Chapter 11
Not that anyone cared they were inauspicious—her father had never been interested in that sort of superstitious nonsense. But Esther’s dim uncle, who had always had a fascination with the family lineage, solemnly informed his brother that his daughter would be cursed.
‘Balderdash,’ Reginald Harding said, sucking on his cigar. His fair hair curled insouciantly over his forehead; his gold-brown eyes were the same shade as his child’s. ‘My daughter is perfectly normal, thank you.’
Esther found out when she was six. On one of his visits, her cousin Thomas had let it slip that his father called her the cursed girl, the misfortunate one, a witch.
Thomas said that she was a ‘bad seed of Eve, like the apple but worser,’ and would kill them all if they weren’t careful.
He said this with the same little vindictive smirk he always said everything with—Thomas was like that.
He was younger than Esther, but he had always treated her like she was a baby.
For some reason, Esther did not find this knowledge surprising—but she found it upsetting, all the same.
She felt the truth of it in the same instinctive way she felt pain when the darkness was near, or when she was made to eat sprouts.
She was cursed. Of course she was. Her mother had died of consumption when she was only one; her father had chosen to abandon England rather than remarry.
Now he was on an East India Company appointment far away, leaving Esther in the hands of the help: eight servants housed in the base of their townhouse in Brunswick Square, replaced so often by her uncle that Esther hardly ever learnt their names.
She was surrounded by lovely things: frosted-glass chandeliers and paintings of insipid courtesans; silk gowns and gold-framed mirrors; a lavender-coloured rocking horse she had named Charmeuse.
But every joy she had seemed coupled with sorrow.
Consider the little songbird she’d received as her fifth birthday present from her father: she’d found it dead at the bottom of its cage the next day.
Think of the shadows that swarmed around her when she was angry, the way she heard whispers in the dark.
She was a First Daughter, and she was cursed. That was simply how it was.
After that, after she knew about the curse, it only seemed to get worse.
Her governess, Harriet, took her out on an excursion on the lake in Hampstead Heath that summer; upon seeing shadows dancing on the water, she had taken such fright that she had fallen into the lake and drowned.
Her successor had apoplexy. By the time Reginald returned from his appointment—another squirming baby in his arms, the product of an affair in Penang—Esther was feared by everyone in the household.
‘She is cursed,’ her uncle said. ‘Our father told us the stories—what happened the last time there was a First Daughter. Shadows followed her, and suffering came in their wake.’
‘Nonsense,’ Reginald Harding said again. He had always been stubborn, carving his opinions upon himself like words carved into stone—he had neither the twitching paranoia of his younger brother nor, perhaps, his foresight.
Esther didn’t tell her brother, Isaac, about the curse, not even once he grew old enough to understand it.
Her father had given him a room near the servants’ quarters for shame of his bastardry, and yet—despite this—Isaac seemed to approach the world with great vigour and optimism; it was often commented that his personality was the opposite of his curt, callous sister’s.
When Esther walked down a hall, he would spring from behind doors and leap to grasp her skirts; he would babble and laugh with all the joy of a piping flute; he was sweet and kind and gullible, craning his neck when Esther told him she saw a pig flying through the sky, gasping in delight when she somehow removed her thumb from its socket.
Eventually, though, as the shadows grew more familiar, their darkness more insistent, Esther learnt to keep the pigs upon the ground, her thumb attached. She did not want to ruin him. She did not want to love him overmuch, or else the curse might take him, also. Instead, she made herself alone.
And so, Esther Harding grew from girl to woman.
She ignored her doddering father and her earnest brother, who always tried so hard to get her attention, and whom she pushed away.
They stayed in the London townhouse all year, regardless of season, as the family estate belonged to her uncle’s line; and although that was terribly out of fashion, Esther didn’t mind it.
To her, London was not only the Ton, with its pastel dreams and white-marble houses, its gilded carriages and manicured lawns.
It was all the filth, too: the horse dung on the cobbles, the thin film of soot that coated everything, the stench of the summer and the bitter cold of the winter.
It was oily puddles and coal smoke, street vendors shouting, butchers lugging sweating cuts of meat.
It was the constant rain, the darkness of the clouds, the way that thunder sometimes shook the chandeliers in their red-papered dining room and made the crystals clatter.
On occasion, Esther would dream of other places—faraway houses, with empty halls and shadowy hills—and it was always with relief that she awakened, remembering she was in London still.
London was so human, so real. It kept her grounded.
The town offered opportunity, too. There were bookshops in the town, those run by secret societies, full of shelves of esoterica and occult scribblings.
Esther would sneak out at night and explore dark alleyways with closed doors that only opened to the correct pattern of knocks; she would seek ancient manuscripts in labyrinthine libraries that claimed to hold the secrets of the universe.
At seventeen, the night before Esther’s first day out in the marriage market, she went to one such library and held a book in her hands that was bound with human skin.
Bringing it home, she followed the ritual inside to the letter, sourcing each ingredient, muttering each incantation with solemn precision: but nothing seemed to happen.
Nothing ever seemed to happen, no matter how many attempts she made.
Esther groaned and tipped her head back, rolling her neck.
It was late, very late, the only illumination in the room the candles she’d lit for the ritual circle.
She remained in the gown she’d worn to tea that afternoon, a pale-blue capped-sleeve dress with bluebells stitched on its hem.
Its incongruity with the pentagrams inked on the back of her hands was almost amusing.
Something tapped on the window. Esther turned to look at it, and she smiled, going to open the sash. The crow on the sill cawed in approval, outstretching its wings as if to imply an embrace. Something glinted in its claws.
‘You brought me something?’ she asked it, and in reply it thrust a curled talon towards her. It dropped something small and red and bloody onto the windowsill: a tiny sparrow’s heart, dead and unbeating, a vivid stain on the white-painted wood.
‘Oh.’ Esther reached forward to take the heart in her hands. A droplet of blood welled between her clasped palms, trailing down her wrist. It tumbled down to the hem of her skirts, where it bloomed red against the cerulean petals of an embroidered bluebell.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and the crow bowed its head.
The crow had been visiting Esther at the townhouse for as long as she could remember.
Perhaps, as a young girl, she had given it something to eat, and so ensured its loyalty; she couldn’t remember.
If so, Esther declined to question how the crow had lived so long, or why it continued to visit with little reward.
As with all things in her life, it was largely inexplicable.
She went to her dressing table, laid out an old silk kerchief, and placed the heart upon it.
She knew she would have to throw it away soon, but she wanted to appreciate the gift while it lasted.
She stared down at the tiny, fingernail-size organ, noting its silence and stillness, and she cocked her head.
The darkness had been whispering to her for years. It was only natural that, sometimes, she had listened.
Their interactions had started as tiny trades: she would ask for something small of it, like setting the logs alight when the fire failed.
In exchange, Esther would feel a brief moment of burning within her, like searing a finger upon a candle flame, and a brief moment of emptiness.
It had become second nature to her, now, to make these miniature deals.
The wonders they created were always worth the pain.
Slowly, gently, she held her hands out to the shadows, welcoming them to her.
They knew her well enough to understand she wanted an exchange.
Immediately, she felt a heat prickle in her chest, and—being careful not to let the pain overwhelm her—she reached forward, placing a trembling finger on the sparrow heart.
Make it beat, she thought. And with that thought, the shadows stretched forward like fingers, curling themselves around the organ. The heart quivered, inflated, and slowly, steadily, began to pulse in time with her own.