The Adventurer by Jaclyn Reding EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author:Jaclyn Reding
- Language: English
- Genre: Scottish Historical Romance
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
“It is only in adventure that some people
succeed in knowing themselves—
in finding themselves.”
—André Gide, Journals
12th July 1748
It is my last day in Paris.
The sky above the slated roofs is perfectly
blue and dappled with tufts of billowing
clouds. I sit in the garden, close my eyes,
and the air is soft, filled with the mingling
scents I’
ve so come to love—morning breezes,
roses in bloom, and the pain mollets just pulled
from hot brick ovens. The chaffinches are
nattering beneath the shady boughs of chestnut
trees like ladies gossiping over afternoon tea.
Outside the garden, a dog barks. Another
responds. And I can hear children laughing,
playing at quoits in an adjacent courtyard,
while somewhere above, someone is performing a
sarabande upon the harpsichord. By Jacquet,
I think? I can hear the notes trilling softly
through an open window…
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Lady Isabella Drayton lifted her pen from the vellum page of her leatherbound journal and sighed. Summertime in Paris. Could there be
anything else quite like it in the world?
Sitting in the courtyard garden of the townhouse her father had rented
just off Rue Saint Honore, with her morning chocolate cooling in a
porcelain pot on the table beside her, she couldn’t think of a single thing
better.
For nearly three months—one-and-eighty days to be precise—Isabella
had delighted in the French capital city. Her days had flitted by in a swift
succession of late morning strolls through the Jardin de Tuileries, visits to
the Louvre Palace to view the royal art collection, performances of Molière
at the Palais Royale, and early morning carriage rides at Longchamp in the
Bois de Boulogne.
And that had only been during the first fortnight.
Soon after, she’d established a routine. On Tuesdays, she sipped strong
coffee in Le Procope, the quaint café she’d discovered just off the
Boulevard Saint-Germain. At her favorite window-side table, she could
watch the incredible bustle of the city passing by on cobbled streets
scarcely wider than a footpath. Fruit and flower sellers pushed makeshift
carts, ringing bells to bring attention to their wares. Carriages would careen
at breakneck speed—Regardez! their drivers would shout only seconds
before narrowly missing pedestrians who would be left waving their fists,
shouting a volley of Gallic invective against the retreating noise of the
churning wheels and clattering hooves.
On Wednesdays, Isabella passed the morning with her letter writing and
her sketching—in the garden on sunny days, in the front parlor that faced
the street when it rained—filling a constant string of letters back and forth
to her parents and sisters across the channel, back at home at Drayton Hall
in Northumbria.
It was her first time away from home, veritably on her own, after a life
spent with one or another of her siblings always in her pockets. Catherine,
not quite nineteen and the eldest of the younger three Drayton daughters,
had written to Isabella faithfully each week, keeping her sister apprised of
all the goings-on at home. In her latest letter, received just three days
before, she’d reported that thirteen-year-old Mattie was apparently once
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