Love by the Morning Star Read Online Free PDF

Hannah, standing at the car-side, a shadowed little obscurity. “I’ll be back for you directly,” he said, with a smile that had the decency to be contrite.
    â€œBut I—” Hannah began, only to be cut off as the blond woman slammed the door. The Bugatti sent up refined puffs of dust, which settled on Hannah’s travel-stained suit.
    She waited . . . and waited . . . and waited, staring hungrily at the castle, thinking, in an abstract sort of way, about the young man she’d just almost met. As glib, but not, she thought, as foolish as a Wodehouse hero. He was Lord Liripip’s only son and heir.
    Her mother had given her a rundown on all of the family, from pottering old Liripip, who had married and buried two wives in quick succession before finally producing an heir, to Lady Liripip, who, unlike the more congenial wives before her, steadfastly refused to expire. There were two married daughters by the first late wife who, with their broods, often occupied Starkers. There was the obligatory eccentric uncle best known for riding to the hounds à la Godiva, minus the hair. All this Hannah’s mother had gleaned from the society pages of English-language papers that trickled into Berlin a few days out of date. Of personalities, though, she could offer little, except to say that Lord Liripip almost always meant well, and Lady Liripip didn’t.
    The line of kicked-up road dust between Hannah and the castle had time to rise and settle again, and still no one came for her. She could have walked—she was bone weary from her journey, and from a fright she hardly let herself acknowledge, but she could have walked. However, he had said he would come back, so out of courtesy she waited. There was a square hunk of rock outside a faux guardhouse. She sat upon it and, to pass the time, took out an oft-folded copy of the letter Lady Liripip had sent.
    Â 
You should know, Caroline, that my husband has never forgiven you for leaving England when he was in mourning for your late sister. It showed a most irresponsible and, may I say, unkind spirit. And to marry a foreigner, a stage jester no less, when Lord Liripip would have been so pleased to arrange a union more suited to your fine family connections! And now you say the unfortunate fruit of that mésalliance must come to England? You never lacked nerve, Caroline. Very well, she may certainly come, but mark my words, we will teach her better than anyone ever taught you about what it means to be an Englishwoman of good blood and family. Here at Starkers, she will learn her proper place
.
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    It was a hard letter, from a hard woman, Hannah could see that, and rested on her mother’s assurance that Lord Liripip was a gentle, easygoing man. No one had ever been unkind to Hannah, and she imagined Lady Liripip as a character, a stereotype, whose company one endured stoically, but whom one laughed at behind her back.
    Hannah and her mother had had a good laugh together over that term,
the unfortunate fruit
, and Cora had taken to calling her daughter by that name, with wry affection. She’d been wary of putting Hannah’s full name in any of the letters, never being quite sure what the government might read. A neighbor had been taken in for questioning after writing to a Russian acquaintance about beet-seed, though her only Communist leanings were toward the neighborhood’s communal vegetable garden. If anyone knew Cora was desperate to get her daughter out of Germany, it might attract attention. If she wanted to get out so badly, could it be because she was hiding something, selling secrets, dangerous in some way? The world was changing, Cora knew, and one couldn’t be too careful. So she used her maiden name, Caroline Curzon, and Hannah’s first name alone, giving a hotel as her return address.
    Hannah had a particular aptitude for being sanguine in the face of trouble. Looking at the castle, at the grounds, she