Suspense and Sensibility by Carrie Bebris

No, he would not go quietly into the darkness. Sunset might claim the bleak late autumn landscape of West Wycombe Park, but it would not claim him so easily. It had been a good run.įiery orange light slanted through the window to stripe the floor. If he had his life to live over again, he would change nothing. He’d lived each moment to its fullest, leaving no desire unindulged, no curiosity unexplored. He’d mocked mortality along with morality, dared death and the devil to catch him if they could. Where had that faded hair come from? The liver spots on his hands? The slight tremble that seized his fingers? Eyes watery with age stared back.Īs a young man, he’d reveled in his vitality. He stared at his reflection in the ornate gilded mirror across from his bed, resenting every wrinkle that etched his ruddy face.

The sandwich went untouched, but the glass of brimstone he drained in two swallows, relishing the familiar taste of the sulfur-laced brandy. Servants had left a simple meal on the bedside table. Once he’d had it in abundance, spent it as liberally and recklessly as any other commodity in his possession. He sat alone in his bedchamber, surrounded by the opulence he’d enjoyed all his life but experiencing the poverty every man knows when his years on earth run out. Sir Francis Dashwood muttered the words under his breath, though he had no audience. Some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the ‘There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to

Suspense and Sensibility by Carrie Bebris