DRAGONMEDE (Dustjacket Included)

Please see any and all photos connected with this listing. The dustjacket is a bit scuffed but all pages intact and legible. Clean. No store stamps. --- --- A brilliant and terrifying Gothic, DRAGONMEDE begins in London in the late 1800's, a time when nobility was the golden key that opened all doors. To Eustacia Rochdale, life was exciting, if uncertain. Her mother, beautiful and talented, courted the rich and titled who came to her Bloomsbury home to gamble and relax. . . . .Luella always managed to win enough from her guests to support herself comfortably, but she was determined that her daughter achieve the respectable upper-class marriage that she herself could never attain. . . . .When Eustacia meets Julian Kershaw--heir to Dragonmede, a title, and a family fortune--Luella is delighted. Desperately gambling on the young man's unskilled passion for cards and his obvious attraction toward Eustacia, she succeeds in arranging their engagement . . . .Eustacia arrives at Dragonmede as Julian's new bride, unaware of her mother's manipulations. She is met with hostility and suspicion, and when Julian himself becomes cold and withdrawn, she begins to wonder if the various accidents occurring since her arrival are not indeed attempts on her life. --- HERE'S THE FIRST FEW SENTENCES --- --- By most standards my upbringing was scandalous, although it was a long time before this fact was brought home to me. As a child I accepted without question the bohemian, rather shameful, but happy life I lived with my mother until I was old enough to learn that it was, to say the least, unconventional, and even then I continued to accept it because whatever her mode of living, her lack of morals, and her feckless attitude toward money, my mother had the rare ability to make life rich and full and warm. She lived generously and she loved generously, and more than all she loved me. . . .See photos for additional content. . .…