The dead are more faithful than the living. For better or worse, they do not leave you. They last out the longest night.
They have been witnessing miracles at Thetford for three hundred years, ever since they turned up a cache of relics, neatly labelled, that included rocks from Mount Calvary, part of Our Lady’s sepulchre, and fragments of the manger in which the child Jesus was laid. Now comes the greatest miracle of all, Thomas Cromwell, the Putney boy: who holds that the passage of time does not add lustre to fakes, and that there is no need to reverence a lie because of its antiquity.
Ambition is a sin. So I am told. Thought I have never seen how it is different from using your talents, which the Bible commands we do.
My daughter Mary is the product of a union illegitimate. If Katherine would not acknowledge the sin in this life, as she would not, then I fear she will suffer for it in the place where she is now.’ Peterborough, he thinks.
We are vain and ambitious all the same, and we never do live quiet, because we rise in the morning and we feel the blood coursing in our veins and we think, by the Holy Trinity, whose head can I stamp on today? What worlds are at hand, for me to conquer? Or at the least we think, if God made me a crewman on his ship of fools, how can I murder the drunken captain, and steer it to port and not be wrecked?
Rafe shrugs. ‘He is frightened of you, sir. You have outgrown him. You have gone beyond what any servant or subject should be.’ It is the cardinal over again, he thinks. Wolsey was broken not for his failures, but for his successes; not for any error, but for grievances stored up, about how great he had become.
He thinks, ten years I have had my soul flattened and pressed till it’s not the thickness of paper. Henry has ground and ground me in the mill of his desires, and now I am fined down to dust I am no more use to him, I am powder in the wind. Princes hate those to whom they have incurred debts.
His councillors caution, ‘No haste, Majesty. As soon as you choose, you forfeit advantage. You can marry only once.’ ‘Can he?’ Fitwilliam mutters. ‘This is Henry we’re talking about.
I have noticed,’ she says, ’common men often love their mothers. Sometimes they even love their wives.
If a man should live as if every day is his last, he should also die as if there is a day to come, and another after that.
I wanted books like a vampire wants blood.
In his spare moments he is studying to improve his Greek. Old Bishop Fisher was in his seventies when he began the language, and he is not to be bested by a dead prelate. In a year or two, he wishes to be able to join the divines in their subtle dissection of each point of translation.
It is prince’s tricks,’ he says. ‘Three days in a row Henry gives the French a private audience. Then he ignores them for a week.
This is what Henry does. He uses people up. He takes all they give him and more. When he is finished with them he is noisier and fatter and they are husks or corpses.
Wolsey always said, work out what people want, and you might be able to offer it; it is not always what you think, and may be cheap to supply.
I had read all the books so hard that when I gave them back the print was faint and gray with exhaustion.
Interesting how our vocabulary responds, providing us with words we have never needed before, words stacked away for us, neatly folded into our brain and there for our use: like a bride’s lifetime supply of linen, or a ducal trove of monogrammed china. Death will overtake us before a fraction of those words are used.
You have no right to assume that you’ll be able to write because you could write yesterday.
The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.
The feeling around his heart – that it is crushed, forced out of shape – he now understands as a deformity caused by grief.