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“Outside, the night was soft and fresh. There was a half-moon shining brightly in a field of stars, a glowing ring of light surrounding it, and it had made a trail across the bay that showed in places through the darker screen of trees.
They walked in silence, and she breathed the mingled scents of wildflowers sleeping in the shadows, and the salt air of the sea.
He had not let go of her hand. She did not want him to. They did not leave the clearing but at length they reached its edge, where rustling branches stretched above them and the light and noise and music of the barn seemed far away. One heart-shaped leaf fell from a nearby tree and landed on his shoulder and unthinkingly she lifted her free hand to brush it off before it marked the white coat she had worked so hard and long to clean.
She felt him looking down at her, and glancing up self-consciously she started to explain. And lost the words.
And then he bent his head and kissed her.
Everything around her seemed to stop, and still, and cease to matter. She could not have said how long it lasted. Not long, probably. It was a gentle kiss but at the same time fierce and sure and full of all the pent-up feelings she herself had fought these past months, and now she knew he had felt them just as she had, and had fought them, too. It was a great release to give up fighting. Give up everything, and float in the sensation.”
― Susanna Kearsley, Bellewether

“You love her."
Jean-Philippe did not- would not- deny it.
Pierre sighed. "You're like the sheep, Marine, so stupid. Always you look back at where you've come from, what you've been, what you believe you are, and so you do not see the path you should be taking."
"I'm a soldier. I don't get to choose my path." He'd meant for that to stop the argument.
It didn't. "You're a soldier, so you follow, yes? Then follow this." Pierre's hard finger jabbed him in the chest, above his heart. "God gave you this. He set it like a light within you, so that you could see it well and know the way to go. You follow this, Marine. Don't look behind.”
― Susanna Kearsley, Bellewether

“He had always liked to put a name to what he wanted.
It was not a name with which he was familiar. In fact he would have missed the times they'd spoken it before because it would have sounded as if they were saying ±ô'¾±»åé²¹±ô, a thought that made him smile faintly. Physically, at least, she was his own ideal. And even her dislike of him provided a distraction from his darker thoughts and troubles.”
― Susanna Kearsley, Bellewether

“She'd been sent up to the field to fetch the mare, although perhaps "sent" was too strong a word. Her father had done nothing more than ask her if she'd go, because the mare would not come willingly to any of the men but led them all a tiring chase, whereas for Lydia she came directly, took the halter quietly, and let herself be led downhill as meekly as a lamb.
To Lydia, it was a welcome chore. These first days of October had been busy ones that kept her in the garden cutting squash to dry and harvesting the beans for seed and digging her potatoes. There'd been pies to bake and pickles to be scalded- she had left the last to Violet, who made pickles best of any she had tasted- but the garden on its own had wanted more hours in the day than she could give it, and the digging left her shoulders sore, so it had been a great relief to start this day by simply walking up along the orchard wall into the upper field to find the mare.
Her father had a mind to go to Hempstead to Aunt Hannah's, and the mare would take him there and back more swiftly than the wagon team. She was a gray, a four-year-old with something of a filly's mischief glinting in her eyes as she stopped grazing, raising her fine head, and watched Lydia approach.
"There'd be no point," was Lydia's advice. "I've neither will nor energy to chase you so you'd have to play the game alone, which would be little fun."
The mare flicked one ear in acknowledgement of this and gave in gracefully, and although she did not step forward, she at least stood still and did not run. Lydia wasn't entirely sure herself why the mare favored her, but they had shared this rapport from the very first day that her father had brought the mare home as a yearling. Just as a horse could sense a nervous rider or a cruel one, it appeared that the mare could sense Lydia already carried a full share of troubles and did not need more. Whatever the reason, the mare bent her head to the halter and made no complaint and submitted herself to be led.”
― Susanna Kearsley, Bellewether

“From that position he had a clear view of Lydia within her garden, working with an admirably single-minded steadiness.
She'd changed her hair. She normally pulled all of it straight back and off her face and bound it simply, letting part of its coiled length hang down beneath the plain white muslin of her cap. But on this morning she had not been so severe with it. He liked the fuller, softer waves of brown about her forehead and her temples.
"So," he told Pierre, "it would be useful for me, while I'm here, to learn more English, so that in the future I can speak to those I capture."
"You are maybe overconfident, Marine, to think you will return to war."
"I'll be exchanged eventually." With a shrug he said, "So then in English, tell me, would you tell someone that it's nice, the way they wear their hair today?"
Pierre's glance held amusement. "This is how you deal with men you capture, eh? You compliment their hair? It's very threatening and very tough, I'm sure it leaves them terrified."
He hadn't had much cause for smiling since coming here, but Jean-Philippe felt his features relaxing now into a genuine smile at the other man's dry remark, and without meaning to, he looked again toward Lydia.
And found her looking straight back at him.
Once he'd been hit an inch under his heart with a bullet- there had been no pain but he'd lost all the wind from his lungs and been knocked right off balance, and what he felt now felt like that. This time, though, despite its swift and sudden strike, the feeling was decidedly more pleasurable. As he sent a nod across the clearing to acknowledge her, his smile of its own volition broadened like a schoolboy's.
He was letting down his guard, he knew, allowing the Acadian to witness where his interest- and his weakness- lay, but for some reason, standing in the sunshine with her watching him, he'd ceased to care.”
― Susanna Kearsley, Bellewether

“Do you ever feel your mother?"
Lydia's pencil stilled. "Yes," she said, quietly. "Sometimes I do."
Later that evening, when supper was finished, she took up her mending and curled herself into her mother's old chair with its leather seat slung in the low X-shaped frame like a welcoming lap. She could almost imagine her mother's arms holding her, here in the room with the warmth of the fire and the light of the candles, the wind rising hard at the glass of the window.
The men were still sitting around the long table in cross conversations, her brother and Mr. Ramírez discussing the length of the Bellewether's deck, while her father and Mr. de Brassart debated the merits of some play by Shakespeare, and Mr. de Sabran sat back and observed.
All the voices ran into and over each other and blended like billowy waves folding into the sea, and she struggled to stay on the surface while all of those waves with the troubles they carried went by. "Feel them passing?" her mother asked, rocking her gently.
Except they weren't passing. They bore her relentlessly down like great weights on her shoulders until she was sinking.
And then in place of her mother's arms she felt the strong ones of Mr. de Sabran, protecting her as they had done in New York, and it suddenly wasn't so terrible, drowning. She held him and drifted down into the dark.”
― Susanna Kearsley, Bellewether