Sea of Secrets: A Novel of Victorian Romantic Suspense by Amanda DeWees Read Free Book Online

was when I embarked on my new life. I was armed with a strange combination of learning and inexperience: from my unorthodox reading (unorthodox, that is, for a young woman) I had culled an accumulation of worldly knowledge but, having led a sheltered and mostly solitary life for more than twenty years, I was nevertheless hugely naïve.
    I knew that evil existed, and that the world was not always a just place; had I not just received shattering proof of this? I knew also a great deal more than I should have about matters considered improper for ladies’ sensibilities—the earthier aspects of love, for example (here I was indebted to Catullus and Byron).
    Of real human evil, though, I was ignorant. My father’s tender mercies had taught me that parents could be unnatural, that where I should most expect caring I might find only calculation. But I thought him an isolated case, an extreme—certainly not one of a multitude. If only there had been some wiser soul to warn me that other families hid secrets just as malignant.
    At the time, though, I would not have heeded any such warning. I was eager to trust, and to love. Only later would I learn the dangers of both.
    When my necessaries had been loaded into the hansom cab I stood for a long moment before the door to my father’s study. He was keeping his normal schedule; no need to interrupt it to bid farewell to someone who was no longer his daughter. He had easily made the transition from father to childless widower. Molly already had orders to move the furniture out of the room I had occupied so that it might be made into a library.
    But I could not sever myself from him so easily. It did not matter that there was no love between us, that he had never shown the slightest interest in me other than as a reflection upon him; for all that, he was my father, and something like loneliness swelled painfully beneath my ribs as I stood ready to leave him.
    If only I could have won his respect, if not his love; I had always hoped somehow that I could achieve something that would win a fraction of the approval and commendation he gave Lionel. My translations for Lionel, I had thought, might impress him; but when I made the mistake of telling him of them, he reviled me as a jealous liar, trying to steal the credit for my brother’s accomplishments, and in the same breath derided me as a bluestocking. My skill in sewing he turned to good use, since if I made my own dresses he did not have to pay a seamstress, but he dismissed it as a brainless accomplishment, the only one elementary enough for a girl who could not play or draw. It had taken me time to learn the futility of running to him with every small accomplishment in hopes of winning his admiration.
    Even so, in spite of the years since in which I had told myself that it was best and easiest to help him to forget my presence rather than to draw attention to it, there was still a part of me that longed for his approval. I wondered if he would be proud of me, even for a moment, if I told him of my acquaintance with the duchess and of her patronage of me. He would be impressed, that was certain; his dearest wish was to move among the aristocracy, and he might even spare a morsel of admiration for me, knowing that I was to achieve what he so prized.
    I raised my hand to knock. I would tell him. But then the memory of the faceless painting of my mother came before my eyes, and a return of that flush of anger and revulsion. He might be proud of me—but it would be because he thought I was using the duchess to foster my own ambition, as he would have done. I would be no better than him if I tried to plume myself on the acquaintance. Heat rushed to my face as I realized how close I had come to lowering myself to that level, and I turned and almost ran out the door and to the waiting cab.
    When I reached the railway station the duchess had named, I discovered that I had no need to ask anyone for directions to her car. The duchess literally