Four weeks into the excerpts and you’ve been introduced to our heroine, Yvette Stapleton. She’s arrived in London, and her ship, the Atlantic Star, is moored at London’s East India Docks.
Here you go:
She peered about.
Where was Mrs. Pettigrove? They were to share a hackney. Yvette had handed over the last of her coin for the conveyance. She took a few steps across the scarred wood, continuing to look around. No Mrs. Pettigrove. No Hackney. She exhaled in exasperation. Bother and blast. The woman had stolen her money.
Yvette tightened her grip on her valise and strode across the wharf. She wasn’t worried. She was armed. A gun rested in her valise and a blade was secure in her reticule. Besides, she knew these docks.
The Dock Manager’s Office was but half a block away—she could see it from where she stood—and Papa’s offices were a half block farther. Surely someone there would lend her coin to hire a hack to get to the solicitor’s.
A familiar twinge gripped her. Her beloved Papa and stepmother, Belle-mere.
No, she would not think of her loss, not now leastways. She was home, and joy whispered across her soul despite her grief. In a matter of days she would be at Somersfield, reunited with her cousin, Vangie, and safe from Edgar. There she would consider her future and decide what she wanted to do.
Edgar’s attacks had served one useful purpose. They had strengthened her resolve to lay the course for her own life. She would bend to the whim of no man. With no siblings, other than her two stepbrothers, she was the sole recipient of Papa’s fortune. She had the financial means to remain independent once she turned one and twenty. And though she’d never wanted for admirers, she had no pressing desire to marry.
In Boston, after she’d rebuffed Edgar’s attempts to court her, he’d called her a bluestocking and claimed she was overly educated–that she didn’t know her place.
Good. She had no intention of ever knowing her place. It sounded quite boring … oppressing.
It was true. She was highly educated. Papa had insisted upon it. He’d also insisted she be trained in weaponry, so she could defend herself. Yvette grinned. Though adept with a blade, her true skill lay in firearms.
