Where did you learn to kiss like that? I said, a little breathless. He grinned and pulled me close again.
Having ensured the health of his bowels by disposing of his parritch in short order, he proceeded to add a French breakfast of buttered rolls and steaming chocolate on top of it.
Please, she said, don't mention Jamie Fraser to my daughter.
Here's tae us. Wha's like us? Damned few, she replied in broad Scots, and they're all deid.
No great difference at all, perhaps. Was my future any more certain than hers? And did I not depend for my life upon a man bound to me—at least in part—by desire of my body? A.
Deftly whipping a small tuning fork from his pocket, he struck it smartly against a pillar and held it next to Jamie's left ear. Jamie rolled his eyes heavenward, but shrugged and obligingly sang a note. The little man jerked back as though he'd been shot.
That, coupled with the.
Would you go down there, Roger? she asked softly. Jump overboard, dive in, go on down through that dark until your lungs were bursting, not knowing whether there are things with teeth and great heavy bodies waiting?
Aye, well, Murray replied, but think. Say a man is a coward and hasna died well. Purgatory gives him a chance to prove his courage after all, no? And once he is proved a proper man, then the bridge is open to him, and he can pass through the clouds of terrible things unhindered to paradise.
Did ye know that the silkies put aside their skins when they come ashore, and walk like men? And if ye find a silkie's skin and hide it, he—or she— he added, fairly, canna go into the sea again, but must stay with ye on the land.
My father liked me, when I wasna being an idiot. And he loved me, too -- enough to beat the daylights out of me when I was being an idiot. Jamie Fraser.
Lying on the floor, with the carved panels of the ceiling flickering dimly above, I found myself thinking that I had always heretofore assumed that the tendency of eighteenth-century ladies to swoon was due to tight stays; now I rather thought it might be due to the idiocy of eighteenth-century men.
It ... wasna a scream of fear, or even anger. It ... ehm ... well, it was the way a woman will scream, sometimes, if she's ... pleased. In bed, you mean. It wasn't a question. So do men. Sometimes. You idiot! Of all the things you might have said ...
Despair dragged at me like an anchor, pulling me down. I closed my eyes and retreated to some dim place within, where there was nothing but an aching grey blankness...
His heart beat slow, echoing in the ear he pressed against the pillow. Some nights, he would fall asleep listening to it, comforted by the fleshy, monotonous thump. Other times, like now, he would hear instead the mortal silence in between the beats—that silence that patiently awaits all men.
He was generally aware that he had been blessed in her beauty; even in her usual homespun, knee-deep in mud from her garden, or stained and fierce with the blood of her calling, the curve of her bones spoke to his own marrow, and those whisky eyes could make him drunk with a glance. Besides, the mad collieshangie of her hair made him laugh.
Oh, foisted, is it?" cried Mr. Ormiston in righteous indignation. "Such a word! And if it means what I think it does, young man, you should get down on your knees and thank God for such foistingness!
Ye are Blood of my Blood, and Bone of my Bone. I give ye my Body, that we Two might be One. I give ye my Spirit, 'til our Life shall be Done.
Good luck, Jamie, he said, voice a little husky. God go with you.
The headline read RETURNED FROM THE DEAD. Beneath was a picture of Claire Randall, twenty years younger, but looking little different than she did now, bar.
Just as my grandmother taught me, and her grandmother before her.
Sorcha, he whispered, and realized that he had called her so a moment before. Now, that was odd; no wonder she had been surprised. It was her name in the Gaelic, but he never called her by it. He liked the strangeness of her, the Englishness. She was his Claire, his Sassenach.
I estimated the ambient humidity at roughly a thousand percent, but tipped a little of my sweetened coffee into the saucer and blew on it nonetheless.
A man's life had to have more purpose than only to feed himself each day.
If a ship's coming in from a port known to have plague of some kind, the damned Hollanders make the sailors swim ashore naked.
You are blood of my blood, he said softly, and bone of my bone. I claim thee as my son before all men, from this day forever. He looked up at Jamie, challenging. After a long moment, Jamie gave the slightest nod of acknowledgment, and stepped back, letting his hand fall from Brianna's shoulder. Roger.
I knew from the first glimpse that he was dead. But I ran to him.
That's the best thing I can think of. Having a good hold on your arse always makes me feel steady.
Whither thou goest,' I said, ‘I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.' Be it Scottish hill or southern forest. You do what you have to; I'll be there.
She supposed that it it perhaps not fair to quarrel with someone on the basis of what you thought they were thinking.
Gentle he would be, denied he would not.
To have ye with me again, to talk wi' you, to know I can say anything, not guard my words or hide my thoughts. God, Sassenach the Lord knows I am as lust-crazed as a lad, and I canna keep my hands from you, or anything else. But I would count that all well lost, had no more than the pleasure of havin' ye by me, and to tell ye all my heart.
Nothing is lost, Sassenach; only changed. That's the first law of thermodynamics, I said, wiping my nose. No, he said. That's faith.
Soeur Emmanuelle? she said very softly, and gently, slowly, laid her hands on her mother's shoulders, fragile under the white cloth. She swallowed hard, so her voice wouldn't shake. You are forgiven.
Almost everybody understands that you have to have something at stake for a story to be good.
More than most men, he valued his name-I only hoped that given time, it would once more have value.
Overall, the library held a hushed exultation, as though the cherished volumes were all singing soundlessly within their covers.
The dog would run a few steps toward the house, circle once or twice as though unable to decide what to do next, then run back into the wood, turn, and run again toward the house, all the while whining with agitation, tail low and wavering. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, I said. Bloody Timmy's in the well! I.
Still, when had the right to live as one wished ever been considered trivial? Was a struggle to choose one's own destiny less worthwhile than the necessity to stop a great evil?
And if there was eternity, or even the idea of it, then perhaps Anselm was right; all things were possible.
Relatively few who could be described as a Red-haired dejenerate Pox-ridden Usuring Son of a Bitch who skulks in Brothels when not drunk and comitting Riot in the Street, I imagine.
There's always a temptation, I think, among some historical writers to shade things toward the modern point of view. You know, they won't show someone doing something that would have been perfectly normal for the time but that is considered reprehensible today.
I'm not sure that religion was constructed with time travelers in mind. Buck's brows rose at that. Constructed? he echoed, surprised. Who builds God?
Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Grey was still in his shirtsleeves; the rain had cut through the cloth to his flesh.
I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I've written a graphic novel.
Partly because of the way I write - I don't work with an outline or in a straight line. I work where I can see things happening, and so I get lots and lots of little bits to start with, and I'm doing the research at the same time.
At least we were not set upon by highwaymen, we encountered no wild beasts, and it didn't rain. By the standards I was becoming used to, it was quite dull.
James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser. Captain.
