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About Domino
Review "Outlandish hats and hairstyles, towering wigs, gender-blurring masquerades—these are among the numerous excellent reasons to pick up Ross King’s Domino." —The New York Times Book Review"A rich brocade of a novel . . . A coming-of-age tale, a comedy of manners, a witty, penetrating and occasionally dark satire, as well as a thriller." —Orlando Sentinel Product Description Ross King’s delightful, Rabelaisian novel recounts the adventures of young George Cautley, an aspiring artist who, as he makes his way through London’s high society, finds that nothing is as it seems and everyone wears a disguise. Moving from masquerade balls in London to the magnificent and mysterious opera houses of Venice, Cautley is drawn into a web of intrigue and murder spun by the seductive and tempestuous Lady Beauclair. Suspenseful, menacing, and laced with black humor, King’s picaresque tale is full of surprisesand suspense, told at the pace of a thriller and with the richness of a restored painting. About the Author Ross King is the author of The Judgment of Paris, Brunelleschi's Dome, and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling. He has twice won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction (for The Judgment of Paris and Leonardo and the Last Supper). Born and raised in Canada, King holds degrees from the University of Regina, York University, and University College, London. He now lives near Oxford, England. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter OneI shall begin at the beginning. I was born in the village of Upper Buckling, in the county of Shropshire, in the year 1753. Before my birth a gypsy fortune-teller predicted to my mother that I should become a prosperous merchant or a noble statesman. My mother, fortunately, set little store by such pagan superstition, being the wife of a clergyman; and this indeed was the profession she was content to reserve for me despite these intimations of future grandeur. My reverend father likewise refused to believe that the clues to our characters resided in tea-leaves or in the palms of our hands-as the gypsy had confidently asserted-but, rather, held they were to be discovered in our faces: in the conformation of the head, the situation therein of the eyes, the length of the nose, the width of the lips, the shape of the eyebrows, the angle of the jaw. He expended a good many years and a great amount of stationery establishing the irrefutability of this hypothesis, the final fruit of which was a learned treatise entitled The Compleat Physiognomist. What of my own lot in life he may have glimpsed in the blots, blemishes and truculent expressions of my youthful visage he did not reveal, but in any event he was agreed with my mother on the choice of my future occupation. This prospect I did not contemplate withenthusiasm, but as a second son I relented to their wishes, however unprepossessing they were to my imagination, which instead prompted dreams of literary fame or of the popular applause I would achieve with my paintbrush in the salons and exhibition halls of the Continent.My prospects for the clergy changed, however, with the death of my elder brother William. At eighteen years William had been purchased a commission in the army, but this career was soon terminated in battle beneath the falls of the Mississippi by the musket-ball of an Indian chieftain. Then, altering my course still further, in the following spring William was followed to the grave by my father, claimed by a fever, The Compleat Physiognomist sadly incomplete. Since my father had entertained a philosophical carelessness to financial affairs, believing that the positive reception of his treatise would obviate the need for all worries in this area, my mother was left without a groat. Under these altered circumstances it was resolved that upon attainment of my seventeenth year I should depart for London, there to foster an alliance with my kinsman Sir Henry Pollixfen. Besides be
