“Vengeance, retaliation, retribution, revenge are deceitful brothers—vile, beguiling demons promising justifiable compensation to a pained soul for his losses. Yet in truth they craftily fester away all else of worth remaining.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, The Tarishe Curse

Jessica Harkness had knowingly said, “It was to be expected. An old maid’s last desperate fling. She’ll settle down to a couple of cats and a bitter looking expression permanently glued on her face in a few years, like Felicity Herbert. Nothing surer. Seen it all before I have, Alice. Lord knows what she’ll do when Miss Sophie marries Clara’s boy, for she can’t look after the place. It’s Miss Sophie that does all the woman’s work and no one will send a man round to help Miss Abi, it’s so sour and unpleasant as she is. A fool to herself that one’s been. She should have had half a dozen children by now, but I guess she couldn’t even be pleasant enough to a man to get him into and keep him in her bed. And Lord knows that’s not a difficult thing to do. A well fed and well bed man is like milk loaf dough in even a plain woman’s hands, and plain she is not. And besides it’s no chore, for a woman does need to be kept comfortable or in child so she can go about her work undistracted.”

“Come on Covern, why did you kill that woman that worked for the agency?” Tizzy was leaning over him, trying to get him to talk.
Her partner was standing nearby, just in case she got out of hand. He knew how Tizzy loves to use force to get her answers.

“Maybe he doesn’t talk unless he has a dildo shove up his ass?” Keith walks around him.

Covern was strapped into a metal chair in the interrogation room. There wasn’t any window or furniture in the room. He looks at both police officers and just smile at them.

The only person who made a socially acceptable living out of posing pre-pubescent girls and horses in the same tableaux was Norman Thelwell.