How, in twenty days, do you create for a man a new and irresistible motive for his existence? And how, this done, do you preserve him and his family from a blow so devastating as to be, in some ways,...
How do you take leave, for all time, of a brother?’‘You wish him well,’ Lymond said, ‘if that is what is in your mind. And you accept from him his understanding, and his pity, and his fellowship as he...
Her suspicions seethed. Over sixty, with a life of violence behind him, Buccleuch had been a broken man after the affair at Liddel Castle. More recently, however, the light of purpose had entered his...
He was not his own master when he left Russia,’ Sybilla said. ‘Nor was he his own master when you brought him to France. He is like a river forced into glass and driven from stem to stem of a conjurer...
He is not immutable. No man can be.
He had ridden through the night, without rest and without sleep, for this. It ought, surely, to give someone a moment of wry amusement. He understood—but then he had always understood—how Richard had...
He did not want to live. As the condition of life does, so the condition of death should depend on one’s choice. The wise man lives as long as he ought, not as long as he can. Democrites fell on his s...
He couldn’t succeed Richard now, certainly, said Janet. But if the English took over? Criminals at the horn with the right kind of politics have died in silk sheets before now.So they say. Perhaps it’...
Good evening, ladies. The gentlemen now entering behind you are all fully armed. I am Francis Crawford of Lymond and I want your lives or your jewels -- the latter for preference; both if necessary.
Gilles made up his mind, and snapped, 'D'you write Latin?'Sometimes Jerott forgot that the blazon of chivalry, with all the status it once had carried, was no longer his. In any case, he had an incred...
Francis Crawford’s face in this fleeting moment of privacy was filled with ungovernable feeling: of shock and of pain and of a desire beyond bearing: the desire of the hart which longs for the waterbr...
For spirits one requires a strong head or else a weak brain, and I fear I possess neither.
Faith, thought O’LiamRoe. And not a decent creature among them thought to say that the only rule in it is for a man to have a fine, steady seat for an elephant.
Every ruin is packed like a biscuit box.
Duty; friendship; compassion. Which moved him to die for you?
Don’t you think you should retire again? The first retiral seems to have got mislaid.
Don’t you think they would all have been happier if Francis Crawford had never existed?
Don’t wrest from me my repentance. A whoremonger, a haunter of stews, a hypocrite, a wretch and a maker of strife.
Don't you know, even yet, why I came back to Orkney? Rognvald said. Than Thorfinn looked up. Rognvald's gaze, waiting for his, took and sustained it. Thorfinn did not look away, but his face held no e...
Disdainful of fur and fretful, privately, about the cost of his buttons, Jerott Blyth sat like the born horseman he was, and watched discreetly for trouble.