An Impossible Impostor (Veronica Speedwell, #7)

by Deanna Raybourn

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

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.

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.

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.”

Division from Stoker, in any form, was like an amputation of the soul, and I would do anything to bridge the abyss between us.

I turned to the legal document. It was the marriage lines Stoker had spoken of—a record of my wedding to Harry Spenlove. And my eyes fell upon the space where the attending clergyman ought to have signed. It was blank. So too were the spaces for witnesses. Without those, there was no marriage, I realized with a dizzying rush of emotion. I had married him in good faith, but Harry, ever the opportunist, had—through some sleight of hand—ensured the proper legalities were not fulfilled. I had, it seemed, lived in sin with him in Sumatra. Delicious, liberating, unfettered, and unbinding sin. Whatever his intentions in keeping the document, in giving it to me, he had ensured that I knew I was free.