Justin Caryll has been raised in Paris by a Jacobite fanatic for a single purpose: to go to London and destroy the Earl of Ostermore, who ruined his mother — and who is Justin's own father. He arrives in London a polished man of fashion with Jacobite business of his own, and finds the earl's household harder to hate than he was taught, and Hortensia, a girl of that household, impossible not to love. Sabatini spoke five languages and chose English because, he said, all the best stories are told in it; the lion's skin of the title is Aesop's, and the question is who is really wearing it. Fifty-six plates of horses, lions and country houses, from Stubbs and Munch among others, echo the masks and appetites of Sabatini's London.
