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He’d won London with his smile as much as with his sword, as his father could never have done.
October that year gave promise of considerable beauty, dawning with harvest skies and foliage splashed with vibrant colour.
I do not know what will happen now but I do fear for the future. I see naught but sorrows in what is to come.
Facilis descensus Averui,”’ Edward said with a shrug. ‘The descent into Hell is easy.’
The fear in the room was a tangible thing, would take flame like sun-dried straw, blaze into a panic that might engulf his entire army.
Edward of York had a resonant voice, remarkably even features, eyes of a blue rarely seen beyond Dublin and the yellow-gold hair common to Plantagenet princes since the first of their line, Henry Fitz-Empress, had claimed the crown in 1154.
‘I’ve a better thought even than that. It is not precisely the season for it, with Epiphany still four days hence, and I daresay our lady mother would never forgive me for saying it. But blasphemy or not, I think it fitting, nonetheless.’ He touched his cup to the one Richard now held. ‘To the Resurrection,’ he said.
Behind her a jewel-coloured stained-glass window spilled sun into the room, and it seemed to Jacquetta that her daughter had drawn all the light from the window into her eyes; never had they shone so green, so luminous.
The Devil tends to its own.
He was unhelmeted and the sun burnished his armour in a blaze of light, beat down on hair as black as purest jet.
‘We tend to forget at times that it is the little ones, the children, who do suffer the greatest hurt. If we cannot comprehend why certain sorrows are visited upon us, how on earth can they?’
What does matter most is not that we err. . . . It is that we do benefit from our mistakes, that we are capable of sincere repentance, of genuine contrition.’
Daylight was lingering beyond its time, the sky above their camp painted in bold bright hues of crimson.
Both the memories and the emotions they stirred were unexplored, had never been exposed to the light.
From where he stood, he could see the tremor in the tightly clenched small fists, could see how they pressed against the folds of her skirt with revealing urgency.
The morals of a tom-cat and the luck of the angels.
She came at once into his arms and they stood for some moments in the sun, drawing upon that special comfort to be found in the embrace of old and intimate friends who’ve shared between them a lifetime of griefs.
the evening air was suddenly athrob with the shimmering sounds of chiming church bells.
Her refusal hovered on her lips, died there.
as if they meant to commit it to memory.
cloaked in the glare of sun
the exacting care of one building a conversational bridge so fragile that the imprudent placement of even one word would doom the entire structure.
‘Fiat justitia mat caelum; let justice be done though the heavens should fall.’
It was Richard. It had always been Richard.
the light was there, but no heat, as if the sun had given way to a perpetual shadowed moon.
Rose-en-Soleil
‘I think I would have given all I have to hear you say that,’
By now it was becoming apparent to all that upon Richard shone the brightest rays of the Sunne of York.
heavy honeysuckle scents of spring.
white roses rained from open windows, lay browning in the sun in dying tribute to the victorious Yorkists.
pulled back from an anger that had come, like lightning from an empty sky, without warning, sudden, intense, and searing.
“Never, Edward, never order a man to do what you were not willing to do yourself.
The axe flashed upward, sent shivers of sunlight into the sky
‘But I’d rather you made it Anne of Gloucester.’
The world below looked to be an entirely different place, to have been stripped under cover of night of the last mellow touches of October gold; the sky was leaden, and a chill stinging rain had been falling since midmorning.
