CHAPTER 1
1872
A lady does not dance more than two dances with the same gentleman.
The daughter of an earl precedes the wife of the youngest son of a marquis but not the wife of the youngest son of a duke.
And I was the daughter of a Spiritualist medium lately from Cheapside.
I was used to simple rules: don’t get caught.
I went back to memorizing the many intricate and involved rules of the British aristocracy, because as convoluted and boring as they were, it was still preferable to talking to my mother.
A lady eats what she is served at dinner without comment.
I was usually hungry enough to eat what I was given without comment, but if the earl served boiled tongue or calves’ foot jelly, I fully intended to wrap it in my napkin and hide it in the nearest umbrella stand.
A well-bred lady always removes her gloves at dinner but never at a ball. She should also travel with two sets of silk gloves and one of kid.
Never mind that I had only two pairs of gloves to my name to begin with, I wasn’t a well-bred lady. I might look the part in my secondhand dresses with the added silk ruchings and delicate embroidery, but I’d done all that work myself, sewing until my fingers bled, to have them ready for this journey.
It was all a pretense.
And it might work well enough in our London parlor for an hour or two, but this trip was a different matter altogether. I’d never dined with earls or dowager countesses or even wealthy tradesmen. Frankly, I’d rather walk alone on the outskirts of Whitechapel. At least I knew what I was about there; I knew what the dangers were and how to avoid them.
An earl’s country estate might as well be deepest India.
When the train reached the next station, I slipped onto the platform before my mother could start another lecture on regal bearing under the cover of the noise of the crowds and the steam engine.
I knew I shouldn’t venture out into the crowd unaccompanied, but I needed a few moments away from my mother and the starched and proper aristocrats with whom we shared the car. They knew we didn’t belong there. I knew we didn’t belong there. Only my mother seemed determined to ignore that fact with sniffs of disdain and complaints about the violent rocking of the train and what it was doing to her delicate sensibilities.
Mother was delicate the way badgers were delicate.
Since this was likely to be my last moment to myself until later in the evening when we reached Lord Jasper’s estate in Hampshire, I rushed out, accidentally bumping into a countess with a tiered bustle that took up the space of three people. I didn’t even stop to apologize properly.
Because if I had to be shut up in that box for another minute, I’d run mad.
Mother would say it was frightfully ungrateful of me, but it was true nonetheless. She’d been hours without her glass of medicinal sherry and that alone was enough to make her cross, never mind the fine ladies looking down their noses at us.
We were situated in the first-class car, which was far and above the most luxurious place I’d ever seen. It was set with chandeliers hanging from the decorated ceiling, carved mahogany tables, and blue silk cushions and was better appointed than the parlor in our house. The movement might have rattled my teeth alarmingly, but I didn’t care. I did, however, feel rather bad for Colin and Marjorie stuck in the last car, with no walls to shield them from the elements or the dust and no seats to speak of. At least it wasn’t raining.
I’d never been on a train before, with the great roar of sound, the billows of steam like a dragon’s breath, and the rapid blur of London tenement houses followed by fields of sheep and oak groves. I rather liked it; it made me feel as if I were leaving my old life behind me.
If only that were true.
I attached myself to a tired-looking woman and her five daughters, all dressed in browns, like plump, happy sparrows. I trailed behind them as if I were a member of the family, a sixth daughter in a black-and-white striped dress. It wasn’t a traveling dress exactly since I’d never had occasion to travel, but it was dashing and hid the dirt well enough. My adopted family afforded me enough protection to see me to the ladies’ necessity and then to a lounge set aside for ladies to procure tea and soup. I didn’t have money for tea but I didn’t care. I didn’t even know what station we were at. I only knew it wasn’t our narrow house near Wimpole Street and that was good enough for me.
Our house was far and above beyond anything of our previous residences, but it felt tainted. We’d only been able to afford it after Miss Hartington died last year. She’d outlived Mrs. Gordon, which was a surprise to us all. We’d been visiting once a month for years, facilitating conversations with her dead husband and daughter. She finally joined them, but Miss Hartington, though older and more cross, stubbornly lived on. More surprising still, when she finally succumbed to a lung fever, her solicitor contacted us with a tidy and surprising sum of three hundred and fifty pounds, which she had willed to me, having no other children or close living relations of her own. Mother took every farthing and rented us a house within walking distance of a very fine neighborhood.
Now we had the veneer of respectability, heaven help us, and doors opened to Mother all over London. When she wasn’t drunk on sherry, she was drunk on fame.
But this was our trickiest demonstration yet. Lord Jasper wasn’t just an earl; he was clever and kind and well versed in Spiritualist matters. Not to mention that we were traveling to him, instead of working in the comfort of our specially rigged parlor. There were so many pitfalls it hardly bore thinking about.
The crowd had thinned on the platform, with most passengers still in the lounges, lingering over their supper. The air was thick with steam and burning coal, the wind pushing the iron hinges of the wooden signs into constant creaking. I skirted a pile of trunks, taller than I was and teetering dangerously, and ran straight into three boys about my age.
They looked to be from the second-class compartments by the state of their suits and smart waistcoats. And they were smiling that certain kind of smile that sent an alarm through me, lifting the hairs on the back of my neck.
I should have preferred being crushed by the luggage.
“Well, what have we here, lads?”
I looked away, refusing to meet their eyes. Colin told me once that if I came upon an angry dog, I shouldn’t meet his eyes as it would be interpreted as a challenge. I adjusted my grip on my parasol. It was plain, with no ruffles or silk roses, but pointy all the same.
“Traveling all alone, are you?” one of them asked with what could be described only as a leer worthy of any penny dreadful.
Blast.
“Let me pass,” I demanded. Where the devil was everyone?
“There’s a toll, love,” he insisted. “Didn’t you know?”
We were well hidden by the luggage and a shroud of steam, thick as London fog. The third boy looked uncomfortable, as if he wanted to stop his companions but didn’t know how. Fat lot of good his squirming would do me.
“Give us a kiss, then.”
When the ringleader reached for me, I jabbed my parasol at him. I was rather proud of my aim. It should have hit him painfully between the ribs. If I hadn’t been wearing a corset and had a proper range of motion, that is. I wasn’t used to wearing corsets, nor the way they restricted my movements and altered my ability to breathe properly.
The young man just grabbed the end of my parasol and held on, smirking. I tugged. He tugged back harder, and I lost my footing slightly. The edge of the tracks loomed close. The bone stays of my corset poked me in the ribs. His friends laughed.
“Now that’s not nice, is it?” he asked. I gave up the struggle and decided to follow with his last yank of the parasol. My sudden weight took him by surprise, nearly toppling him. One of them grabbed my elbow.
I opened my mouth to scream.
A gloved hand closed over my chin, fingers digging into my lips. “None of that now.”
And then suddenly I was free, sailing backward without warning.
“Get off her!”
I hit the trunks, bruising my shoulder. A hat box fell to the ground. I pushed my hair out of my eyes just in time to see Colin rearing back to punch the ringleader.
“No!” I leaped forward, grabbing his arm. The momentum of his swing had me sliding forward but at least it stopped his fist from connecting. They glared at each other as the passengers began to trickle around us, returning to their cars. Colin frowned down at me.
“Violet,” he muttered, shaking me loose. “Are you daft?”
“Are you?” I shot back as the crowd pulled us away from them.
“I could’ve taken that tosser,” he said, clearly insulted.
“I know that, but they were rich, or rich enough, anyway. Do you think they would have shrugged it off if one of them had had their nose broken by a manservant from third class?” And no doubt he would have done just that. He was taller than each of them and had broader shoulders, for all that he was only eighteen years old. And he’d survived the alleys of London, whereas the others hadn’t likely ever made it east of Covent Garden.
“Did they hurt you?” His voice was gentle, his blue eyes searching.
“No,” I shook my head. “I’m fine. Thanks to you.”
“What the devil are you doing wandering about alone?” he snapped. “And dressed like a bloomin’ lady, the way you are. You have to be careful now, princess.”
And there was the Colin I knew.
“ ’Tisn’t proper,” he insisted as he led me along the platform like a petulant child. His Irish accent always thickened when he was upset. I jerked my arm out of his grasp.
“Proper?” I echoed, nodding to my mother, who was flirting with no fewer than two earls from our compartment and three gentlemen from the car behind us. As if any impropriety I might muster could even hope to compete with my mother’s expertise.
She still didn’t know I’d discovered her real name: Mary Morgan. Mary Morgan was just another poor girl, scratching out a living, trying to keep her belly full while she yearned for pretty dresses and carriage rides. Celeste Willoughby was a gifted widow, crushed by the tragic death of her husband, leaving her young, beautiful, and with child.
Never mind that Mother had never married.
Or that she sometimes claimed my father was a great lord who had dallied with her when she had been a lady’s maid in Wiltshire. I couldn’t even be sure she’d ever stepped foot out of London. More often than not, she just muttered that I ought to be grateful she’d kept me at all. I’d only gotten that much out of her because she’d had one too many glasses of sherry.
Mother thought drinking sherry was dignified and sophisticated.
And if one glass was what the Beau Monde drank, then surely three glasses must be three times more sophisticated.
She was right, I supposed. Not about the sherry, of course, but that I ought to be grateful. She could have left me at some drafty orphanage or sent me to the workhouses—something she pointed out to me on a weekly basis. I was pretty enough to be useful now; pretty girls, after all, can marry rich no matter what their station. And even better, I was not so beautiful as to draw any attention away from her. My place was comfortably in her shadow.
If there was one thing she craved even more than expensive liqueur, it was to be the toast of polite society, to be invited to lavish dinner parties and weekends in the country. And Mary, with her Cockney accent and her questionable past, could never accomplish such a feat, no matter her physical attributes.
Mrs. Celeste Willoughby, however, could.
Colin sighed. “You’d best go. And I should see how Marjorie’s getting on.”
Mother liked the idea of arriving with a manservant and our own lady’s maid, even though Marjorie was actually just a maid-of-all-work. Mother had rescued Marjorie from a brothel just after we’d moved into our new house.
In my less charitable moments, I wondered if she’d rescued Marjorie and Colin so they would serve her out of loyalty and never ask for proper payment.
Colin acted as butler when necessary, servant boy when heavy things needed lifting, and as a guard for my mother when it would add to her mystique. She liked to tell people that her spirit guides had cautioned her to have her own protector, as her gifts were such a weighty responsibility.
I didn’t believe in spirit guides. Or spirits.
Colin and I exchanged a commiserating roll of the eyes before I made my way to my mother’s side. Her dark hair was coiled under a small black hat edged with a lace veil, carefully pinned back so it wouldn’t obscure her face. To be fair, she was uncommonly beautiful; the trouble was, she knew it.
“Mo—,” I cut myself off. She hated it when I called her Mother in front of handsome men. It made her peevish and sour for hours afterward. I swallowed, trying not to notice the way she stood far too close to a man with prodigious whiskers and a neat mustache.
“Violet, come along,” she said, scolding me. “Where on earth have you been?” The scolding was for everyone else’s benefit. I knew full well she hadn’t yet realized I had gone. “Inside now, and not another word.” Which meant she was afraid I would give her away.
I hadn’t given her away in the last seven years, since that first visit to Mrs. Gordon, nor at any of the other sittings we provided. I didn’t know why she thought I’d choose to do so on some train platform without a Spiritualist for miles. I found my seat as her giggle tinkled, like champagne flutes touching. Even one of the disapproving matrons in our car lifted her head, momentarily enchanted. Her scowl returned, dark as a thundercloud, when she spotted my mother stepping nimbly up the stair, wasp-waisted and beautiful.
Mother lowered herself gracefully into her seat. “I should have brought my own cushion,” she said, a trifle too loudly. “I can’t think who might have used this one before me.”
The truth was, she loved the blue silk and would hide the cushion under her crinolines to keep, first chance she got. The warning whistle pierced through the steam and the train lurched into movement, jostling us. We left the station and the red roofs of the village, plunging once more into the green countryside. The sun glinted off a meandering creek as it set. There was something lulling about the motion of the train, once you got used to it.
I leaned my temple against the window, content to decipher shapes in the lilac-colored clouds above us and then the stars when it grew too dark to see anything else. We barely saw the stars in London, because of the coal smoke. We barely even saw the sky.
As we approached the village, the glass grew oddly misty, then abruptly bloomed with frost.
It was nearly the end of summer and far too warm for frost of any kind.
I glanced about but no one else seemed to notice anything out of the ordinary. Mother was resting her eyes so she wouldn’t arrive with lines on her face. Most of the men were reading newspapers; one snored loudly. Two ladies bent over their embroidery hoops. Everyone else appeared to be dozing.
The frost traveled slowly, thickly. The lamplight made it look like lace, but it burned to touch. I snatched my fingers away, sitting up straight, my heart thumping loud and slow under my corset bones. Behind the thin ice, where the glass was still glass, the hills and hamlets that ought to have been dark glowed softly. It wasn’t torchlight I was seeing, or candles in cottage windows. We weren’t that near to the village yet; it was still all fields and oak groves. Otherwise I might have taken the lights for hundreds of candles, even though they flickered with a faintly blue glow, ghostly and cold.
The train cut through swarms of them, like giant fireflies, but not a single passenger noticed. I was the only one gaping at the scene outside. I’d read about corpse candles before, but I’d thought them idle superstition. A quaint folk tradition.
I did not credit them to be the terrifying unearthly light that now fell on my face and made me feel wretched and ill and shiver as if I were up to my neck in a snowdrift. I understood the warning not to follow will-o-the-wisps, to cast your eyes downward when you walked at night.
I thought I saw flashes of pale faces, pale hands, pale teeth.
And then, a face was suddenly there on the other side of the window.
Long translucent hair drifted as if the girl were underwater. There was a cloying scent in the still air, like lilies wilting by green water. She dripped as if it were raining, floated as if she were made of dandelion fluff. She wore a white dress layered with flounces.
Her eyes met mine, cold as starlight. I jerked backward, yelping.
My mother opened one eye crossly. “Violet, really.”
The girl faded, tattering like mist under a spear of strong sunlight.
The ghostly candles guttered and went out.