make what they will of it. Though every man dreads to know the hour of his death, the Christian dreads more a sudden end, such as his father met: mors improvisa with no time to repent. Neighbours in Putney believed Walter Cromwell had mended his ways, given up the drinking, rowing and fighting. But one night he quarrelled with a fellow churchwarden – and it was no godly dispute, it was a row over cockfighting. Coming away, leaving the other fellow with a black eye, Walter kicked his way into the house and shouted for victuals. He was pale and sweating, the witnesses said, but still he fell on a dish of cold meat, all the time vituperating. Next he complained about his dinner, rubbing his chest and saying it had given him a pain; five minutes later he fell face-down on the table. They laid him flat, and, ‘God damn you, I’m choking,’ he said, ‘get me up, get me up –’ and that was the last word he spoke.

  There was a good crowd at his burying. He, Thomas, had paid for Masses for his soul. ‘Do you think it does any good?’ he had said to the priest.

  ‘Don’t despair of him,’ the fellow said. ‘He was rough, but he wasn’t all bad.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t mean, will prayers do Walter any good. I mean, do they do good for any dead person? God is watching us all our lives. Surely, if you live as long as Walter, God has formed a view. Unless He always knows.’

  ‘That sounds like heresy to me,’ the priest said.

  ‘Of course it does. It hits your pocket. If God knows His mind, what becomes of your chantries and your rosaries and your fees for a thousand years of Masses?’

  He remembers himself lying smashed and broken in the inn yard in Putney, fifteen years old: his father standing over him, his blood on the cobbles, the twine of his father’s boot sprung free from the leather. Walter shouting down at him and he shouting back, je voudrais mourir autrement – not here, not now, and not like this.

  But, no, he thinks, I was not shouting. I did not speak French. Torn and contused, I got myself off the ground and across the Narrow Sea. I fought other men’s wars, for money, till at last I had the sense to earn it in easier ways: Cremuello at your service, your shadow in a glass.

  One night long ago in Venice he had glimpsed a woman, a wraith in the watery mist. A courtesan, she let her lazy laughter float after her on the air; the streak of her yellow scarf was the only colour, the click of her shoes on cobbles the only sound. Then a door opened in the wall, and darkness swallowed her up. She was gone so swiftly and completely that he wondered if he had dreamed her. He had thought, if ever I need to disappear, Venice is where I will come.

  Sometimes in those days he woke from dreams that threatened to drown him, his eyelashes wet; he woke between languages, not knowing where he was but filled with an inchoate longing to be somewhere else. He thinks back to his childhood, his days on the river, days in the fields. His life has been filled with fugitive women. He remembers the stepmothers Walter would bring home: scarcely had you made your duties to one of them, before Walter fell out with her, or she flounced off with her clothes tied up in a bundle. He thinks of his daughters Anne and Grace; perhaps he will meet them as women grown? He thinks of Anselma’s daughter, moving slowly in his house with soft and curious eyes, picking up those things that belonged to him, his seal, his books, examining his globe of the world and asking, ‘This island, where is this? Is this the New World?’

  Mr Wriothesley has moved into Austin Friars, they tell him. The king has ordered him to dissolve the Cromwell household. By day, Call-Me strides through the rooms, expansive, breathing in the smell of paper and ink, rosewater and resin. But by night the leopard pads the floor, smelling the fur of long-dead animals, spaniels and marmosets, gazing upward at the nightingale mute in her cage. She sniffs out the boiled meats of a decade of dinners, and the bones of mice behind the panelling; her opaque, unmoved glance follows the flight of a bird outside the window. He thinks, I have spent hundreds of pounds on glass. Wriothesley cannot dissolve my household. He can only walk through the glass and shatter it, bleeding from a thousand cuts.

  Christophe comes back. He looks unsteady: drink, or sun, or something else. He says, ‘You could have stayed out longer. I did not lack for company.’

  July, and the nights are short. When the light begins to fade, he sends the boy out again to find his supper, while he thinks of Heaven and Hell. When he pictures Hell he can only think of a cold place, a wasteland, a wharf, a marsh, a landing stage; Walter distantly bawling, then the bawling coming nearer. That is how it will be – not pain itself, but the constant apprehension of pain; the constant apprehension of fault, the knowledge that you are going to be punished for something you couldn’t help and didn’t even know was wrong; and the discord in Hell will be constant, repeating for ever and ever, a violent argument being carried on in the next room. When he thinks of Heaven he imagines it as a vast party arranged by the cardinal; like that field in Picardy, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, with palaces built on unlikely and marginal ground, acres of clear glass catching the sun. But his master should have built in a softer climate. Perhaps, he thinks, this time tomorrow I will inhabit some kinder city: the blue shadows lengthening, the sun’s final rays softening the lines of bell towers and domes; ladies in niches at their prayers, a small dog with a plumed tail strolling the streets; indifferent doves alighting on gilded spires.

  After supper he packs up his books. He will ask Kingston to give them to Rafe. He puts away Clendardus, his grammar. He has not made much progress with Hebrew, in part because he has been occupied with the king’s business; there was never a prisoner more hard-pressed, or who called for so much ink. He wishes he had ever met the scholar – Nicolas Cleynaerts, as he is properly; his Antwerp friends say he is a very great linguist, who has spent many hours by lamplight, through the northern winters, learning to copy the loops and curls of Arabic script. In pursuit of books in that tongue he went some years ago to Salamanca, and from there to Granada, but only to be disappointed; the Inquisition is diligent these days in locking away the writings of the Arabs. Some say Clendardus will go into Africa next, and learn to read the holy book of the Mohammedans. He pictures this scholar, strolling through the markets. His diet will be dates and olives, and honeyed pears with orange-blossom water, and lamb baked with saffron and apricots.

  All your life you tramp the empty road with the wind at your back. You are hungry and your spirit is perturbed as you journey on into the gloom. But when you get to your destination the doorkeeper knows you. A torch goes before you as you cross the court. Inside there is a fire and a flask of wine, there is a candle and beside the candle your book. You pick it up and find your place is marked. You sit down by the fire, open it, and begin your story. You read on, into the night.

  At nine o’clock, 27 July, he kneels down and makes his prayer. He had wondered how you would recognise your dead, when you yourself go to Judgement. But as he waits out this last night, he sees how they are visible, and how they shine. They are distilled into a spark, into an instant. There is air between their ribs, their flesh is honeycombed with light, and the marrow of their bones is molten with God’s grace.

  He thinks he sees the eel boy looking at him from the corner of the room. Shog off, you streak of piss, he says.

  He does not sleep, then perhaps he does. He dreams of four women, veiled, standing by his bed. He wakes and looks for them in the dark, but there is only Christophe, snoring on his pallet. He pictures Christophe in Calais, at Calkwell Street: his ropes of hair,
his unspeakable apron. Who could guess the boy would be the companion of his last night? He thinks of the memory engine, its ledges and recesses, its vaults.

  It must be that he sleeps again, because he sees himself as a child. All about him are the airy forms of playmates, other sons that Walter had, sons born before him who had died. He sees these elders, some three or four of them kneeling in profile, carved on a bench end or painted on a wall: their sizes running down from the tallest and the longest dead, to himself, the littlest and the least.

  He half-wakes and asks himself, did Walter speak of such sons? Never: yet each time his father had expressed dissatisfaction with him – with, say, a boot or a fist – he had felt their frail dead presence, their silent commiseration, as a faint stir in the air.

  The first bells make him sit up. He puts a foot on the floor. He hears Christophe muttering something: prayers, he hopes. He sees himself, crawling across the cobbles in Florence, damaged beyond repair: to the Frescobaldi gate.

  II

  Light

  28 July 1540

  A prisoner thinks of nothing but meals. ‘Christophe, where’s my breakfast? And my water to wash – I cannot meet God in this state.’

  Cold sweat. He rubs his hand across his chin. They have been wary of sending him a razor: as you would be.

  The boy creeps in with bread and ale. ‘Martin brings cold fowl.’

  ‘Good. See if you can get anything out of him. About what time I shall go.’ He doesn’t trust Kingston’s schedules. He kept Anne waiting a whole day.

  But Martin will not spend many words on this prisoner now; he represents a task near-done. He thinks, I did not know that, when you are dying, no one will look at you. Nor do you want to look at them. You see a pattern you cannot imitate.

  He yawns. But speaks to himself: you must not be tired. If a man should live as if every day is his last, he should also die as if there is a day to come, and another after that.

  Martin says – to Christophe, rather than to the prisoner – ‘Lord Hungerford, they don’t know how to convey him. He saw the devil in the night. He’s lying on the floor bawling like a drunk.’

  The sheriffs, William Laxton and Martin Bowes, come in with Kingston. They make him a civil good morning: ‘Are you ready, Lord Cromwell? We are ready for you.’

  They give him coins, which he will pass to the executioner, payment for his services. His coat, too, will be the headsman’s perquisite. He thinks, I should have looked out the purple one. Or that violent orange coat, that upset Mr Wriothesley once. It occurs to him that when he is dead, other people will be getting on with their day; it will be dinner time or nearly, there will be a bubbling of pottages, the clatter of ladles, the swift scoop of meats from spit to platter; a thousand dogs will stir from sleep and wag their tails; napkins will be unfurled and twitched over the shoulder, fingers dipped in rosewater, bread broken. And when the crumbs are swept away, the pewter piled for scouring, his body will be broken meat, and the executioner will clean the blade.

  ‘Messages?’ Martin says. He is willing to bear them, for payment from the dead man’s kin.

  ‘Tell my son –’ He breaks off. ‘Tell Master Secretary Sadler … no, never mind. Send to Austin Friars and tell Thomas Avery –’ No. Avery doesn’t need telling twice.

  He says to the sheriffs, ‘There is a Plymouth man, William Hawkins, has fitted a ship for Brazil. He is taking lead and copper, woollen cloth, combs and knives and nineteen dozen nightcaps. I would have liked to know how that works out.’

  The sheriffs make commiserating noises. No doubt they wish they had invested.

  He looks back over his shoulder. ‘Christophe, get a broom and sweep this floor.’

  The boy’s face crumples. ‘Sir, I must accompany you. Some menial may sweep. Here,’ he fumbles inside his shirt, ‘I have a medal, it is a holy medal, my mother gave it to me, take it for the love of Christ.’

  He says, ‘I do not need an image, because I shall see God’s face.’

  Christophe holds it out on his palm. ‘Sir, take it back to her. She is waiting for it.’

  He suffers it to be hung about him. He remembers the medal his sister gave him; it lies beneath the sea. ‘Now Christophe, obey me this last time. When you have cleaned the floor you may follow on behind, but no fighting. I must pray, you understand, so do not interrupt my prayer. Martin, do you pray for me too, while I am dying. And after, if I may, I will pray for you.’

  He remembers what George Boleyn had said: we have a man plays Robin Goodfellow. When kings and queens have quit the scene, he comes with broom and candle, to show the play is done.

  The light is early and tender, the sky eggshell blue. He can feel already it will be another hot day. He must walk out of the fortress as far as Tower Hill, where they have set up a public scaffold.

  He stares, incredulous, at the bristling ranks of the guard. ‘All these?’ he says to Kingston.

  ‘Wait, wait, wait!’ yells the captain of the guard. ‘Halt, halt, halt!’

  It is only Hungerford. He is propped up between two officers, his mouth gaping, his feet dragging. The intention is for the processions to merge. Hungerford’s glazed eyes pass over him as if he is a stranger. ‘My lord?’ he says. ‘We have very little time now and I trust our pain will be sharp but will not endure. Are you man enough to bear yourself in hope? If you are truly sorry for what you have done, there is mercy enough with God.’

  He has been in prison forty-eight days, during which time he has hardly stepped out of doors. Even this light seems to dazzle, so he thinks of Tyndale, walking in the bleach fields. Rafe is right, he thinks, we always complain of the weather, and today is not what it should be. An Englishman dies drenched, in the rain that has enwrapped him all his life. Then he lurks about his old haunts in the drizzle and mist, so you cannot be sure whether he is quick or dead. The climate protects him, as a cupped hand protects a candle.

  They are outside the fortress, on Tower Hill. The crowd surging towards the execution ground are walking on their own dead, their foremothers and fathers. They say the bones of thousands lie underground, the men and women of London killed by plague. They fell in the streets and died where they fell, they were carried off in such haste that they were buried in their good boots, and not even their purses cut; so if any man dared dig for it, there’s a fortune beneath our feet.

  It is not clear, from the roaring, whether the Londoners are there to regret or revile. But the king has turned out some six hundred soldiers so it hardly matters. And perhaps they don’t know themselves. After the silence of the Bell Tower, he feels he is on a battlefield, moving to the beat of the drum: boro borombetta …

  Scaramella to the war is gone …

  Now the pages of the book of his life are turning faster and faster. The book of his heart is unscrolling, the lines erasing themselves. Between his prayers run the lines of a verse:

  I am as I am and so will I be

  But how that I am, none knoweth truly

  Be it evil, be it well, be I bound, be I free,

  I am as I am and so will I be …

  … But how that is I leave to you.

  Judge as ye list, false or true

  Ye know no more than afore ye knew

  Yet I am as I am, whatever ensue.

  His heart thuds as if it will break out of his chest. Behind him, another drumbeat, rat-tat-tat. It trips the rhythm of his own heart – pit-pat, rat-tat. He feels the surge of his blood check and stand, like a tide about to turn. He swivels his head, distressed, to the source of the racket, a drum in the crowd. The guard close in, as if to block his view. Why? Do they think it is a signal? Rat-tat-tat: do they think he hopes to be rescued?

  Scaramella fa la gala …

  ‘Look where you are going, my lord,’ one of the guard says; and he does, and finds he is at the foot of the scaffold. ‘So one arrives,’ he says. Thomas Wy
att stands before him. It was Wyatt who wrote the verse: who but he? Judge as ye list, false or true … Wyatt holds out his hands. They have not bound him, so he is able to grasp them. ‘Do not weep,’ he says. ‘If there is anything to forgive, I forgive it. Mind, that does not go for Stephen Gardiner. But I forgive the king. Be quiet now and you will hear me do it.’

  He thinks, there is death in Wyatt’s eyes. Who can better recognise it, than I? Your enemies will flourish. You will follow after.

  ‘Go up,’ one of the guard says.

  He tries to shake off their hands. ‘I can do this.’ His heart is still tripping, racing. But they will help you whether you need it or no. Men have been known to fall. Men have been known to plummet. Men have been known to do anything and everything. Lords have stood up to death; indeed, they have stood up after death. In the days of our ancestors Thomas Fitzalan, who was Earl of Arundel, was axed down on this spot and his corpse leapt upright to say a Pater Noster. All headsmen, when they meet in their conclaves, talk of it as a fact.

  His foot is now on the step of the scaffold. His mind is quiet but the body has its own business, and that business includes trembling. His head turns again. He is not looking for pardon. He knows the king is busy getting married. All he is looking for is the source of the noise, to quell it, because he wants to die listening to his own heart, till verse and prayer fade and heart says hush.

  Then in the depths of the packed crowd he sees Christophe. He is pushing forward, flailing his arms. Please God he has not a weapon. His whole body braces, ready for a mêlée. ‘My lord, my lord,’ Christophe calls. The guard make a wall, but Christophe’s arm snakes between them as if to touch him. One of the men raises his armoured fist. He hears a crack. He sees the boy’s face twist in shock and pain. Holding out his arm like a broken wing, his voice hoarse, his body convulsing, he speaks his curse: ‘Henry King of England! I, Christophe Cremuel, curse you. The Holy Ghost curses you. Your own mother curses you. I hope a leper spits on you. I hope your whore has the pox. I hope you go to sea in a boat with a hole in it. I hope the waters of your heart rise up and spout down your nose. May you fall under a cart. May rot rise up from your heels to your head, going slowly, so you take seven years to die. May God squash you. May Hell gape.’