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  To all the girls who were told they couldn’t …

  And did it anyway.

  PROLOGUE

  Dreyton Abbey, Shropshire, England, 1876

  According to Cecelia Teague’s calculations, she approached the close of her second day in captivity.

  She couldn’t remember the last time her father had locked her in the cellar’s green room for so long.

  Perhaps he’d finally gone mad.

  Would he ever unlock that door again?

  Would the world forget she ever existed?

  The questions pecked at her in the gathering dark like carrion birds at a fresh corpse.

  She’d done nothing wicked or wanton. Nothing to merit her schoolmates’ violent cruelty nor her father’s pious fury.

  She’d merely been the first girl, at thirteen, to best everyone at the village school at calculus. Even the final-year students. When Mr. Rolland, the teacher, had accused her of cheating because of her age and sex, she’d reminded them that Maria Gaetana Agnesi had written the modern-day textbook on differential and integral calculus.

  Mr. Rolland then banished her to the corner to stand until her feet ached and her skin burned with humiliation.

  Thomas Wingate, the butcher’s son, had seized her at lunch, shoved his thin, ruddy face in hers, and called her nine kinds of foul names as he ripped her spectacles from her face and crushed them into the mud. He spat on her before shoving her on stomach over a felled tree and exposing her drawers to his entourage of lads, who all howled their mirth.

  Fraught and humiliated as she was, Cecelia hadn’t shed a single tear until Mr. Rolland had threatened to go straight to her father, the Vicar Josiah Teague.

  The threat had been directed at the boys.

  But as Cecelia had predicted, she was the one who paid the price for their sins.

  For in the eyes of her father, the sin was hers.

  The original sin.

  She’d been born a girl.

  As the Reverend Teague marched her to the green room, he hissed at her the usual litany of condemnations, ignoring her vehement protestations.

  “Just like your mother, allowing any gobshite to lift your skirts. I’ll see you in the grave before you become a jezebel.” He’d thrust her roughly through the cellar door, causing her to stumble down the stairs and land in a heavy heap on the packed-dirt floor. His lips had pulled away from his tea-stained teeth in a grimace of unmitigated disgust. “I thought you too fat to draw the carnal notice of man.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” she cried, ignoring the grit of the earth beneath her knees as she rose to press her hands together as though in prayer. “Please believe me. I would never—”

  “You are a woman now.” He wiped the word away from his mouth with the back of his hand. “And there is no such creature as an innocent woman. You tempted those boys to sin, and for that, you must atone.”

  Her remonstrations were lost when he’d slammed the heavy door, ensconcing her in shadow.

  Cecelia settled into a corner, growing accustomed to the increasingly frequent punishment. She’d her primer to keep her occupied at the very least, as she’d thrust it into her bodice before her father had stormed into the schoolyard.

  The panic hadn’t encroached until a day, a night, and the next day had slipped by.

  When her bucket of water ran dry, she’d succumbed to a fit of histrionics.

  Cecelia banged on the door until the meat of her fists throbbed. She pitted her substantial weight against it, bruising her shoulders.

  She pleaded at the keyhole like a convicted man might do on the last night of his life. She vowed to be good. To behave. Promised anything she could think of to soften her father’s heart, or God’s. She even confessed to sins she’d not committed, hoping her perceived candor and penitence would buy her freedom.

  “Please, Papa, please let me out,” she sobbed at the shadows of his feet, two pillars of condemnation against the thin strip of light beneath the door. “Don’t leave me alone in the dark.”

  “You were conceived in darkness, child, and to eternal darkness you’ll likely return.” His voice was as loud and stern in their small parish home as it was from the pulpit. “Pray and ponder upon that.”

  The shadows of his feet disappeared, and Cecelia dropped to her knees, her fingertips reaching for the last of the light of his lantern as it faded away.

  She curled up next to the door like a dog awaiting its master’s return, her trembling cheek pressed to the dank floor as she searched beneath for the return of the light.

  Conceived in darkness. What did that mean? And how was it her fault?

  Cecelia called her prison the green room because the moss clinging to damp stone was the only color to be found in the cellar of the modest cottage. Some long-ago vicar with a family too large for the two-room house to adequately contain had partitioned a section of the subterranean space into an extra bedroom. Which was to say, a cot and trunk had been shoved into the corner.

  In the summer, she would open the window and curl up in the anemic shafts of sun or moonlight, drinking in what she could. One day, the Reverend Teague’s boots had appeared at the window and kicked dirt inside, showering her with soil.

  She’d begged him not to lock the window from the outside. Not to take away the only light she knew.

  “I won’t escape,” she vowed.

  “I’m not afraid you’ll escape,” he blustered around a rare and colorless laugh. “It isn’t as though you could fit through a window this small.”

  It was the first time Cecelia had hated her body. The size and shape of it. If only she were wraithlike and delicate, perhaps she could slither through the window and slip away into the night.

  Not that she would … she was too afraid of the dark.

  And she’d nowhere to go.

  Over the years, she’d faced the green room with more courage. The fiends and monsters her fanciful fears conjured never once attacked her. Spiders and other very real denizens of the dark scuffled and shuffled and spun their webs but had yet to hurt her.

  The sounds of the mice and such eventually became a serenade, preferable to the awful silence.

  It amazed her what she could adapt to. The gnawing of thirst and hunger. The putrid scent of a neglected chamber pot and her unwashed body in a poorly ventilated room.

  She snuck a blanket from her own bed into a cupboard one day when her father had been out proselytizing. This, she wrapped around her in the night, pretending the feeble warmth she found within belonged to something—someone—else.

  She’d lean against the wall, hugging the blanket to herself, and fancy that her arms clinging to her middle were the arms of another, holding her as no one had ever done. That the planes and curves of the cold stones at her back were really the carved strength of a man. Of a protector. Of someone who didn’t leave her alone in the night.

  To face the da
rk by herself.

  Because even as her imagined childhood torments fell away with the advancement of each year, one never did.

  In the absolute darkness beneath the earth, something more insidious than a ghost lurked in the green room. More unrelenting than hunger. More rotten than filth. More venomous than any spider.

  Loneliness.

  An all-encompassing word, as correct as it was inadequate.

  What began as boredom and isolation slowly became a void of silence inside of her, a yawning chasm of emptiness that no meal or interaction seemed to sate.

  Because even when she was free, the room was always there, waiting for her next perceived slight, her next accidental sin.

  The anticipation of being tossed into hell was almost as torturous as the endless hours she spent in her prison.

  Cecelia prayed as her father bade her, but not the prayers she’d been forced to memorize. She would drop to her knees every night, prostrating herself before a cold and condemning God and imploring with the fervency of a pilgrim for one thing.

  Someone to save her from this gray-and-green hell in which she lived.

  This time, she prayed until her dry tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and her tears would no longer come. Her stomach, too empty to churn, seized with the acid flavor of terror. After two days, she barely had the strength to sit up, so she lay against the stone wall, her blanket wrapped around her.

  I don’t think he means to let me out this time.

  The realization opened up the void within her. The one where the light used to be, where God used to live.

  The hinges on the cellar window protested as the vicar yanked them open, and a bucket of water sloshed as her father lowered it to the ground with uncharacteristic haste.

  Cecelia pushed herself to sit on trembling arms.

  “You drink and wash, just in case,” her father barked. “But if you make a sound whilst they’re here, you’ll never again see the outside of this room, do you mark me, girl?”

  He didn’t wait for her reply. The window banged shut and he walked away without bothering to lock it.

  Cecelia sat in frozen astonishment for a few breaths before scrambling toward the bucket. She didn’t heed the filth of her hands as she cupped them into the vessel and greedily slurped the contents. Unable to slake her thirst thus, she lifted the entire bucket to her lips and all but drowned herself in the process of tipping it back to wet her greedy throat.

  Footsteps marched overhead, a short, staccato sound very different than that of her father’s heavy-soled boots.

  They were upstairs. Who were they, that could alarm her father so?

  Setting the bucket down quietly, she climbed the stairs and crept to the door, crouching to listen beneath the crack.

  “Where y’all keeping her, Preacher?” a foreign feminine voice demanded in an accent Cecelia couldn’t have conceived of even if her mind hadn’t been muddled by hunger.

  She pressed her hand to the cool wood of the door. Were they looking for her? Had her prayers been answered after all these tearful years?

  “The whereabouts of my daughter is of no concern to a whore.”

  This was no great clue to the identity of the woman. To Josiah Teague, every daughter of Eve was likely also a secret prostitute.

  “Not a whore, just a businesswoman,” the lady had the audacity to correct her father as she moved closer. “I was warned you were a sanctimonious charlatan. You look down on us, pray for and pity us. You condemn and humiliate us, all the while unaware that we do nothing but sit around and laugh about that limp, useless little appendage swinging between your legs.”

  “You dare to—” The rest of the words cut off in a whoosh, as though they’d been stolen from him by a blow to the gut.

  “Oh, Hortense told us all about your impotence,” continued the woman. “We are all aware you’re not that child’s daddy.”

  Hortense. Her mother.

  At this revelation, Cecelia must have fainted because the next thing she knew she was being scooped off the floor and clutched against the plump, pillowy bosoms of a stranger. “Why, you poor darlin’,” a syrupy voice cooed. “Bless your sweet, little heart. How long has that mean old preacher kept you cooped up down here?”

  “I…” Frightened, uncertain, Cecelia glanced up the stairs to see her forbidding father being held at bay by a man significantly shorter than he, but wide enough to fill the entire door.

  Her questions were answered the moment the reverend’s eyes met hers. Black eyes, the same color as his hair.

  As his soul.

  No … not her father. He was lean, tall, and sharp, his nose long and his chin severe.

  When Cecelia had studied her soft round features in the mirror, she’d never noted the slightest hint of him, and now she knew why.

  She didn’t belong to him.

  Thank God.

  A tear slid out the side of her eye as she looked up at her savior, the most beautiful human being Cecelia had ever glimpsed.

  Her dress, a deep shade of gold, shone impossibly vibrant in the dismal underground gloom. Her skin and hair glowed as golden as brilliant bullion, though her eyes were curiously dark. She’d painted her full lips the same shade as hothouse calla lilies.

  The woman was round and soft, like herself, and an astounding luminescence shone from her as though her entire being was suffused with light.

  “Cecelia, darlin’, my name’s Genevieve Leveaux, but my friends call me Genny. You have any particular objection to being my friend?”

  Another tear fell. She’d never had a friend before.

  Entranced, Cecelia lifted her fingers to brush at the woman’s face. She caught herself in time, distressed at the dirt on her hands. She would no sooner mar her savior with her filth than she would finger paint over the Mona Lisa.

  “Don’t leave me here.” The first words she’d spoken in days felt like rusting metal in her throat, but the plea had to be made.

  “Oh sugar, you won’t spend another minute beneath this foul roof. Can you stand up?”

  Cecelia nodded, and let the angel pull her to her feet. She swayed and found herself once again face-to-breast with the woman.

  “Come on, now.” Tucking her arm firmly around Cecelia, Genny helped her up the stairs as her stout and extraordinarily well-dressed companion shouldered the reverend out of the doorframe and into the hall.

  “Whew, sakes alive!” Genny exclaimed none-too-delicately. “No offense, honey, but like my grandmama back in Louisiana used to say, your stink could singe a polecat’s nose hair.”

  Dazed and dizzy, Cecelia followed without replying, mostly because she didn’t understand a word of that beyond the general gist. She’d not washed in almost three days, and the shame struck her dumb.

  To distract herself from her humiliation, she cataloged the life she was leaving behind. The wobbly table at which they ate their silent meager meals, her every portion rationed, and her every bite berated. The dilapidated parlor, eternally empty of company. The sitting room with the perpetually cold hearth, even though a rainy October was upon them, where she’d read nothing but the Bible and other canonical texts by firelight until her eyes crossed.

  “It is my duty to save her from the sins of her mother!” Josiah Teague finally found his voice, though Cecelia couldn’t make out his features from across the room. “Most men wouldn’t have brought up a girl begot in sin against his own marriage. Remember that, Cecelia, when you’re tempted to commit immoral acts by these fallen, forsaken women! I would have saved your soul. I can save you still!”

  “Oh, quit your bleating, you limp-peckered billy goat.” Genny shifted Cecelia behind her as the guard strong-armed Josiah into a chair at the table. “There’s more singin’ God’s praises and hollering hallelujahs in my house than yours, believe you me.” With a saucy wink, Genny turned to Cecelia and bent down to bring their faces level. “Now, aren’t you just a perfect porcelain baby doll,” she crooned, touching the tip of her finge
r to Cecelia’s pert nose. “I knew you’d be a pretty child, but you just beat all.”

  “Thank you, Miss Leveaux.” Cecelia’s cheeks were so warm, she feared she’d contracted a fever.

  “Miss Leveaux! You hear that, Wexler?” Genny straightened to give her mirth room to shake out of her in the most cheerful laugh.

  Wexler didn’t laugh. Didn’t move. He stayed where he was, looming over Josiah Teague in a threatening manner.

  Wiping an invisible tear of hilarity from the corner of her eye, Genny leaned back down to Cecelia. “You call me Genny. We’re friends now, remember?”

  Cecelia nodded, flicking a glance to the man who’d been her father, thinking that her last memory of him would be of his blurry face, as her spectacles were still crushed somewhere in the schoolyard dirt.

  It was all right. She knew what expression he wore.

  “You have any other frock than this, baby? You must have grown out of this—well, we’ll call it a dress if we have to—a year past.”

  “She doesn’t need to succumb to the sin of vanity,” the reverend hissed, his features mottled with such contained rage and fear, his skin had darkened from crimson to violet. “She’s a weak-willed, gluttonous girl. Look at her! I’ve done my best by her, but she sneaks food in the middle of the night, and no amount of discipline, correction, or isolation will break her of the habit. It’s not my responsibility to buy her new clothing when she’s bursting out of a perfectly reasonably sized garment.”

  “You excuse me a minute, honey.” Genny pulled herself to her full height, stomped past Wexler, and struck Josiah Teague across the face. Hard. Hard enough to rock him back in his chair.

  Gaining his balance, the reverend surged to his feet, but was again wrestled back down by the block of muscle that was the silent and enigmatic Wexler.

  Genny didn’t even flinch. She caught Cecelia and swept her outside to a sumptuous coach, tucking her into a fur-lined cloak.

  The abiding Wexler remained inside for a moment, and despite everything, Cecelia opened the curtain and anxiously watched the door.