The Everest Enigma: An Abbie Bradford Mystery by Jeannette de Beauvoir

Author:Jeannette de Beauvoir [de Beauvoir, Jeannette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beckett Books
Published: 2025-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Excerpt from the journal of George Mallory

Venice, Italy, 1914: Well, the thing is done. I am quite simply mad with love.

Turner asked me to join him and his daughters here in Venice, and as soon as I saw Ruth, I knew. I simply knew. She did feel it, as well! She did fall for me as hard as I’d fallen for her! I think that all along, somewhere deep in my body, I knew, with a certainty that I’ve only ever felt around mountains.

She is perfectly marvellous. The best way to describe her is Botticellian, with her wistful, innocent beauty, her blue eyes, her luxuriant brown hair… she is an angel, she has stepped out of a storybook to grace mortals with her presence.

We took the train—just Ruth and I—out to Asolo, a romantic town with a medieval castle in the hills northeast of Venice; Robert Browning once lived here. We walked the hills and sat for a time in a meadow thick with alpine flowers. I have never felt so much at ease in the company of another person.

I’ve never written poetry before; words are to be descriptive, not evocative… and yet I stayed up all night last Tuesday to write a sonnet for her.

I shall probably never give it to her, because events have overtaken me. I arrived back in Godalming only ten days ago, and then today—what a fortuitous day!—I asked her to marry me, and she said yes!

Really, I don’t know what’s overcome me. I’d thought for some time I might just marry Cottie—after all, we have so much in common, she’s a smashing girl and quite a decent climber in her own right—but that was before I knew someone who could rip my world apart as Ruth Turner has done.

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