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Chapter one

Lit Lantern

Awoman who survives the first night can survive all the ones after.

— The Wicked Widow's Rules

Audrey

Kent, 1818

The carriage smelled of leather and someone else's perfume and Audrey had not been happier in her life. The window was down, letting in September air, sharp and green, full of wet earth and hedgerow and the last of the afternoon. The road was terrible, every rut jolted her hip, and she did not care. She pressed her face to the glass and watched England rearrange itself from city to town to village to nothing, and the nothing was magical.

No companion sat across from her, knitting and watching. No husband beside her, deciding she was too frail to continue. No doctor waiting at the other end with instructions to rest, always rest, as though rest were a life and not the absence of one.

In her lap she held a list. Ordinary things. Small things. But she had never in her life done small things for herself, not even purchasing her own soap. She'd written it at the inn that morning, over toast she'd ordered herself, at a table she'd chosen herself.

Three times she read it, then folded it and held it against her skirt. Two letters sat in her travelling case, both opened, both answered. The first was from a solicitor representing a buyer she had never met, offering a sum for Silverton generous enough to insult her. She had declined by return of post. The second had arrived a week later. Unsigned. A different hand. Shorter. It did not mention the property. It mentioned her—where she walked each morning, the name of the inn where she had been staying, the hour she returned. It hoped she would reconsider.

She took both letters from the case and crumpled them together, held the ball out the window, and let go. The wind caught it and it bounced once on the road and vanished into the hedgerow.

Outside, the fields gave way to woods and the light changed—thinner, greener, cut into slats by the trees. The road narrowed. The driver had told her it was another hour. She closed her eyes and imagined the house.

The memories came from childhood. Twice, maybe three times, her mother had brought her to visit Aunt Marian, and the visits had softened with age into something unreliable: a wide corridor, books stacked on every surface, a garden that smelled of lavender, a small woman who laughed too loud and gave her sweets before dinner. The house had been old but warm, full of noise and light and the joyful disorder of a woman who did as she pleased.

When she opened her eyes, the woods were gone. The sky had dropped. It was grey, low, pressed against the tops of the hedgerows like a lid being closed. The light was not fading so much as retreating, pulling back from the land in long, reluctant strips. Ahead, the lane curved and she saw the gates.

Iron. Half open. One hinge had given way, so the left gate leaned into the mud at an angle that looked like genuflection. Beyond them, through the gap, the house.

Her first thought was that she'd come to the wrong place. Her second was that the wrong place had been waiting for her.

After she'd paid the coachman and the carriage wheels had rattled away from her, Audrey stood at the front door with the key in her hand and the trunk at her feet.

She told herself she would not cry. The house was dark, soulless, dead on its feet. Ivy had strangled the west wing so thick that the windows beneath it had disappeared entirely, as though the house were being slowly digested. A chimney pot was missing. The garden was gone, swallowed whole by grass and weed and something thorny that had taken the front path and showed no intention of giving it back. The stonework was black with damp, and in the dying light the whole structure seemed to list slightly to one side, settling into the earth because no one was left to hold it upright.

This was not the house she remembered. This was its corpse.

She blinked hard, twice, and dug her thumbnail into her palm, a trick she'd learned in her marriage for moments when tears were inconvenient. A long breath in through her nose, out through her mouth, and then the key was in the lock and turning.

The door opened onto cold. Permanent cold, older than the autumn, deeper than the stone. But there on the table by the door sat a lantern, lit, the flame low and steady behind the glass, throwing a circle of amber light onto the cracked flagstones. The warmth of it reached her face before anything else did.

Audrey stared at it. The solicitor had said the house was empty. Staff gone, no one in residence, just the building and the debts and the land.

A lit lantern in an empty house. Someone had set it here, by the door, as though they knew she was coming. The flame did not waver. It burned patient and steady, as though it had been waiting.

For a long moment she considered stepping back and closing the door and standing on the other side of it until the carriage could be recalled. But the part of her that wanted to take her life back said no. It said: the lantern is yours. The house is yours. Whatever lit it is yours to face.

With her cane raised like a weapon she stepped inside. The wallpaper was peeling, the stone floor cracked, and a long brown stain of water damage spread across the ceiling and down the wall.

The smell of damp stone and cold ash reached her, and underneath it something sharper: tallow, recent. The lantern had been lit within the hour. She picked it up and held it ahead of her and walked forward, and she made it four steps before she stopped with a gasp.

The floor in front of her was gone. A section of flagstone had collapsed into whatever lay below, leaving a hole the width of a man, edged in broken mortar and black earth. The lantern light stopped at its rim as though the dark beneath it were solid.

Cold air rose from the opening, carrying damp stone and turned soil and, beneath that, something faintly sweet and faintly wrong. She held the lantern over the edge and the flame bent toward the hole, pulled down, and still, she could not see the bottom.

Her hip seized with a stabbing pain in the joint. Groaning quietly, she grabbed the wall with her free hand and stood very still and breathed. What she wanted was to sit on the cold floor and weep—weep for the house with its missing floors, for the body that reminded her regularly of her fragility, for the fear that her hope of independence was rotting alongside what stood around her in the dark.

But she did not weep. Instead, she adjusted her grip on the lantern and looked for a way around the hole.