What metaphors are used in Katherine by Anya Seton?

Lost innocence is an underlying metaphor. Katherine arrives at court at age sixteen with a happy heart, but is attacked by Hugh Swynford, and is exposed to the cutting gossip and back-stabbing of the courtiers. Flirtation is everywhere, and the court is competitive and corrupt. When Katherine married and moved to Swynford, she found Hugh's insane mother-in-law who thought she had a water disease and talked to pixies, and poor Gibbon, the bailiff, who was paraplegic and dying. The servants were angry and lazy, and the place, unlike the luxurious castle and the neat, prim convent, is drafty, dirty and in ill-repair.