Hilary Mantel - Fludd

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

This edition published by Fourth Estate 2010

FIRST EDITION

First published by Viking 1989

Published in paperback by Harper Perennial 2005

Copyright © Hilary Mantel 1989

PS section copyright © Sarah O’Reilly 2010

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Hilary Mantel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is a work of fiction.

The characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination.

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Source ISBN: 9780007172894

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2010 ISBN 9780007354931

Version: 2019-06-07

For Anne Ostrowska

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.

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 grave-clothes 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.

Cover Page

Title Page Fludd Hilary Mantel

Copyright

Dedication

Note

Excerpt

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

P.S. Ideas, interviews & features…

About the author

A Kind of Alchemy

LIFE at a Glance

A Writing Life

Read on

Have You Read?

By the same author

About the Author

Praise

About the Publisher

On Wednesday the bishop came in person. He was a modern prelate, brisk and plump in his rimless glasses, and he liked nothing better than to tear around the diocese in his big black car.

He had taken the precaution – advisable in the circumstances – of announcing himself two hours before his arrival. The telephone bell, ringing in the hall of the parish priest’s house, had in itself a muted ecclesiastical tone. Miss Dempsey heard it as she was coming from the kitchen. She stood looking at the telephone for a moment, and then approached it gingerly, walking on the balls of her feet. She lifted the receiver as if it were hot. Her head on one side, holding the earpiece well away from her cheek, she listened to the message given by the bishop’s secretary. ‘Yes My Lord,’ she murmured, though in retrospect she knew that the secretary did not merit this. ‘The bishop and his sycophants’, Father Angwin always said; Miss Dempsey supposed they were a kind of deacon. Holding the receiver in her fingertips, she replaced it with great care. She stood in the dim passageway, for a moment, thinking, and bowed her head momentarily, as if she had heard the Holy Name of Jesus. Then she went to the foot of the stairs and bellowed up them: ‘Father Angwin, Father Angwin, get yourself up and dressed, the bishop will be upon us before eleven o’clock.’

Miss Dempsey went back into the kitchen, and switched on the electric light. It was not a morning when the light made a great deal of difference; the summer, a thick grey blanket, had pinned itself to the windows. Miss Dempsey heard the incessant drip, drip, drip from the branches and leaves outside, and a more urgent metallic drip, pit-pat, pit-pat; it was the guttering. Her figure moved, the electric light behind it, over the dull green wall; immense hands floated towards the kettle; as in a thick sea, her limbs swam for the range. Upstairs, the priest beat his shoe along the floor, and pretended to be coming.

Ten minutes later he had got himself up; she heard the creak of the floorboards above, the gurgle of water from the washbasin, his feet on the stairs. He sighed as he came down the hallway, his solitary morning sigh. Suddenly he was behind her, hovering: ‘Agnes, have you something for my stomach?’

‘I daresay,’ she said. He knew where the salts were kept; but she must get it for him, as if she were his mother. ‘Were there many at seven o’clock Mass?’