Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel Read Free Book Online Page B

men, wearing sheepskins and sweating with anger, he had dreams about the Castile soap.

    Later she says, “So who is the lady?”
    His hand, resting on her familiar but lovely left breast, removes itself in bewilderment. “What?” Does she think he has taken up with some woman in Yorkshire? He falls onto his back and wonders how to persuade her this is not so; if necessary he’ll take her there, and then she’ll see.
    â€œThe emerald lady?” she says. “I only ask because people say the king is wanting to do something very strange, and I can’t really believe it. But that is the word in the city.”
    Really? Rumor has advanced, in the fortnight while he has been north among the slope-heads.
    â€œIf he tries this,” she says, “then half the people in the world will be against it.”
    He had only thought, and Wolsey had only thought, that the Emperor and Spain would be against it.
Only
the Emperor. He smiles in the dark, hands behind his head. He doesn’t say, which people, but waits for Liz to tell him. “All women,” she says. “All women everywhere in England. All women who have a daughter but no son. All women who have lost a child. All women who have lost any hope of having a child. All women who are forty.”
    She puts her head on his shoulder. Too tired to speak, they lie side by side, in sheets of fine linen, under a quilt of yellow turkey satin. Their bodies breathe out the faint borrowed scent of sun and herbs. In Castilian, he remembers, he can insult people.
    â€œAre you asleep now?”
    â€œNo. Thinking.”
    â€œThomas,” she says, sounding shocked, “it’s three o’clock.”
    And then it is six. He dreams that all the women of England are in bed, jostling and pushing him out of it. So he gets up, to read his German book, before Liz can do anything about it.
    It’s not that she says anything; or only, when provoked, she says, “My prayer book is good reading for me.” And indeed she does read her prayer book, taking it in her hand absently in the middle of the day—but only half stopping what she’s doing—interspersing her murmured litany with household instructions; it was a wedding present, a book of hours, from her first husband, and he wrote her new married name in it, Elizabeth Williams. Sometimes, feeling jealous, he would like to write other things, contrarian sentiments: he knew Liz’s first husband, but that doesn’t mean he liked him. He has said, Liz, there’s Tyndale’s book, his New Testament, in the locked chest there, read it, here’s the key; she says, you read it to me if you’re so keen, and he says, it’s in English, read it for yourself: that’s the point, Lizzie. You read it, you’ll be surprised what’s not in it.
    He’d thought this hint would draw her: seemingly not. He can’t imagine himself reading to his household; he’s not, like Thomas More, some sort of failed priest, a frustrated preacher. He never sees More—a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod—without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, “Purgatory.” Show me where it says “relics, monks, nuns.” Show me where it says “Pope.”
    He turns back to his German book. The king, with help from Thomas More, has written a book against Luther, for which the Pope has granted him the title of Defender of the Faith. It’s not that he loves Brother Martin