Night of a Thousand Stars

Night of a Thousand Stars by Deanna Raybourn Read Free Book Online

Book: Night of a Thousand Stars by Deanna Raybourn Read Free Book Online
Authors: Deanna Raybourn
responsibility is?”
    I thought of the endless round of brushing clothes and whipping hems and pinning hair and shrugged.
    “It’s to be watchful—to see all and understand what we see. I watched you with Mr. Madderley, and I could tell from the first moment I saw you together you were entirely unsuited.”
    “You might have told me,” I said, kicking a pebble.
    “You did not ask,” she returned mildly.
    I grinned again. “All right, Masterman. I’ll give you that. And you can stay on if you like.”
    She gave me a brisk nod to indicate her acceptance. We walked on in silence for a little while, taking a turn around the pond. A few apathetic ducks bobbed on the glassy surface and a limp lily floated along. There was no one else on the village green, and even the smoke coming from the chimneys drifted in lazy circles.
    “Masterman, with your gift for watchfulness what do you make of our present circumstances?”
    She looked around the village, taking in the quiet shops and tranquil, sleepy air of the place.
    “I think, miss, we are in very great danger of being bored.”
    * * *
    She was not wrong. After that, our days settled into a pattern. Masterman and I went for long walks each morning, and after luncheon Father painted in his studio while I tried to make friends with George, although he remained stubbornly unmoved by my charms. I asked him to teach me to make his clever little soufflés or roast a duck or let me polish the silver, but each attempt was met with a firm rebuff. “That’s your side of the cottage,” he would state flatly, pushing me out of the kitchen and back into the hall. It was too bad really, because I was bored senseless and genuinely interested in acquiring a few new skills. It might come in handy to be able to roast a duck, I thought, but George was unwilling to oblige.
    So I occupied myself with brooding. I wrote no letters and received only one—a curt message from Mother stating that she had returned the wedding gifts but that I had been remiss in returning my engagement ring to Gerald. It was an enormous pigeon’s blood ruby, a relic from the days of the first King George and worn by every Madderley bride. The viscountess had been particularly resentful at giving it up, and I was abashed I hadn’t thought to give it back to Gerald when he left the cottage. I made a note to take it with me when I went up to London next; I couldn’t possibly trust such a valuable jewel to the post. But London held no charms for me in my present mood. I had given up reading the Town newspapers after the second day. They were vitriolic on the subject of my almost-marriage, and going up would mean facing people who had decided I was only slightly less awful than Messalina.
    So I buried myself in books, raiding Father’s library for anything that looked promising. There were a handful of Scarlet Pimpernel books and an assortment of detective stories, but beyond that nothing but weighty tomes on art history. I had almost resigned myself to reading one of them when I discovered a set of books high on a shelf, bound in scarlet morocco. They were privately printed, that much was obvious, and I gave a little gasp when I saw the author’s name: Lady Julia Brisbane. She was Father’s youngest sister, and the most notorious of our eccentric family. After a particularly awful first marriage, she had taken as her second husband a Scot who was half-Gypsy and rumoured to have the second sight. The fact that he was distantly related to the Duke of Aberdour hadn’t counted for much, I seemed to recall. There had been scandal and outrage that a peer’s daughter had married a man in trade. Nicholas Brisbane was a private inquiry agent, and Aunt Julia had joined him in his work. Ending up a duchess must have been particularly sweet for her, I decided. Father had talked about them my first morning at the cottage, and as near as I could guess, these books were her memoirs.
    I turned the first over in my

Similar Books

The Newlyweds

Elizabeth Bevarly

H. M. S. Cockerel

Dewey Lambdin

Finding Mary Jane

Amy Sparling

Dare Me Again

Karin Tabke

Amish Confidential

Lebanon" Levi Stoltzfus

The Moscoviad

Yuri Andrukhovych

The Black Box

Michael Connelly