PROLOGUE
Dreyton Abbey, Shropshire, England, 1876
According to Cecelia Teague’s calculations, she approached the close of her second day in captivity.
She couldn’t remember the last time her father had locked her in the cellar’s green room for so long.
Perhaps he’d finally gone mad.
Would he ever unlock that door again?
Would the world forget she ever existed?
The questions pecked at her in the gathering dark like carrion birds at a fresh corpse.
She’d done nothing wicked or wanton. Nothing to merit her schoolmates’ violent cruelty nor her father’s pious fury.
She’d merely been the first girl, at thirteen, to best everyone at the village school at calculus. Even the final-year students. When Mr. Rolland, the teacher, had accused her of cheating because of her age and sex, she’d reminded them that Maria Gaetana Agnesi had written the modern-day textbook on differential and integral calculus.
Mr. Rolland then banished her to the corner to stand until her feet ached and her skin burned with humiliation.
Thomas Wingate, the butcher’s son, had seized her at lunch, shoved his thin, ruddy face in hers, and called her nine kinds of foul names as he ripped her spectacles from her face and crushed them into the mud. He spat on her before shoving her on stomach over a felled tree and exposing her drawers to his entourage of lads, who all howled their mirth.
Fraught and humiliated as she was, Cecelia hadn’t shed a single tear until Mr. Rolland had threatened to go straight to her father, the Vicar Josiah Teague.
The threat had been directed at the boys.
But as Cecelia had predicted, she was the one who paid the price for their sins.
For in the eyes of her father, the sin was hers.
The original sin.
She’d been born a girl.
As the Reverend Teague marched her to the green room, he hissed at her the usual litany of condemnations, ignoring her vehement protestations.
“Just like your mother, allowing any gobshite to lift your skirts. I’ll see you in the grave before you become a jezebel.” He’d thrust her roughly through the cellar door, causing her to stumble down the stairs and land in a heavy heap on the packed-dirt floor. His lips had pulled away from his tea-stained teeth in a grimace of unmitigated disgust. “I thought you too fat to draw the carnal notice of man.”
“I didn’t do anything,” she cried, ignoring the grit of the earth beneath her knees as she rose to press her hands together as though in prayer. “Please believe me. I would never—”
“You are a woman now.” He wiped the word away from his mouth with the back of his hand. “And there is no such creature as an innocent woman. You tempted those boys to sin, and for that, you must atone.”
Her remonstrations were lost when he’d slammed the heavy door, ensconcing her in shadow.
Cecelia settled into a corner, growing accustomed to the increasingly frequent punishment. She’d her primer to keep her occupied at the very least, as she’d thrust it into her bodice before her father had stormed into the schoolyard.
The panic hadn’t encroached until a day, a night, and the next day had slipped by.
When her bucket of water ran dry, she’d succumbed to a fit of histrionics.
Cecelia banged on the door until the meat of her fists throbbed. She pitted her substantial weight against it, bruising her shoulders.
She pleaded at the keyhole like a convicted man might do on the last night of his life. She vowed to be good. To behave. Promised anything she could think of to soften her father’s heart, or God’s. She even confessed to sins she’d not committed, hoping her perceived candor and penitence would buy her freedom.
“Please, Papa, please let me out,” she sobbed at the shadows of his feet, two pillars of condemnation against the thin strip of light beneath the door. “Don’t leave me alone in the dark.”
“You were conceived in darkness, child, and to eternal darkness you’ll likely return.” His voice was as loud and stern in their small parish home as it was from the pulpit. “Pray and ponder upon that.”
The shadows of his feet disappeared, and Cecelia dropped to her knees, her fingertips reaching for the last of the light of his lantern as it faded away.
She curled up next to the door like a dog awaiting its master’s return, her trembling cheek pressed to the dank floor as she searched beneath for the return of the light.
Conceived in darkness. What did that mean? And how was it her fault?
Cecelia called her prison the green room because the moss clinging to damp stone was the only color to be found in the cellar of the modest cottage. Some long-ago vicar with a family too large for the two-room house to adequately contain had partitioned a section of the subterranean space into an extra bedroom. Which was to say, a cot and trunk had been shoved into the corner.
In the summer, she would open the window and curl up in the anemic shafts of sun or moonlight, drinking in what she could. One day, the Reverend Teague’s boots had appeared at the window and kicked dirt inside, showering her with soil.
She’d begged him not to lock the window from the outside. Not to take away the only light she knew.
“I won’t escape,” she vowed.
“I’m not afraid you’ll escape,” he blustered around a rare and colorless laugh. “It isn’t as though you could fit through a window this small.”
It was the first time Cecelia had hated her body. The size and shape of it. If only she were wraithlike and delicate, perhaps she could slither through the window and slip away into the night.
Not that she would … she was too afraid of the dark.
And she’d nowhere to go.
Over the years, she’d faced the green room with more courage. The fiends and monsters her fanciful fears conjured never once attacked her. Spiders and other very real denizens of the dark scuffled and shuffled and spun their webs but had yet to hurt her.
The sounds of the mice and such eventually became a serenade, preferable to the awful silence.
It amazed her what she could adapt to. The gnawing of thirst and hunger. The putrid scent of a neglected chamber pot and her unwashed body in a poorly ventilated room.
She snuck a blanket from her own bed into a cupboard one day when her father had been out proselytizing. This, she wrapped around her in the night, pretending the feeble warmth she found within belonged to something—someone—else.
She’d lean against the wall, hugging the blanket to herself, and fancy that her arms clinging to her middle were the arms of another, holding her as no one had ever done. That the planes and curves of the cold stones at her back were really the carved strength of a man. Of a protector. Of someone who didn’t leave her alone in the night.
To face the dark by herself.
Because even as her imagined childhood torments fell away with the advancement of each year, one never did.
In the absolute darkness beneath the earth, something more insidious than a ghost lurked in the green room. More unrelenting than hunger. More rotten than filth. More venomous than any spider.
Loneliness.
An all-encompassing word, as correct as it was inadequate.
What began as boredom and isolation slowly became a void of silence inside of her, a yawning chasm of emptiness that no meal or interaction seemed to sate.
Because even when she was free, the room was always there, waiting for her next perceived slight, her next accidental sin.