I confess: I was not a great baron. I was a passable warrior, an indifferent administrator, and — I hope — a tolerable poet.
Reader, I confess: I was not a great baron. I was a passable warrior, an indifferent administrator, and — I hope — a tolerable poet.\n\nI fought at Agincourt under Henry V. The dawn was cold and the French confident. By midday the field was a tangle of horses and men, and I had killed three knights I never named. That night, in the candlelit pavilion, I wrote a sonnet about the way light moves through a leaf. I have wondered ever since whether the two acts — killing and writing — were performed by the same man, or by two men sharing one body.\n\nDo not despise contradictions in your character. The men who knew only how to fight grew brittle. The men who knew only how to write were trampled. The Brattleby line endured because it carried both — sword and quill, hall and library, the long table and the long thought.\n\nIf you write, write honestly. If you fight, fight only when the cause demands it. And if, like me, you do both — never confuse the two.
Read what I wrote, if any survives. Forgive what I did, if any remembers.