Fludd: A Novel

Anyway, it would prepare him to face what the day must bring: questions, circumventions, realizations. The time will come, she thought, when we will look back on what has occurred and account it an Age of Miracles. She touched the spot where her wart used to be; these last two days, whenever she passed a looking-glass-and she had plans to hang many more—she would pause, and gaze at herself, and smile.

Meanwhile there were the police to be dealt with. At nine o’clock the Chief Constable came in person. He was a modern policeman, fresh-faced and cold-eyed, and he liked nothing better than to tear around the county in his big black car.

You are familiar, no doubt, with Sebastiano del Piombo’s huge painting The Raising of Lazarus, which hangs in the National Gallery in London, having been purchased in the last century from the Angerstein collection. Against a background of water, arched bridges, and a hot blue sky, a crowd of people—presumably the neighbours—cluster about the risen man. Lazarus has turned rather yellow in death, but he is a muscular, well-set-up type. His graveclothes are draped like a towel over his head, and people lean towards him solicitously, and seem to confer; what he most resembles is a boxer in his corner. The expressions of those around are puzzled, mildly censorious. Here—in the very act of extricating his right leg from a knot of the shroud— one feels his troubles are about to begin again. A woman—Mary, or maybe Martha—is whispering behind her hand. Christ points to the revenant, and holds up his other hand, fingers outstretched: so many rounds down, five to go.

NOTE

The Church in this story bears some but not much resemblance to the Roman Catholic Church in the real world, c. 1956. The village of Fetherhoughton is not to be found on a map.

The real Fludd (1574-1637) was a physician, scholar, and alchemist. In alchemy, everything has a literal and factual description, and in addition a description that is symbolic and fantastical.

ALSO BY HILARY MANTEL

Every Day Is Mother’s Day

Vacant Possession

A Place of Greater Safety

Eight Months on Ghazzah Street

A Change of Climate

An Experiment in Love

The Giant, O’Brien

In paintings, there are various guises in which angels come to make their annunciation. Some have bird-bones and tiny feet, and wings that shimmer like a kingfisher’s back. Others, with delicate, crimped gold hair, have the demure expression of music-mistresses. Some angels appear more masculine. Their feet, huge and simian, dig into the marble pavements. Their wings have the wet solidity of large marine animals.

There is a painting, a Virgin and Child, by Ambrosio Bergognone. The woman has a silvery pallor; her child is plump and well-doing, the kind of baby, ready to walk if it were not so idle, that makes your arms ache. She supports him with one hand; his feet are set upon a deep green cloth.

On either side of her is an open window, giving out on to a dusty street. Life goes on; in the distance is a bell- tower. Approaching, a figure carries a basket. Walking away from us are two other figures, absorbed in conversation, and following them closely is a small white dog with a plumed tail. The infant plays with a string of rosary beads: coral, perhaps.

An open book is propped before the woman. She is reading the First Psalm, with its message of utter reassurance: “For the Lord knoweth the ways of the just; and the ways of the wicked shall perish.”

The Virgin’s expression, at first sight, seems unfathomably sad. It is only on closer observation that one notices the near-smirk on her dimpled mouth, and the expression of satisfaction in her long, duncoloured eyes.

Copyright © 1989 by Hilary Mantel

All rights reserved.

First published in hardcover in the United Kingdom in 1989 by Viking UK

Henry Holt and Company, LLC

Publishers since 1866

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New York, New York 10011

Henry Holt is a registered trademark of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Designed by Paula Russell Szafranski

eISBN 978-1-4299-0062-1

First eBook Edition : February 2011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mantel, Hilary, date.

Fludd.—1st Owl Books ed.

p. cm.

1. Fludd, Robert, 1574—1637—Fiction. 2. Alchemists—England—Fiction. 3. Reincarnation—Fiction. 4. Catholic Church—England—Clergy—Fiction.

I. Title.

PR6063.A438 F58 2000

99-049485

823’.914—dc21