21
" The guiding hand at one’s pony; the voice at one’s porridge bowl; the splendid athlete one watched from one’s books in the cold tower window, while outside in the sunshine he rode at the ring, threw his spears, matched his sword with the master-at-arms. The brother who had cared for him, a grown man in illness, and defended him against calumny, and who at length, heartbroken at his defection, had turned his back on him a year ago in Scotland. "
― Dorothy Dunnett , Checkmate (The Lymond Chronicles, #6)
23
" Francis Crawford did not look at the English warden. Instead he wandered to the high window and, gazing down on the mild English countryside, said soberly, ‘Affinity? French blood runs in both England and Scotland; their tongue is no barrier. As for religion … Identity of faith is small recommendation. Freedom of faith, surely, is what must be sought for: tolerance between every sect and its neighbour; clemency from every government. Otherwise you have men fighting from conviction who might as well be fighting from devilment: the thing has no more sense in it than your young Allendale’s cocks, slashing each other to death only because one will not give way to the other. And if there is to be tolerance, where do you think we may look for it? To England? Or to France, rather? "
― Dorothy Dunnett , Checkmate (The Lymond Chronicles, #6)
31
" All the linear delicacy of the boy he had once been stood exposed now in the still, blindfolded face of her son. The clinging yellow hair, orderly on the white linen, was the same silk that had veiled her rings when she had smoothed his pillow in childhood; the cheekbone under the bandage had once, fresh and firm, been pressed to her own; the beautiful hands, lying loose on the damask, belonged to him and also to another man, whom she had placed before all others, and always would. "
― Dorothy Dunnett , Checkmate (The Lymond Chronicles, #6)
32
" Except once, long ago, over an estrangement with his wife Mariotta, Lord Culter had never been jealous of the young brother he had seen grow from babyhood. Until the moment Francis had left home at sixteen, a prisoner of war to the English, Richard knew him solely as a blond and delicate boy, interested only, it seemed, in reading and music, whose apparent fragility concealed a will of steel, and a turn of phrase which could wound like a sword-cut. "
― Dorothy Dunnett , Checkmate (The Lymond Chronicles, #6)
38
" It was then that she found that he had laid flat, himself, every defence against her: that she could, if she wished, enter and be received within this, the long-guarded citadel. And so she discovered, fragment by fragment, what he had never told anyone: the inner truth of all those events which, strung together, made up his unruly life. "
― Dorothy Dunnett , Checkmate (The Lymond Chronicles, #6)