PROLOGUE
Victoria Beck was eleven years old when she learned to lie.
“Where did you get this dress?” her older brother Teddy was asking, frowning as he held up the frilly frock to the window of the vicarage office, light catching on the purple and yellow ribbons in its sleeves. It looked ridiculous in his grip, like a doll’s dress, all soft lace and flounces against his big, scarred hands and dirty sleeves. “Where did it come from?”
“Where do you think?” Roland Reed answered from his spot on the corner of the desk, lifting a single golden brow at the question. “It’s a whore’s. She said we could borrow it.”
Teddy frowned. “It’s a child’s dress.”
Roland shrugged, popping a chestnut into his mouth and chewing. “Yes.”
“Oh, charming,” the third boy in the room said with a sigh.
Matthew Everly was the vicar’s son, and he was seated behind the desk like he himself ran the church, bent over a documenthe was halfway through filling out with a smudged-up quill. “Vix, don’t mention anything about the dress’s origins to your assessor, okay, love?”
“I won’t,” she said softly, looking from one boy to the next in queasy discomfort. “Can I still wear it?”
Teddy, her brother, sighed heavily, tossing the frock on a nearby chair. He was obviously disgusted, but he was tired too. He looked so very tired.
“Yes,” he said, meeting her eye with a flat expression of resignation. “Yes, you can wear it. You need something better than what you’ve got on.”
She chewed her lip, looking down at her dress. It wasn’t an ugly dress or a bad one. It was just too small and starting to pill in a lot of places. The sleeves were sitting too high on her wrists now. The collar was very thin.
Her mother had picked this dress out. She had liked the flowers on the skirt.
“Foxgloves,” she’d told Vix when she showed her the fabric. “To poison. To heal. Or just to decorate. Like a woman.”
Vix fisted the flowers in her hands so that she couldn’t see them anymore and closed her eyes against the tears that threatened to rise.
Her mother was gone now. It wouldn’t do to remember it.
She looked at her brother instead.
Teddy always looked tired lately, worse by the day since their mother had died. He had bags under his dark eyes, and eventhough his shoulders were broad and his arms were strong, his own clothes were hanging off him.
The other night, when they’d come to the vicarage for dinner, Vix had heard the parson’s wife say that at fifteen, a lad like Teddy should be growing, not shrinking. He’d still given Vix his dinner roll, though. He always did.
“Do you want to practice again?” Roland asked her, his voice soft in a way that it only ever got when he knew she was upset. “We can practice one more time before they get here.”
She pressed her lips together and shook her head. “No. I know it. I memorized everything.”
“It couldn’t hurt, Vix,” Teddy said gently. “We only get one chance to get this right.”
“We need to fix her hair,” Matthew said absently from his quill-scratching. “It’s too frizzy.”
Vix turned to him with an outraged little scoff, her eyes flying immediately to his own mop of unruly curls. “How very dare!” she snapped, making him look up at her and chuckle.
“The accent is good now, though,” he said with a self-congratulatory little smirk. “This is going to be fine. You’re all worrying over nothing.”
“We’re worrying over Vix,” Roland corrected, reaching forward to slap the side of Matthew’s head, upsetting his already rumpled curls. “This is important.”
“I know it is,” Matthew retorted, batting away the assault with an outraged little grimace. “Look at all the work I’m doing. You couldn’t afford forgery this fine without me! I wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t important.”
“Enough,” said Teddy, softly enough that they obeyed without argument. “She says she’s ready.”
“I am,” Vix said.
The first lie.
