A Curious Beginning (Veronica Speedwell, #1)

by Deanna Raybourn

I took a sip of the tea, pleased to find it scalding hot and properly strong. I abhorred weakness of any kind but most particularly in my tea.

Now, pay attention. I want you to drink this coffee. It is black as the devil and twice as strong. Drink it all.” I did as he bade, pulling a face at the taste of it. “Good girl. Now, pull back your hair,”

I felt in this new adventure I was rousing to life again. I was a butterfly, newly emerged from the chrysalis, damp winged and trembling with expectation.

“I do not like people who are easy to get along with. I would far rather keep company with the hedgehog than the squirrel.” “Don’t you mind the prickles?” he asked, and I had the oddest sensation he was laughing at me. “Prickles don’t frighten me,” I returned stoutly. “Not even yours.”

“I shall make a note of that,” he said soberly.

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.

I aspired to such sangfroid, but I had found it impossible to reconcile detachment with passionate fervor. One may be elegant or enthusiastic, but seldom both.

“Brazil? You have not lain with a woman since Brazil? Stoker, that was years ago.” “And?” he demanded. “You must engage in horizontal refreshment. It isn’t healthy to congest oneself like that.”

“And who is responsible for engaging the governess? No doubt Lady Cordelia. Who runs the household? Manages the servants? Supervises the children’s education? Settles the accounts? Lady Cordelia. I think his lordship takes wretched advantage of her generosity.”

“Perhaps. It is something of a relief to find another woman of intelligence and sound common sense. I have not met many, I can assure you.” “For which you blame my gender,” he finished. “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 I daresay you will not turn them loose without a fight.”

“No, I am not. I have known enough of women to understand they are as duplicitous and vicious as men. If they are capable of being our equals in malice, why not in our better qualities as well? 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.”

“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.” I put out my hand. “There is no one I would rather have at my back. To the end, then.” He grasped my hand and shook it. “To the end.”

“That’s how it often is in the world,” he reminded me. “But sometimes right wins simply because justice demands it.”