City of Masks by Mary Hoffman

Author:Mary Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-06-29T08:13:26+00:00

Lucien’s parents continued to behave mysteriously. Before going off to work, his dad gave him a wink as he hugged him and said, ‘See you tonight.’ The words and the hug were usual; the wink was not. His mother had an almost full day of lessons. But she said at breakfast, ‘I’m going to be very busy today, Lucien, but we’ll have a chance to talk at dinner.’

Talk about what, Lucien wondered, but he wasn’t bothered about being left to his own devices. He needed time to himself, to think and to doze. His mother was out most of the day but he wasn’t tempted to return to Bellezza and see what was happening there at night.

He was beginning to feel uneasy about his nightly visits to the city. The situation there was getting more dangerous. It was only a matter of luck and the element of surprise that had made Lucien the hero of the assassination attempt and not one of the victims. He wondered what would have happened to his body here in his own world if he had been stabbed in Bellezza. Would Mum or Dad have come into his room and found him lying dead in his bed with blood all over the sheets?

His imaginings became more ghoulish. Suppose they had started a murder hunt in London? No killer would ever have been found and he would have become a statistic; just one of many unsolved murder cases. And what about his body in Bellezza? Would that have just disappeared? If the assassin’s attempt had been successful, would anyone have even known he had died in the Duchessa’s defence?

The questions were all unanswerable so Lucien fell into a deep sleep till lunchtime, dreaming of a trial in which the Bellezzan assassin, still unaccountably holding the merlino-dagger, stood in a very twenty-first century witness box, saying, ‘You can’t prove I killed him without a body.’ The dagger dripped blood all over the courtroom floor and, in his dream, Lucien knew the blood was his.

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