Read Online The Secret Life of Lady Julia by Lecia Cornwall - Free Book Online Page B

listless, and afraid. She rubbed Dorothea’s wrists, anointed her temples with attar of roses, and wondered if she might resort to laudanum too, if she lost Jamie, or a beloved husband.
    She would probably never marry now, or be any man’s beloved. That was a pain and a pleasure that she would never know.
    “I cannot rest!” Dorothea sobbed, clutching Julia’s hand on a fierce grip.
    “I’ll open the window, let the cool air in,” Julia said. “Try to sleep.”
    “No! Leave it closed. The air smells of sweat and garlic and piss, and the street is too noisy. I won’t have the window open, d’you hear?” Dorothea said sharply, moving restively on the sheets.
    “Then I shall read to you,” Julia said calmly.
    Gradually, as Julia read, Dorothea drifted off. She moaned in her sleep, her brow furrowed as her ghosts haunted her.
    At last the clock struck eleven, and the door opened with a soft creak. Dorothea’s maid tiptoed in, back from her night out. “I’ll keep an eye on her now. You get some sleep,” she said kindly, and Julia went to her own rooms, and opened the door of the small antechamber where her son slept in a cot near his nurse.
    He opened his eyes and smiled at her, waving his arms to be lifted, and she picked him up and crossed to open the window, letting the cool night air flow over them both. There were fireworks bursting in the sky above they city, great blossoms of red and yellow, and she watched the colors reflecting in the baby’s wide eyes and against his soft flesh. He reached out a chubby hand, and she smiled and kissed the soft curls on his head.
    Jamie was her whole world. She had lost everything but gained her son, and he was enough.
    She hugged him tightly, and he made a soft exclamation, his fingers coiling in her hair. She kissed him again, breathed him in. She would devote herself to him, be father, mother, and friend, protect him with her life if she had to. On days when she wanted to break down and cry for all she’d lost, she had Jamie to console her, the miracle—never the mistake.
    She gazed up at the fireworks. Where was Thomas Merritt now? Far from here, no doubt, unaware that he had a son. He’d probably forgotten her altogether. Jamie cooed as a new burst of scarlet petals filled the sky, and Julia smiled down at him.
    He was her son, and no one else’s.
    T he coach came to a stop on a hill just outside Paris as the fireworks began.
    Donovan whistled as he looked out the window. “Look at that!” he said, staring at the colored lights bursting over the dark city. “We should have stayed an extra day or two, had some fun.”
    Thomas barely glanced at the sky. He wasn’t interested. He wanted to be gone from the city, on the way to somewhere new, someplace that might offer him—well, whatever it was his restless soul was looking for. Even he didn’t know. He was beginning to fear he’d spend his life wandering aimlessly from place to place, never finding a home. It made him angry, irritable.
    “We have work to do,” he said to Donovan. “And if we want a decent place to stay in Vienna, we’d best get there before everyone else.”
    “I know, I know,” Donovan sighed. “The longer we wait, the more a place to stay will cost, if you can’t find a landlady to charm into letting us stay for free.”
    Thomas knocked on the ceiling of the coach. But the coach didn’t move. The coachman was probably watching the fireworks, couldn’t hear over the booms and whistles. “We will need to appear to be entirely respectable and start forming social connections as soon as we arrive, make friends, earn the trust of people who count, and they’ll provide us invitations to the best parties, the finest balls.”
    “And access to the best jewels,” Donovan added eagerly. “To be delicately plucked from the prettiest necks, wrists, and earlobes.”
    Thomas glanced at the grinning face of his valet, glowing devilish red for a moment in the light of the fireworks. Donovan