The Reckoning of Noah Shaw by Michelle Hodkin

Author:Michelle Hodkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

27

I AM NOT WORTHY

SIMON SHAW AWOKE THE NEXT morning in one of the three foule wards of St. Thomas’ Hospital in London to find himself with his memory, his health, and his power of speech restored.

He awoke screaming.

28

SUCH WORSHIP

North Yorkshire, England

THE DAY OF LORD SIMON’S wedding to Sarah Hargrove brought with it unseasonable warmth, sunshine, and two uninvited guests.

The presence of the two men was all the more notable due to the small size of the affair. Simon’s own father had died more than forty years ago, and his mother thirty. Simon himself was fifty-five years of age. The two men knew it. His bride did not.

Simon still looked like a man in his thirties—he checked, quite obsessively, every time he passed a mirror—but he didn’t feel like it. His bones ached, for one thing, and he dreamt of lost teeth and hair. Any cough or sneeze plunged him into a secret terror which he would disguise as melancholy or ennui to the servants or whomever else he had to deal with. He’d taken to having portraits done of himself every time he imagined his age was beginning to catch up with him, so he could soothe his fears by comparing them. He earned a bit of a reputation for vanity as a result.

That hardly prevented him from receiving far more than the usual amount of attention a wealthy, unmarried lord of his (apparent) age could expect in London society. And he enjoyed it, perhaps too much. Simon tended to fall in and out of love (and lust) easily, and there had been a few incidents over the decades, the most serious of which involved one of his mother’s lady’s maids. Simon would have married her, but his mother forbade it. He received a letter six months later, informing him of his son’s birth.

The letter was from the professor.

If you do not make better use of your time on Earth, you may well find yourself short of it.

Simon made arrangements to provide handsomely for the boy and his mother—he wasn’t a monster, after all. But he burned the letter. And decided to study medicine, after that. Just in case.

Every now and again, he would receive a letter from the professor—sometimes writing as Abraham Locke, other times as Augustin Langley, and still other times as Armin Lenaurd—curiously, the initials were always the same. The letters were always short, and always useful, if cryptic.

You might consider an appointment with—

Your presence would be most welcome at—

An appointment led to a role in the East India Company, and as such, an opportunity to reestablish his family’s fortune. His presence at a ball nearly a year ago resulted in his introduction to Miss Hargrove—Sarah—whom he adored more than his own life.

But he hadn’t seen the professor in person, not since the day he walked out of St. Thomas’, to the astonishment of the physicians and surgeons and nurses who attended him. The professor was standing outside the gate, past the green, in front of a waiting carriage.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.