Luckstones by Madeleine E. Robins

Author:Madeleine E. Robins [Robins, Madeleine E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, romance, mannerpunk, gender roles, luck, magic, pirates, fantasy of manners
ISBN: 9781611385274
Publisher: Book View Cafe
Published: 2015-06-16T07:00:00+00:00

Virtue and the Archangel

Velliaune me Corse left her virtue in the tumbled sheets of a chamber at the Bronze Manticore. This act, which would have licensed her parents to cut her off from family and fortune, was a grave error; but with her maidenhead, Velliaune also left the Archangel behind, and that was a calamity.

Velliaune had departed the inn before dawn, made her way through empty streets and back to her parents’ home in the Vocarle district, slipped into the garden and thence through a window into the servants’ hall, and finally to her room. There, happily unaware of the missing jewel, she had thrown herself upon her bed and considered the night just past.

She had gone to the opera. She had flirted dutifully in her mother’s presence with half a dozen acceptable men. At the end of the intermission, she had pled a headache and been permitted to return home on her own; instead, she had gone to meet Col ha Vanderon for a private supper at the Bronze Manticore. She had not intended matters to progress to the point where her clothes were strewn across the room and her ankles crossed behind Col’s back, but all in all, she was not unhappy. As she recalled the event now, Velliaune’s hands strayed across her pale breast, trailing a faint echo of sensation. If it had not been the rapturous experience romantic poetry led her to expect, it had at least been exciting.

Then her fingers reached the hollow of her throat. The Archangel, an enormous sapphire given by a long-dead king to some long-dead Corse forebear and, since then, the sign and magical underpinning of her family’s power and position in Meviel, was gone.

Velliaune had begged to wear it the night before, noting how beautifully it would set off her gown, silver-blue silk chosen to complement her fair, blue-eyed beauty, the bodice cut low across the breast, tight-fitted from shoulder to hip, where the skirt blossomed in a froth of lace. Her mother had hung the jewel, set in a cunning filigree of gold, around Velliaune’s neck, and the girl had sworn upon her life to guard it as she would her virtue.

About which the less said, the better.

Velliaune sat up and plunged her hand frantically into her bodice, hoping the jewel had simply fallen into the gown. Finding nothing, she shed her clothing—dress, under-gown, stay-cover, petticoats one, two and three, stays, and chemise. When she stood naked in the ruins of her toilette, she had nothing to show for it but a love bite on one breast. Velliaune sank into the pile of fabric and despaired.

When she had cried her fill, she slept a little, having slept not at all the night before. When she woke, hope and commonsense reasserted themselves. Col would have found the stone amid the sheets. He would keep it for her; he might even now be wondering how he might discreetly return it to her. She had only to write him a note, and find someone to carry it to him and bring the jewel back.

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