Then Lymond’s voice, the chill gone, said, ‘Don’t be an ass, Jerott? You know I can’t do without you.’ It was an obvious answer. But it was also something Jerott had never had from Lymond before: an a...
The words now had meaning. All poetry had meaning, and sorrow she had never envisaged. Behind, veiled in soft rain as the dragon-prowed barge slid across the grey water to Pera, she saw for the last t...
The unicorns, led by costumed grooms, were behaving well about their horns, and the painted rhapsodies all round the cart were more than flattering while the pseudo-king, sceptred in ermine, was posit...
The moment is past. The chessboard has gone; and the people. You must let me take the room from you too.
The child, level with the kneeling man, had moved nearer, his eyes wide, his face uplifted as if to embrace him. Before he could touch him, Lymond rose, and, looking down, smiled. ‘Keep thy kisses. Th...
That way, that sunlit, gentle path was set with mines, and had at the end of it a chasm she could not contemplate. So she hid her impulse, and did not know, because he was better at concealment than s...
So,’ said Mary, ‘you would condemn the human race to hell, for want of enlightenment?’‘Why not?’ said Francis Crawford. ‘It has nothing to fear, surely, from hell.
Richard’s angry grey eyes … honest grey eyes … were looking at him. Sybilla was not watching. He supposed she knew that however near he might tread to the crevasse, he did not mean to fall in, and dra...
Philippa, enviously, wished she could do the same, and then decided she would rather be interesting and sensitive.
Philippa said, to the scandalization of priest and secretary and chargé d’affaires, ‘I think I’d like to get drunk.
Oh, well. Everyone else has suave, cosmopolitan sheep: why not us? The Millers at Hepple have a ewe that’s been to Kelso three times, and they’ve never been farther than Ford in their lives. Kate peer...
Oh God, thought Jerott. Don’t let it happen. She doesn’t deserve the torment. The lifetime of waiting, in return for a handful of moments of ecstasy. And standing behind him, always, the ghosts of his...
My son is not very complicated, Mariotta, although the artifice glitters. He’s afraid—Afraid! Blue eyes, dead of feeling, looked into blue. Afraid of what? Damned by the church and condemned by the la...
Marriage, like law, is a practice. Aut bibat, aut abeat. Subscribe, or get out of it.
Lymond surveyed the grinning audience with an air of gentle discovery. Is there no work to be done? Or perhaps it’s a holiday?
Lymond said, ‘Have I been talking?’‘We all have, in nightmares. But yours have not been about the sea.
Lancelot Plummer had expected to undertake this survey with Adam, but had been foiled calmly in passing by Lymond. ‘Ah, no. One aesthete and one philistine are what we require.’ There could have been...
Kiaya Khátún is of the happy family circle.’‘You didn’t marry her!’ said Richard sharply.‘No! No,’ said Lymond soothingly. ‘All but the ceremony. We hope to have the four children legitimized.’For a m...
Jerott had no reason to challenge her wit. For a woman, it seemed to him at times excessive to tiresomeness.
I’m not in St Mary’s because I like it. I am embarked spellbound on a study of devil-worship.