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The sultan felt it was time to send someone competent to the island of the English to wring concessions from her queen. And so the ambassador and his entourage traveled to the end of the world.
Such a great opening!
This particular question amused those of the English negotiators who had never left England but deeply troubled those English who had traveled, especially in Mahometan lands. There was much to be said for any religion that promised wealth, opportunity, and wives in this world.
The Ottoman ambassador readily agreed to this reciprocity, unable to conceive of any Ottoman who would see an advantage—spiritual or economic—in apostasy or, for that matter, take up permanent residence on this island. England was simply too poor and Christianity too unpromising in this life. After all, they were scarcely able to convince some of the English pirates to return from Constantinople. Even those in prison.
The island’s damp simply could not in most cases produce men of physical beauty or virility. The nation was doomed by its weather (all praise be to Allah) to weakness, in the individual and the aggregate.
But the reality of power—a field of study Ezzedine had ignored, even as he benefited from it—could not be denied infinitely. He would be subject to its immutable laws whether he studied them or pretended they didn’t exist.
Please tell your mother that I will return when God arranges for it and that my return will never be delayed by any desire of my own. Her husband is alive and hurt only by our separation. Please read her these words as often as she desires. I am delayed, only delayed.
😭😭
1579—HE begins to welcome into HIS bed HIS French and Catholic cousin, Esmé d’Aubigny. Saith the spy Prideaux, they do count the rosary together in private.
Oooh! Very scandalous.
Somehow, after all these years of blood and fire, the Catholics might simply place one of their own on the English throne, without even a battle. No armada, no murder, just a Catholic Scotsman walking into Whitehall.
He watched with envy and wonder. He felt a strange satisfaction at every play’s ending, when, with the epilogue, all questions were answered. The fate of every character was revealed. There was a deep pleasure in simply knowing what happened to everyone at the end.
Marking this as a spoiler because I HATE THAT THIS WAS A THEME OF THIS BOOK!!!!!!!!!!
Geoff was very happy, and he knew he was very happy. He had accomplished extraordinary things. He had been present at the most important events of his or any time, the very definition of the world, the protection of all that mattered. He had witnessed events that people would remember forever, would write of in books, would put on the stage.
All massacres complete, all villains punished, all lovers wed, all endings final before the sun was going down, the company was released into their true vocation as men of the stage: drinking.
“They’re like that.” “Who? Queens? Scots? Catholics?”
There was a time when he told himself that Matthew Thatcher ate the pork but it never touched the lips of Mahmoud Ezzedine. He could recall that trick of the mind, these years later, but could not remember if he had ever truly believed it.
In the years since, Dr. Thatcher had viewed the wine and ale as the necessary antidote to the island’s persistent English melancholy, though keener eyes than his (or his own eyes when he was younger) might have guessed they were no antidote but cause.
He could, with exercise of will, hold memories away from his mind. To survive required forgetting, submission, the murder of pointless hope.
I cannot handle this
“I would like to read it, if that doesn’t strike you as immodest. How does it end?”
Or this!
“Is it such a horror as this? Are Christians truly so varied? Elizabeth’s father was Catholic, was he not? And every king and queen before him? And did he not also have her mother killed?” Thatcher was, as nearly as Belloc could tell, asking in all sincerity. There was something amusing, and reassuring, in his foreign perspective:
“No. If my faith is strong, He will not judge me except for my faith. And what stronger sign of my faith can I exhibit than my willingness to make my conscience ache in His service? If I cannot sleep for the howling of my conscience, what a gift I have given my God.”
“Does earthly wealth not impress your pagan mind, Matt?”
Me at a bar in 2015
“The city in the past twelvemonth has not been swept to sea nor overrun by witches nor monsters.
Counting my blessings during the pandemic
Thatcher’s efforts to discuss Catholicism further would have to wait, for the king’s interest in witchcraft so strongly held him that he ignored the (losing) game before him. He was still eager to talk about black sorcery the following night at chess again.
To be fair, I would rather talk about black sorcery than play chess
He must, he knew, be honest with this king, except, of course, for why he was here, who he was, how he became this other version of himself, and how well he could play chess
How maddening to be the king, when men hide the best of themselves for fear of offending and hide their worst from shame, and a king is only allowed to see, for all his power, the bland smile and nodding praise of men at their dullest and most dishonest.
Thatcher pitied this young king and then liked him. It was never a question he would have asked himself in London or Constantinople—liked or not liked?—as if he liked a cloud or would trust this lion more than that lion. But this was a young man of uncertainties and unconvincingly declared certainties.
History is written by the future, and therefore distorted at its start. There’s no other way to write it, of course, but it always glows with the unnatural clarity of having eliminated all the possibilities that didn’t happen. The present doesn’t feel like a link in a chain leading to the eventual coherent historical event, and unlived futures infinitely outnumber the one statistically improbable reality that occurred.
ok but ...........
All of these visions and every other possibility are granted to Mahmoud Ezzedine by his loving God.
I HATE THIS ENDING!!!!!
