Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2)

by Hilary Mantel

‘I cherish diplomacy. It’s cheap.’

Jane is facing front, like a sentry. The clouds have blown away overnight. We may have one more fine day. The early sun touches the fields, rosy. Night vapours disperse. The forms of trees swim into particularity. The house is waking up. Unstalled horses tread and whinny. A back door slams. Footsteps creak above them. Jane hardly seems to breathe. No rise and fall discernible, of that flat bosom. He feels he should walk backwards, withdraw, fade back into the night, and leave her here in the moment she occupies: looking out into England.

A commotion at the door. It is Christophe. He cannot enter in the ordinary way; he treats doors as his foe.

Haha! He can't enter as an ordinary - doors are his foe

What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door. Tidying up after Katherine’s death,

them to forget the blasphemies of these last three

‘So it could be the earl’s?’ ‘If it is a strong boy I dare say he will own it.’ The cakes are distracting her: ‘That white one, is that almond cream?’

the remnants. He craves honey, sugar. You can never mistake a boy who was brought up hungry.

Brought up hungry

please.’ Now Rochford does not know which to do. All he can do is reinforce that he is standing, by flouncing on the spot; he can pick up his hat; he can say, ‘I pity you, Master Secretary. If you succeed in forcing

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

Boleyn folds into himself: narrowing himself, arms across his body, as if to protect his guts from the butcher’s knife, and he slumps to a stool; he thinks, you should have done that before, I told you to sit, you see how without touching you I have made you sit? He tells him softly, ‘You profess the gospel, my lord, and that you are saved. But your actions do not suggest you are saved.’ ‘You may take your thumbprints off my soul,’ George says. ‘

They bask in sunlit groves, under cypress trees; a white doe peeps through foliage, while the hunters head off in another direction, and hounds lollop ahead of them, making their hound music.

She steps back, puts her hands around her throat: like a strangler she closes them around her own flesh. ‘I have only a little neck,’ she says. ‘It will be the work of a moment.’

‘Wyatt once said I was the cleverest man in England.’ ‘He didn’t flatter,’ Call-Me says. ‘I learn much daily, from mere proximity.’

‘Bring up the bodies.’ Deliver, that is, the accused men, by name Weston, Brereton, Smeaton and Norris, to Westminster Hall for trial.

unafraid. How can it be for her, to enter that great

She was not so much your poor little daughter, he thinks, when you married her off without asking her;

it is only very poor men and women who are free to choose who they love.

downstairs, hiding behind doors to jump on each

wine Lord Lisle sends me from France. I do

it.’ No he would not, he thinks.