There was a space, during which, of the five men and women standing or kneeling about Francis Crawford, only one watched him. Then Lymond said clearly, ‘On my honour, I promise it.
There is a new game about to begin. Will you leave it to others?’‘As you will leave it to your son,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘It is all I find I can do.
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 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...
The arrangement, temporary or otherwise, was usually public and acknowledged when at the highest level; only when it was clandestine and conducted to the injury of legitimate relatives did it become u...
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.
She may be hoping for Lug of the Long Arms but what she has is the family Crawford, qui peut de tous bois faire flèches in order to sit in the butts and shoot hearty rounds at each other.
Scorpio,’ Lymond said, ‘does not caper. He stings. We are damned, as the man says, of nature: so conceaved and borne as a serpent is a serpent, and a tode a tode, and a snake a snake by nature …’ He l...
Philippa, enviously, wished she could do the same, and then decided she would rather be interesting and sensitive.
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, left to speak first, said agreeably, Quite so. I, King of Flesh, flourishing in my flowers. Come in. I am sensible, sober, and have no designs on your virtue.
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.
Long ago, returning from some turbulent sequence of misdeeds, the younger, beloved son of the house of Culter would rap at the door of his mother’s chamber, and be admitted, and closing the door, woul...
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...
Khátún, what is his face?’‘A lemon?’ said Philippa.