Midwinter

Alastair Maclean

Alastair Maclean is a soldier of Jacobite sympathies returning from France, whose slow journey home keeps snagging on mischances, warrants, and other men's secrets. His exchange with General Oglethorpe exposes the tension that defines him: a man of the old chivalrous world, courteous even to his enemies, caught in a new England he only half understands. His divided loyalties and his habit of being trusted by both sides make him the natural thread on which the whole intrigue is strung.

Mr. Samuel Johnson

Johnson is the travelling companion and moral counterweight to Alastair's soldierly impulses, a man whose learning gives him confident verdicts on everything from loyalty to love. His pronouncement that some women give once in life and then utterly and forever haunts Alastair at the very moment he must decide whether to shatter a heart or save it. As the pair ride through fog and flood toward Derby, Johnson's presence keeps the story's private dilemmas as urgent as its political ones.

Mr. Nicholas Kyd

Mr. Kyd moves through Brightwell society as a genial bachelor, laughing off runaway marriages and wagging a moralising head at other men's scandals. His perpetual readiness for laughter and his broad Lowland accent make him easy to underestimate, even as he steers conversations exactly where he wants them. The letters that pass through Brightwell on their way north carry his hand, and the question of what he is really doing in this business shadows the whole middle of the book.

Sir John Norreys

Sir John Norreys is the husband Lady Norreys speaks of with such tender pride, a man of the trusted inner circle whose absence she bears as her chief sorrow. Yet his movements are not what she believes: he is expected near Brightwell, receiving letters from Edom that carry desperate import to the Prince. The gap between the devoted husband his wife describes and the man actually moving through the plot is one of the story's most unsettling puzzles.

Amos Midwinter

Midwinter appears at the Fallow Deer in the thick of the snow, gives orders to the landlord like a man who owns the place, and is gone again before Alastair can make sense of him. His creed forswears all common loyalties, which makes him useful to everyone and trustworthy to no one, and he shows little interest in Alastair's hunt for the traitor. Yet his advice to come to Brightwell, and his quiet assurance that Sir John will travel securely, prove he knows far more about the web than he lets on.

Duchess Kitty

Duchess Kitty holds court at Brightwell in flowered chintz and cherry-velvet ribbons, teasing Mr. Murray about the King's Solicitor and lamenting that Pope and Gay have left her without a versifier. Her childlike eyes and tripping walk disguise a woman who reads the room better than anyone in it, and who knows exactly how dangerous it is to be Scotch in this company. Her playful invitation to plot treason is not entirely a joke, and her presence gives the Brightwell scenes their glittering, uneasy surface.