A stiff white hand
They brought him back from the dockyard on a cart. It was a cold day, with drizzling rain, and the men who accompanied the body were wet and bedraggled. They had covered him with a...
Category: Bride for Bedivere
Extracts from A Bride for Bedivere
A fine gentleman
It was just after four o’clock that Sir Donald arrived, by growler and unaccompanied. I had expected something more impressive: a private carriage and a retinue of servants. But it was a rare occasion even...
A smiling sacrifice
The morning was grey to match my feelings, and bitingly cold. Sir Donald was handed in to sit with his back to the coachman, and I was placed opposite. I was permitted to have the...
Welcome to Carmaliot
The village huddled in a valley fold, its single street rising fairly steeply between converging slopes. Above and beyond the clutter of buildings, on the horizon, an immensely larger house was silhouetted against a sky...
The eldest cousin
‘Here is Michael at last. Jane, permit me to introduce you to the eldest of your cousins.’ I stared as he bowed in greeting. It was true Sir Donald had said nothing of his appearance,...
Beauty and Beast
I came on him unexpectedly, the morning after my arrival. Walking in the garden I turned the corner of a high box hedge and saw him lying in my path, dozing in the wintry sun....
My four-legged friend
The figure rose out of the ground in front of me, a shorter distance away than the bird had been. I stopped, my hand on my breast. It was a man: wild, dirty, menacing. He...
Disdain at first sight
Sir Donald asked: ‘Have you taken your Chlorodyne?’ ‘Doctor Roberts brought me some mixture of his own.’ ‘Then you should have taken them both,’ Sir Donald declared. ‘I have sent away for some pulmonic wafers,...
More – or less – beastly
A significant character in A Bride for Bedivere is Beast, the ugly cowering mutt whom Jane befriends and who – like many of the others she meets at Carmaliot – turns out to be not...
Arthur’s country
We had walked on the drive itself, with gravel softly crunching under our feet, but suddenly Sir Donald put a hand under my elbow and steered me on to the lawn. The grass was heavy...
