The White Queen (The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels, #2)

by Philippa Gregory

The tragedy of Melusina, whatever language tells it, whatever tune it sings, is that a man will always promise more than he can do to a woman he cannot understand.

Did you think I could walk away from you, and not come back? Of course I am coming back.

The new moon is rising, a small sickle of a moon. Without a word spoken, we both wish on it; we bob a curtsey, and I hear the chink as we turn over the little coins in our pockets.

The road you have chosen will mean that you have to spend your life scheming and fighting. Our task, as your family, is to make sure you win.”

He is lost to the world, poor Henry, and he has forgotten everything that we have taken from him.

So he left her, because in his heart he feared that she was a woman with a divided nature—and he did not realize that all women are creatures of divided nature.

as men do—and those who are close enough, his old friends, turn on him like furious dogs to kill him as a thing worse than the enemy: a traitor on the battlefield.

William Hastings on his shield arm, his sword out, his knife in his other hand, bellows, “Victory to York! Victory to York!” and his soldiers believe that mighty shout, and so does the Lancaster army, attacked from the front in darkness, attacked from the rear in mist, and now leaderless, as Warwick shouts for his page to save him, flings himself on his waiting horse, and gallops away.

For nothing is sacred in England anymore.

But I did not know that war was nothing more than butchery, as savage and unskilled as sticking a pig in the throat and leaving it to bleed to make the meat tender.

No wonder women loathe you.” “As long as men do not.” I smile.

“We are all precious,” Anthony declares. “And we all have to live a life with risk.

All the York men are sick with ambition and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, is no different. Edward risked his life, year after year, fighting for his throne. George put his head in a vat of wine rather than promise never to claim it.

You love the crown more than your children.”

If there is love enough, then nothing—not nature, not even death itself—can come between two who love each other.