Extraits

« - Ensemble nous formons la rose blanche, dit Montague d’une voix douce. Nous sommes les Plantagenêts, les vrais souverains d’Angleterre. Le roi est notre cousin. Nous devons le faire revenir à la raison.

En voyant leur enthousiasme, je me dis que leur père m’a gardée dans l’obscurité et la modicité, cachée du pouvoir, afin que je n’aie jamais à prendre une telle décision : remplir mon devoir de dirigeante légitime du pays, guider le royaume. »

Current interesting research from Catrina Banks Whitley and Kyra Kramer suggests that Henry may have had the rare Kell positive blood type, which can cause miscarriages, stillbirths, and infant deaths when the mother has the more common Kell negative blood type. Whitley and Kramer also suggest that Henry’s later symptoms of paranoia and anger may have been caused by McLeod syndrome—a disease found only in Kell positive individuals. McLeod syndrome usually develops when sufferers are aged around forty and causes physical degeneration and personality changes resulting in paranoia, depression, and irrational behavior.

Interestingly, Whitley and Kramer trace Kell syndrome back to Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, the suspected witch and mother of Elizabeth Woodville. Sometimes, uncannily, fiction creates a metaphor for an historical truth: in a fictional scene in the novel, Elizabeth, together with her daughter Elizabeth of York, curse the murderer of her sons, swearing that they shall lose their son and their grandsons, while in real life her genes—unknown and undetectable at the time—entered the Tudor line through her daughter and may have caused the deaths of four Tudor babies to Katherine of Aragon and three to Anne Boleyn.

“Life is a risk, who knows this better than me? Who knows more surely that babies die easily, that children fall ill from the least cause, that royal blood is fatally weak, that death walks behind my family like a faithful black hound?”

“But Elizabeth and I are accustomed to loss, we are Plantagenets—we dine on a diet of betrayal and heartbreak.”

A mon réveil, je me sent innocente, la conscience tranquille. En ce premier instant d' hébétude, tandis que j' ouvre lentement les yeux, je ne pense à rien; je ne suis qu' une jeune femme de vingt-six ans, au corps musclé et à la peau douce, qui s' éveille avec joie à la vie.