Wolf Hall - Bring Up the Bodies

though it’s taken her nearly sixty years to do it.
    Bess Seymour, the widowed sister, sails in. She has a parcel wrapped in linen in her hands. ‘Master Secretary,’ she says, with a reverence. She says to her brother, ‘Here, Tom, hold this. Sit down, sister.’
    Jane sits on a stool. You expect someone to hand her a slate and begin her on A.B.C. ‘Now,’ Bess says. ‘Off with this.’ For a moment, she looks as if she is attacking her sister: with a vigorous double-handed tug, she rips off her half-moon headdress, flips up its veil and bundles the whole into the waiting hands of her mother.
    Jane in her white cap looks naked and pained, her face as small and wan as a face on a sickbed. ‘Cap off too, and start again,’ Bess orders. She drags at the knotted string under her sister’s chin. ‘What have you done with this, Jane? It looks as if you’ve been sucking it.’ Lady Margery produces a pair of embroidery scissors. With a snip, Jane is freed. Her sister whisks the cap off and Jane’s pale hair, a thin ribbon of light, streaks over her shoulder. Sir John ahems and looks away, the old hypocrite: as if he’d seen something beyond the male remit. The hair has a moment’s freedom before Lady Margery plucks it up and wraps it around her hand, as unfeeling as if it were a hank of wool; Jane frowns as it is whipped up from her nape, coiled, and crammed under a newer, stiffer cap. ‘We’re going to pin this,’ Bess says. She works, absorbed. ‘More elegant, if you can stand it.’
    ‘Never liked strings myself,’ Lady Margery says.
    ‘Thank you, Tom,’ Bess says, and takes her parcel. She casts aside the wrappings. ‘Cap tighter,’ she decrees. Her mother pinches as directed, repins. The next moment a fabric box is crammed on Jane’s head. Her eyes turn up, as if for help, and she utters one little bleat, as the wire frame bites into her scalp. ‘Well, I am surprised,’ Lady Margery says. ‘You’ve got a bigger head than I thought, Jane.’ Bess applies herself to bending the wire. Jane sits mute. ‘That’ll do,’ Lady Margery says. ‘It’s got a bit of give in it. Push it down. Turn up the lappets. About chin level, Bess. That’s how the old queen used to like it.’ She stands back to assess her daughter, now imprisoned in an old-fashioned gable hood, the kind that hasn’t been seen since Anne came up. Lady Margery sucks in her lips and studies her daughter. ‘Tilting,’ she pronounces.
    ‘That’s Jane, I think,’ Tom Seymour says. ‘Sit up straight, sister.’
    Jane puts her hands to her head, gingerly, as if the construction might be hot. ‘Leave it alone,’ her mother snaps. ‘You wore it before. You’ll get used to it.’
    From somewhere Bess produces a length of fine black veiling. ‘Sit still.’ She begins to pin it to the back of the box, her face absorbed. Ouch, that was my neck, Jane says, and Tom Seymour gives a heartless laugh; some private joke of his, too unseemly to share, but one can guess. ‘I’m sorry to keep you, Master Secretary,’ Bess says, ‘but she has to get this right. We cannot have her reminding the king of, you know.’
    Just take care, he thinks, uneasy: it is only four months since Katherine died, perhaps the king does not want to be reminded of her either.
    ‘We have several more frames at our command,’ Bess tells her sister, ‘so if you really can’t balance it, we can take the whole thing down and try again.’
    Jane closed her eyes. ‘I’m sure it will do.’
    ‘How did you get them so quickly?’ he asks.
    ‘They have been put away,’ Lady Margery says. ‘In chests. By women like myself who knew they would be needed again. We shall not see the French fashions now, not for many a year, please God.’
    Old Sir John says, ‘The king has sent her jewels.’
    ‘Things La Ana had no use for,’ Tom Seymour says. ‘But they will all come to her soon.’
    Bess says, ‘I suppose Anne will not want them, in her convent.’
    Jane glances up: and now she does it, now she meets the eyes of her brothers, and pulls her gaze away again. It is always a surprise to hear her voice, so soft and so unpractised, its tone so at odds with what she has to say. ‘I do not see how that can work, the convent. First Anne would claim that she was carrying the king’s child. Then he would be forced to wait on her, without result, for there is never a result. After that she would think of new delays. And meanwhile none of us would be