Chapter 1 #2
The words hit her body before her mind could process them—a wave of cold that spread from her hands inward until it reached her chest, where it sat like a fist clenched around her heart.
“She is my sister.” The words came out low and raw and stripped of every courtesy she had maintained until that moment. “She is not a piece of property to be removed.”
Edwin paused at the door. He adjusted his hat, turning back with an expression that would have looked kind to anyone who did not know what kindness actually was.
“I am her family, Rosamund. As are you. The difference is that I have the resources to prove it.” He studied her for a moment—the frayed cuffs of her dress, the shadows beneath her eyes, the whole diminished architecture of a life that had been built and rebuilt and was threatening to collapse again.
“You have always been brave. Your father was too. It was his finest quality, and his most useless.”
Then he was gone. The front door closed with a sound quieter than it had any right to be, and the carriage wheels began to turn, and Rosamund stood in the centre of a parlour that smelled of cold tea and damp plaster and felt the foundations of everything she had fought to hold together crack beneath her feet.
She did not cry. She could not afford to cry, because crying required a privacy she did not have and a luxury of time she had already spent.
She pressed both hands flat against the mantle and breathed. Once. Twice. The third breath shuddered badly, and she caught it before it could become anything more.
Think. Think.
A solicitor. She needed a solicitor—someone who could tell her whether Edwin’s claim had merit or whether he was bluffing with the confidence of a man who had never been called on a bluff.
But solicitors cost money, and money was precisely the absence around which her entire existence revolved.
Eleanor might know someone. Eleanor’s father had been a barrister—perhaps there was a colleague, a favour owed.
Perhaps. The word tasted like sand.
“Rosamund?”
She turned. Clara stood at the foot of the stairs, one hand gripping the banister, her stockinged feet planted on the bare wood floor.
She was holding the rag doll she slept with—a thing of wool and cotton and desperate repair that Rosamund had sewn from scraps two winters ago, when Clara had cried for a toy and there had been nothing in the house to give her.
“Who was that man?” Clara’s voice was small but precise in the way of children who have learned to ask careful questions. “Why did he come here?”
Rosamund crossed the room and knelt. She took Clara’s hands—cold, always cold in this house—and held them between her own.
“He is your uncle. Papa’s brother.”
“I don’t like him.”
“You don’t know him, darling.”
“I don’t like him.” Clara’s chin trembled. Her grip on the rag doll tightened until her small knuckles went white. “He looked at our house like it was dirty. And he made you scared. You went all stiff, like when the landlord comes.”
The accuracy of the observation pained Rosamund more than any of Edwin’s words.
“I am not scared.” The lie sat badly in her mouth, and Clara’s face told her it had landed worse. She tried again, pressing her sister’s hands between her palms. “I am going to take care of everything. Do you hear me? Nothing is going to change.”
But Clara was already crying—not the loud, protesting tears of a child denied something, but the quiet, shaking kind that came from a place too deep for six years to explain.
She pressed herself against Rosamund’s chest, as though trying to make herself small enough to disappear, and Rosamund gathered her up with arms that had been doing this since Clara was two and the world had first begun to fall apart.
“Don’t let him take me,” Clara whispered into Rosamund’s collarbone. “Please. I want to stay with you. Please don’t let him take me away.”
Rosamund pressed her mouth against her sister’s hair and held her tight enough that her arms ached, and she said I won’t and I promise and you are safe—every lie that love required her to tell—while the truth sat in her chest like a stone: she had no money, no influence, no husband, no family name worth invoking, and no weapon except the ferocity of a woman who had already lost everything once and could not survive losing the last of it.
She held Clara until the shaking stopped.
She carried her to the kitchen and warmed milk she could not spare and told her the story about a girl who lived in a castle made of clouds—the same story their mother used to tell, in the same voice, with the same pauses, because some things had to be preserved exactly as they were or they ceased to mean anything at all.
And later, when Clara had fallen asleep on the settee with the rag doll crushed against her chest and the milk half-finished on the table beside her, Rosamund sat in the darkening parlour and stared at the hole in the curtain and understood, with a clarity that felt like falling, that love alone was not enough.
She needed help.
She needed it from someone who had the power, the name, and the ruthlessness to make a man like Edwin Vale afraid.
And she had absolutely no idea where to find one.