An Impossible Impostor (Veronica Speedwell, #7)

by Deanna Raybourn

uxoriousness.

One must speak the truth and shame the devil, as my dear mama always used to say.” It was astonishing, I mused, how often people claimed to be honest when they were simply making a virtue of excessive rudeness.

reserved my escapades for my travels, always knowing I could retreat to England should I feel myself in danger of falling prey once more to my softer feelings. And yet it was in England that I met the man who was more myself than I was. I had observed before that if the rest of the world’s folk were made of mud, Stoker and I were quicksilver, able to catch one another’s thoughts as easily as a swallowtail may be netted on the wing. We did not require one another, for neither of us was deficient. But we enhanced one another, we bettered one another.

“The easiest quicksand to get out of, Miss Veronica,” he had said with an emphatic gesture, “is the one into which one never gets.”

But Harry had been different, and with a rush of unpleasant self-knowledge, I understood why. Like Stoker, he had a slender ribbon of pain woven into the fabric of his soul. He troubled to conceal his—whilst Stoker, when I met him, was content to display his foul temper to anyone—but the root of the suffering was the same: abandonment. Two such different men, yet their wounds were very nearly identical. I had been drawn to them as wounded things, not to heal them, but because I sensed in them kindred spirits, for my own soul bore lacerations of its own, and with that realization came a sudden and ungovernable anger. I had existed, in almost perfect contentment, for quite a long time without that knowledge, and the implacable storm of it breaking so swiftly over my head left me adrift.

You madden me. You distract me. You enrage me. I cannot think of any person of my acquaintance who has so often and so thoroughly driven me to the brink of endurance. And yet you saved me. Whatever that melancholy state, it has been banished, and I know it is because I wake every day knowing that you are there.”

“It takes courage to live a good life, Harry, but it also takes courage to live like a blackguard. Both require difficult choices. Both require hardship and endurance and patience. There is, in the end, little difference between the good and the bad. Only one of these lives requires you to look over your shoulder all the while and the other one makes it a little easier to sleep at night.”

have been my whole life in the habit of solitude, of trusting no one but myself.

“His skepticism of Europeans is an honest result of the invasion and occupation of our country. I hope in time he will come to trust that we have some friends here, although not as many as I would like.”

Charles is not a monster,” Anjali clarified, “but what he is doing to her is monstrous. He has taken all from her that matters, her studies, her passions. He allows his wife to reduce her to a shadow, less than a person. She is permitted nothing of her own, not a dream, not an ambition. He gives all control over to Mary Hathaway, and because she fears what people will say more than anything, she strives to break Effie’s spirit as one would break an unruly horse. It is an untenable situation.”