The Lost Letter by Mimi Matthews

Author:Mimi Matthews [Matthews, Mimi]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2017-06-14T05:15:46+00:00

It was well past one in the morning. Sylvia did not need a clock to tell her so. She had been tossing and turning for hours, too restless to fall back asleep. Earlier, after a brief episode of tears, she had dozed fitfully, only to wake feeling as forlorn and miserable as she had when she first retired to her bedroom for the evening. It had seemed stupid to cry. Everything was sorted out now, was it not? Sebastian had said that he did not hate her. That he had never hated her. He had even said that he hoped they might be friends again.

Yet, he had not joined them on their walk. Nor had he joined them for dinner. And as for coming to the music room to listen to her sing…

She had been a fool to have believed that he would. If she had been thinking with her head instead of her heart, she would have recognized at once that his kind words in the picture gallery were nothing more than empty civility. He clearly did not want to see her any more than was necessary. No doubt she had made him uncomfortable with all her talk of those letters.

Sylvia rolled onto her back and stared at the canopy over her bed. She contemplated returning to Cheapside in the morning. It would not be running away, surely. And no one could ever accuse her of cowardice. She had, after all, managed an entire week at Pershing Hall. One wonderful, terrible week in which she had been confronted by all the memories of her former life. But there was a limit to what one could endure and, unless she was very much mistaken, she had reached that limit last night. She feared that if she stayed any longer, she would become truly, and irrevocably, unhappy.

She tossed and turned for another quarter of an hour. Then, abruptly, she flung off her blankets and sat up. She was done with lying awake and worrying. If she could not sleep, she may as well go down and find something to read. She rose from bed and put on her dressing gown, cinching it tightly round her waist. Her hair had worked itself loose from its nighttime plait and now fell loose about her shoulders. She did not regard it. No one else would be up. The house had been deathly quiet for hours.

Lighting a candle, she quietly exited her bedchamber and made her way downstairs.

The Pershing Hall library was a singularly masculine room, dark and cluttered and smelling faintly of pipe tobacco and lemon oil and beeswax furniture polish. She had not been back to it since the day of her arrival. Lady Harker preferred to serve refreshments in the much brighter, and far more feminine, drawing room. Nevertheless, during the short time she had spent having tea with Sebastian and Lady Harker that first afternoon, she had not failed to notice that the library contained a dazzling array of books. She was certain to find something interesting to read.

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