Chapter 1
Two years later
London
Hannah Lazarus was trying to be polite.
Tonight was the fourth dinner. The fourth of seven! And she was expected to attend every single one of them.
To be honest, she’d been ready to step quietly out the fourth-floor window by the second. Of course, if she chose to meet her demise in such an uncouth way, her family would never forgive her. Her sister would likely make snide comments about it for the next half century.
Hannah couldn’t have that.
So she stayed alive, even though the dinners made her wish to be otherwise.
“Have you tried the turbot?” came the hopeful voice of Nelson Goldfarb, making Hannah inhale very slowly through her nose before turning to him with a polite and patient smile. He held up a spear of the fish with a glob of orange at the end as though to demonstrate the matter. “Succulent!”
“Oh,” she answered, doing her level best to keep her face as neutral as possible. “Succulent indeed!”
From across the table, her youngest sister Dinah snorted delicately into her punch, pulling it up over her nose to muffle herself.
“Have some of mine,” Mr. Goldfarb insisted, plopping the remains of his fork on Hannah’s plate before she could protest and then watching her expectantly.
She squeezed her molars together as she forced a curve to her lips. “Goodness,” she said tightly, forcing herself to slick her own fork through the morsel and lift it toward her mouth. “How generous!”
“Go on, Hannah,” Dinah whispered, her eyes glittering. “It looks delicious!”
Hannah turned and held her sister’s eyes as she put it in her mouth, chewed slowly, and swallowed. She dragged it out until Dinah looked a little sick about it.
And good.
She was smug because she hadn’t officially left childhood for the marriage mart yet, but her time would come. Oh, it would come.
Soon, in fact. Sooner now that Esther, their middle sister, had married.
Bloody Esther. These interminable dinners were her fault!
And there she sat, glowing at the head of the table like she was perfectly pleased to visit this misery upon everyone else. Very, very pleased.
“Your little sister looks very well!” Mr. Goldfarb continued, sinking the tines of his fork into another unfortunate jellied apricot with a squish. “You must be eager to make your own match now that she’s wed, hm?”
Hannah let her eyes shut for a very brief moment as she released what was left of her patience, turning to smile so sweetly at her culinary neighbor that he ought to have been immediately concerned.
He really ought to have. She’d known Nelson since they were children.
He knew very well that she assumed sweetness before taking her shots.
And yet, he never seemed to remember it.
He never seemed to learn anything about Hannah at all, in fact.
He hadn’t stopped trying to romance her since planting a wet, unwanted kiss on her head at the conclusion of a game of hide-and-seek when they were both six.
“Oh, quite the contrary,” she said, smooth as silk, flicking her eyes to the way his yarmulke sat in the wrong place, clinging pitifully to his hair with poorly applied pins.
His hand immediately went up to check, his cheeks flushing at the realization of its improper geography. Still, he attempted to hold her eye. Still, he hadn’t learned.
“What do you mean?” he asked, because he was a fool.
Hannah flashed her teeth at him. “Esther’s triumph has made me quite averse to the idea of my own, actually. I’ve told my parents I intend to become a spinster.”
Dinah actually did choke at that, reaching for her napkin like she wanted to throw it over her own face.
Unfortunately, the parents in question had also overheard. Both were slowly rotating in an agonizing, unstoppable show of awareness toward where Hannah sat.
“Yes, I think I’d rather die alone,” Hannah continued, her heart leaping into a shallow, military tattoo as it climbed into her throat. “Alone seems better.”
Why was she making it worse?
She glanced at that window she’d been flirting with earlier and wondered if she’d chosen the wrong death.
She tried to avoid looking at them, but her father’s bald, oiled pate caught a glint of light that flashed right into her hands. And now that they were looking, Esther was too. Perfect Esther, frowning prettily over her glass of wine and stroking the back of her perfect husband’s perfect hand.
Hannah almost laughed. Not because she was amused, but because her sanity had finally cracked.
“Well,” said an elderly aunt somewhere from the ether. “I’ve never heard such an outburst.”
It was ironic, Hannah thought, considering that particular aunt’s particular lifetime of actual solitude. She wasn’t a spinster, but she’d gotten widowed enviably young.
She sighed.
“Apologies,” she said, snatching up her own napkin and fanning herself. “I’m a bit overtired, Mr. Goldfarb. I’m afraid I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“Oh, my poor Miss Lazarus!” Nelson gasped, touching her knee. “I can take you to the garden!”
“No!” Dinah said, standing suddenly. “No, do not interrupt your dinner. My sister has a … she needs … Hannah, come,” she said, holding out her glorious, blessed little hand in absolution. “I will get you your powders.”
A thousand blessings upon Dinah, Hannah thought. A thousand golden blessings.
Her parents and other sister were still openly glaring as she accepted the aid and beat a hasty exit, holding her sister’s hand and trotting as quickly as propriety would allow out of the dining hall.
They both spoke the instant they had alighted the staircase.
“My powders?” said Hannah.
“You actually ate it!” Dinah whispered in horror.
They both paused, staring at one another, and then burst into shared, mildly horrified laughter. They continued to hiccup and chortle all the way out into the garden, a tiny little courtyard that was more stone than green, but was lit beautifully for the evening’s festivities.
“I hate this house,” Hannah said, but only because she did not.
“Ah, well,” Dinah answered, collapsing onto a bench. “Good thing you didn’t marry its owner, then, hm?”
“A very good thing,” Hannah agreed, and took the seat next to her, reaching up to adjust the curl of Dinah’s golden-brown hair where it had gone askew in their flight.
“Did you really tell Mama and Papa that you want to be a spinster?” Dinah asked, swatting at Hannah’s hands. “Did you really say that?”
“Of course not,” Hannah answered with a sigh, swatting right back and finishing her task until the curl sat the way it was supposed to. “Though I suppose now I’m going to have to, after that.”
Dinah’s smile slid away, her eyes darting behind Hannah’s head with a little whimper of resignation. “Yes,” she agreed with a grimace. “I think you’re going to have to right away.”
“Oh,” Hannah moaned, feeling her mother’s approach rather than turning to see it. Somehow, even without hearing her footfalls, she knew the exact gait that was being taken, the exact swing of her skirt, the precise way her lace veil fluttered in the evening air. “Already?”
“Already,” Dinah said, already moving to stand, the little traitor. “I … Good luck!”
“I will deal with you later,” Hannah heard her mother whisper to her sister as she escaped this particular reckoning. “Do not go back to the dinner right away.”
“Yes, Mama,” Dinah replied weakly.
Hannah kept her back to the entire affair. Why not preserve what little peace she still had, just a breath longer?
Still, she did not flinch or otherwise try to avoid it when her mother stepped into the torchlight in front of her, her arms crossed and her frown very loud. She turned her eyes up to her mother and gave a single, one-shouldered shrug, as though to say I don’t know why I did it.
Because she knew she was going to be asked.
“Oh, Hannah,” she said with a sigh, settling into the spot Dinah had left, her shoulders slumping in a fashion so at odds with the lashing Hannah had been anticipating from her usually upright and uncompromising mother that she immediately felt a jolt of concern. “What am I going to do with you?”
“Is it up to me?” Hannah replied carefully, reaching out with a tentative hand just short of her mother’s arm, as though she had any right to offer her comfort. “I am sorry, Mama. He is just … he has always been so …”
“Kind?” her mother suggested, a little sharper than she had been, cutting her eyes to Hannah. “Sweet? Unerringly in love with you?”
“Insufferable,” Hannah replied immediately with an apologetic wince. “I know he is … I know he’s not a monster, I just … Mama, I cannot.”
“He is just fascinated by you, meidele,” Martha Lazarus said with a sigh, reaching out to take Hannah’s hand. “You cannot blame him for that. There are many worse husbands to be had out there in London.”
“Yes, I know that,” Hannah replied, letting her hand be taken, even though now she wanted nothing more than to never be touched again. “I have met them.”
Her mother pressed her lips together. Hannah didn’t know if her father ever told the entire truth of what had happened that year at Blackcove, at the proposition that had been made, but sometimes she suspected her mother knew all of it.
It hadn’t been a coincidence that she had not gotten another Season in polite Society afterward. It probably hadn’t been one that Esther was never even offered the option.
And perhaps that had been better, for now the younger sister was married while the older was still saying untoward things at dinner functions.
“He is handsome,” Martha reasoned. “He is capable. He could care for you.”
“No,” Hannah replied. She tried to say it kindly, but she said it, all the same.
Martha nodded. She nodded like she understood.
“I was like you,” she said, startling Hannah so genuinely that she actually did snatch her hand away, which only made her mother smile. “I was. It is true. I refused to have anyone but your father, and your bubbe threatened to have me put in the stocks if I didn’t behave as I was bid.”