Love's a Stage by Laura London

Author:Laura London [London, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Historical, Historical Romance
Amazon: B00I5KIN74
Publisher: Headline Eternal
Published: 2014-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

The forest beneath them became laced with swamp, the reflecting tendrils of water snaking in among huge ancient oaks. Oxlip and orchids provided brilliant splashes of color accenting among the brown and gray. Their hope that the swamp would border an open, grassy area was not borne out, and Frances watched disappointedly as the water disappeared and the swamp changed into thick, dark forest. Then the wind veered and they were sent scudding in a new direction as if by an unseen hand. The sudden switch sent Frances grasping for the side of the gondola.

“The wind’s shifted; we’re going south,” said Lord Landry. He smiled at Frances. “It might be good.”

“If,” said Frances, through gritted teeth, “a woodpecker doesn’t drill a hole in the balloon silk and drop us like a shot.” She hadn’t finished speaking when, in the far distance, a green open chase peeked through a break in the forest line. “There!” she shouted, pointing.

Lord Landry had seen it already. He was gazing at it intently, shading his eyes from a shaft of sunlight. “I wish I could see how far the flat stretch reaches.” He looked at Frances. “We have to make a decision right away; we’ll have to start losing altitude immediately if we want to land in the open area. Do you want to sport canvas?”

“Yes, I do,” said Frances, “if you mean, do I want to take a chance. I’m not familiar with a lot of horrid boxing cant.”

“So I observed.” Landry smiled and added the cordial hope that he could put the thing down without killing them. “Only consider the chagrin of our surviving families should our corpses be discovered entangled with a couple of deceased blackface sheep.”

Frances knelt and looked at the approaching landscape, her knuckles white on the gondola’s edge. Over her head Landry manipulated the valve, and she heard strange hisses and whistles as the toy trees grew larger and developed distinct and very jagged branches, which reached up to snare them. The gondola began to sway under the balloon as they lost altitude, and the ropes to twist and shimmy.

There was a drop of perhaps a hundred feet that left Frances gasping, and the balloon swung wildly to the side, skipped over a knoll, and dropped rapidly on a collision course with the great ruin of a Palladian manor house, which seemed to erupt from the hill’s flank. The balloon dived and swung at the mercy of the wind, and the great walls of the burnt-out manor loomed closer. Frances’ heart pounded like a blacksmith’s hammer as she waited for the jolt.

The gondola cleared the wall by inches, and Frances found herself looking into a hollow interior filled with sooty flame-blackened timbers. She pressed her palms over her eyes.

“We’ve cleared the manor!” Landry called to her encouragingly. “I’m going to toss out the grapnel and see if we can anchor.”

“What’s down there?” she asked, not daring to look.

“An overgrown garden.” There was a loud, brittle crash from below. “That was a statue of a nymph holding twin bear cubs.

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