Status Updates From At Your Pleasure

The mark of a good author is to grab the reader by the throat at the proper time. In a work of historical import, as the bulk of this novel was, no the reader is as chained to the narrative as is the prisoner. The remove of Adrian from Nora has its own pathos, and it follows page after page after page

His care for her would be his undoing as well as his own.

And he had spared her brother for her sake.
Feckless idiocy

Their procession slowed by a prisoner and a woman. Adrian kept off from her. And the plot -now exploded, by gunpowder, continued on towards London.

The gunpowder. David her brother. Destroying what she held dearest, as her husband said do you want him to put a pistol to your head, how stupid you were.

And the action began to roll downhill like an avalanche.

What keeps a man powerful is his dissuasion of his enemies’ aims. This task which was sent me with regard to your brother – my failure is one of their aims. How would it look if I failed? I, a former recusant?

Would he play the jailer for the rest of his natural life? Would he lock the bird in its cage until it forgot how to sing? What use, then, for the cage, once the song had gone?

They were visiting his ancestral home, in his chamber, with his objects, no resonant that she could examine them

God but this dark creature in him wanted her whether it cost him the rest of the world…

This hunger in him wanted to break her open so completely that she would never recover her reserve; that she would forget, for eternity, that once your body had been ought else but his.
It was not an innocent craving.
It was too near to violence for him to trust.
He was learning again… Why love and bloodshed seem to poets to be natural confederates…

There is only one person whom I have known to remain true in the face of such tests. And that is you.

while the shadow of the historicity flits over the narrative, it is the dance of the warring partners of honor and treachery that seemed to occupy the pages. Underlying it all is the repeated ref refrain “I have loved you for a very long time “
The reader cannot doubt this

… Educated by intimacy’s absence

Her wedded life where she did not belong, parallel to Adrian‘s education in France where he finally found acceptance. Catholic versus Protestant. The sins of religion that lead to such great death from the absence of belonging

The plot line has Nora entrenched in a resistance to her marriage. This would be played upon by the loyalties of one side and the other, dueling rather than in harmony. Finding any space for an Accused or perceived treachery, whether it be actual or not. Sentences spoken can be batted towards either side; silence, keeping one’s own council is safest when the current is so deep

In 1715 in England, a Baroque lute would look like a large, deep pear-shaped instrument with 11 to 13 courses of gut strings, an intricately carved wooden rosette soundhole, and a sharply bent pegbox. A mandolin (mandolino) of that era would look like a much smaller, delicate bowl-back instrument, typically strung with four or six pairs of metal or gut strings and played with a plectrum

Lord John plays the worm to the apple. He colludes with Cosimo against Adrian. The currents of treachery are never deep in the river.

The lines of honor, of the trespass of honor are spoken succinctly

You may call me like a dog. But I will not heel, Lord Rivenham.

To Weaponize desire would mean an abandonment of respect. A woman must be also a person. This is something that men do not
Understand, they cannot even fathom the question.

The rule of the roost. Who is on the top most rung of the ladder? Who will her servants obey.

The right of a woman to rule in her own person, not to be trammeled or beaten to harness by a man-even her husband

That does not concern you! A soused parson might give you possession of me, but he cannot put Hotterby into your hands!

… to whom did you seek to carry this proof of Hodderby’s possession?

The seduction, the bedding, the unquiet mind, these are of less interest to this reader than the treacherous puzzle that still needs be navigated. Events outside of the bed. Rather the intruding events of a more demanding mistress,

The simplest of analogies in the quietest of seductions when the woman has to continuously be persuaded

She understood how sugar felt as it dissolved in water.

Every part of me, Lady Rivenham, now serves at your pleasure

She defeats herself by arguing with herself. A critical battle with the freedom of her own will. Her decision, only her decision.

He has made it so.

We walk on thin ice here, as the plot becomes somewhat stretched. I want him, I cannot want him. I still want him. I am married to him this is what I always wanted. I do not want him
So it goes on, and on…

Would it not suit the earl of Rivenham’s station better to ensure that his new brother-in-law was not beheaded before the town?

Her fury was for her lack of agency, as a woman.

“He had herded her like a dumb animal, a sheep,
a dog”

Her violence was her only voice, and she screamed, and screamed, and screamed
“ there can be no betrayal where there is no affection “ Adrian behind his own wall