At first they’d thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there are problems of scale.
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 dead are more faithful than the living. For better or worse, they do not leave you. They last out the longest night.
The feeling around his heart – that it is crushed, forced out of shape – he now understands as a deformity caused by grief.
The past changes a little every time we retell it.
He feels he is in the torture chamber but he knows that one day he will find the door out, because it is he who has the key.
Forgetting is an art like other arts. It needs dedication and practice.
You cannot return to the moment you were in before.