Seduced by a Stranger by Eve Silver EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Author: Eve Silver
- Language: English
- Genre: Victorian Historical Romance
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
MARLOW, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, 1812
At the age of eleven, Catherine Weston was buried alive in a shallow,
wet grave.
Two months before that, she had stood in the cemetery beside the
ancient stone church, clutching her mother’s hand as the tiny coffin
containing her brother’s remains was lowered into the ground. All four of
her infant brothers had been buried this way. Sent to the warmth and light of
Heaven, her mother said.
But now, on this miserable, gray October day, as the damp earth
weighed impossibly heavy on her chest and forced her to struggle for every
breath, Catherine realized her mother had lied. There was no light or
warmth. There was only the cold, pungent mud and the choking terror that
made her heart beat so hard she was certain it would burst.
She wondered how long it would be before someone missed her.
Too long.
She was the only child of two only children, and she had spent the first
decade of her life entertaining herself while her parents grieved for their
four infant sons and grew distant and tired and old before their time.
Solitude was a state she knew best. So though she had been at Browning
School for Girls for nearly a month, she had not formed any close
friendships. No one would note her absence with any alacrity.
As she lay panting in her grave, she thought with bitter regret that her
preference for solitude had come with a terrible price.
The morning had been stormy, the rain pounding, the boom of thunder
loud and near. By the afternoon, the downpour abated and as soon as
lessons were over, Catherine left the school and sneaked off to gather
smooth, cool stones like the ones she and her mother took to her brothers’
graves and left there to mark the fact that they had come and gone. In the
spring and summer, they left flowers. In the autumn and winter, stones.
There was a welcome familiarity to the task.
The large pocket at the front of her pinafore was already heavy with a
dozen small rocks when she bent at the edge of a low embankment to pick
up one more. Without warning or sound, the earth gave way beneath her
feet. One moment she stood on wet ground, the next, she slipped down to
the muddy riverbank and sank in the fetid mire as a good chunk of the
embankment came sliding down atop her.
And there she was. Buried as her brothers were buried, though they
were dead and she was not. Not yet.
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