All Hallows’ Eve

All Hallows’ Eve is the night of vigil and remembrance that marks the loss of Liz in Thomas Cromwell’s life. The ritual that he and Liz once shared for their dead becomes, in her absence, an encounter with grief: he waits for her to find him, then holds her prayer book as the living and the dead gather in memory around him.

Vigil and the dead

At this time of year, Thomas Cromwell and Liz would keep vigil with their parish, praying for the dead. Their prayers reached across several generations and degrees of intimacy: Liz’s father, Henry Wykys; her first husband, Thomas Williams; Walter Cromwell; distant cousins; half-forgotten names; long-dead half-sisters; and lost stepchildren. The observance makes remembrance communal, but its names also belong to the particular history of the household.

In 1529, Thomas keeps the vigil alone. He is at Esher with Thomas Wolsey rather than at Austin Friars, yet his separation from home does not interrupt his hope that Liz will find him. He imagines her drawn toward the cardinal by incense and candlelight, and thinks that wherever Thomas Wolsey is, he will be. The thought makes the absent wife part of the same remembered world as the dead for whom they prayed.

Grief made present

The night passes into daylight without easing the loss. The room feels so empty that it seems empty even of Thomas himself; on All Hallows’ Day, grief comes in waves and threatens to overwhelm him. He does not believe the dead return, yet he feels the brush of their fingertips or wings against his shoulder. They are no longer distinct faces but a mass, dense and crowded, as if the remembered dead have become a single presence pressing upon the living.

Standing in a window embrasure, he holds Liz’s prayer book. Grace, his daughter, had liked to look at it, and he feels the imprint of her small fingers beneath his own. The book’s illuminated offices give grief a sequence of images to follow: Matins shows the angel greeting Mary beneath a scroll; Lauds depicts the Visitation, Mary pregnant and meeting her cousin Elizabeth; Prime presents the Nativity. As he turns the pages, he imagines Grace silently turning them with him. The object joins wife, daughter, prayer, and loss without making them interchangeable.

A measure of what is lost

All Hallows’ Eve gives the novel a recurring measure of mortality: the dead are recalled by name, while the living remain bound to them through shared customs and objects. The passage from vigil to day does not restore Thomas to ordinary time. Instead, the prayer book preserves traces of Liz and Grace in gestures once made by the living, while his sense of the dead gathers them into an unsettling whole. The observance thus holds two experiences together: a religious practice directed toward the departed and a private grief that persists even without belief in their return.