DUKES AND DIAMONDS (VICTORIAN JEWEL #1) BY LAUREN SMITH – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Lauren Smith
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Romance
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
The string of burglaries in Grosvenor Square and Mayfair have
left authorities baffled. No suspects have been identified. The
latest victim is Lady Ashburg, who had an emerald necklace
stolen during a garden party at her home last Sunday. Scotland Yard
has interviewed every guest and servant present at the time of the
theft. Yet no arrests have been made. Rewards are being offered for
any information as to the identity of the thief and the location of
the jewels.
—Illustrated Police News, September 1876
Fitzwilliam Seagrave, the Duke of Helston, or Fitz, as his friends
and family insisted upon calling him, folded up the illustrated newspaper
that sat on his lap and frowned. The paper contained sensational, garish
reports on crime and punishment in England. He set it on the reading table
in front of him and sipped his brandy thoughtfully as he examined the
frontpage illustration. It depicted a man in black clothing wearing a mask
and gloves as he crept behind a beautiful young woman whose neck was
bedecked with a large, jeweled necklace.
“Jewel thieves . . . Honestly, don’t the poor wretches have anything
better to do with their time than take things they have no right to?” he
muttered to himself. For the last several months, the Police News and other
papers had been carrying the story of the jewelry thefts as though it was a
matter of national concern. As if a veritable wave of crime was crashing
upon England’s shores.
He stared around vacant chairs in Berkley’s, his gentlemen’s club. The
reading room was usually empty this time of night. He was alone except for
an elderly man asleep by the fireplace halfway between Fitz and the door.
Most of the men were in the cardroom or the dining room at this time of
night.
Normally, he would have been in the midst of that crowd, throwing
himself into games of risk, but they had begun to bore him of late. The
usual amusements he relied on had lost their appeal. He was too good at
choosing the right horses at the derby, it was too easy to take a woman to
his bed, and he had exhausted the pockets of most of the men in the
cardroom one floor below.
Fitz studied the portraits of past members on the wall. Nearly sixty
years ago, life in England had been vastly different. There had been no
industry, fewer mills to turn the northern cities white with cotton from the
factories, or coal turning the industrial cities black with soot. The men on
these walls had never known the hum of gaslights, the rattle of trains, or the
feeling of a steam engine in a ship that could power across the water faster
than any sail.
Yet Fitz had the sense that the men who graced these canvases had seen
and done much in their lives, whereas he had not. It was strange to think
that in a world of invention and industry, his life was far less adventurous
than the men who’d lived in the past.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB