I have to know the killer, the victim and the motive when I begin. Then I start to create the characters and see how the novel takes shape based on what these people are like.
The one small room the house contained was scoured as a seashell. There was a table, a chest, a bedstead with a faded quilt, a spinning wheel, and a small loom. A few ancient kettles hung about the clean-swept hearth. From a square of sunlight on the floor an enormous yellow cat opened one eye to look at them.
Tis so beautiful – flowers every day of the year. You can always smell them in the air, even out to sea.
As Kit reached the part about the schoolmaster and his cane, to her amazement a rusty chuckle interrupted her. Hannah’s face had crumpled into a thousand gleeful wrinkles.
I can still see the green feathers if I look hard enough. But they’ve done their best to make you into a sparrow, haven’t they?
Because they have never tried to get to know her. People are afraid of things they don’t understand.
There was the Dolphin coming up the river with all her sails. The curving tail of the prow was chipped and dull, the hull was battered and knobby with barnacles, the canvas dark and weathered, yet how beautiful she was! In.
He trains my hands for war, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze.
Tell them the truth if you like,” responded Kit airily, knowing quite well that Judith, for all her disapproval, would never give her away. The common bond of just being young together in that household was strong enough for that.
A sudden joyful hope sprang into Mart’s mind.
He had envied Attean his free, unhampered life in the forest, and the boisterous comradeship in the village.
The man did not even hear her. His eyes had gone straight to Mercy where she sat by the hearth, and her own eyes stared back, enormous in her white face. Then with a hoarse, wordless sigh, John Holbrook stumbled across the room, and went down on his knees with his head in Mercy’s lap.
Beside the plain blue homespun and white linen which modestly clothed Aunt Rachel and Judith, Kit’s flowered silk gave her the look of some vivid tropical bird lighted by mistake on a strange shore.
She and Prudence sat on a cool grassy carpet. A pale green curtain of branches just brushed the grasses and threw a filigree of shadows, as delicate as the wrought silver, on the child’s face.
For Prudence was an entirely different child from the woebegone shrinking creature who had stood in the roadway outside the school. The tight little bud that was the real Prudence had steadily opened its petals in the sunshine of Kit’s friendship and Hannah’s gentle affection.
Watching Prudence, Kit suddenly felt a queer prickling along her spine There was something different about her. The child’s head was up. Her eyes were fastened levelly on the magistrate. Prudence was not afraid!
THERE WILL BE no Thanksgiving this week,” announced Matthew when he came home at noontime the next day. “It seems we have no authority here in Connecticut to declare our own holidays. His Excellency, the new governor, will declare a Thanksgiving when it pleases him.
I just wish it hadn’t happened four days before Thanksgiving. It’s going to spoil the holiday to have everyone so gloomy.
Was it possible that only love could bend the bow of bronze?
The dress that hung close to her head, waiting for the first rays of the sun to light it into beauty, symbolized the wonder of the past few days.
Matt thought, as though he couldn’t count the weeks for himself.