Love and Honor A Novel [Paperback]

Virginia cavalryman Kieran Selkirk is summoned to a clandestine meeting in the winter of 1774. There he finds none other than Benjamin Franklin, who reveals the brilliant soldier's assignment: He is to travel to Russia disguised as a British mercenary and convince Catherine the Great not to join the British in their war with America. It is not a quest for the weak of heart, for to succeed, Selkirk must survive savage terrain, starving wolves, secret assassins, marauding Cossacks, a court of seductive young women, and even a dramatic romantic face-off with the legendary Tsarina herself. Wallace's perfectly chosen words weave spell upon spell, rising to give images so romantic, stories so enthralling and characters so compelling that one is utterly transported.

-- Mel Gibson

A full, rewarding story, told in the lives of characters so vivid they command our watching.

-- Reynolds Price

Chapter One

Northern Russia, 1774

The first howl sang across the night void and trembled the frozen air, a sound thin as the starlight poised on the blue plains of snow, with no more presence than the memory of a vanished loved one, and just as inescapable across the face of the world; and as with a ghostly visage rising before me, I might have denied that the cry existed. But the horses plunged.

Sergei Gorlov, the friend and fellow mercenary who had mentored me for the last two years in the art of cavalry warfare and who guided me now into the vast mysteries of his homeland, sat beside me, bundled beneath blankets in the open sleigh. Opposite us huddled a fat merchant, his back to Gorlov's driver, Pyotr, an ageless Russian peasant whose expert hands upon the reins had kept the horses moving briskly through the llƒ/