Miriamgreen’s Reviews > At Your Pleasure > Status Update

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