Read Online Since the Surrender by Julie Anne Long - Free Book Online

universal appeal, hung back as it was from the street, as if in lowered-head recognition of the superiority of other museums. She took one last look at the painting, at the great placid cow and the angel with her forward-spilling bosom, and sighed. What on earth could this have to do with Lucy? Lucy with her too-ready laugh and yearning for luxury and her constant, restless aspiring for something she thought would make her happy, when only starting life over again with plenty of things to begin with would have done that. Lucy, her baby sister, not at all a baby anymore, but a very pretty woman who’d never been given a reason to develop any real sense, and this in part was her fault, Rosalind knew, because she had taken upon herself the burden of being sensible enough for all of them. She should have kept a closer eye on Lucy, but she’d been in Derbyshire since Waterloo, wallowing, savoring the rare solitude. Waiting with a curious near-detachment to see what shape her life would take in the wake of the war.
    She smoothed dampened palms down the elegant shape of her pelisse.
    Maybe she was mad. Flailing for clues the way someone plummeting to the ground flails the air for holds of any kind on the way down. She hated her sudden uncertainty, but she’d felt the tug of Captain Eversea’s usual certainty as he spoke. It was tempting to surrender to it, to conclude she was of course misguided. Deluded, even.
    And this is why she hadn’t told him about the letter she’d received a week ago. Because she could imagine his expression then. Unsigned, comprised of one vague, offhand sentence. It frightened her, coming as it had just after she’d begun inquiring into Lucy’s disappearance. But when she held it up to the cold light of Captain Eversea’s surgical reasoning, it, like everything else she considered a clue to Lucy’s disappearance, seemed circumstantial. Worrying about Lucy doubtless made her easier to frighten. She sighed and turned to leave the museum.
    Which is when she saw, out of the corner of her eye, a man dart across the room next to her.

    Shock congealed a scream that would have tattered her throat. An embarrassing rasp of sound finally emerged from her. Her heart crashed so punishing against her breastbone that she touched the wall for balance.
    She could have sworn the man was wearing…a doublet. And a cloak that he’d swished elegantly aside as he walked. And…puffy drawers. Stuffed hose, in other words. She was certain she would have heard another human being anywhere near her. Had another living human being in fact been near.
    Her wits reconvened with the aid of a few deep breaths, and she found herself cleaved by two impulses: to investigate, and to flee. Curiosity, that wonderful panacea against all things frightening, moved her two steps forward into the room before she fully realized what she was doing. She stopped, and wondered dryly if courage by nature required a deficit of sense.
    Then again, despite all the other things she might have been, she was not, nor had she ever been, a coward.
    She paused, and listened, and tried concertedly to feel whether anything was amiss. Whether another human was present. Once again she heard and sensed nothing at all.
    She was emboldened to inventory the room with her eyes. It was stocked with furniture allegedly plucked from King Henry VIII, according to the brass wall plaques—an enormous, complicatedly carved bureau, fashioned of a cacophony of shining whorled woods and propped on fussy gilded legs—surely one needed a ladder to reach whatever one kept in the top drawer. A crown? A writing desk as fussy and shining as the other furniture, the wood as patterned as the pelt of a jungle cat, an inkwell and quill atop it—looked ready for its owner to settle in and record the happenings of the day: Flogged serf for insolence. Devoured hart haunch. Ravished mistress.
    The ravishing, she decided, must have taken place in the canopied and curtained bed the