Love, loss and pandemics

Cromwell insists the rules of families' self-quarantining apply to everyone

“His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him…Grace Cromwell hovers in thin air.”

These opening lines from Hilary Mantel’s second volume of her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, master secretary to Henry VIII, are instantly arresting. Readers of Wolf Hall,  the first volume, know that Cromwell lost his wife and both his daughters in successive summers to a deadly “sweating sickness”: “This plague …every few years fills the graveyards. Merry at breakfast, they say, dead by noon.” What are the two girls doing, then, seemingly suspended in a hot-air balloon?

In a second, the