More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘Poets prosper,’ Richard says. ‘It is their friends who sustain the hurt.’
‘How typical of bankers,’ Chapuys says, sniffing. ‘More money than taste.’
Reginald’s plain exterior gives no idea of the elaborate, useless nature of his mind, with its little shelves and niches for scruples and doubts.
After supper, as a hush falls and the long midsummer day folds itself and disposes to dusk, he and the ambassador climb one of the garden towers.
That’s the point of a promise, he thinks. It wouldn’t have any value, if you could see what it would cost you when you made it.
You have lost before you ride out. Who are you? You are one man. Who follows you? Only carrion crows, bone-pickers. Do not stop moving, or they will eat you alive.’
He imagines laying a clasp-knife to the heart of Nicholas Carew, prising it open like an oyster. He imagines shaking Gertrude Courtenay, till treason drops from her like falling leaves. Slicing the cranium of her husband, the Marquis of Exeter, and stirring a forefinger in the murk of his intentions.
It is hot and as the day wears on it becomes a hoop around the ribs and a band tightening the heart. It is the same feeling you get when you are standing before the king, agenda in your hand, twenty items on it and every one crucial—and the king decides to talk about the medicinal properties of lilies.
He sits in Whitehall, the year folding around him, aware of the shadow of his hand as it moves across the paper,
But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.
