Rembrandt Susanna and the Elders

Rembrandt Christ On The Cross
Magrat went in.
Rooms in the castle could hardly be said to belong to
anyone in any case. They’d had too many occupants over the
centuries. The very atmosphere was the equivalent of those
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walls scattered It hadn’t worked.
There was the Great Bed of Lancre, which was said to be able to sleep a dozen people, although in what circum-stances and why it should be necessary history had never made clear. It was huge and made of oak.
It was also, very clearly, unslept in.with outbreaks of drawing-pin holes where last term’s occupants hung the posters of rock groups long disbanded. You couldn’t stamp your personality on that stone. It stamped back harder.For Magrat, stepping into a man’s bedroom was like an explorer stepping on to that part of the map marked Here Be Dragons.And it wasn’t exactly what it ought to have been.Verence had arrived at the bedroom concept fairly late in life. When he was a boy, the entire family slept on straw in the cottage attic. As an apprentice in the Guild of Joculators, he’d slept on a pallet in a long dormitory of other sad, beaten young men. When he was a fully fledged Fool he’d slept, by tradition, curled up in front of his master’s door. Suddenly, at a later age than is usual, he’d been intro-duced to the notion of soft mattresses.And now Magrat was privy to the big secret.