Read Doppelgänger for Free Online

and the feel of Ola’s hand on her nearly made her retch. She struggled, but the monster held her in some kind of paralysis that made her helpless against it. All she could do was watch as the knife tore away her clothes, touching but not breaking her skin. Ola had come from the grave to claim his bride.
    She tried to scream. She wanted to scream. But no air left her lungs; instead it sucked itself in, like screaming in reverse. When the horrible scene passed she found herself sitting up in bed, gasping and huffing in the darkness, clawing at the bosom of her nightgown as if warding away the blade of the knife and Ola Bergenhjelm’s jealous wrath.

Chapter Three
    In the Pool of Sharks
    Anine Gyldenhorn was a very delicate beauty, but then most aristocratic young women in Swedish society were. She was five foot three inches tall, had hair so fair it appeared bright yellow in strong sunlight and unusually sharp features that made her face seem slightly birdlike though it did not detract from her comeliness. The Gyldenhorn family was unintroduced nobility—they were of Danish extraction, having lived in Sweden for only a century—but Anine’s father, a noted jurist in Stockholm, had always hoped the family could eventually become introduced nobility. The only entrée into the exclusive club of families with titles recognized by the Swedish crown was through marriage. Achieving this trajectory would be the central purpose of Anine’s life, and she knew it from an early age. If she ever happened to forget it, her mother could be counted upon to remind her.
    This purpose seemed at first to be fulfilled almost too easily. Ola Bergenhjelm paid a call to the Gyldenhorns’ summer home the day after Anine’s sixteenth birthday, and he respectfully asked her father’s permission to court her. Gustav enthusiastically agreed. Anine knew Ola slightly; he was occasionally invited to the family’s parties or receptions back in Stockholm. He was the son of a shipping magnate. Most importantly, the Bergenhjelms were introduced, though among the patriarchs of the family only Ola’s eldest uncle was entitled to call himself Count Bergenhjelm. This was close enough for Anine’s parents. After a grand total of three private conversations with Ola, two of which were about the evolution of fish into land animals, she found herself betrothed to him, and the long two-year fuse of their engagement began to burn slowly toward marriage.
    â€œA dull husband is one of those things that must be endured in life,” Solveig Gyldenhorn told her daughter six months later, after Anine had grown thoroughly bored of Ola Bergenhjelm and completely stupefied at the thought of spending the rest of her life with him. “Fortunately, the duller they are, the more diverting is the exercise of spending their money.” Anine was too meek to argue and too proper to dream of taking a lover. Fortunately for her virtue all the men she encountered in Stockholm society were as dull and colorless as the one to whom she would soon be married.
    That changed at the Christmas reception of 1877. That evening the Count had included among his guests two unusual personages: Cornelius Atherton, a portly American with immense mutton-chop sideburns and a penchant for colorful waistcoats, and his son Julian, an awkward but attractive boy. The elder Atherton had been awarded the post of Ambassador to Sweden as a plum for some political favor he’d done for the new American president, and he’d brought along his son, who had graduated from Harvard nearly a year early, to teach him the virtue of a gentleman’s career in public service.
    Anine had never met an American before. Julian’s boyish good looks and fiery red hair intrigued her. “I confess you look more like an Irishman than a Yankee,” she told him, her first-ever words to him, moments after they were introduced.
    â€œIn many parts of New York,”