For a moment, disconnected by the stitch in his side, he listened not to the sense but to the interplay of the two flexible voices, one masculine and light, one mellow and feminine, unreeling their st...
For a moment no one spoke. Then Lymond got to his feet. ‘I have a better idea. marry her,’ he suggested.
Every other woman since Eve,’ he said. ‘Except you.
Does anyone—Jerott?—know a nice clean strumpet who doesn’t have the pox and will sleep in my room tonight to discourage Richard? She needn’t stay beyond half an hour, and I don’t want to meet her.’‘An...
Do you think I envy him? At least I was reared without tenderness and without expectation of it. During all that time, you were breeding a hothouse love based on deception.
Do you swim? Hunt? Wrestle? I see. Can you use a crossbow? Your longest shot? Can you count? Read and write? Ah, the sting of sarcasm—Have we a scholar here? Then produce us a specimen, said Lymond. W...
Do you regret it?’ said Sybilla. ‘I would have kept it for you if I could. I did not know, you see, what you were to be.
Danny said, ‘I didn’t tell you the other side, because you know it. You and I don’t have a family. They have. They were brought up together. They need each other, and support each other. It’s too late...
But I,’ said Lymond, ‘am one of the new apostles, seeking nothing but voluptuousness and human pleasures, and abusing the world.…
Bruges was the multiple voice of working water; and the quality of brick-thrown echoes, and the hiss of trees and the flap of drying cloths in the flat-country wind, and the grunting, like frogs in a...
Because,’ said Crawford, as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘you ought to remember that Philippa has been trained in Turkey and will expect certain standards if you mean to make an impression, whether as her fir...
Because, I think, of something you said. One should be able to face anything. I have learned to play chess again. I have learned to listen to music, and to play it. I have learned to buy self-indulgen...
Because you have done all that skill could devise to present a detached case, and failed. Because you are asking for help, and you hate asking for help. [...] This may be,’ said Richard with unexpecte...
At every second location Danny said monotonously, ‘You can’t do that,’ and Plummer bridled and said, ‘They built Sviajsk three years ago in four weeks. They felled the timber at Uglich and floated the...
As a highly qualified Turkish-trained concubine from the harem of Suleiman the Magnificent, Philippa Somerville settled into English court life as a kite among chickens, and as a kite among kites into...
Are you mourning? Seneca says a wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can. You should be pleased. At last Francis has managed to follow his own misguided path without the rest of us co...
Are you by any chance …’ said Lymond.‘… baiting you?’ Philippa said. ‘Only when you are inclined to be magisterial.’‘Oh, good God,’ Lymond said. ‘Kate must be out of her mind.’‘And thank heaven you ar...
And you can’t adjust to bastardy?’He said evenly, ‘Give me, perhaps, until tomorrow instead of today to achieve it.
And so the amber hair of Francis Crawford’s father, which all his life had marked him out: for hurt, for passion; for treachery; performed its last destined office in the sunshine and fresh winds of E...
And for Adam Blacklock the artist, older, wiser, and perhaps less vulnerable than once he had been, a chance to assess from maturity a person whose maturity was and always had been a thing disconcerti...