Written on Your Skin Read Online Free PDF

that has anything to do with it.” She gritted her teeth. “Listen to me, Mama: it will be a cold day in hell before I marry Collins’s protégé.”
    “Then I suggest Jane pack your furs. We expect an offer any day now, and we are planning to accept it.”
    Mina drew a hard breath through her nose. This was important news. She should be glad to know it, regardless of the manner in which it emerged. Leave, her reason bade her. Go figure out what to do. Maybe it was time to risk speaking with the consul. She’d collected a bundle of documents, some in code, others suggestive enough to provoke his interest, provided that his honor proved stronger than his friendship with Collins.
    But her emotions were clamoring for a hotter conclusion to the conversation than her reason desired. She struck a compromise, speaking quietly. “I could have run away, you know. So many times I was tempted to do it. Every time he screamed at me, every time he locked me in my room because I dared to disagree with him, I stayed for your sake. For your sake, I learned to grovel.”
    Mama’s expression softened. “Darling. I know it hasn’t been easy for you. You’ve always been so high-spirited. And as God is my witness, I’ve never wished to see you hurt.” She lifted her hand, and Mina turned her head to avoid the touch. “Mina,” she whispered, and her hand fell back to her side. “I love you more than my life. But the world has no use for a woman’s spirits. Trust me: if you learn that now, it will save you a great deal of grief in the long run.”
    “There is only one thing I’ve learned tonight. I was wrong to stay with you.”
    “Brave words,” Mama said gravely. “I expected no less from you. But my brother no longer acknowledges us. So tell me, child. Where else would you go?”

    They had tied Monroe to the bed. “He started to thrash,” explained Jane. She was holding a cold compress to her eye and looked unsteady on her feet. In the corner, a Chinese maid was mixing powder into a cup. “Blackened my eye and threw a manservant into the wall.”
    “Poor Jane.” Mina spoke absently. Her cheek still seemed to burn. Was it wrong to feel envy? A black eye would heal, but the numbness in her bones felt unreachable by common medicine. Where else would you go? “Perhaps you should sit down.”
    Jane accepted her help into a chair. “I’ve never seen such behavior. First he was laughing hysterically, and then he began thrashing. Do you see how red he looks? His pupils were the size of saucers! And he’s hot as a bedpan to boot. I’d think it some queer tropical fever, but he hasn’t voided himself. We’re giving him quinine anyway, and laudanum to dill him—just until the doctor arrives. It can’t hurt, I think.”
    “Probably not.” She couldn’t marry Bonham. He was so much like her stepfather. He would expect her to sing on command and to fall silent at his bidding, and when she failed to do so, he would consider it his right to punish her, for he was, after all, a man of power and reputation, whom any woman should be grateful to have for a husband.
    But if he took after Collins, she did not take after her mother. She would kill him before she let him cow her.
    “Mina. Are you all right?”
    She exhaled. “My mother has decided to marry me to Bonham. As if she has had any success in choosing a husband. As if her judgment hasn’t been proven wrong in a million different ways!”
    “Did you tell her of your objections?”
    “Of course. She thinks me too high-spirited.”
    Jane sighed. “You must have a little compassion for her, I think. She regrets her own choices, and wants to make sure you don’t do the same.”
    No. She was done with compassion. “I told her not to marry him.” She remembered the exact moment she had seen Collins as he really was. He had just arrived to pay a call; it had still been early in his courtship. She had come in from the garden, laughing, and greeted him as he was handing