Sometime before noon, clouds scudded in from the west and rain fell in big scented drops but the sun re-emerged with a scorching heat, and now the sky is so clear you can see into Heaven and spy on what the saints are doing.Īs they dismount, handing their horses to the grooms and waiting on the king, his mind is already moving to paperwork: to dispatches from Whitehall, galloped down by the post routes that are laid wherever the court shifts. And for a few days at least, the sun has shone on Henry. When they look down they see nothing but their prey, and the borrowed plumes of the hunters: they see a flittering, flinching universe, a universe filled with their dinner.Īll summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment, fur and feather flying the beating off and the whipping in of hounds, the coddling of tired horses, the nursing, by the gentlemen, of contusions, sprains and blisters. Weightless, they glide on the upper currents of the air. These dead women, their bones long sunk in London clay, are now transmigrated. Tomorrow his wife and two sisters will go out. They are tired the sun is declining, and they ride back to Wolf Hall with the reins slack on the necks of their mounts. Later, Henry will say, ‘Your girls flew well today.’ The hawk Anne Cromwell bounces on the glove of Rafe Sadler, who rides by the king in easy conversation.
Her breast is gore-streaked and flesh clings to her claws. But the sounds she makes then, the rustle of feathers and the creak, the sigh and riffle of pinion, the small cluck-cluck from her throat, these are sounds of recognition, intimate, daughterly, almost disapproving. She is silent when she takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist.
He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze. 'In another league.His children are falling from the sky. 'A great novel of dark and dirty passions, public and private. But the bloody theatre of the queen's final days will leave no one unscathed. With Henry captivated by plain Jane Seymour and rumours of Anne Boleyn's faithlessness whispered by all, Cromwell knows what he must do to secure his position.
'Our most brilliant English writer' Guardianīring Up the Bodies unlocks the darkly glittering court of Henry VIII, where Thomas Cromwell is now chief minister. The second book in Hilary Mantel's award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, with a stunning new cover design to celebrate the publication of the much anticipated The Mirror and the LightĪn astounding literary accomplishment, Bring Up the Bodies is the story of this most terrifying moment of history, by one of our greatest living novelists.
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