The September Queen [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE The afternoon sun dappled through the leaves of the oak tree. Jane Lane sat in its shade, her back against its stalwart trunk, the Second Folio of Shakespeare's works open on her lap. She had sneaked her favorite book from her father's library and taken it out near the summerhouse, where she could read and dream in peace. Thoughwhat need have I to sneak? she asked herself. I am five and twenty today, and if I am ever to be thought no longer a child, it must be so today. Lammas Eve. "On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen," her Nurse had said of Juliet Capulet. Jane shared Juliet's birthday, the thirty-first of July, but Juliet, at not quite fourteen, had found her Romeo, to woo her and win her beneath a moon hanging low in a warm Italian night sky. But not I, Jane thought. I have come to the great age of five and twenty, and but one man has stirred my heart, and that came to naught. An old maid, her eldest sister, Withy, would say. What is wrong with me? Jane wondered. Why can I not like any man well enough to want to wed him? It is not as though I am such a