I had hoped that the sleeping draught he had proposed might be forgotten, or failing this that it would be sent up to the privacy of my room. No such relief was granted: Michael and...

After dinner, while his three sons made up a whist table with Lady Bedivere, Sir Donald spoke to me. We sat together on the far side of the room from the card players, and were...

It was Sir Thomas Malory in Morte d’Arthur who created the image of Camelot, the fabled capital of King Arthur’s realm and potent symbol of the Arthurian world. The precise location of Camelot is not...

The dinner was a special one. We dined well normally at Carmaliot – too well, I thought – but this particular meal, as I had gathered from a muttered snatch of conversation between two of...

He moved towards the open door of the hut, attempting to draw me after him. I was shocked again by the full realization of his intentions, now undisguised. At the same time I understood that...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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....