“Repressively, Lymond himself answered. “I dislike being discussed as if I were a disease. Nobody ‘got’ me,” he said.”

“If you can repress for a moment your spinster-like longing to meddle in my affairs,’ said Lymond cuttingly, from the door, ‘I am waiting to go.”

“I must apologize for these damned entrances,’ said Francis Crawford of Lymond. ‘I feel Tom here never knows if he should send for a bishop or start a round of applause.”

“You’re going to declare a rest period?’ asked Jerott. Leisure, with Gabriel there, seemed too good to be true. ‘Rumour being what it is, I imagine it will have declared itself by now,’ Lymond said. ‘Yes. We shall take three days from our labours to relax. Provided Sir Graham understands that by midday tomorrow St Mary’s will be empty and all the men at arms and half the officers whoring in Peebles.’ In the half-dark you could guess at Gabriel’s smile. ‘Do you think I don’t know human nature?’ he said. ‘They are bound by no vows. But as they learn to respect you, they will do as you do.’ ‘That’s what we’re all afraid of,’ said Jerott; and there was a ripple of laughter and a flash of amusement, he saw, from Lymond himself.”

“Then Lymond’s voice, the chill gone, said, ‘Don’t be an ass, Jerott? You know I can’t do without you.’ It was an obvious answer. But it was also something Jerott had never had from Lymond before: an apology and an appeal both at once.”

“What do you hope for that you haven’t got? What can that child give you?’ There was a little silence. ‘A virgin audience for my riddles, I believe,’ said Lymond thoughtfully, at length. ‘But it certainly poses an ungallant question.”

“Better to be whipped than humoured; better to be crushed than cherished.… It was a woman told me that. I live in a world of men, my dear,’ Lymond had said. ‘I love you all, but I shall never marry you.”