Sublime

‘She was the wife of John Bell, who owned Lowlands until his death in 1889, and we’ve never known anything more about her: it’s as if she’s been cut out of time. We have records of their marriage, but not of her death; we have no portraits of her anywhere, and when the house and contents were sold none of her possessions were listed in the inventor

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but by blood”—his last words before execution were recorded, and, as has often been noted, they were prophetic. But they were also only partly true. Certain crimes were ceased by the Civil War, but they have not been purged. Not yet. Harpers Ferry is

briary

Earl Gerald,

I smiled, pulling my left elbow into my chest so that I could feel the shape of the gun in its holster. I made it look as if I were scratching. If she wanted to play it girlish, I’d play it boyish. I’d scratch. My gun. The time had come to kill Virginia.

Burns was

There was some justice in that, Mary thought. That nature had given Aoife such a weapon, and shaped it in the image of herself.