An Impossible Impostor (Veronica Speedwell, #7)

by Deanna Raybourn

From his thirst for adventure to his avid intelligence, Stoker was an eminently likeable man when he was in good spirits. (The fact that he was superbly fit and partial to reciting Keats in moments of tenderness entered into my assessment of him not in the slightest. I am, after all, a woman of science.)

In our experience, anarchists might claim to have the good of the people at heart, but they were often quite untidy in their methods.

Stoker, being a male of the species, could not help occasionally erupting into irrationality. I had long observed that when a man does so, it is simplest to treat him with the same calm good humor one might employ when coaxing a stubborn horse or a slightly backwards child.

“Do not point your breakfast meats at me, sir,” I said in a tone of mild reproach.

Why gentlemen so often feel the need to conceal their kinder impulses is a mystery only Nature herself could answer.

I was a fervent believer in the restorative benefits of action.

There are few things I despise more than people who constantly quote platitudes. It demonstrates a painful lack of originality.

It was astonishing, I mused, how often people claimed to be honest when they were simply making a virtue of excessive rudeness.

I had been taught by my native guide how to extricate myself safely and indeed had done so upon numerous occasions, though not without incident. Quicksand, it must be noted, is almost always ruinous to one’s hat.

You have health and beauty and a wit so sharp a man might cut himself and think the bleeding a privilege.”

Too late, I understood the magnitude of a woman’s vulnerability in marriage, how every particle of her happiness depends upon her choosing well. And I had chosen unwisely.

We did not require one another, for neither of us was deficient. But we enhanced one another, we bettered one another.

Was my love the lesser because I would not risk myself to keep it?

What, I began to wonder, was the point of allowing a gentleman access to one’s bed and heart if he could not interpret a lady’s most irrational moods?

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.”

He was filthy and looked every inch the disreputable pirate. And he was the loveliest thing I had ever seen.

It was not a mere love token, I realized, but a gift from someone who truly understood what mattered to me. Any man might present orchids or jewels, but Stoker had given me back my joy.