Moonlight Masquerade Read Online Free PDF Page B

nourishing her body,
her soul, before the earl moved directly beneath her and into the
house. Her head was reeling with questions, her body reeling with
sensations alien to her.
    Why was the Earl of Hawkhurst hiding? There
was nothing wrong with him, as her aunt had supposed, nothing that
would offend or frighten onlookers. On the contrary, he was
handsome. He was the most handsome man Christine had ever seen or
hoped to see.
    She let her forehead press against the
windowpane, her eyes closed, her heart still pounding unevenly in
her breast. “He’s beautiful,” she breathed on a sigh.

Chapter 7

    O h, Aunt Nellis,”
Christine exclaimed, whirling about, eager to look everywhere at
once, “isn’t this just the most wonderful room you have ever seen?
Look—look over there, at that dresser. It must have a half-hundred
golden cherubs carved into its face. This is like a great
exhibition. I feel we should have paid a pennypiece each at the
door in order to enter. And that tub—it’s enormous. No wonder
Lazarus didn’t want to move it into my chamber.”
    Aunt Nellis obediently looked around the
earl’s massive private bedchamber, grudgingly admiring the man’s
good taste. The entire room was a shrine to classic beauty and
expert craftsmanship, she agreed, but somehow the chamber seemed
cold to her, and lonely. The softening touches—a woman’s touch—were
missing. But then, this was a bachelor establishment.
    “There are no mirrors, Christine,” she said
at last, able to voice at least one possible reason for her
disconcertment. “Not a single one. Isn’t that just the oddest
thing? Everyone has mirrors. How else is one to know whether or not
one is going about with a piece of meat stuck between one’s front
teeth, or with one’s buttons undone?”
    Christine looked up in the midst of admiring
an elaborately carved clock that boasted not one, but three faces.
“Really? No mirrors? That is a bit odd. Are you quite sure,
Aunt?”
    Her aunt was standing perfectly still in the
center of the room, her face unbecomingly pale. “I’ve heard it said
that the devil can’t see himself in mirrors,” she murmured,
shivering.
    Remembering the face she had seen the
previous evening in the moonlight, Christine only laughed, running
across the room to hug her imaginative aunt. “The devil is it, Aunt
Nellis? Now you’re sounding as silly and superstitious as
Alice.”
    Aunt Nellis stiffened. Obviously, she
disliked being compared to their housemaid at Manderley, a woman
who had been known to walk backward through a prickle hedge to
avoid coming face to face with Farmer Williamson’s gray wagon horse
before noon, a woman who wore so many good luck charms and amulets
that she rattled when she walked. “I am no such thing!” Nellis
protested hotly. “I was merely making a reasonable
observation.”
    “Then observe this,” Christine said,
pointing toward a door in the corner of the large room. “Obviously
we have not seen all of the earl’s quarters. I’ll wager that door
leads to a dressing room, complete with mirrors of every shape and
size. Shall I go investigate, both to soothe your jangled nerves
and to see if I am right?”
    “You shall not,” Nellis commanded tersely.
“We all know what happened to Pandora. Besides, I believe I hear
the earl’s man, Lazarus, coming down the hallway with the first of
your bathwater. I wouldn’t want him to think you’re nothing but a
common snoop. My goodness,” she continued as the clock struck a
single chime, “it’s more than time he arrived isn’t it? The earl
said ten o’clock, and it’s nearly half past the hour already.”
    Christine was instantly diverted. “Dear
Lazarus,” she said on a sigh. “How sweet he is to have begged the
earl for this favor. But he’s aptly named, isn’t he, the poor soul?
I mean, he does look rather moldy, doesn’t he, almost as if he has
just recently been resurrected.”
    “Now you’re being blasphemous!” Aunt