THE MONSTER THEY MADE
Somewhere in the Atlantic, One Year Later
According to Cecily, she would’ve liked to have died when they said she did. But death, she’d been told, was too merciful for her.
Since she wasn’t worthy of Heaven, she spent most of her time in a purgatory of her own making. It came in the form of a home she’d built inside her head, where she could be gentle, quiet, and good while nurturing back the pieces of her soul she’d lost.
She had lost so many these past months.
The house stood in a meadow surrounded by trees, with no road that led to it. Its pretty white facade boasted two floors of glittering windows, and there was a heavy front door guarded by a footman who always smiled.
Here the sun never set, the garden was perpetually in bloom, and she could sit in a parlor with lavender walls and plush white chairs where she’d sip tea in a silk gown, a matching ribbon braided through her long, black hair.
She knew the placement of each piece of furniture, where the pictures hung, and the exact number of flowers blooming in the vase in the foyer.
Today they were lilies, white like death, and they smelled as sweet as spun sugar—
A high-pitched squeal shattered through the walls of her home, followed by a loud giggle.
Cecily’s eyes cracked open, her lids heavy as her perfect little home became the belly of a cold, dank prison ship.
Her silk gown turned into a foul linen dress and a pair of stained trousers as the scent of lilies cleared, chased by the reek of sweat, humidity, and twenty-nine other dirty women held behind iron bars and bound in shackles.
Cecily wasn’t worthy of Heaven, and she was absolutely in hell.
Nothing was spared for comfort aboard the Sparrow. No beds, no blankets, not even a thin layer of straw to pad the splintered floorboards. Some of the small, cramped cells lining the sides of the ship had grimy portholes, but the frames were bolted shut, keeping the fusty air stagnant and thick.
Even after four weeks of sailing, there was no getting used to it.
It was sometime in April, which meant Cecily was probably nineteen.
Regardless of whether her birthday had passed, she was the youngest of the women, barely old enough to be included among these prisoners headed for Antigua.
There they’d be sold into indentured servitude to work until they died, paying for a multitude of sins ranging from stealing a horse to pretending to be nobility.
All the women here deserved that sentence, except Cecily, who was the only one who’d earned worse.
While she’d initially resented the injustice—she really would have rather died—she had made her peace with being alive and now turned her thoughts to all the ways she might ensure her own comfort at any cost.
There was almost no price she wasn’t willing to pay.
After her arrest, Cecily had spent six months in Newgate prison until the day of her supposed execution, weeping and pleading for someone to listen to her, to hear her case and allow her a defense.
But since she had no husband or father to speak for her, no court, judge, or jury would allow her to speak for herself.
She had been prepared to die, welcomed it even, if only so that she might be with her father again. Every day was spent on her knees in her cell, praying for her soul so that she might be with him again in the afterlife.
But then her appointment with the gallows was cut short, and she was sent to Bridewell, a penitentiary for petty criminals where no one knew her name or crime.
For the six months following, terror became her constant companion, and though its guiding hand wasn’t tender or loving like her father’s, it had molded her into its own image.
Or, rather, it had shoved her into a crucible and recast her as a hellish woman given to bouts of vicious savagery, all but extinguishing every trace of the quiet, sullen, regretful girl she’d been after her arrest.
Prisoners with such behavior were often put to death.
It was more of a hassle to keep such people alive, and Cecily certainly wasn’t worth the trouble she caused.
However, the Bridewell guards were paid handsomely to ensure her survival, so they had merely thrown her into a cell and hung a sign on the door that read, Violent: do not engage.
She wouldn’t have cared if they killed her. She didn’t care that they left her alive either. She only wanted to be left alone, and the sign on her door was effective enough to please her.
Thankfully, the prison guards had even sent it with her to the Sparrow.
The sailors heeded it and left her in a solitary cell at the back of the brig where the shadows were deepest. Like she was a beast, or a monster, or a witch.
She let them think whatever they wanted about her, and supported whichever theories scared them most.
The laugh came again, pealing from the top of the stairs where the door to the brig stood ajar, spilling dim light from the crew’s quarters above.
“Go back to sleep,” said a gentle whisper to her right.
A young, straw-blonde woman peered at Cecily through the bars separating their cells, her hazel eyes tight with worry that she tried to hide by raising her eyebrows. But she held them too high to be genuine, and she was a terrible liar besides.
“Wasn’t asleep, Hester,” Cecily answered, her voice gruff as though she had, in fact, been sleeping.
“Then try to sleep.” Hester offered a weak grin, but her brawny shoulders stiffened as the laughter came again.
Of all the people she hated in a world defined by iron and locks—which was, by her estimations, all of them—Hester was spared from her ire as she was the only one who saw Cecily’s wretchedness and did not damn her for it.
At Bridewell, the two had been able to see each other through the grates in their doors, and over that short distance, Hester had forced a friendship in spite of all Cecily’s screaming and threats.
She had simply not hollered back, and told colorful stories about her life before.
They were close in age—Hester was only three years older, which lent to the bond between them.
Hester alone could ease Cecily’s scowl into an occasional smirk, and when Cecily had once asked why she bothered, she had flashed her oddly disturbing smile and said, “I’m a butcher’s daughter. I’m used to sharp things.”
Cecily didn’t flaunt her fondness, but everyone knew it anyway. The two had been placed next to one another on the ship as though the butcher girl were some sort of sacrificial pet to ensure easy travels. To the sailors’ credit, it had worked. So far.
At the other end of the brig, footsteps began to descend the stairs.
“Pretend to sleep,” Hester said, hissing the command just as Morgyn appeared.
Cecily’s hackles rose at the sight of her.
The prisoner traipsed down the narrow steps with not a shackle in sight, her brunette hair windswept and luscious. A guard followed, both of them grinning and Morgyn girl-giggling like she was far younger than her mid-thirties.
Morgyn had ruled Bridewell and its inmates as their self-imposed queen, and this ship was no different.
This might’ve been a non-issue—commendable, even, for the sheer wit it required—if only had she been blessed with a better personality.
As it was, hers was rancid enough to curdle blood as she seduced the guards into doing her bidding while extorting and tyrannizing everyone else into fearful admiration.
Except for Cecily.
As Morgyn neared, Cecily closed her eyes and pretended to sleep, but it didn’t spare her from the painful awareness of the woman returning to her shackles and being let in to the cell next door.
By some damnable luck, Cecily’s only friend was cellmates with the actual devil.
Hester chirped, “Hiya!” and Morgyn dropped her seductive cooing once the men were gone, the two swapping pleasantries like the oldest of friends.
There was no saying what endeared them. Perhaps it was witchcraft—people were such a riot about it these days.
Regardless, Cecily hadn’t asked, relegating herself to endlessly wonder while she restrained herself from reaching through the bars to throttle Morgyn into silence.
And that restraint was only out of a very mindful and intentional respect for Hester.
Morgyn laughed again, and in a moment of oversight, Cecily neglected to school her face.
Her lips twisted into a grimace, and as soon as they did so, she felt Morgyn’s gaze rake over her like hot iron.
Fighting to maintain the charade of sleep, she thought longingly of gallows and graves, but it was too late.
“My, what a scowl,” Morgyn said in a sultry tone that made Cecily feel like peeling off her own skin. “What’s brought this on?”
Heaving a long-suffering sigh, she accepted the inevitable and met Morgyn’s gaze.
God, those eyes. They were like the pits of hell, dark and void, though she was sure her own weren’t much different.
In fact, if she allowed herself to lose all the pieces of her soul, the creature left over might be something like Morgyn.
This made Cecily hate her all the more, because she saw how close she was to that fate.
Morgyn leaned in to the bars separating them. “Jealous?”
Cecily snorted, but there was no humor in it. “No.”
She leered. “You could leave your cell too, if you wanted.”
“Don’t want to,” Cecily said.
From this angle, the late afternoon sun cut through one of the portholes and threw Morgyn’s crooked nose into harsh relief. Cecily traced the line of it with her gaze, satisfaction cutting through the permanent coldness in her chest.
She’d put that dent in Morgyn’s nose shortly after arriving at Bridewell, when the woman loudly introduced her to the others as the new whore.
Freshly devastated from being denied her death, and harboring a new, terrible, angry rot in her cracking soul, Cecily had thrown Morgyn to the ground and pummeled her into a bleeding mess.