Chapter One
London, England
October 2nd, 1831
It was a lovely day for a funeral. Of course, any day would have been lovely for this particular funeral—but today had turned out particularly fine. Clear, unseasonably warm, and not a cloud in the sky. As if the earth itself celebrated the interment of the miserable bastard presently ensconced within the cheapest and most shoddily-constructed coffin which Charity had been able to find. Only a pine box, unvarnished, unornamented, likely not even sanded, though Charity had not cared to touch it to confirm. But then it had cost only four shillings, and she had thought even that a price beyond what its occupant deserved.
The pallbearers—that was to say, the undertaker and his assistant, for nobody else had come to the funeral to take up that task—labored beneath the weight of the coffin and the cadaver within as they staggered toward the freshly-dug grave with unsteady, awkward gaits. The reverend stammered through his liturgy, his once-lethargic drone tumbling into a rapid patter as the coffin approached the grave at too swift a pace for his liking.
The undertaker’s assistant, a scrawny lad of perhaps eighteen years, faltered just at the end, stumbling in his attempt to move around the grave for a better angle at which to lower the coffin. Instead his knees trembled and bowed, at last collapsing beneath him. Reflexively his grip loosened, slacking upon the coffin as he dropped to the ground.
The undertaker gave a startled squawk as the coffin slid from his own shoulder. Charity watched, brows lifted in sudden interest, as the coffin fell to the earth with a magnificent, ground-shuddering crash, half its bulk balanced precariously at the very edge of the open grave.
Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. Most especially not the dead man.
“I can kick him in if you like,” Charity offered brightly, smoothing the scarlet silk of her skirts. “It’s no trouble. Really.”
The reverend glowered, but that was hardly surprising. He’d been glowering since she had arrived, dressed head to toe in bright, glaring red. Her most vivid and cheerful clothing, tailored to perfection, designed to catch the eye. When the sunlight hit just right, the gold threads woven within the cloth glowed, and the whole gown shimmered with the capricious passion of flame. Or like hellfire, she supposed the reverend might himself have suggested.
“Madam,” the reverend hissed. “May I remind you that this is a funeral.”
“I am aware,” Charity returned, meeting that condemning gaze without so much as a flinch. “I have paid for it, after all.”
“One wonders why you would bear the expense, when you plainly see no need to mark it for the somber occasion it is meant to be.” The thin arches of his brows flattened into grim lines. The beginning of a sneer curled his lip.
“Only,” Charity said, with composed serenity, “because pauper’s graves go frequently unmarked. I should like to know where my father is buried, so that when I’ve a mind to spit upon him, I know precisely where his decaying corpse might be found.”
As if to punctuate the insolent remark, the cheap, thin pine of the coffin groaned, shuddered—and tipped past its point of balance upon the precipice of the open grave, falling into it with a crash that splintered the still air.
Probably the coffin had splintered, too, but Charity could not quite bring herself to care. “Please,” she said to the reverend. “Do continue.” Her blithe, cheery tone drew a deepening scowl from the reverend, but then she was no stranger to such disapproving looks, and had long since ceased to let them affect her.
With a dour shake of his head and a muted grumble beneath his breath, the reverend proceeded through the last of the funeral rites in a stilted, rote fashion which left little doubt that his mind was less upon his task than it was upon Charity’s complete lack of filial piety.
There was an awkward moment just at the end, when the reverend lapsed into silence following the conclusion of the rites. As he tucked away his Bible, his gaze fell upon the small bundle of rosemary stalks left beside the grave, meant to be given to mourners to offer to the grave of the deceased in the spirit of remembrance.
There were no mourners here. Charity had thought she had made that point clear enough from the outset, and yet the reverendwas still a man—only a man, afflicted with the same blight endemic to their sex which they so often inflicted upon those they considered inferior. Which was to say, of course,women. And so he had assumed that he had known better than she when she had informed him that the wretched old bastard would be neither missed nor mourned by anyone at all.
The reverend drew himself up, lifted his chin, and summoned every bit of patronizing condescension to which he could lay claim. Which, in Charity’s experience of men of the cloth, was rather a lot.
“Madam,” he said, his voice dripping with scorn. “Will you not show your father the respect he is due?”
For a long, tense moment, Charity met that contemptuous gaze with one of her own. The reverend was the first to flinch, his gaze shying from the directness of hers. At long last, Charity rose from the rickety chair she had all too recently occupied, brushed out her skirts, and made for the grave.
Instead of a sprig of rosemary, Charity thrust her fingers into a mound of displaced dirt, gathering up a handful of it to cast atop the coffin. “The world is well rid of you, you evil bastard,” she said with poisonous sweetness as she let the dirt fall from her fingers. “And may God rot your miserable soul.”
“Madam!” the reverend blustered, his jaw hanging open in shock and horror. “Madam, it is the duty of all children to revere and honor their parents as they rightly deserve.”
“I quite agree,” Charity said, dusting the dirt off her fingers—though thin slivers of it remained caked beneath her nails. “Rest assured, he has received far more than his due. I gave serious consideration to tipping him into a ditch and leaving him there to rot.” And with that, she left the reverend still gaping in mute astonishment near the open grave as she turned to leave.
Charity tilted her face to the soft autumn sunshine—a rarity for the time of year—and enjoyed the warmth of it upon her cheeks. Once, the predisposition toward freckling had plagued her, but these past two years since she had retired her former profession had freed her from the obligation of maintaining quite so strict a beauty regimen as she had once sustained.
She picked a wandering path through the graveyard, which was mostly deserted. Death, she thought, tended to make people uncomfortable. To be reminded of one’s own mortality with a stroll through the headstones and statuaries marking those who had come and gone before one was not a particularly comfortable experience for most. But she had seen more than her fair share of it all, death and suffering. She had been reminded of her ownmortality too many times to find it anything but an inevitable path all would one day walk, rather than a threat lingering forever at the fringes of her mind.
Her hack was waiting for her still, but she was in no particular hurry. The ceremony had taken at most fifteen minutes; the driver would have waited upwards of an hour for what she had paid him. But as she trekked back up the hill behind the parish church where the graveyard was laid toward where the hack awaited her return, a solitary figure came into view, crouched near a weathered headstone some distance away.
Charity’s heart lurched in her chest with a sort of helpless disquiet she hadn’t experienced in years. It wasn’t the man’s presence here in the graveyard, head bowed in solemn contemplation, which disturbed her. It was the labyrinthine mass of scars which cut across the right half of his face. It was the patch that neatly covered the entirety of his right eye, concealing a past injury more severe even than those she could plainly see gouged into his flesh.
Her feet stuttered, stopped, stilled—as if roots had crawled from deep beneath the earth and tied her there. The panicked flutter of her heartbeat pulsed in her ears, drowning out the sound of the breeze rustling through the trees. Drowning out everything but the short, sharp breath she sucked into her lungs. It couldn’t behim. It couldn’t be. She’d seen war wounded men enough to know that scars abounded; that hundreds, perhaps thousands of them had similar scars.
