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He said nothing for a long moment. Fingers tightened on her shoulders as if he could hold the truth off. Then, reluctant, he rose and left the room. He came back shortly with an ornate hand mirror. He lifted it as if the glass itself might bite, and angled it so her face would not warp.

A stranger looked back. Long silken hair the color of summer barley framed a heart-shaped face of creamy porcelain. Down the right side ran a sprawling stain, deep rose pink shot with mauve, from temple to jaw. It lay on her skin like a flame that had been stopped mid-leap and left there.

The mark seemed to beat with her pulse, branching like leaf veins. Isolde could not look away. Horror locked her joints. A thin sound tore out of her, half sob and half cry, as the truth came down the way the sea came down on the rocks.

Augustus took the glass at once and laid it face down with a firm motion. He pulled her in again and cradled her against his chest. His heart knocked under the waistcoat, strong and close.

“Hear me, Isolde,” he said, and the storyteller’s cadence she loved came into his voice. “This household pays no mind to a stain on the skin. Mrs. Roskelly holds you dear. So do the maids. I hold you dearer than breath. At Grimsfell we live well, far from the hard stares of folk who know no better. We carry a great family charge, my darling. It reaches back to a king whose secrets rest with us alone. That vicar and his kin have no grasp of true nobility.”

Isolde pressed her forehead to his coat and gave a nod. The sobs shrank to hiccups. She wanted his words to be enough. She wanted it with her whole small body. Doubt had already put down a root, though, and the strangers’ voices watered it.

“What charge, Papa?” she whispered, holding to the promise in his tone. “Tell me the rest. Is that why I wear this?”

He waited, then leaned back to look at her with a gravity that made her feel older than her years. “Yes, my love. Destiny put it there.”

Isolde let out a long breath. Relief came with it. The mark on her face served a purpose. She was not the devil’s child.

Night settled later. The house went quiet. A coal settled in the grate with a sigh. The wind’s chorus thinned to a mutter against the casement. She sat on her bed with Dante open across her knees, the cover warm from her hands. The Inferno woodcut stared up. Figures twisted in fire that would not end. She could almost smell smoke in the ink.

Her fingers found her right cheek and followed the birthmark. Under the skin it felt no different from the rest of her face. In her mind it burned anyway, a heat that promised trouble.

Had the vicar’s wife been right? Was it the devil’s brand? Or had Papa told the truth, and heaven itself had signed her?

The question outshone every flame in the woodcut. She turned over the tale he had given her about their line. Was that the work waiting for her? To wear the stain as a badge of solitude, held apart for a task no one else could touch?

She shut the book and pressed it to her breastbone. Beyond the glass the wind kept singing. Isolde did not answer it. Under a sky studded with stars, she made her vow in silence, and the old house seemed to ease around her as if it had been waiting for that promise. The drafts in the grates quieted. They sounded almost like guardians drawing her into their number.

Grimsfell was a wall, cage, and calling. All three. Leaving it would put her soul in reach of damnation. The eternal fires waited for the careless. She pressed the book harder against her breastbone until the gilt bit her skin, a discomfort she chose.

If she stayed, if she minded her lessons, if she kept her curiosity on a short lead, perhaps heaven would look past the stain. The only path she could see was to be good, and to keep her soul from the pit.

CHAPTER 1

“Her mind was not less disordered than on the preceding night; a thousand restless and dismal thoughts still crowded upon her attention.”

Ann Radcliffe

* * *

February 10, 1822

Angelo Scott had begun to fear that his brother’s wedded joy might do him bodily injury.

Not a stopped heart. Nothing so theatrical as bursting into flame over the kippers. Still, some dusty volume must have named the ailment that seized a man forced to watch newly married folk gaze at each other across breakfast as if the plate between them were a shrine.

Il mal di nausea degli scapoli, he thought, dry as dust. Bachelor’s queasiness. Someone ought to write the symptoms down.

Across the table in the Scotts’ London townhouse, Marco Scott, heir to the Baron of Blackwood, Angelo’s elder brother, and until lately a man of sense, kept hold of his bride’s fingers while they spoke of the day’s plans. The closeness made every other soul at the table feel like a trespasser.

“I thought we might call on the modiste this morning,” Molly said. Her opalescent eyes never left Marco’s face. “I shall need a spring wardrobe now that mourning is done. And now that I am a wife.” The last came with a smile bright enough to blind.

“Sì, amore mio,” Marco answered in his Florentine cadence, lifting her knuckles to his mouth. The kiss stayed a breath too long for a breakfast room. “Whatever you wish. I did promise to go with you.”

Color rose in Molly’s cheeks as if she were a girl in her first Season and not the intelligent young woman Angelo knew. “You did. And I confess I should like your thoughts on the materials. Rose, do you think? Or cerulean?”

“I like you in every color,” Marco said, and his voice dropped into a register that made Angelo wish for a sudden errand. “Anche in un sacco di farina.” As if the table did not speak Italian. As if they had not all heard him say even in a flour sack.

“Marco!” But Molly was giggling. Giggling!