Chapter 12
It wasn’t that Miriam had expected to gain much from her repeated visits to Esther Harding; in fact, she knew there was nothing to gain from them at all.
There was only one thing that was required of her, and that was to wait until Esther’s time was up.
Miriam wasn’t concerned that Esther would find a way to break the curse.
That had never even been a consideration.
It would have been amusing, perhaps, to speak to her in human form—but Miriam was wary of reminding Esther of her past lives, of accidentally removing whatever mortal obstruction had prevented Cybil’s memories from resurfacing.
By the time of her death, Cybil had been extremely powerful; now Esther was even more so.
Once she realised that attempting to break the curse was futile, who knew what havoc she could wreak in search of an escape from the deal?
No. Miriam had all she needed this way, watching her as a crow from the windowsill.
She saw Esther’s pleasure, her pain, her confusion and regret.
The deal had done its work well: Cybil and Esther were physically indistinguishable, save for the absence and presence of a few scars, and a slight gain in height that a more varied diet had afforded the latter.
Now Esther was grown to the same age as Cybil had been, they were the same woman entirely.
Perhaps Esther was somehow now even more herself than she had been as Cybil, her soul reaffirmed with a second light, glowing even brighter than it had before.
The shadows rejoiced in her presence, swarming to sip from the power that leaked through her skin.
With her father’s death—and wasn’t that fascinating? Esther’s life a dark mirror to Cybil’s, like a clock, hands pointing to the same number at two different times of day—Esther had quit the home of her childhood and found herself replanted within her cousin’s townhouse.
It hardly made much of a difference to Miriam, of course; one windowsill was much the same as any other. But on the first night of her residence there, Esther herself had seemed disquieted, tossing and turning in her sleep, fingers carving canyons into the sheets.
Miriam wanted to take pleasure in her distress, in the beauty of it, the sheer sensuality—but she knew what it forewarned.
With each passing year, the weight of Cybil’s memories grew stronger, and Miriam was no longer confident that Esther would live and die without knowledge of her previous life.
If it did not risk invalidating the deal, and starting the cycle anew, Miriam would kill her at this very moment: preserve the sleeping elegance of her lashes falling softly against her cheeks, her back arching as she bucked against the dream.
But Miriam was confident another rebirth would only lead to disaster.
One life was difficult enough to forget, let alone two.
The knob of Esther’s bedroom door turned—so slowly, so gently, that even Miriam almost did not notice someone was entering.
But then a knife of flickering light sliced across the threshold.
A shined-leather shoe pressed forward, then another; the man that followed had a bright soul, as bright as Christopher Harding’s once had been, although it was no match for Esther’s.
He was brown-blond, and hawkish. The candle he held made his face a skull, light eyes lit golden.
Miriam concentrated, and a soft touch upon his psyche revealed his name—Thomas Harding—as well as his purpose.
Hatred, bitter bright, made his fingers twitch against the candlestick, his brows furrow, his steps stutter.
He hated the woman in the bed with such intensity, such passion, that he desired her, too—he wanted to conquer her and ruin her.
He blamed her for every disaster his life had ever had: the failed Company appointments; the death of his father; the death of his wife.
One week had separated them at birth. Because of that week, the family gift had become hers, magic denied to him forever.
And that gift had not only been given to Esther, but twisted by her, corrupted ineffably.
She was a First Daughter, and she was cursed. The Hardings were cursed.
Thomas crept forward and stood over Esther, watching her as she slept. His face was grim and furious. The candle wobbled in his shaking hand. Grimacing, he took care to right it.
Miriam fed upon the basest elements of humanity: regret, desperation, sadness, lust. For this reason, she had always recognised the darker emotions that had infected her creators.
She felt satisfaction at others’ pain, fury at a lost cause, desire and hunger, as much as any person would.
And now she saw something familiar in Thomas Harding’s expression, something she imagined was often in hers, in the moment before making a deal.
He was uncertain—this was not a calculated visit, merely an impulse of obsession—but still, he remained as capable of destruction as Miriam was.
He was capable of touching the candle to the sheet and setting it alight, or lunging forward to throttle Esther as she slept.
Miriam could not allow it. She shifted partly into shadows, making herself intangible, and went to step through the glass—then bounced back, feeling a stinging pain skitter across her feathers.
There was salt laid on the windowsill. Only a line of it, grain by grain, thin enough to be undetectable. But it was enough to forbid her entry. Enough to save Thomas Harding’s life for now.
Was this how it felt to be mortal, to be trapped and impotent, to see disaster approach and accept it as inevitable? Furious, Miriam pecked at the window with her beak, making a loud clunking sound. Inside, Thomas froze. Esther muttered to herself and shifted in her sleep.
Miriam cawed and pecked again at the window.
A hairline crack appeared in the glass, and Thomas stepped back, candle shaking wildly in his hands.
Miriam was tempted to continue and see the window shatter, but doing so wouldn’t remove the line of salt, or permit her entry.
Instead, she focused on making as much noise as possible, cawing and shrieking, clawing at the window with her talons. The glass squealed as if in pain.
Thomas, eyes wide, spun away and ran out of the room. The door slammed shut behind him. Esther bolted up in the bed, gasping in shock, holding the sheet to her chest. She looked at the window.
‘Little shadow,’ she said, loudly enough that Miriam could hear her through the glass. ‘What are you doing?’
She slid off the bed. Her nightdress, semi-sheer in the moonlight, clung invitingly to the round of her stomach, the lines of her thighs. But Miriam could hardly indulge herself—particularly not with a line of salt between them, and the cousin threatening his return.
Instead, she tapped her beak once more against the window, expanding the crack in the glass, just to see Esther flinch in response. The rush of possessiveness Miriam felt was dizzying.
No one else should ever make you feel fear, darling, she thought. No one but me.
Then she turned away and took off into the night.
Miriam was walking a tightrope, that much was clear.
Esther was on the precipice of remembering her previous life—any event too jarring, a moment of shock or anger, could tip her over the edge.
Meanwhile, Thomas Harding had ensconced himself in his salt-rimmed house, defended from Miriam’s intervention by the safety of his walls.
He would have to leave eventually, she knew, but he seemed stubbornly resistant to the world outside; he spent the entirety of the next day in his library, flipping through old books and taking notes in a ledger.
Miriam saw something of Cybil’s father in the man, in the wild twitch of his fingers as he turned the pages, in the minute pinpricks of his pupils as they caught the light of the sun outside.
It was a bloodline, clearly, that was prone to obsession, prone to ambition.
It was both the Hardings’ greatness and their ruin.
The afternoon came, and Esther bid Thomas farewell: she was going to some sort of society event.
Miriam was torn between following her and watching Thomas for longer.
Eventually, she settled on Esther—there was nothing more entertaining than watching her try to navigate high society—and she was about to fly away from the windowsill when Thomas stood from his seat, went over to the lefthand wall, and crouched down to pull up a floorboard.
Miriam watched, fascinated, as he lifted a book out of a hiding place. Thomas stayed there for a while, crouched, staring at it—perhaps considering whether to open it—before he squared his shoulders and stood up.
The book had a black leather cover. Even from this distance, Miriam recognised it immediately. The three-headed hawk pressed to the cover stared back at her, beaks open. Past, present, future.
Thomas gripped the grimoire with white knuckles.
‘Lily,’ he said to himself. ‘For you, Lily.’
He left the room.
Miriam slumped, pressing her head to the window, beak clinking softly against the glass. If she had been human in that moment, she might have groaned. But she had no choice. If the deal was to complete, Esther had to live her twenty-three years. Miriam had to warn her.
Isaac hadn’t wanted to accompany Esther to the Cheswick fete.
Frankly, she hadn’t wanted him to accompany her—she avoided him as much as possible, as the curse demanded—but she still required a chaperone.
Still, his dramatic sighs as they stepped into the carriage made her wish she could have asked someone else.