An Impossible Impostor (Veronica Speedwell, #7)

by Deanna Raybourn

Stoker, being a male of the species, could not help occasionally erupting into irrationality.

There are few comforts as satisfying as a warm fire, a cozy bed, and a delicious meal after one has been chilled to the bone with wind and rain.

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

The voice came from the shadows under the stairs, and I began to wonder if the Hathaways kept that particular doorway dark solely to accommodate dramatic entrances.

I do not regret you, Harry. I do not think of you.”

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.

And so, I forgot it. At least, I tried. I worked hard, day and night, driving myself into exhausted and dreamless sleep, until at last, Harry began to fade, like a snippet of a song, long since heard and half-forgot.

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

It has been my experience that when one is accosted by a lowness of spirits due to some failing in one’s character, it becomes a habit to seek out and prod any other failing.

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?

“I should hope that I am a woman of sufficient character not to bear grudges of anything as insignificant as a failed love affair.”

MacGregor’s eyes were bright and fathomless, and she used them to wonderful effect. A man could drown in such eyes, I reflected, and possibly quite a few women.

I much prefer cats, you know. They are entirely indifferent to one’s presence.”

“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.”

The sea is the sea wherever you go. I want only to sit and watch the wind on the waves and feel small for a while. I want to feel my own insignificance.”

“For a civilized country, England is absolute death to a nice wardrobe.”

We were jolted and jostled, and yet there was something magical about that moment, that liminal time between our liberation and our arrival back in London. We could do nothing but be carried along like so many leaves upon the surface of a churning river. The leaf so moved does not think, and neither did I, content to feel the whip of the wind against my cheeks as we dashed through the night.

“I have oft thought of us as Pyramus and Thisbe, Orpheus and Eurydice, Apollo and Daphne . . .” He trailed off with a dreamy look. “Stabbed, cursed to the underworld for all eternity, turned into a tree,” I said, ticking off the endings on my fingers. “I do not much care for the fates of your heroines,” I told him.

“There is nothing more political than the ability to take care of one’s own people.”

“The mistake you made was in thinking she was a bit player in your story,” Stoker told him. “She is mistress of her own fate and she bends to no man.”

There is no power or pain as devastating as a first love.”