Chapter IV
IV
London, England
The rain hangs in the air, but doesn’t fall.
It is a damp dusk as Sabine glides down the street, sheltered from the mist and the last dregs of light beneath her parasol, her veil pinned up into her hat.
She has just arrived, but already she is quite fond of London.
It is a messy, sprawling city, and no matter how many bodies find their way into the Thames, she doubts anyone will notice.
Sabine thumbs one of the pendants around her neck—a Polish grosz—and slows before a dress shop window, a gown the color of honeycomb on display beyond the glass.
Her reflection hovers just beside it. With her red hair bundled discreetly against her neck, she is a somber ghost in gray and black.
The bleak armor has served her well as a woman traveling alone, but she must confess she misses the jewel-toned gowns she used to wear.
The honeycomb one calls to her, lit by a lamp still on inside the shop.
Sabine looks up and down the road.
At this hour, most of the businesses are already closed.
She assumes this one is as well, despite the lamp, but then the door swings wide, and a mother and daughter come tumbling out, the latter chittering about lace and the former nagging her to stand up straight.
Sabine catches the door as they pass by, is still holding it when a voice within the shop bids her to come in.
And to close the door behind, before the damp spoils the silk.
Inside, a middle-aged modiste kneels before a half-made dress, tacking a hemline with metal pins, which she plucks from between her teeth, all the while muttering to herself. The English, Sabine has noticed, seem to do that, as if quiet is a thing that must be banished, lest it settle in.
“I’ll be with you in a moment,” says the modiste, and so Sabine looks around the narrow room, considers the selection.
The shop is full of headless bodies, each wearing a different dress.
The colors, all paler than she would prefer, pastel shades of pink and green and blue.
Watered down, she thinks, just like the London air.
She grazes a ribboned waist, the fabric cinched just below the bust.
After a century of bustles and big skirts, the new fashion seems designed to pour down the body in thin liquid layers. Far more to her taste.
The modiste spits the last two pins into her hand. “Have you come to collect a dress?” she asks, groaning a little as she gets to her feet.
“No,” says Sabine, drawing out the skirt to see how wide it flares. “I’ve come to buy one.”
“You’re too late, miss,” says the modiste, turning toward her as she says it. She draws up short, taking in the somber dress, the veil. “Oh, I’m sorry for your loss.”
Sabine’s mouth twitches. “Yes, well, that’s why I’m here. I think I’ve spent long enough in mourning. I find myself in want of something brighter.”
A slight grimace. “I’m afraid all the dresses in the shop are spoken for.”
Sabine lets the skirt slip through her fingers, nods at the honey-colored gown in the window. At a glance, she knows that it will fit. “Even that one?”
“ That one is reserved for Lady Fletcher’s eldest daughter,” says the modiste, as if the name means anything.
“How long, then,” asks Sabine, “to have a new one made?”
“Weeks,” answers the modiste bluntly.
Sabine sighs through her teeth. She has never been a patient woman, and now that she’s decided to rid herself of her dreary mourning palette, she cannot wait.
She considers persuading the modiste, but it’s one thing to bend a mind the way it wants to go, and another to force it the other way, and hers is clearly set, so Sabine tries a new approach.
“Money is no object,” she says, reaching for her coin purse. But there’s no greed in the air around the modiste. Only a harried energy.
“To you, or any other member of the ton,” she says, waving her hand. “If you had come to me a month ago, perhaps, but now, with the season about to start . . .”
Sabine frowns. These days she thought she had a decent grasp of English, but the conversation is studded with words she’s never heard before, or ones she has, but snipped and dropped into new context. “Season?” she asks. “Do you mean spring?”
The modiste bustles past her toward another half-finished dress.
“You must be new to London,” she says. “The season, when England’s most eligible daughters descend on the city to be presented here at court.
Every mother in the ton hoping to secure a worthy match.
” She stabs a pin into a ruffled sleeve.
“Three months of teas and balls and God forbid they wear the same dress twice.”
Sabine’s mood brightens as the woman speaks.
This season sounds diverting. A wealth of prospects. A perfect place to occupy her time, her mind, her urge to hunt.
“You know,” says the modiste, looking her up and down. “I do have something from last season that might fit.” She turns toward a curtain at the back of her shop. “It won’t be the latest fashion, of course, but beggars can’t be—”
She never finishes the thought.
“What a wonderful dress,” says Lady Pollard barely a week later, as she takes her seat in Sabine’s parlor.
“Why thank you,” she says, running a hand over the honey-colored skirts. She was right—it did fit perfectly.
And so does London.
The first thing Sabine did, after procuring the new house—it belonged to an old baroness who died in her sleep, or so it’s said, and had no living heirs—was to send out invitations to the ladies on her street.
After all, it is important to be seen.
Three women sit around her table now, and in the wake of Lady Pollard’s compliment, the other two make cooing sounds of warm agreement. Sabine smiles and pours from a teapot made of painted porcelain, grateful that the late baroness shared her expensive taste.
It is early afternoon, the light reaching through the gauzy curtains, but the surrounding houses interrupt the sun, and the windows all face south, and Sabine has arranged the chairs so that hers sits safely out of reach, regardless of the hour.
“Speaking of dresses,” says Madam Harris. “Have you heard about the modiste on Earl Street? Dropped dead in her shop. Pins still in her mouth, and a dozen dresses left unfinished.”
“And so close to the start of the Season,” says Madam Thatch.
Sabine knows now that in context, the word is pronounced with a slight emphasis, as if it is a proper noun. English is a fickle language, but she is learning.
She contorts her face in mock horror as she takes up her cup. “What a loss.”
The women coo, and nod, and soon talk of loss invariably turns to talk of her.
She is a widow, after all, despite the honey-colored dress. She is just out of mourning, she explains. The air around her swims with a fresh hunger, not for blood or food but gossip.
Who was her husband?
Well, she says, she was married to a Spanish viscount named Andrés.
How easy it is to lie when you can use the truth to do it.
A viscount! they exclaim. Goodness me. What was he like?
And here is where history invites revision.
And a hefty bit of flourish. In Sabine’s hands, Andrés becomes a kind and loving husband, his family known for wine as well as wealth.
And she, a noble daughter in her own right, raised mostly in Spain, but with a fondness for the trappings of the British court.
They had just moved here, for her, in fact, when he perished. Suddenly.
How tragic, the women echo, sitting there with hands to breasts, and tea forgotten.
They are horrified, of course. And just as rapt. Their curiosity bleeds into the air, circling the room like smoke. They want to know more. Want to know everything. But Sabine lets the silence hold. Forces them to break it.
“You are so young,” says Lady Pollard, reaching for her hand, which has been warmed by the teacup she’s been holding.
“And so lovely,” adds Madam Thatch.
“Surely you could make another match,” offers Madam Harris.
Sabine arranges her features into something like sadness, softened by time. “He was the love of my life,” she lies. “I do not think I want to find another.”
Murmurs of understanding.
“What about your family?” asks Lady Pollard.
Sabine shakes her head and says, “Mine, I’m sad to say, were gone before I wed. And his are back in Spain.”
“Then you are all alone!” says Madam Harris, aghast.
“And yet,” she says, letting her gaze skate from one face to the next, “I do not feel that way.” A small but hopeful smile playing on her face.
“Don’t worry,” they say with bobbing heads.
“We will make the introductions.”
“You’ll never want for company.”
“You will fit right in.”
Sabine smirks behind her cup of tea.
“You are too kind.”
The Season. What a concept.
That first night is like the opening of Carnevale.
Less debauchery, perhaps, or so it seems, but everyone is so well fed and watered, pampered and dressed and paraded through the ballrooms. She watches, considering her options.
It is a feast of choice, and though Matteo is not there to play, she sets the game, the rules, the prize.
Never the girls being presented to the court. Nice as they are to look at, bundled like presents in taffeta and lace, Matteo’s voice still has a way of nagging from inside her head. Not the ones who will be greatly missed. Whose death would bring catastrophe.
Still, Sabine is not so strict as her old friend, and a Season is a long time—too long, she thinks—to go entirely without a meal.
She tends her hunger like a flame, stoked just enough to keep the coals blushed, the heat from going out.
But the bulk of her excitement, her attention, goes to the prey.
That first year she contents herself with a lady’s maid.
The next, a daughter who’s made the rounds three times without a match.
The third, a visiting cousin, already wed.
More than once, Sabine catches the eye of a male suitor, thinking to court her instead. More than once, she’s forced to pause her game, to clear the board of this unwelcome piece. But it is never satisfying. She forgot the bitter way their blood tastes. Like unripe fruit.
Matteo would call it cheating, but it’s not as though it slakes her thirst.
And then, the fourth year comes around, and perhaps it is just that she has put down roots, sown and grown herself into the London soil, but Sabine finds she is no longer content with choosing scraps.
She wants a greater challenge.
After all, the Season is full to bursting with young women and their suitors. They are all hunting for something, someone. Why shouldn’t she?
Perhaps she craves the risk as well as the reward.
After all, the danger is what makes the prize so sweet.
She stands on the balcony that first night, at the presentation ball, and instead of searching the wings, as she has in years before, she lets herself survey the banquet streaming by below. A river of young women, all in shades of cream.
By the end of the ball, she’s made her choice.
A lanky girl with white-gold hair, and blushing cheeks, and blue eyes that remind her of Matteo’s lover back in Venice.
Sabine is giddy with the promise of a proper hunt.
But at the next ball, as she searches for her chosen mark among the couples dancing in the hall, Sabine sees her instead.
A new face. Dressed in gold and growing like a vine against the wall.
Her complexion, not the pale shade called English rose, but sun-kissed, nearing bronze.
Her hair a mass of brown curls, twisted and pinned, but clearly fighting to escape.
Tendrils climbing free around her heart-shaped face.
Her mouth, like a slice of peach, and her eyes, wide and bright with wonder.
“Who is that?” Sabine asks lightly, and Lady Pollard lifts a pair of looking glasses to her nose, and squints across the hall.
“Oh,” she says. “That must be Amelia Hastings’s newest ward.”
Sabine finds herself intrigued. “She wasn’t announced.”
“No, not this year,” says Lady Pollard. “Word is she’s a bit rough around the edges. Though I’m sure Amelia will set her straight.” Her voice dips low beneath the weight of gossip. “I heard there was an incident, back at her estate.” She leans in closer still. “Something involving another girl.”
Sabine feigns shock, even as her interest sharpens. “You don’t say.”
“But of course,” chirps Lady Pollard, fluttering a fan, “I’m sure that was only idle talk.”
The woman takes her leave, but Sabine stays where she is, attention hooked on this new girl, the one with the white-blond hair and pale blue eyes already slipping from her thoughts.
It is her game after all.
She is allowed to change the rules.
She watches as the girl plucks at the dance card on her wrist, as if it were a chain, and even though the ball is full of bodies, their thoughts a whispered tangle, her mind seems like it is reaching out, the air around her full of hope and fear and life. A longing to be seen, set free.
A lovely girl.
A perfect mark.
Sabine has no way of knowing that this one night will tip the balance of her life.
That this one girl will be both the beginning and the end of everything.