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What she saw in his eyes was a yearning so strong it might have broken her heart.
The secrecy made their meetings almost unbearably thrilling.
Now, as her imagination began to depict them together, and she heard, in the ear of fantasy, the intimate words he would murmur to her as he touched her, she felt the familiar sensation in her loins, and her hand drifted to the place between her legs where delight arose. Strangely, her meetings with Ned did not quench this desire: in fact, she did it more now, as if one sin fed the other.
there was no time for niceties.
sang-froid
A soft answer turneth away wrath.
Adjusting his lace collar in front of the mirror, he smiled as he remembered the play he had seen last night, called The Rivals. Highly original, it was a comedy about ordinary people who spoke naturally, rather than in verse, and featured two young men, both of whom wanted to abduct the same girl – who turned out, in a surprise ending, to be the sister of one of them. The whole thing took place in one location, a short stretch of street, in a period of less than twenty-four hours. Ned had not before seen anything so clever in London or Paris.
She had taken control of the conversation.
A few moments later she emerged from the door below and walked away, a small, erect figure with a brisk, unwavering step; willing to die for the ideal of tolerance that Ned shared. What a woman, he thought. What a hero. He watched her out of sight.
caryatids,
duke of Alba,
He was a man of some power and importance, but he showed no arrogance; in fact, he had a rather modest charm. All the same she suspected he was no softie. Hanging alongside his coat she had seen a sword and a long Spanish dagger that looked as if they were not merely for decoration.
Nine years, he thought. Anything can happen in nine years.
He fought back unmanly tears.
Time went by without talk.
He had not forgotten Margery. He never would. But she had refused to run away with him, and he had the rest of his life to live without her. He was entitled to love someone else.
You discharge of an infected prostitute!
The ultra-Catholic Parisians did not want their naughty darling to marry a Protestant rotter.
He buttonholed her
Charles’s words reinforced Ned’s optimism. Addressing Coligny, the king said: ‘The pain is yours, but the outrage is mine.’
By Saturday evening, Duke Henri was in a tantrum, possessed by the rage of a young man who finds that the world does not work in the way he confidently expected.
He accepted what he was told as fact. ‘I will be ready,’ he vowed.
With a whole raft of plausible small deceptions, he had smoothed the way for Armageddon.
It was the oldest of stories. Aphrodite’s maid was helping her mistress have an unauthorized romance. Well, that was none of Ned’s business. He walked her to the back of the house where she tapped on a high wooden gate. It was opened immediately by a young girl.
He realized, with a sense of triumph mingled with wonder, that this could be the final solution.
We never found Isabelle’s body, and that made it harder for Sylvie to mourn. In the end we treated the burned-out shop as a grave, and stood in front of it for a few minutes every Sunday, holding hands and remembering a strong, brave woman.
I worried about her, but I had learned from Queen Elizabeth that some women could not be ruled by men.
He wished he was not relying so heavily on his sister. She was smart and well-organized and fearless, but in the end she was a woman. However, Rollo himself did not want to set foot on English soil, not yet, so he had to use her.
His hope was so intense that it made his whole body taut and he almost felt he might throw up with fear of failure.
Ned studied the face of his son, Roger. His heart was so full he could hardly speak.
Ned was also recalling his own adolescence. I know what you have in front of you, he thought as he looked at Roger; and I wish I could tell you all about it, and make it easier for you; but when I was your age I never believed older people who said they knew what the lives of younger ones were like, and I don’t suppose you will either.
He was what the English called a ‘politician’ – in French un politique – meaning that he made decisions about religion according to what he thought would be good for his country, rather than the other way around.
However, he did not want to arrive muddy-stockinged and road-weary, in case he needed to impose his authority.
Ned continued to speak to the earl. ‘From now on she takes her meals in the turret house.’ Mary said: ‘Your insolence is intolerable.’ Ned ignored her. He owed no courtesy to the woman who wanted to murder his queen.
She told him the names of her three children, and he memorized them because he was in the habit of memorizing names.
AFTERWARDS, WALKING to the Guise palace, Pierre felt as he sometimes did after a feast: sated but slightly nauseated. He loved to see an aristocrat humiliated, but this had almost been too much. He would go back, of course; but perhaps not for a few days. She was rich food.
All Ned had to do was stop the men, with his usual well-mannered determination, and demand that they open the barrels so that he could check the contents.
Ned said quietly: ‘You are now as close as you have ever come to being hanged.’
He had learned to watch for a certain look in the eyes. The look combined noble purpose with a high-minded disregard for consequences. It was not madness, but it was a kind of irrationality.
He had not guessed how elaborate and professional Queen Elizabeth’s secret service was.
The very fact that so little was known about someone so important suggested, to Ned, that he was extraordinarily competent and therefore dangerous.
Her heart seemed to turn into a lead weight in her chest, and her legs felt weak. She wanted to lie down and close her eyes and fall asleep for ever.
She was pale but calm, and Alison – who knew her well – felt reassured, at that moment, that the queen would maintain her regal bearing throughout the ordeal to come.
Sylvie enjoyed the occasion hugely: everyone hugging and shaking hands, news pouring out, several people talking at the same time, laughter and delight. As always on such occasions, she could not help contrasting Ned’s family with her own. They had been just three, her parents and herself, and then two. At first she had been bewildered by Ned’s crowd, but she loved it now, and it made her original family seem limited.
the pink-and-white complexion people sometimes called ‘fresh’.
But Margery at forty-five no longer believed that Protestantism was evil and Catholicism perfect. For her the important divide was between tyranny and tolerance; between people who tried to force their views on everyone else, and people who respected the faith of those who disagreed with them.
The end of doubt came as a strange relief. Now there was nothing to do but fight to the death.
What we did, mainly, was to harry the enemy until the inherent difficulties overwhelmed him.’
‘The Third Estate
It was an amputation. I would never get back the part of me that vanished when Sylvie died. I knew the feeling of a man who tries to walk having lost a leg. I would never shake off the sense that something should be there, where the missing limb had always been. There was a hole in my life, a great gaping cavity that could never be filled.
