The Game of Kings (The Lymond Chronicles, #1)

by Dorothy Dunnett

drama; just, awful and poetic, spread with uncials

Tongue like the clatterbone of a goose’s arse.

ON SUNDAY, the day after the affair at Lake of Menteith, Lord Culter was also taking aquatic exercise of a kind which all but turned his epithalamics into elegies.

Even Sybilla, soul of charity and tolerance, had mentioned to the girl’s grandfather that the child had regrettable taste; adding inaccurately that it came no doubt from the late Lord Herries her father, and not from her mother who had thrown over the joys of widowhood for a well-endowed marriage.

“Heir to nothing,” said Sir George wearily. “You know perfectly well Henry of England disinherited her from the succession in the midst of his uxorial fluctuations.

The forty-five men who passed over the hills next day with Lymond and Will Scott were fortified, within and without, and sang impolite songs in discreet harmony, syncopated by beer and rough ground.

Like the enchanted garden of Jannes, tenanted by daemons, the keep of Ballaggan encased the ceaseless drone of Mr. Crouch’s voice. He droned through September until it and his captors were exhausted; then pounced on October with undimmed vigour and worried the blameless days for a fortnight.

Dangerous quantity, music. Because it spouts sweet venom in their ears and makes their minds all effeminate, you know. We can’t have that.”

“I should like,” pronounced Lady Herries with a stately air, “a husband who put me before business or politics.” “They don’t exist.”

IF THE RICHARD CRAWFORD who went to Branxholm was a troubled and reticent man, the Richard Crawford who returned was, as his wife ruefully put it, as sociable as a Trappist monk.

“Father disapproves of gambling with people who play better than he does.”

“Pretty girls with no dowry are for the hedgerow, not the altar. We are not all as fortunate as Richard.”

front parlour. What did you want to know?” “Something very simple.” He threw

“It is a little difficult,” said Lord Wharton, “to convey acceptably to a noble gentleman that he is an interfering fool.” And he let a pause develop just sufficiently before going on.

Meg Douglas in girlhood had possessed the gorgeous, leonine sort of beauty that her uncle Henry VIII had frittered away, and of which her father, the Earl of Angus, was the vestigial affidavit. In sixteen years’ residence in England, careening at Henry’s whim from near-throne to near-block, Margaret had kept her splendour.

own dirty pleasures while bairns starve in Teviotdale

You know Arran. So does everyone else, but no one’s going to tell the Queen that he’s a jelly-footed puddock with his wits in his wame.”

“Perhaps. I have been gifted with a surfeit of Satanity and the need to live up to it.

“Big bangs and primary colours appeal to the young.”

Today you murdered a friend of mine. You treat that very lightly. I hope his tolerance and his honesty and his infirmities break their way into your imagination

“I wish to God,” said Gideon with mild exasperation, “that you’d talk—just once—in prose like other people.”

“And as for Scottishe men and Englishe men be not enemyes by nature but by custome; not by our good wyll, but by theyre own follye: whiche shoulde take more honour in being coupled to Englande than we shulde take profite in being joyned to Scotlande…One God, one faythe, one compasse of the see, one lande and countrie, one tungue in speakynge, one maner and trade in lyvynge, lyke courage and stomake in war, lyke quicknesse of witte to learning, hath made Englande and Scotlande bothe one.”

“Like a shark. It’s a habit. And habits are hell’s own substitute for good intentions. Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative, of imagination. They’re the curse of marriage and the after-bane of death.”

“Versatility is one of the few human traits which are universally intolerable. You may be good at Greek and good at painting and be popular. You may be good at Greek and good at sport, and be wildly popular. But try all three and you’re a mountebank. Nothing arouses suspicion quicker than genuine, all-round proficiency.”

THE BELL OF HEXHAM ABBEY opening its lips to the pagan moon, sent its voice across the river: Voce mea viva depello cuncta novica; and the men waiting across the water in a blackened and doorless dovecote heard it; and heard also the rattle of approaching hoofs.

Grand Amour should be received royally, Richard, as a harsh and noble art.

The news reached Will Scott where he hung about in a frenzy of inactivity in Edinburgh.

“That,” said Henry Lauder, closing his spectacles and throwing his pen in the wastepaper basket, “is a brain. If I were ten years younger and a lassie, I’d woo him myself.”