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August 20 - August 31, 2025
the once brilliant comet whose light had burned out so flamboyantly had come to rest in obscurity and poverty,
impressive number of gunfights in cities in the western United States. But that, too, was no great surprise. In my experience, Americans were very friendly and very fond of their firearms.
I didn’t do any of this for you, you impossible man. I did it for myself.
“Yes, well, being a lady is a crashing bore, or hadn’t you noticed?”
“I am above thirty years of age. I have led, not accompanied, but led expeditions to Amazonia and the Galapagos. I have discovered forty-two species of animal never before named in the known world. I have seen active combat in naval battles. And you have reduced me to a moronic child who asks questions and performs coin tricks.”
in my experience, it is far better to tell a man what he wants to hear and then do as you please than attempt to reason with him.
“There are times when it is entirely safe to show one’s vulnerability, to roll over and reveal the soft underbelly beneath. But there are other times when pain must be borne without a murmur, when the pain is so consuming that if you give in to it, even in the slightest, you have lost everything.”
“It’s funny, really. Do you know what his specialty was? Restoration. He loved nothing more than to take old paintings—pieces damaged by neglect or time or war—and make them whole again. Pity he never finished with me.”
He was entirely happy alone. He had his books and his music and his specimens, and that was all he required.
On the ground floor, cases and cabinets and plinths displayed what seemed at first impression to be a microcosm of the world itself. Art, nature, artifact—all were gathered there, as if to pay homage to the accomplishments of man and universe.
Seven inches across and shimmering with light, the creature had wings as black as night blazed across with a streak of emerald green richer than any jewel in the queen’s possession. A neat ruby head surmounted it all, and from this sprouted a pair of slender black antennae, curved as delicately as lace. The green slash ended in points, like feathers, and the vivid color was threaded with black capillaries, as though someone had drawn them in ink with the finest nib. It was this spectacular butterfly that had driven me to Sumatra in spite of the rumblings of Krakatoa. Such a small and fragile
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dank green river like a son of Poseidon.
I dared not meet his eyes for fear I would dissolve into laughter at the notion of an abductor who suffered from excessive wind. I primmed my mouth.
“I have this day been abducted, nearly drowned, and stabbed a man with a hatpin. I am unsinkable, Stoker. Do your worst.”
I thought of her then, her brilliant mathematician’s mind wasted upon grocers’ bills and linen counts, and I pressed her hand in return. “I will do my best not to let down the side, Lady Cordelia.”
It was as if we were two castaways from a far-off land, adrift among strangers whose ways we could not entirely understand.
“Who else? It is men who have kept women downtrodden and poorly educated, so burdened by domesticity and babies they can scarcely raise their heads. You put us on pedestals and wrap us in cotton wool, cluck over us as being too precious and too fragile for any real labor of the mind, yet where is the concern for the Yorkshire woman working herself into an early grave in a coal mine? The factory girl who chokes herself to an untimely death on bad air? The wife so worn by repeated childbearing that she is dead at thirty? No, my dear Stoker, your sex has held the reins of power for too long. And
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There are no masculine virtues, Veronica. And none sacred to women either. We are all of us just people, and most badly flawed ones at that.”
Where Stoker was a portrait in oils, his brother was a watercolor, with auburn hair and hazel eyes to Stoker’s black locks and dark blue eyes.
I always thought everything would be all right. I always believed when I closed my eyes at night that I would wake again in the morning. I knew the sun was just over the horizon, and I believed I would live to see it rise again.
“I could sooner influence the sun to set in the east, Sir Hugo. She is entirely her own woman.”
The rush of gratitude I felt for Stoker’s understanding nearly made me dizzy. Never before had I encountered a man so willing to abandon his allegedly God-given right to dominion over the fairer sex.
Empires rose and fell and wars were fought and children were born and lived and grew old and died before he answered, and the worst of it was that I could not show him by word or gesture how very much his reply would mean to me.
A thousand adventures lay before us, and I could not wait to begin them.
