The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Leigh Bardugo
- Language: English
- Genre: Renaissance Historical Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
If the bread hadn’t burned, this would be a very different story. If the
cook’s son hadn’t come home late the night before, if the cook hadn’t
known he was hanging around that lady playwright, if she hadn’t lain
awake fretting for his immortal soul and weeping over the future fates of
possible grandchildren, if she hadn’t been so tired and distracted, then the
bread would not have burned and the calamities that followed might have
belonged to some other house than Casa Ordoño, on some other street than
Calle de Dos Santos.
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If, on that morning, Don Marius had bent to kiss his wife’s cheek before
he went about the day’s business, this would be a happier story. If he had
called her my darling, my dove, my beauty, if he had noted the blue lapis in
her ears, or the flowers she had placed in the hall, if Don Marius hadn’t
ignored his wife so that he could ride out to Hernán Saravia’s stables to
look over horses he could never afford to buy, maybe Doña Valentina
wouldn’t have bothered going down to the kitchen, and all of the tragedy
that was to follow would have poured out into the gutter and rolled down to
the sea instead. Then no one would have had to suffer anything but a
bowlful of melancholy clams.
Doña Valentina had been raised by two cold, distracted parents who felt
little toward her beyond a vague sense of disappointment in her tepid
beauty and the unlikelihood that she would make a good match. She hadn’t.
Don Marius Ordoño possessed a dwindling fortune, lands crowded with
olive trees that failed to fruit, and a well-proportioned but unassuming
house on one of the better streets in Madrid. He was the best that Valentina,
with her unremarkable dowry and less remarkable face, could hope for. As
for Marius, he’d been married once before to a redheaded heiress, who had
stepped in front of a carriage and been trampled to death only days after
their wedding, leaving him without children or a single coin of her parents’
money.
On Valentina’s wedding day, she wore a veil of golden lace and ivory
combs in her hair. Don Marius, gazing at their reflection in the watery
mirror propped against the wall in the front room of his home, had been
surprised by the jolt of lust that overtook him, inspired perhaps by his
bride’s hopeful eyes, or the sight of himself in his wedding clothes. But it’s
more likely he was moved by the brandied cherries he’d been eating all
morning, tucking them into his cheeks and chewing them slowly rather than
making conversation with his new father-in-law.
That night he fell upon his
bride in a frenzy of passion, whispering poetry into her ears, but he had
managed only a few awkward thrusts before vertigo overcame him and he
vomited the plump half-chewed bodies of brandied cherries all over the
nuptial linen that Valentina had embroidered with her own hands over a
period of many weeks.
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