An Impossible Impostor (Veronica Speedwell, #7)

by Deanna Raybourn

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

Quicksand, it must be noted, is almost always ruinous to one’s hat.

More ravishing than you were then and entirely mistress of your own destiny. You have employment that suits you, a companion who clearly worships your very hem. 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.

If I took one excellent lesson away from my marriage, it was that wifehood was not my calling and was one I vowed I would never undertake again.

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.

“When you have reached my advanced years, Mary dear, I do hope you will have acquired a little wisdom to compensate for the loss of your good looks.”

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. Self-loathing is a habit, and one I could not afford to indulge.

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.

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.”

“Do you really plan on garroting someone in the Sudbury?” he asked pleasantly. “One can never anticipate when one will be forced to garrote,” I informed him as I pinned my hat into place.

“She is mistress of her own fate and she bends to no man.”

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

His hair, always overlong, was a tumble of black waves, his jaw heavily shadowed by unshaven beard. He was filthy and looked every inch the disreputable pirate. And he was the loveliest thing I had ever seen.

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

“For too long I have resisted allowing anyone else to be responsible for me. I have loved you but held you at bay, determined to withhold part of myself. I am willing now to put my happiness into these hands.”