Part One
The Master of Winterthurse
“Stars, hide your fires;
Let not light see my black and deep desires.”
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
How did I become so superstitious? I was sensible once, was I not? Now my dreams are incensed with asphodel and my nights imbued by haunting strangeness. The gargoyles stir at dusk and the moors howl and gnaw against the battlements. But my every wakeful thought is for the master who reigns o’er this exquisite darkness.
Chapter One
Littérature Étrange
My dear Mary,—I am consigned to London for the season to chaperone Milli. Would you believe, I alighted from the coach in Lad Lane only to plant my boot and petticoats five inches deep in a feculent mass of horse leavings upon taking my inaugural steps. Thus has my London adventure begun. Your loving and muck-stained cousin,
Emma.
“The great dragon and his dark angels were cast down to earth from heaven; cast into eternal darkness.” The rector’s hair was ruffled with excitement as he sermonized.
Emma Rose smothered an errant yawn, her thoughts straying from angels and dragons to lustful monks and magic mirrors. She lowered her gaze, sure that her cheeks were flushed with wicked scarlet. It had occurred to her last Sunday that reading romances into the small hours was likely better avoided on the night before the Sabbath.
Her second yawn, however, would not be so easily suppressed, and though she tried to disguise it with an inconspicuous hand, her uncle marked the offense with a flattening of his mouth. His brief side glance nudged her like a reproving elbow.
“From that darkness, the dragon corrupts God’s flock…”
Emma’s lip twitched as she observed one of God’s flock surreptitiously picking his nose in the second row pew.
“…Wander not from the light; stray not from the path of righteousness…”
Emma tried to attend the sermon, but was too distracted. She glanced at her sister. Millicent was perched beside her in the pew, unaffected by the dolorous mood that overshadowed every face, her chin tucked demurely into her neck as though in devotional repose beneath her bonnet. Her lashes were lowered to her cheeks in a semblance of prayer, to all observers a most faithful and devout paragon. Fortunately, it was only Emma who appeared to notice her sister’s quiet snoring, overpowered as it was by the fiery homily.
The prospect of the sun becoming black and the moon like blood ought to have been the enemy to slumber, but Milli was an uncomplicated creature and when she put her mind to something—or turned it off, for that matter—she was more often successful than not. She was of that blessed race of people that seemed always to land in muck and walk out unsoiled, reeking of roses. Emma was decidedly not one among that lucky race.
In the course of the service, as the first strident key of the piano was sounding a hymn, Emma felt it incumbent on her to drop Milli’s psalm book, none too gently, in her younger sister’s lap. Accordingly, Milli’s lids flew wide and she shot up directly from her seat to stand beside Emma with a muffled giggle.
Milli glanced at the page number of Emma’s hymnal before flicking hastily through her own. “What have I missed?” she whispered under her breath.
“The stars falling to the earth,” Emma replied. But she quickly suppressed the smirk that was nudging at the corner of her mouth, aware that her uncle’s beetled brow had swung towards her yet again.
He acknowledged with a nod the penitent flush that mottled her cheeks and continued singing. It was devilish unfair of him to have noticed Emma’s misbehavior so readily yet remain oblivious to her sister’s. Milli, God bless her, would only have to flash a smile at the surliest judge and be acquitted of murder despite bloodied hands. But then beauty always would enjoy an unfair advantage over the rest of God’s plainer creatures.
Her earlier good humor now much subdued, Emma lent her voice to the hymn and absently studied the faces of the parishioners. There was an ominous tension in the room that had little to do with the dour young rector’s apocalyptic sermon. The whole of London, in fact, seemed invested in widow’s weeds. Each expression was imbrued with gloom, every whisper furtive and curt, all save her own and Milli’s. Well, her Aunt Haywood might also have been included in that minority, but the old dear was rarely aware of the hour, never mind the day of the year, and she was certainly in no danger of being sensible to the grim features of her leery neighbors. Uncle Haywood, however, was manifestly au fait with whatever evils plagued London, yet, time and again, he spared himself the trouble of satisfying his niece’s curiosity. Much to Emma’s vexation, her uncle took to answering her with contrived deafness. Although, she allowed, he was rather deaf at the best of times, poor fellow.
At length, the rector’s voice grew hoarse and the service drew to a close. It was with dreary shuffling that the murmurous flock began to withdraw from their perches in a funereal procession of narrowed looks.
“Ghastly business!” said a man nearby. He was speaking in hushed tones to the gentleman beside him. “My poor Fanny keeps to her bed now; she won’t even look out the window, lest she attract some fiend’s notice.”
“More than a few rum-looking fellows about, I can tell you,” said his neighbor.
“And what think you of these pestiferous fogs we’ve been having of late?”
“Quite chronic, indeed.”
“I blame the Whigs, sir.”
“Quite so!”
Emma gritted her teeth against an absurd impulse to interject and demand these perfect strangers expound what her uncle determinedly withheld. With a rueful sigh, she trailed after her guardians, resigned instead to filling her empty stomach with warm vittles in lieu of fulfilling her curiosity.
At the door, she returned the rector’s adieu, noticing the way his stern expression instantly smoothed beneath the power of Milli’s angelic smile. And he was not the only ridiculous young hopeful to find himself besotted by her sister. Rolling her eyes, Emma pushed past the two young gentlemen that were also vying for Milli’s attention. In due course, the girls followed their elders from the churchyard down to the cobbled lane—the flirtations having finally concluded—and thence onto the thoroughfare that would take them back to their uncle’s townhome.
The clouds were so heavy with gloom that their black underbellies seemed to drag along the rooftops. It was really too bad, Emma thought, glaring down at her clacking boots, that Milli’s coquettish smile could not do for the London sky what it had done for her admirers who had left the church with brightened gazes.
She pulled off her glove to better scratch the itch on her nose and ducked her head, lest anyone think she was picking it instead. Emma’s thoughts so overmastered all other faculties—such as the simple business of avoiding fellow pedestrians—that it was with a startled gasp that her bonnet collided with another’s.
The stranger threw up her hand the very same moment that Emma did, therewith dropping her reticule into a dirty puddle and promptly rueing its loss with some foreign and obscure utterance. The contact of those long white fingers, raised in defense, against Emma’s own naked palm shot a strange and unpleasant current along Emma’s skin. She hastily slipped her glove back on, muttering apologies.