Streszczenie książki Córka Montezumy

The story in 10 parts

1. Key idea 1 · free to read

   An old man writes to explain his life

   The story opens in 1588, in the marketplace at Bungay. Thomas Wingfield, very old, hears that Spain's Armada is beaten. The news stirs a memory of the Queen, who once asked him about his twenty years among the Indians of Anahuac, the land now called Mexico.

   He tells the lesson of his life before the tale begins. No wrong can bring about a right, he says, and every wrong falls back on the hand that made it. He points to Cortes, who died poor and disgraced, and to the Aztecs, who fed their gods with human lives and lost their country. He expects Spain to pay for its own cruelty.

   His English wife Lily died last Christmas Day. He waited until then to write because the story holds another wife, Otomie, and children whom Lily could never share. Once he woke from a dream of his dead sons and called their names aloud, and Lily, hurt, thought of their own buried baby. It was their only quarrel.

   The whole tale is a confession, told by a man who has paid for his choices.

2. 2

   A stranger, a kiss and a murdered mother

   Thomas grows up at the Lodge in Ditchingham, the son of an English father and a Spanish mother named Luisa.

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3. 3

   In Seville a quack doctor changes his course

   Thomas sails to Spain under a false name, Diego d'Aila.

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4. 4

   Shipwreck, slavery and the stone at Tobasco

   The ship to Hispaniola breaks up in a storm, and about two hundred people drown.

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5. 5

   At Montezuma's court a captive becomes a god

   Prince Guatemoc arrives in Tobasco with Montezuma's order to bring the white man to the capital.

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6. 6

   On the sacrificial stone love and rescue arrive together

   Cortes enters the city and seizes Montezuma.

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7. 7

   War, buried gold and the fall of Tenoctitlan

   Thomas now serves the Aztecs as an adviser and a general of archers.

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8. 8

   Vengeance breeds more wrongs than it ends

   The book's main idea is stated in its first chapter and tested in every one that follows.

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9. 9

   Two women and two worlds pull at one man

   Thomas loves Lily Bozard from childhood, and their parting beneath the beech tree stays with him for twenty years.

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10. 10

    An old man's voice holds the whole tale together

    Thomas tells the whole book in the first person, in his old age, at the desk in the room where he was born.

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