I want to take you for pleasure, and hold you in my arms for desire. I want you to know that it is your kiss that I want, not another heir to the throne. You can know that I love you, quite for yourself, when I come to your bed, and not as the York’s broodmare.” I tilt back my head and look at him under my eyelashes. “You think to bed me for love and not for children? Isn’t that sin?” His arm comes around my waist and his palm cups my breast. “I shall make sure that it feels richly sinful,” - Edward IV to Elizabeth Woodville -

Only fools wait when their enemies are coming, to see if they may prove to be friends.

In Spain," indeed! He would have got no closer than the Indies if I had not showed him how to do it. Stupid puppy.

In a way. Magic is the act of making a wish come about. Like praying, like plotting, like herbs, like exerting your will on the world, making something happen.

And – I think you know, don’t you? – that I love you, Anne.’ I feel as if I have been living in a loveless world for too long. The last tender face I saw was my father’s when he sailed for England. ‘You do? Truly?’ ‘I do.’ He rises to his feet and pulls me up to stand beside him. My chin comes to his shoulder, we are both dainty, long-limbed, coltish: well-matched. I turn my face into his jacket. ‘Will you marry me?’ he whispers. ‘Yes,’ I say.

You have to choose the best, every day, without compromise...guided by your own virtue and highest ambition

It is not love that matters, Mistress Boy, it is what you choose to do with it. What’d you choose to do with yours?