Chapter 1 #2
It was all I had left. Not much, by any means. Nothing to leave a legacy, a mark, or a reminder that they, or I, had ever lived.
With a shake of my head, I opened the door. It was time to face my fate.
The matron stood tall and stiff, a pillar of shadow and brimstone as I approached, and I gripped the burlap sack tight with hands that shook. The rough-hewn fabric scratched my skin, the only reminder this was real—despite the death knell a-clanging in my ears.
Time was up. Father had said we simply borrow time to stay the reaper. Stumble one step ahead. One meal beyond his reach. But the reaper had just come calling, hand out, for debt owed and interest due.
I didn’t dare open my mouth to ask what was amiss, for if I did, I’d scream my throat raw as sure as the day was long. Instead, I watched as the matron rapped on the master’s door. As she tilted her head toward the thick, stained wood. Waiting. Waiting. And then she nodded. He must have replied.
But I couldn’t hear a blasted thing over the rush in my ears: an ocean of blood crashing against a storm-weary shore.
“English only once you’re within. Chin up, Maggie,” said the matron, rolling her own shoulders in case I’d forgotten how to stand. What language to speak. How to be. How to exist as a nothing and no one before a master.
As if I could forget.
And as the matron stepped from the shadow to push in the door, I molded my back, forcing it straight as if about to serve my own mistress, Lady Grace—as she had liked to be called—and followed the matron inside.
The office was a cave with no windows. A cavern of black so bleak, I’d not seen the like since the potato rotted where it grew—the only crop we could grow for ourselves, the only food we ever had to eat—and passed through our disbelieving fingers as a dark, inedible sludge.
There were no beeswax candles here, only the impossibly bright glow of oil lamps, made all fancy and delicate like the ones that had lit the darkest afternoons in Lady Grace’s parlor.
A painting broke up the boring wood paneling—a fierce-looking man in a high-necked white shirt with white cravat choking a well-fed throat.
A lord, I supposed. But the man sitting behind a desk fit for a king was certainly not he.
He scribbled and scratched, fingers blotted with ink as he ran a free hand through a generous cropping of hair.
His clothes were crisp. Well-laundered and kept, though not new. Local fabric at that. Wool, perhaps. My brother, Michael, would never stop talking about fabrics, describing their wins and woes in minute detail until we’d beg Father for a story. Anything to get Michael to shut his hole.
Jesus wept, but I could hear him now.
That’s good Dublin wool, Maggie. Expensive enough, but not out of reach for a comfortable man of the Town. Now, if I were to show you his lordship’s woolens, you’d see at once the gulf between them, and know his lordship a man of great station.
I squeezed my eyes shut at the memory. Of my constant reminder to him that Colonel Moore-Vandeleur was only a mister, not a lord.
Not high-born aristocracy like his wife, Lady Grace.
But Michael would always roll his eyes and say, “What matter that, when he’s a-lording over most of Clare, and you and I the richer for being polite. ”
The matron cleared her throat, stirring me from the past. “As requested, Mr. O’Brien. Inmate 1-3-4-0, O’Shaughnessy, Margaret.”
The master didn’t look up. Instead, he stilled his scratching and swapped the fountain pen for a pair of spectacles that had seen better days.
“What’s your place, inmate?” he asked, a thin, nasally preen that set my teeth on edge. There was a trace of London in his English, but he was Irish-born for sure. Educated across the sea then. I opened my eyes.
“Kilrush, sir.”
A grunt. He rose and turned to sift through a filing cabinet that lined the wall, then returned with a rectangle of cardboard, a ream of paper within.
“Kilrush,” he repeated, though more to himself than me. He thumbed through the file, licking his inked thumb between pages, and I fought the urge to remind him. But the ink now staining the corner of his wafer-thin lips made him less … intimidating. Less the master.
“O’Shaughnessy.” Murmuring, he seemed to find the right page, then glanced up at me, his beady eyes skimming from the tip of my crown to my dirtied bare toes. “Margaret, you said?”
“Yes, sir.” I bobbed my head, the movement stiff and odd, as if more than two years had passed between duty and now.
He took up the pen and made a note on the paper. “Family?”
I paused, but only for a beat. “Dead, sir.”
“In what union?” he asked.
I winced. “I don’t know, sir.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” Pursing his lips, he glanced at me and circled the air with his pen. “What poor union did they perish in? Which workhouse, girl? What district?”
“They perished on the trip, Mr. O’Brien.” The matron stepped forward and placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. I would thank her for that small kindness later. “From the Kilrush union, by way of Kildysert, then Ennis.”
Mr. O’Brien’s wispy brows drew together. “Why not come straight to Ennis?”
My throat tightened, but it seemed he didn’t need or want an answer.
“No mind. I’ll pray to thank your destitute family for absconding their burden on Her Majesty’s charity,” he said, burying his nose in his notes. I didn’t know why I felt nothing, for I knew I should. But New Me would bite her tongue, so I did.
“Age?”
“Nine—” I broke off and pressed my lips together. “Twenty-two, sir.”
“Are you certain?” he asked, a sneer in his inflection. No. I wasn’t sure. But time had passed both fast and slow since that first summer, and I had aged a decade between.
“Yes, sir.”
He put down his pen, then spoke into the shadows beyond my shoulder. I raised a brow.
“Will she do, Your Ladyship?” he asked.
I didn’t whirl—for I was beyond childish surprise—but I did stiffen. There was a rustle, one I knew all too well. The crisp newness of fresh-pressed taffeta afore an outing, and a whiff of lavender blended with foreign spice.
“She’s the right height.” The woman’s voice rolled over my skin, a deep alto drizzled with warm honey that could spell fortune or ruin on a whim.
And yet there was something unrefined about it; it lacked the nasaled clip of all the well-to-dos that had swanned through the Moore-Vandeleur estate at one time or another.
Click-tap. A pause. Click-tap.
The hair at my nape snapped to attention as she neared, her perfume wafting in the draft as I fought the urge to turn. To ask why my height mattered.
“It’s as I was told. She’ll do, Mr. O’Brien.” The woman’s skirts brushed my bare feet as she approached. She held a cane in her left hand, lazily dragging it forward with each step as a gentleman might. And as she came into view, my brow furrowed.
The lady wore a black gentleman’s frock coat, cut in the back to accommodate the frill of the charcoal taffeta bustle skirt that cascaded from rump to floor.
A ruffled charcoal bodice peeked beneath her lapels, swimming up the length of her neck before pillowing in a cloud of black lace.
A simple golden charm—three swirls, connected to a central branch—adorned her throat, held in place by a length of black ribbon.
Her dark hair was swept up, a severe style I’d never seen before, and tucked into the black top hat perched on her head.
It was bold. Daring. Like her eyes. I thought they could have been a smoky dark blue. But in the dim light of the master’s office, shadowed by the languid sweep of black lashes, I could swear they too were charcoal.
I knew I stared, but I couldn’t glance away. Even as she stepped before me, a half-smile lighting her pale face. She didn’t need the powders and kohl that Lady Grace had always insisted upon. By no means young, yet I couldn’t place her age.
“Leave us,” she said, shooting the words over her shoulder at the master. I shivered, from chill or fear, I knew not.
His face flushed as the woman raised a black, lace-gloved hand and gestured for the door. He was dismissed, and the arch of his brow screamed displeasure.
“Th-there’s still the matter of her debt—” he began, but the woman cut through his words with a sharp rap of the cane against the concrete floor.
“Later,” she snapped, her eyes locked on mine. They were both cold yet warm, and my heart raced in tandem with my thoughts as I wondered what this woman wanted with me.
“I must insist, My Lady. We also discussed compensation for silence in this matter.”
My guts turned to water as his words sank in. What in the name of God did he mean?
“And you will be compensated,” the lady said, a dangerous edge creeping into her voice as she turned in his direction.
“Though what value would you put on a life when that soul spends their days toiling for naught but a cup of gruel and a place to lay their head? I’m sure she’s repaid her debt to the state ten times over.
See my man in the courtyard. He has your purse. ”
With a curt bow, the master backed out the door, and I didn’t blame him. I wanted to follow. There was a charge in the air, the kind of shift that warned of a coming, violent storm. But there was nowhere for me to go. Nowhere to take cover.
Not as the lady turned her attention back to me. Not as those dark eyes gleamed as bright and dark as a selkie’s.
I swallowed, forcing a lump down my throat.
“Margaret, is it?” she asked, and I found I could do naught but nod. “Do you prefer that name? Or do you go by another?”
“M-Maggie.” Wincing, I cleared my throat to steady my nerve. “Maggie, that is, Your Ladyship.”
“Maggie,” she repeated, nodding. “Very well. Tell me, Maggie. What is it you desire most in the world? If the wrath of God, and the British Crown, weren’t determined to wipe this country and her people off the map, what is it you would want?”
Danger settled hard and heavy in my stomach, filling my heart with dread even as I opened my mouth. As if I had no control of myself. “A house. A few acres. Land in my own right that could never be taken, and food enough to never know hunger again.”
“And?” she urged, leaning forward, the scent of her perfume overwhelming my senses as the truth slipped, unbidden, from my lips.
“Revenge.”
She smiled, a wide grin that brightened the room.
“Good. Excellent. Well then, Maggie. I have a proposition for you.”