Prologue
King’s Place, St. James, London
November 1790
Emma Downingwas the fourth.
She was fifteen years old at the time. It was too old to be of much use, in Lady Amanda Clifford’s opinion, but then it was the exception that made the rule, and anomalies had always fascinated Lady Amanda.
Emma came on a wave of blood. Not all of it her own, but enough that it dropped like thick, red tears from her fingertips. The slashes on her hands would scar, of course, but Lady Amanda looked upon scars as a blessing, of a sort.
A healing, if animperfect one.
It wasn’t the scars that would haunt Emma Downing. It was the invisible wounds, the secret skin that never knit itself together again, the deep, jagged gashes on her heart that would forever alter that fragileorgan’s rhythm.
Even so, pity alone would not have moved Lady Amanda in the girl’s favor. London was teeming with pitiable creatures, all of them victims of private misfortunes. There was nothing so extraordinary about Emma Downing’s tragedy.
Aside, that is, from one small detail, the tiniest wrinkle in the page.
Against all the odds, Emma Downing hadsurvived.
That made her extraordinary. No, more than that. It madeher a miracle.
Fifteen years old. Too old to be of much use, but too young be a miracle.
How she’d managed to wrench the knife away from her paramour was a mystery destined to remain forever unsolved. Emma herself claimed no memory of the incident.
As forhim, well…divine justice was an ethereal thing, and never quite worked the way one wished it would. If Lady Amanda had been given a say in the matter, he would have died at once. It was neater that way, dead men being, on the whole, unlikelyto tell tales.
As it was, he mysteriously disappeared from London that night, and was never seen again. Curious, but then human justice did tend to be swift, if not quite as divine as thespiritual sort.
His blood might have proved a problem, stabbings being a gory business. Some of it had soaked into Madame Marchand’s Aubusson carpet by the time Lady Amanda arrived, but great gouts of it stained the silk gown on Emma Downing’s back, and the rusty smell of it permeatedthe bedchamber.
Lady Amanda was obliged to pay for Madame’s damaged goods—the carpet, the fine silk gown, and Emma Downing herself. She handed over the notes without a murmur, well satisfied with her endof the bargain.
As for Emma Downing…
She remained mute during this transaction, her face blank, her eyes glassy. Like all of Madame Marchand’s courtesans, Emma Downing was a beauty, but Lady Amanda had never put much faith in pretty faces.
The girl’seyes, though.
Such a deep blue, and so very like another pair of blue eyes, forever closed.
That another girl with eyes that shade of blue should have crossed her path…well, how could Lady Amanda interpret such an extraordinary coincidence as anything other than a command from fate?
So Emma Downing came to the Clifford School, her ghosts trailing behind her, her scars still fresh, the tender, bruised places inside her still swollen, still bleeding, the only one of Lady Amanda’s girls who could recall with perfect clarity the day, the hour, the moment they’dbeen inflicted.
Fifteen years old, already with a world of ugliness in her head.
Memories were, alas, as often a curse as they were a blessing.
Sometimes, it was easier—so much easier—if one couldn’t remember.
Chapter One
King’s Place, St. James, London
April 1795
