Chapter 1 The tent smelled of vinegar, wet wool, and copper. Outside, the rain had turned Belgian earth into something that ate boots and swallowed wheels whole, and the guns had stopped two hours ago, which was somehow worse than when they were firing. Colonel Sebastian Ashford, Duke of Winterbourne, sat on a crate with…
Chapter 1 The thread broke twice before it held. Rosalind Thorne sat at the last table in the hall, near the door the servants used, and worked the needle through the seam of her glove by the light of one guttering candle. Black mourning silk, brushed that morning until it shone, mended so many times…
Chapter 1 Alys had trimmed a thousand candles in her ten years inside the palace of Aldermere, but never once had she been summoned to the queen’s private chambers at the hour when even the mice had given up for the night. The summons came as a folded note, bone-dry and crested with the queen’s…
Chapter 1 The gravel went on for four hundred yards. She counted them, because counting was something to do with her head, and because a woman walking up a drive she had not been asked to walk up needed something to do with her hands. Her boots had made it three weeks. They were making…
Chapter 1 The teapot was still warm under her palm when the room went quiet. Not the polite quiet of people waiting for a compliment, but the other kind — the kind that has a shape, that settles on the shoulders like wet wool. Wren Ashby kept her eyes on the silver spout and counted…
Chapter 1 The stallion’s thought landed in my skull like a thrown apple — flat, fast, and rude. That man walked before breakfast. Badly. Like a heron regretting its legs. But he walked. My left hand was on the horse’s shoulder and my right hand held a bucket I could not afford to drop, and…
Chapter 1 The coal dust had worked its way so deep beneath his fingernails that no brush would ever reach it, and Adrian Ashford—Duke of Ravensmere, master of nine thousand acres—stood in a servant’s corridor with a bucket in his hand and his own name stitched inside his coat, close enough to hear the woman…
Chapter 1 The door had a smell, and that was the worst of it. Beeswax gone sour with years, lavender dried down to powder, and beneath both, the flat iron chill of a room where nobody had breathed in a long while. Duke Elias Thornbury stood in the east corridor at four in the afternoon…
Chapter 1 The hand in hers was cold the way old paper is cold — dry, weightless, and colder than the room. Hester had been holding it a quarter of an hour and had not managed to warm it. Behind her the music went on: a violin, a pianoforte, forty people pretending not to look…
Chapter 1 The candlelight caught the silver buttons on his coat as the Duke of Ashford lifted his wine glass, and six-year-old Sam Hale chose that exact moment to walk into the dining hall. Rowan nearly dropped the serving dish. She had been reaching for the Duke’s empty plate when her son appeared beside the…
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