Mistress of Night and Dawn by Vina Jackson Read Free Book Online

unnerving, but every time she looked around to investigate there was no one to be seen.
    And then the letter arrived.
    In a thick, brown envelope that screamed bureaucracy it fell onto the mat below the door’s flap with a heavy thud alongside the usual assortment of household bills, a couple of magazines and a handful of circulars.
    Aurelia was in the first-floor bathroom brushing her teeth. She heard Laura’s steps in the hall and her customary grunt as she bent down to pick up the mail. Her godmother was suffering from arthritis in her joints and, these days, her movements were all too often punctuated by sighs and sounds of mild protest at the way her body was reacting to her physical needs.
    Laura was a decade older than her godfather, John, and Aurelia had always been amazed that two people who seemed so different had managed to stick together for so long. John was a serious, practical man who worked as an architect on dull corporate building projects in the City of London. Whereas Laura was an artist who specialised in blowing glass into delicate birdlike shapes, as far removed from the sturdy steel structures that John designed as one could imagine.
    They had met twenty years earlier on the Tube, when Laura had been carrying one of her creations to an exhibition and had dropped it at his feet where the glass had shattered into a million pieces. Their hands had touched as Laura had knelt down to gather up the fragments and John had tried to help her. The rest, as they often said, was history. And, despite the apparent contrast in their personalities, they remained as much in love now as they had been the first year they met.
    Aurelia had never known her own parents. She was only a baby when they both died in an accident in America and she had been raised by John, who had been a friend of her father’s at university, and his wife Laura, who was unable to conceive children of her own.
    Aurelia was grateful to them for taking her in, but despite their kindless she had never quite managed to think of them as Mum and Dad, and so their relationship remained a strange mix of affection and distance.
    Her godparents had always been somewhat furtive about the details of her parents’ deaths and eventually Aurelia presumed they simply didn’t know anything more. So she stopped asking questions, but she never stopped wondering what sort of people her parents had been, exactly how they had died and whether or not she was growing into their likeness.
    There was a shuffle of paper from the hall and then Laura’s voice.
    ‘Aurelia dear, there’s some mail for you.’
    She rinsed her mouth and acknowledged her godmother’s shout out. In all likelihood something totally unimportant. Aurelia couldn’t remember the last time she’d received any actual mail in the post. All her communications were through email and text messages, with Siv and the other friends in their circle, and she had no recollection of setting pen to paper aside from sending the occasional birthday card. She rushed back to her bedroom, slipped on a pair of jeans and ran downstairs.
    Laura had moved to the kitchen where she was busying herself with preparing breakfast. Gentle hissing sounds from the coffee maker were punctuated by the steady rhythm of the wooden spoon turning in the pan, stirring the porridge oats to keep them from burning. A soft light fell through the large bay windows and lit up the jars of marmalade and pickles that were stacked on wooden shelves alongside the larder. John was still upstairs reading in bed, his customary weekend indulgence.
    The mail had been picked up from the mat and the letter addressed to her was propped up on the dining table, resting against a large jug of tulips, imported from the hot houses in Holland and just beginning to open, their pale-pink buds unfurling with surprising swiftness and adding an early spring note to the late winter morning.
    Aurelia peered down at the envelope. It was indeed her name typed in a