A Curious Beginning (Veronica Speedwell, #1)

by Deanna Raybourn

“O, the perfidy of men.” “What have I done?” he protested. “Nothing at present, but you are the only representative of your sex I have at hand to abuse. Take your lumps for your brothers.”

I have known enough of women to understand they are as duplicitous and vicious as men.

We are all of us just people, and most badly flawed ones at that.”

I might have enlightened him on the devastating effect of going about looking like a highwayman, but the risk he might scrub himself up to look like a parson was too horrifying to contemplate.

“But I know whatever it is, whatever ugly truths are resting in that bank, you will face them squarely. You have an odd sort of courage, Veronica. It will see you through.”

“If you are trying to frighten me, I assure you, my imagination is every bit as Gothic as yours.

“Stoker, I have received seventeen marriage proposals and that is by far the most halfhearted.”

“I am many things, Veronica Speedwell, and most of them I take no pride in, but I am still—and will ever be—a gentleman and a former sailor of Her Majesty’s Navy. And the one thing a sailor does not do is desert his comrades under fire. If we stay, we go down together, and we go down fighting.”

Of course, as had become our habit, we quarreled over what the end should be—or at least Stoker quarreled and I carried on doing precisely as I wished.

Stoker was every bit as tiresome about the plan as I expected. He raised objections on the grounds of my safety, his safety, common sense, and half a dozen other topics that I dispatched with a coolness that would have been a credit to any battlefield commander.

But it was not his rage I wanted then. For the first time in a very long time, I wanted something quite different from another human being—and as I explored that want I recognized it as a longing for reassurance.

“And I am the captain of this little endeavor? Are you content to be led into battle by me?” “You’re as fine a man as any I knew in the navy,” he assured me. “And if I did not give you command, you would only take it.”

“Templeton-Vane. It has been a long time.” “Not quite long enough,” Stoker observed blandly.

“I can only quote Xenocrates, dear lady. ‘I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.’”

I did not know what to say, so, as was my wont in times of confusion, I turned to the butterfly—always darting just out of reach, using its mazy flight as defense as well as a means of moving forward. I reached into my pocket and changed the subject.

That is the hallmark of a good partnership, you know—when one partner sees the forest and the other studies the trees.

I held my breath as he considered, and in that moment of stillness it seemed all of eternity slipped past. 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.

We bickered happily all the way back to Bishop’s Folly, as I had expected we would. Whatever Stoker and I undertook, we should never do so without a feisty discussion and a pitched battle of wits.

Exploration beckoned and we would answer its clarion call to continents uncharted and seas unsailed; we would travel them together and perhaps even unravel a mystery or two as well. A thousand adventures lay before us, and I could not wait to begin them.