Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

pared from a pearl. ‘You see that stool,’ he says. ‘Sit on it.’
    The boy flops down. The demands of the household have had him on the run since early morning. Why is it always little legs that have to save big legs? Just run upstairs and fetch me… It flattered you, when you were young. You thought you were important, indeed essential. He used to hurtle around Putney, on errands for Walter. More fool him. Now it pleases him to say to a boy, take your ease. ‘I used to speak a bit of Welsh when I was a boy. I can’t now.’
    He thinks, that’s the bleat of the man of fifty: Welsh, tennis, I used to, I can’t now. There are compensations: the head is better stored with information, the heart better proof against chips and fractures. Just now he is undertaking a survey of the queen’s Welsh properties. For this and weightier reasons, he keeps a keen eye on the principality. ‘Tell me your life,’ he asks the child. ‘Tell me how you came here.’ With the boy’s own bit of English, he pieces together his tale: arson, cattle raids, the usual borderlands story, ending in destitution, the making of orphans.
    â€˜Can you say the Pater Noster?’ he asks.
    â€˜Pater Noster,’ says the boy. ‘Or, Our Father.’
    â€˜In Welsh?’
    â€˜No, sir. There are no prayers in Welsh.’
    â€˜Dear Jesus. I’ll get a man on it.’
    â€˜Do, sir. Then I can pray for my father and mother.’
    â€˜Do you know John ap Rice? He was at supper with us tonight.’
    â€˜Married to your niece Johane, sir?’
    The boy darts off. Little legs at work again. It’s his aim that all the Welsh will speak English, but that can’t be yet, and meanwhile they need God on their side. Brigands cover the whole principality, and bribe and threaten their way out of gaol; pirates savage the coasts. Those gentlemen with territory there, like Norris and Brereton of the king’s privy chamber, seem resistant to his interest. They put their own dealings before the king’s peace. They do not care to have their activities overseen. They do not care for justice: whereas he means to make an equal justice, from Essex to Anglesey, Cornwall to the Scots border.
    Rice brings in with him a little velvet box, which he puts down on the desk: ‘Present. You have to guess.’
    He rattles it. Something like grains. His finger explores fragments, scaly, grey. Rice has been surveying abbeys for him. ‘It wouldn’t be St Apollonia’s teeth?’
    â€˜Guess again.’
    â€˜Is it teeth from the comb of Mary Magdalene?’
    Rice relents. ‘St Edmund’s nail parings.’
    â€˜Ah. Tip them in with the rest. The man must have had five hundred fingers.’
    In the year 1257, an elephant died in the Tower menagerie and was buried in a pit near the chapel. But the following year he was dug up and his remains sent to Westminster Abbey. Now, what did they want at Westminster Abbey, with the remains of an elephant? If not to carve a ton of relics out of him, and make his animal bones into the bones of saints?
    According to the custodians of holy relics, part of the power of these artefacts is that they are able to multiply. Bone, wood and stone have, like animals, the ability to breed, yet keep their intact nature; the offspring are in no wise inferior to the originals. So the crown of thorns blossoms. The cross of Christ puts out buds; it flourishes, like a living tree. Christ’s seamless coat weaves copies of itself. Nails give birth to nails.
    John ap Rice says, ‘Reason cannot win against these people. You try to open their eyes. But ranged against you are statues of the virgin that weep tears of blood.’
    â€˜And they say I play tricks!’ He broods. ‘John, you must sit down and write. Your compatriots must have prayers.’
    â€˜They must have a Bible, sir, in their own tongue.’
    â€˜Let me first