 Bring up the bodies, by Hillary Mantell, read by Julian Rine-Tutt, September 1535. His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him. They drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze. Grace Cromwell hovers in thin air. She is silent when she takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist. But the sounds she makes then, the rustle of feathers, and the creak, the sigh and riffle of pinion, the small cluck-cluck from her throat, these are sounds of recognition, intimate, daughterly, almost disapproving. Her breast is gore-streaked, and flesh clings to her claws. Later, Henry will say, Your girls flew well to-day. The hawk, Anne Cromwell, bounces on the glove of Rafe Sadler, who rides by the king in easy conversation. They are tired. The sun is declining as they ride back to Wolf Hall. Tomorrow his wife and two sisters will go out. These dead women, their bones long-sunk in London clay, are now transmigrated. Weightless, they glide on the air. They pity no one. They answer to no one. Their lives are simple. When they look down, they see nothing but their prey, a universe filled with their dinner. All summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment, fur and feather flying, the beating off and the whipping-in of hounds, the coddling of tired horses, the nursing by the gentlemen of contusions, sprains and blisters. And for a few days, at least, the sun has shone on Henry. Sometime before noon, clouds scutted in from the west and rain fell in big scented drops. But the sun re-emerged with a scorching heat. And now the sky is so clear, you can see into heaven. As they dismount, handing their horses to the grooms and waiting on the king, his mind is already moving to paperwork, to dispatches from Whitehall, galloped down by the post-routes that are laid wherever the court shifts. At supper with the Seymours, he will defer to any stories his hosts wish to tell, to anything the king may venture, tousaled and happy and amiable as he seems tonight. When the king has gone to bed, his working-night will begin. Though the day is over, Henry seems disinclined to go indoors. Already, you can feel the autumn. You know there will not be many more days like these. So let us stand, the horse-boys of Wolfhall swarming around us, Wiltshire and the western counties stretching into a haze of blue. Let us stand, the king's hand on his shoulder. His face earnest as he talks his way back through the landscape of the day. The green copses and rushing streams, the alders by the water's edge, the brief shower, the afternoon heat. Henry stands looking about him, sunburn across his forehead. Sir, how are you not burned? rave saddler demands. A redhead like the king, he has turned a mottled, freckled pink. He, Thomas Cromwell, shrugs. He went through the whole of Italy, the battlefield as well as the shaded arena of the counting-house, without losing his London pallor. His ruffian childhood, the days on the river, the days in the fields, they left him as white as God made him. Cromwell has the skin of a lily, the king pronounces. The only particular in which he resembles that or any other blossom. Teasing him they ambled towards supper. The king had left Whitehall the week of Thomas Moore's death, a miserable dripping week in July, the hoof-prints of the royal entourage sinking deep into the mud. Since then the progress has taken in a swathe of the western counties. The Cromwell aides, having finished up the king's business.