The Mirror & the Light (Thomas Cromwell, #3)

by Hilary Mantel

The king nods as they leave, his blue eyes mild. The emerald in his turban gleams, the eye of a false god, and his big pink feet in their velvet slippers look like pigs walking to market.

Yet one must part with it, send it to the printer. The trick is to get them to set the line right to the edge of the page. It does not make for a good appearance, but no white space means no perversion by marginalia.

As for Norfolk’s daughter, ‘Not for us,’ he tells Wriothesley. ‘Norfolk will look higher. The Howards don’t think about the future, not the way we do. They want it to look like the past.’

Seven Wise Men, he tells Gregory: here are their sayings. Moderation in all things, nothing to excess (those two are the same, wisdom can be repetitious). Know yourself. Know your opportunity. Look ahead. Don’t try for the impossible. And Bias of Priene: pleistoi anthropoi kakoi, most men are bad.

The poor labourer owns his sleep and his stool, and can sell his piss to the fuller, whereas the king’s piss and stool is the property of all England, and every fantasy that disturbs his night hours is recorded somewhere in a book of dreams, which is written in the clouds massing over the fields and forests of his realm: every stir of lust, every frightful waking. Should he be costive, he is ordered a potion; should his bowel be loose, its product is taken away in a bowl under an embroidered cloth. They can only judge what is within him, by what comes out: a pity he is not made of glass.

Austin Friars, January: his daughter turns over, in a flood of splintered sunlight, the Book of Hours that belonged to Lizzie Wycks. ‘Your wife, what was she like?’ What can he tell her? We were practical people, who did each other acts of practical kindness; she died and I missed her. Her affections were deep and stern and when she spoke to the children about their derelictions she would say, ‘I tell you this for your own good.’ When she went into company she wore a gable hood like a woman of fashion but when she was at home she wore a housewife’s coif. She was a maker of lists, a tabulator of stores: servants careless as they are, a woman must always be taking stock. She kept a list of his sins, in the pocket of her apron: took it out and checked it from time to time.

He thinks, they have bruised me, but it will not hurt until tomorrow. The water rocks beneath them, cerulean blue. The Tower is in sight. The flint sparkles like sunlight on the sea.