Falling Stars Read Online Free PDF Page A

sadness again, and quarreled with it, for the two little girls were simply asleep, as they should be. He spoke anyway, his voice just a whisper: “Good night, my dears.”
    Two flaxen heads popped up from the bed-clothes.
    “Oh, you have come,” Delia exclaimed. “I told you,” she chided her sister.
    “You did not,” said Livy. “You said maybe. I said maybe, too.”
    He shouldn’t feel so very gratified, but he did, and all the adult common sense in the world couldn’t keep Marcus from entering the room and savoring their quarrelsome welcome.
    “I hope you didn’t stay awake on my account,” he said, though he rather hoped they had.
    Their blonde heads bobbed up and down.
    “Oh, dear,” he said. “That will never do. Next time, I shall have to dress more quickly. It took me much longer than it should have, I’m afraid.”
    “Mama takes hours,” Delia said. “There’s all the things for underneath, and then the things on top of them.”
    “Yes,” said Livy. “There’s the chemise, and the corset, and the stockings and the petticoat and—”
    “Ladies’ garments can be very complicated,” Marcus hastily interjected while he tried to banish the seductive vision Livy had evoked. “Though a gentleman’s are much simpler, he must contend with his neckcloth, which is not very easy to tie properly.”
    Livy gravely considered the neckcloth. “You have a star,” she said. “I like stars.”
    She meant the diamond stickpin. It was too gaudy, he decided, too demanding of attention. Someone might think he was trying to impress... someone.
    ‘It’s not a star,” Delia told her sister. “It’s a diamond.”
    “A star,” said Livy.
    “A diamond.” Delia drove her elbow into Livy’s arm.
    “Do you know what I think?” Marcus put in before the disagreement could escalate into violence. “Maybe stars are diamonds with which angels adorn the heavens. Maybe sometimes they drop them, and they fall all the way to the earth.”
    Twin blue gazes swung abruptly back to him.
    “Oh, yes,” said Delia. “The ones in the sky do fall sometimes. We saw it, didn’t we?” she asked her sister. “Last night we saw one fall.”
    “You promised not to tell,” Livy reproached.
    “He won’t tell Mama.”
    They lifted pleading countenances to him.
    “You won’t tell, will you?” Delia asked. “It was very late, and we went to the window.”
    “When you were supposed to be sleeping?” he whispered conspiratorially.
    They nodded guiltily.
    Marcus crossed the room to the window and looked out. “It’s very pretty, isn’t it? Dark and quiet and magical. When I was a little boy, sometimes I woke very late in the night, and couldn’t fall asleep again right away. I would climb onto the window seat and look at the stars, and imagine things. If I tell on you, I suppose I must tell on me, too. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be fair, would it?”
    The blonde heads shook back and forth.
    “Well, I can’t possibly bear to tell on myself. It’s a special secret.”
    The sisters looked at each other.
    “It was very, very late,” Delia said.
    “I counted twelve chimes,” said Livy.
    ‘Then we saw the star fall, over there.” Delia’s small finger pointed eastward.
    Marcus felt a tingle at the back of his neck.
    That was the direction he’d come last night. At the stroke of midnight, he had left the comforts of Marlborough’s Castle Inn and climbed back onto his carriage, to continue the remaining thirty-odd miles to Greymarch. He couldn’t explain that sudden decision any more than he could the one that had driven him from London in the first place. There seemed to be a great deal lately that he couldn’t explain. A long, long time ago, he would have believed the falling star explained everything.
    As a child, he had truly believed angels looked after the stars, and after him as well; and when they dropped a star, it was to send him a special message. Even as a young man—for he’d been a dreamer, as