The Mirror And The Light

For six or seven years, male children live with the women. Then without choice or discussion, one day they are plucked away, their hair cropped so their ears are always cold, and thrust into the sullen world where everyone finds fault and visits punishment, and until you are married there is no kindness unless you pay for it. I

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.

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.

Remember the winter ahead.

Perhaps nothing is quite clear, that is spoken in a garden on an evening like this. In Arcadia.

He remembers the weight of the weapon, when the Frenchman put it in his hand. He saw the light flash on the steel and he saw that there were words written on the blade; he drew his finger over them. Mirror of Justice. Speculum justitiae. Pray for us.

Seven Wise Men, he tells Gregory: here are their sayings. Moderation in all things, nothing to excess (those two are the same, wisdom can be repetitious). Know yourself. Know your opportunity. Look ahead. Don’t try for the impossible. And Bias of Priene: pleistoi anthropoi kakoi, most men are bad.

Mother of Sorrows, the game hurt when it stopped. Though when you were playing, you never felt a thing

As soon as he unravels the conspiracies of such people – unknotting them with a casual hand, and deliberately looking the other way – they insist on entangling themselves again, and whistling and shouting till they get his attention.

‘The first news is always wrong,’ he says.

Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit, and somewhere it is written that Cromwell is his name.

In the blink of an eye, in the space of an Ave, he is somewhere else: he is at Launde Abbey, on the cardinal’s business: on a day of buzzing heat, a young fellow laughing with the monks in a garden. This abbey, where he ate honey scented with thyme, stands in the heart of England, far from the dangers of salt water. It basks in woods and fields, and summer or winter the air is sweet. When he visited for the cardinal he looked at figures as he was bidden, but he found it so blessed a spot that he could not see it through the grid or lattice of an account book. Now he thinks: I’ll have Launde for myself, when its surrender comes. I’ll build a house, and live there when I’m old, far from the court and council. It’s time I had something I want.

We never know how to take it when our life begins to be charmed.

He can see and feel, without pitying the child; only suspect that, to keep the streets tidy, someone ought to collect it and send it home.

Each man is watching the other, for signs of treason, signs of weakness. 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. If it falls it is because it is betrayed from within.

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.

All around, scattering from the misted eye, the tracks of small birds and animals, cut into white like some code or lost alphabet. God sees them, two black figures under enamelled blue.

You gain a point and lose a point, gain and lose.

All your life you tramp the empty road with the wind at your back. You are hungry and your spirit is perturbed as you journey on into the gloom. But when you get to your destination the doorkeeper knows you. A torch goes before you as you cross the court. Inside there is a fire and a flask of wine, there is a candle and beside the candle your book. You pick it up and find your place is marked. You sit down by the fire, open it, and begin your story. You read on, into the night.