You have done your best to evade me, it read,but you shall not prevail. It is only a matter of time before this sham of a marriage falls apart and you lose everything you love.
Sybil blinked at the page. Surely it couldn’t be saying… why would anyone want to harm her?
Except for the obvious, of course: that she was the daughter of a courtesan marrying a Duke. But that, surely, wasn’t reason enough to send this.
“Sybil?” Her mother’s voice was sharp, slicing through her preoccupation. “What is it? You’ve gone white.”
“It’s—” Words failed her as she looked at the letter once more. It was athreat. “Someone wants me to end my engagement.”
Scarlet was already tossing down her napkin and hurrying to Sybil’s side. With a twist of her fingers, she plucked the missive from Sybil’s loose grasp, and as Sybil watched, she read it, her face turning just as white as no doubt Sybil’s was.
“This is preposterous,” she snapped, ripping the note in half and tossing it onto the table.
“Mama—”
“Think no more of it. You will not end your engagement to the Duke over something so trite.”
Sybil peered up at her mother. Scarlet’s cheeks were red now, flushed with anger, and her eyes sparkled. She was more than ordinarily beautiful, but there was something else there that Sybil didn’t usually see—fear.
“I will not end my engagement,” she said, hoping to reassure her mother, but Scarlet merely strode to the other end of the room. The fires hadn’t been lit, as it was summer and the room was already hot, but Sybil could almost see her desire to throw the letter in the flames.
“Do not tell Thomas of this,” Scarlet said shortly.
“Of course not, Mama, if you do not think he should know.”
“I do not. He is—” Scarlet gave a tight smile, looking more vulnerable than Sybil had ever seen her. “He is a good man and would want to cause a fuss getting to the bottom of this.”
“You don’t think he would try to convince me to end the engagement?”
Scarlet eyed Sybil for a long moment and seemed to come to a conclusion. “We can never be too careful. We shall handle this ourselves, you and I.”
“Perhaps it was just a jealous young lady,” Sybil said hopefully and tucked the paper away. “It’s unlikely we will receive any more.”
* * *
That was, to Sybil’s disappointment, a vain hope. Over the course of the next three days, during which George was away in the country and she didn’t see him, she received three notes. One for every day.
The first two were similarly threatening and arrived in a similar way, carried in on a silver tray that by the third day, Sybil had come to hate.
But on the third day, breakfast arrived and went and she received no note. Sybil, unspeakably relieved, concluded that the mysterious letter-writer had had their entertainment and had decided to take their attention elsewhere. Over the course of the day, she found herself relaxing.
Now she was engaged to the Duke, when she went to the seamstress for a new dress fitting, no one madeanymention of her mother. And, when she went for a ride in the park—on the most placid mare imaginable—almost every acquaintance she passed greeted her with at least surface affability.
So this was what it was like to be… not hated. Sybil found she could get used to the behavior.
Thomas, too, was excessively pleased about the turn of events. He congratulated Sybil several times about her good luck, making it sound as though it was more luck than anything else that had attracted the attention of a Duke, and even suggested commissioning a painting in her honor. Sybil, not remotely regretfully, refused.
In fact, everything seemed as though it was going too good to be true when she ascended the stairs to her chamber, candle in hand. Her mother and Thomas were still downstairs, but there was only so much she could take of her mother and new stepfather acting wildly in love around one another.
Her room was quiet and after her maid undressed her she brushed her hair ready for bed, she was alone. Blissfully alone. For once, she didn’t mind being alone. Before, being alone had been a reflection of her likelihood ofremainingalone for the rest of all time. But now she wasengaged, it was just a moment of reflection about how good—unreasonably good, all things considered—her life had turned out.
She padded across the room to her bed and she had just drawn back the covers, ready to crawl under them, when acracklanced through the room, accompanied by a thud and the tinkle of broken glass.
Sybil screamed. It was a reasonable reaction under the circumstance even when further inspection confirmed she was not in the presence of a rabid murderer, or perhaps a vampire visiting from the depths of Transylvania.
Yes, perhaps she did read too many circulating novels, but after a year in the country with nothing else to entertain her, she had to turn to one vice or another. But, instead of a vampire or another fearsome beast, there was only a brick lying in the middle of her carpet, surrounded by shattered glass. And around the brick was white paper.
Mindful of the glass, Sybil tiptoed to the brick and picked it up. Immediately, it became obvious this was another of the notes.
