Prologue
November 1880, London
When the blood bond severed, she felt it. Pain washed over her, but she bore it, bracing herself against the sensation of the cut as one did for the pain of amputation in order to separate a diseased limb that would kill if left on.
Then the pain lifted. Genevieve gasped, her first free breath in twenty years.
“Genevieve? What is it?” Elspeth asked from the other side of their small, dark bolt hole. Her quick needle hovered over the frayed hem of Genevieve’s cloak.
“It’s—gone,” Genevieve stammered. “Gone—” Her hand scrabbled convulsively at her chest, as if to hunt for the end of the broken, intangible tether.
Elspeth’s face blanked—and then set. “Then you must go. Go now,” she urged. She tied off the last stitch and snipped the thread, thrusting the cloak towards Genevieve.
“I—but what about you?”
“Genevieve,” Elspeth said, her colorless eyes flashing red in the dark, “Go.”
Genevieve Dryden wrapped herself in the voluminous cloak and fled the dark depths of London.
She recalled little of her flight, stowing away in baggage cars, sleeping when she had to, clutching her hood tight about her, ignoring the cold winds that blew.
Need drove her on. Need—and desperation.
Her journey ended on a bleak street in Oxford as she stared up at the lit windows of a small house. But as she gazed through the cloudy glass, she did not recognize the man who pored over a book in the study. Small footfalls and children’s laughter rang out from the upper floor.
Her heart, which she had thought long dead, seized in her chest.
The neighbors in the surrounding houses were all different. And she could not call on any other familiar acquaintances. Not after twenty years.
She searched the college as a last resort, but no familiar figure lay asleep in the library over a translation or sat beneath the trees to watch the constellations.
Genevieve finally drifted through the streets to the churchyard. And in the moonlight, as snow began to softly fall, she fell to her knees in front of the tall hewn stone and sobbed bitterly, her threadbare gloves clawing at the words inscribed there under an open book:
In Memory of Ezra Dryden, who died Nov. 23rd, 1879, Aged 78 Years. Beloved Husband to Constance. Faithful Father to Genevieve.
“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”Job 1:21
She was too late.
ChapterOne
After dark had fallen—early, for wintertime, and doubly so for all the coal smoke and smog that filled the air—a woman swathed in black disembarked from Paddington Station and merged with the foot traffic on the streets of London. Ignoring the cries of shopkeepers and flower sellers, she moved slowly through the thick, choking fog, heading east towards the poorer districts, the narrow thoroughfares where no one looked up, the alleys devoid of light.
Genevieve walked past crowded omnibuses and cabstands, staring sightlessly ahead. It was cold, but she couldn’t feel it. A part of her not numbed by grief rebelled against the path her feet trod—but where else could she go? What was left for her now?
At her elbow, someone tugged. Her hand clamped atop the grimy paw before she thought.
“Cor blimey, miss, you moved fast,” the urchin said. Two green eyes stared up at her from under a ragged cap. “And you don’t half smell. Whatisthat?”
“It’s the dye,” Genevieve rasped. She had paid a woman in Oxford half of what was in her purse to do the dyeing of her dress. It felt senselessly wasteful now—but at the time, it had seemed like the most important thing in the world.
“Where you been, Miss Dryden? The tykes been missing you.”
“I’ve been away, Fletcher,” she whispered. “A—death in the family.” Her voice caught. Genevieve hurried on, even as the boy called after her.
In a lonely, putrid street with houses leaning crookedly against each other, she held her breath and willed her body to still.See me not, she thought.
Then she passed between two large men who stood at either side of a house’s open basement entrance. Neither one registered her presence. Inside the basement, she walked to the back and pushed aside a grate that a woman of her slight build should not have been able to lift. She descended into the bowels of London.
