If that image doesn’t grab you, you have no romance in your soul, and this isn’t the author for you. I’m not sure I will ever look at the full or waning moon in the same light again. And the wool slips from the spindles into the water, and unravels in long ripples of light from the shore to the horizon, rising above the sea, just a thin curved thread, reappearing in the sky. Then, at length, the moon is gone, and the world has darkness, and rest, and the creatures of the hillsides are safe from the hunter and the tides are still.Then in the darkest night, the maidens take their spindles down to the sea, to wash their wool. Night after night, you can see the moon getting less and less, the ball of light waning, while it grows on the spidles of the maidens. They’re not fates, or anything terrible they don’t affect the lives of men all they have to do is see that the world gets its hours of darkness, and they do this by spinning the moon down out of the sky. She brings her settings to life, she stirs in some mythology and classical references, and she gives you a bit of classic poetry to start off every chapter head. Lest you think Mary Stewart a simple, unsophisticated romance writer, allow me to assure you that she writes with wit, and with a knowledge base that shows at every turn. Nancy Drew for a slightly older crowd? Whatever it is, I seem to sink into her world and never wish to exit until I have reached the last page, and I find them just as much fun at my advanced age as I did when I was in my teens and devouring them for the first time. Perhaps I have always loved Stewart so much because she paints the kind of witty, fearless, adventurous women that all young girls secretly long to be. Who can resist a man in trouble? No Nicola Ferris, evidently, for despite the imminent danger, she links her fate with a wounded stranger she finds in the remote mountains of a Cretan village. My mind threw back immediately to Arthur pursuing the white stag to find Excalibur in her masterpiece Merlin trilogy, and I settled down to love every word yet to come. I saw it straight away as the conventional herald of adventure, the white stag of the fairytale, which, bounding from the enchanted thicket, entices the prince away from his followers, and loses him in the forest where danger threatens with the dusk. I knew I was going to be in love with this novel when I read the opening paragraph. Of course, one would hope not to encounter any of the diabolical characters she plants in the way of her heroine, but then it wouldn’t be a Mary Stewart novel if they weren’t there, would it? I cannot think how anyone could read her gorgeous descriptions of the White Mountains of Crete and not be wishing to board the next plane out for Greece. Mary Stewart always brings out the wanna-be traveler in me.
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