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You cannot greet the world in the morning with anything less than ferocity, or by evening you will be destroyed.
A castle is a world in little. Everyone inside it must work together.
But once you have been in Italy you can never really get warm. The English sun has half a heart, it flickers and lurks, it sinks
when you least expect it: then comes the autumn, the warm and smoky rain.
Months, years have gone by, when Lord Cromwell has never thought of his early life; when he has pushed the past into the yard and barred the door on it. Now it is not Gardiner’s questions about Italy that trouble him: Italy keeps its secrets. It is Putney that works away at him, distant but close. When he was weak from fever the past broke in, and now he has no defence against his memories, they recapitulate themselves any time they like: when he sits in the council chamber, words fall about him in a drizzling haze, and he finds himself wrapped in the climate of his childhood. He is a monk who
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transformed to the whisper of leaves in the forests of infancy: and like a hidden creature stirring from a leaf-bed, his mind stirs and turns, on a restless circuit. He tries to tether it (to now, this time, this place) but it will roam: scenting the staleness of soiled straw and stagnant water, the hot grease of the smithy, horse sweat, leather, grass, yeast, tallow, honey, wet dog, spilled beer, the lanes and wharves of his childhood.
He is a busy man. He has not time to read every curt note life sends him.
In the park the trees are marrying the darkness. You can’t see where the rain ends and the shadows begin.
The dead are more faithful than the living. For better or worse, they do not leave you. They last out the longest night.
‘You feed the poor at your gates every day,’ Norfolk says. ‘It is what great men do.’
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.
We are all dying, just at different speeds.’
