Primrose and the Dreadful Duke
Chapter OnePrimrose Garland liked books. All kinds of books, but especially books written many centuries ago, and most especially books that were the real thoughts of real people. Pliny’s letters, for example. Catullus’s love-sick poems. Marcus Aurelius’s philosophical musings.
That morning, she was reading Aurelius again, experiencing the same delight and wonder that she always felt. Aurelius had been an emperor in Rome, she was a spinster in London—and yet here she was, reading his private notes to himself, his musings on life. It was extremely intimate, this insight into a man’s thoughts. Sometimes it felt as if he were talking directly to her, that if she turned her head, there he would be: Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome, seated at the writing table,
