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January 18 - January 19, 2025
“Minnie Mornaday?” Stoker lifted a brow. “Definitely do not marry her and inflict such a fate on the girl.” “May. I. Finish?”
“Beloved, you have misplaced your shoulder again,” I advised him. He looked down in surprise. “So I have.”
“Do you really think so?” “I do. In fact, I have observed something in the few seconds we have been standing here—namely, that the lock has been broken,”
“But my love is best reserved for myself, I think. That will serve me better.”
“Yes, do,” I urged. “And Mornaday, leave that revolver in your pocket. We are not Americans, for heaven’s sake. Besides, it is not Eliza Elyot, I am almost certain. It is someone else entirely, and here at my invitation.”
“Veronica, kindly bring this meeting back to the matter at hand, or I will do a violence to someone, and at the moment, I do not particularly care to whom.”
“Veronica,” Stoker said, his eyes brilliant in the low lamplight, “I have known you in every possible way a man can know a woman. I understand you better than you will ever admit because one cannot fully love what one does not fully comprehend, and believe me when I say I love you entirely and comprehend you completely. For all your delightful unpredictability, you are thoroughly consistent in always choosing the most outlandish, outrageous, unimaginable options in any given situation. And that is how I know you mean to take the place of the Beauty in that casket.”
“Do you not mean to dissuade me? Point out the flaws in my plan? Express your objections with vehemence and eloquence?” He tipped his head. “Actually, no.” I blinked in astonishment. “Are you entirely well? Have you a fever? Should I palpate something?”
We have enjoyed many adventures together—hazards and perils I could never have imagined before I met you, and I say that as a person who has actually participated in naval bombardments and expeditions to Amazonia.
And time and again, I have been ignored. You have done exactly as you pleased in the face of my objections. They have won me precisely nothing. Not an inch of ground have you given. So, I concede.”
most? If I have lectured or harangued in the past, it is because I am afraid. Every moment of every day, I am afraid.”
“Of losing that which I have come to realise I cannot live without. But I do not want a small and stifled version of you. I want you—in all your intrepid and audacious glory. I want you just as you are, the entirety of your chaos and your wildness. You are the whirlwind I did not know I needed, but now that you are here, I will
not be the one to ask you to be anything different than exactly as you are. More than anyone, I ought to understand that nature cannot be denied. And your nature is tumult.”
“Only one man in a thousand—ten thousand—would have answered me as you have just done.”
“Only one woman in ten thousand would have deserved that answer.”
“Someday,” I said, a trifle acidulously, “perhaps men will stop finding unconscious women to be an allurement.” “Some men prefer a lady who is silent,”
“She did not throw herself in,” Eliza corrected savagely. “She ended up in the canal because he put her there.”
there, I would find him and drag him out. And if I could not do that, I would join him.
He pulled me to him at the same moment I threw myself on him.
“But you show no signs of concussion—frankly a miracle, for you ought to have been blown to bits.”
“I thought you liked my scars.” “I would rather have your scars than any other man’s perfection,”
“I love you,” I told him, tipping my head to the side like a winsome kitten. “Not that. Say what I really want to hear,” he commanded. “I don’t see why—” “Veronica Speedwell. Say. It.” “Very well,” I muttered. “I was wrong.”
“My god, I have never been so happy to hear anything in the whole of my life.” “Enjoy the moment,” I told him tartly. “It will surely never come again.”
“What in the name of the oozing wound of Christ—VERONICA!”
Mary Smith. Whether that was how she was called at birth or the name given her by the orphanage, we would never know.
His eyes never left mine as he closed my hand around the ring. “But I know now that I will never die alone and unclaimed. I have you.”
