As Shadows Haunting by Lake Deryn

Author:Lake, Deryn [Lake, Deryn]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2015-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

It was a revelation, like a dream come true; the city of Paris in springtime was without doubt the most beautiful on earth. To Sarah, who had never visited the capital before, the very smell in the air was enough to give pleasure. The flowers clustering in the markets, the bakers’ shops, the watered dust from the streets, all combined in a unique odour which seemed to her to be the very essence of the French metropolis. And this family visit — for Bunbury’s wife was in Paris with her sisters Caroline and Louisa, her two elder nephews Ste and Charles James, and an irrepressible friend who delighted in the name of Clotworthy Upton — could not help but be both pleasurable and amusing. No pastime being more stimulating than to sit in the Tivoli Gardens, smaller than Vaux Hall but somehow more interesting, and watch the world passing by; pretty men, fine ladies, whores and washerwomen, scoundrels and scandalmongers, uneasily rubbing shoulders as they thronged past in the daily parade.

“Is it not fine?” Sarah said to Ste, and he nodded with enthusiastic agreement.

He was twenty now, exactly five days older than Sarah, but alas had inherited none of the beauty of his aunt’s side of the family. For the fact was that Ste looked remarkably like Mr Fox, being both portly and heavily jowled. Unlike his father, however, he was also rather deaf which made the young man difficult in strange company, while his character was reputed to suffer from certain other weaknesses.

The truth was that he had been born a compulsive gambler and by the age of fifteen had already become massively in debt. And even when after a great deal of effort Ste had cured himself and given up the tables, his passion for clothes and horses undid him once more and he had again plunged towards ruin. If it had not been for his indulgent father, who constantly settled his bills, Sarah paled to think what would have happened to her eldest nephew. But for all that there was nothing cruel about Ste. He was merely weak. He found temptation impossible to resist, and as a result was adored by his contemporaries who could see his faults only as a mirror of their own.

Charles James, on the other hand, was growing up precocious yet amusingly so. At fourteen he was a slave to fashion, on one occasion arriving at the Playhouse with his hair powdered and coiffé en aile de pigeon. He was now fully in charge of dramatic performances at Holland House in which he both starred and directed the other actors. Currently he was feigning jealousy because Sarah spent more time talking to Ste than she did to him, and demonstrated this by going into a fit of the sulks, which he was doing as the family party sat in the Tivoli Gardens waiting for the firework display to begin. Knowing her nephew was glowering, Sarah ignored him and instead turned deliberately towards her sisters.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.