Chapter 1

U nlike her parents’ house in the country, Isabel’s rented room was nearly empty. One chair, one small table for her one teacup, one little iron basket for firewood.

Her parents weren’t poor. They simply did not want her to have callers.

“Jenny, do leave me and start for home. You don’t want to miss any of your Christmas Eve.”

Jenny looked at her, not the bare room, as she dried her hands on her apron. She pitied Isabel, and it burned. Not to be pitied by her own maid, but to be unable to hide any of the evidence about what an unwanted spinster she was.

“Leave you alone with only a cold supper, and on Christmas Eve? What would my mother say to me?” Jenny tucked up a lock of hair as if her mother might be watching.

It fell often, that lock of hair, with Jenny’s vigorous dusting and washing of plates. Isabel wished she had a lock of hair that free.

“She’ll never know,” Isabel told her maid, with a serious nod to the thought of their conspiracy. “You can help her with the family dinner. I’ll want to hear about Bill’s new dog, and I hope Frank and Caleb don’t spend an hour fighting over the goose liver and miss the whole night. Go! And tell me the stories on Monday.” Sunday was Christmas and Jenny’s half-day anyway. Isabel had bread enough to last till the bakery opened again on Monday; she’d toast her little slab of cheese by the fire. There wasn’t money for meat.

Nor was their money for the Christmas indulgence she had planned, but oh, if she could just get Jenny on her way, Isabel was going to spend it anyway.

Jenny looked at her with big pitying eyes but Isabel urged her into her coat, then out the door.

She’d have to wait a few minutes for Jenny to walk down the flights and out past the street where the sounds of reveling passers were growing louder.

Then Isabel was going out.

She might be unmarried and unwanted, but she had the key to her own door. there was freedom in being alone, and she’d decided over her dinner of parsnips and tea to indulge herself in one frivolous thing. Just one.

She’d decided that her Christmas would not be complete without a book.

Victor threw the newspaper with enough force to make its rag pages crack against the carriage wall before flopping onto the empty seat. The words of the foreign report swam before him.

No progress

Unsure

Conversations ongoing

They were more tepid than his father’s descriptions of him— weak, limp, useless —but they were in the same vein. He’d wasted six months.

Just to come back here.

When the letter had reached him in Belgium, ragged and stained from crossing a war-torn continent, Victor’s impulse was to ignore it. His father had spent a lifetime thinking him good for nothing; he’d spend his death thinking the same thing. Victor’s work in Ghent was not done.

But recent marriage had turned his friend Goulburn sentimental. “You must go. A man deserves to have his son with him when he dies.”

If that was true, Victor had failed at that as well.

“Beg yer pardon, Lord Hartwick, but did you decide where yer going?” the driver called down through the slot.

And now for the rest of his life, Victor would be called by his father’s name.

He retrieved the hat he’d sent accidentally flying when he’d thrown the paper and rapped on the roof. “Stop anywhere. Stop here.”

He ought to have been more polite. The driver had at least been civil.

But after cramped days in ship’s cabins and carriages, Victor needed to move, to breath fresh air that did not smell of disappointment.

Well, it was London. It would be air, at any rate.

His boots thumped to the pavement before the carriage wheels even stopped rattling. The air had less snap than the Belgian December he’d left behind; here it was soft and smelled of rain.

“Head home, Bottle. Haven’t you got children?”

Taken aback, the driver blinked his meaty eyelids. “Six, m’lord. Kind of you to remember. But how will you return?”

He’d rather sleep on the pavement than subject himself to more disapproving glares from his father’s servants. He was a grown man, had gone abroad at the request of an under-secretary of Parliament. He didn’t need anyone’s approval.

“Likely engage myself a cab. Never fear, Bottle, I’ll find my way home.” Then as the driver nodded and snapped the reins, lurching the horses into motion, he muttered to himself, “Whether anyone likes it or not.”

As the Hartwick carriage rolled away, Victor stalked from window to window following the light of candles flickering orange through the gray glass panes of shops.

There were more candles than he expected, and suddenly, more shouts.

He stopped a red-faced man in the street. “Is it the treaty?” He searched the walls, the pavement for handbills with a burst of hope. Perhaps a special edition of the news had been printed.

“Treaty?” The man looked pitying. “It’s Christmas Eve, sir.”

Christmas Eve?

He had dim memories of bonfires in the country. Someone there had celebrated Christmas; not his father. His father had not celebrated anything but strength.

“Get up that tree, boy.” He’d wave at an oak older than their family pedigree, and wait till Victor fell out.

Then he just stood there, the grim curve of his mouth curling downward in puzzled disgust.

The red-faced man he’d collared looked more puzzled than disgusted. Victor realized he still gripped the man’s coat, and let him go.

Teeth gritted, Victor stalked on.

Isabel had never tasted freedom before. It tasted like cold dust and chilled the inside of her nose.

Others might not like it, but she found it bracing. She did not need freedom to be beautiful, only to be hers for a little while.

Once she left her little room under the eaves and descended the stairs, her solitude, for better or worse, was washed away in a flood of people. She heard banging pots and shrieks through other doors, then the cacophony of shoe leather, wheels, and shouts as she stepped onto the pavement. It was a hurricane of people.

Taking one hitching breath, then another, Isabel dove into the dizzying stream.

After all, what if this winter was like the last, with heaping snowdrifts and mummifying fog? Months trapped inside her family’s country home, with her family, had nearly driven her out of her senses; this year she’d spend the winter, whatever it brought, alone in her rented room.

It was right to take air whenever one could.

Every passing brush made her gasp and clutch at her purse. She might not have the nerve for what she was doing.

Still it was jollier to stroll past the men in serious hats, ruffians in dirty caps, families trooping through the streets for their holiday than to spend the evening sitting inside listening to it all happen in the distance.

London was so big. It would be her fault if she let her world grow small.

Her mother often wrote how small her world ought to be. Every letter closed with the exhortation that Isabel must never venture out without a suitable chaperone.

But her mother wasn’t here. And she certainly didn’t understand the current nature of London.

Every marriageable woman wanted to snare one of the last possible husbands trickling back from Europe.

Abandoned by local men, Isabel had been established in London as a last resort, as if London were still stuffed with bachelors; but it wasn’t.

Nor did it celebrate Christmas quietly with chestnuts and songs.

Plenty of the men passing Isabel were bundled against the cold, going about their business with the same sour expressions they wore every other day.

Plenty more veered drunkenly along the pavement, their clothes lurching one direction as they lurched another. Occasionally painted ladies leaned and laughed out open windows; that might be for Christmas, or it might not.

She herself was not wandering. She had a goal: Allenby’s bookshop. She couldn’t get drawn into anything unsavory as long as she kept her feet moving in that direction.

Not that she was entirely sure of the direction.

She might be on the wrong street. Perhaps she shouldn’t be here, seeing these people do these things.

She tried not to stare and kept her small steps quick.

One man spit a stream of foul brown liquid to the pavement at her feet.

Freezing, not even breathing, Isabel did not look up.

She was the sort of brazen woman who walked on the street alone. If she could do that, she could give in to the impulse that made her the girl no one in her little town wanted to marry.

She met the spitting man’s eyes, frowned, and shook her head no.

Taken aback, the big ham of a man actually shuffled back a few steps and muttered “Sorry m’m” before swinging around Isabel and taking his greasy waistcoat and himself on his way.

Heart pounding, Isabel went on with lighter steps and a higher head. She might not be able to talk to people, but she could talk back and still survive. It was not the earth-shattering crime her family said.

Not that she’d talked.

It was reassuring to see families strolling together, joking and pointing at things in shop windows. They looked like they were from smaller villages, like she was. Isabel wondered if those women ever talked back.

The sight of them made her feel like she wasn’t alone, but it also made her feel a little hollow. All those fathers, mothers too, looking for work, looking for different lives in lofty London.

She’d have been perfectly happy to settle in a little house far from the city. For example, a curate’s house near an ancient church would have been ideal. A particular curate’s house. Isabel had never expected luxury.

But neither had she expected Mr. Ball to marry his cousin’s school friend, or for Mr. Wheelock, Isabel’s second choice, to marry his distant cousin. A little too much speaking up had doomed her.

She’d never expected to face a life with no home of her own and no children. Nor to be sent away so her younger sister had a better chance of marrying.

In fact, a number of things in life had surprised her badly.

She might have a long lonely life ahead of her, but she could still walk. All the more reason to venture out to Allenby’s, the famous bookseller near St. James’ Square.

And here it was.

The door’s bell made her jump. It was a spacious little cavern of books, right in the heart of the city, and she also hadn’t expected to feel this much excitement as she faced its heaps of treasure.

A harried shopkeeper with messy hair—or had he dressed it that way on purpose?—bustled up to her in his black coat. She wondered if he actually ran the presses. “Yes, madam?”

She only wanted to get past him to the books. “A Christmas Eve book,” she stammered, unable to string together a sentence with all the trimmings of polite but unnecessary words. She’d already come a long way. She had little boldness left.

He peered down at her over a disapproving nose. “If madam wishes to purchase a book, please inform me of your selection. It will be bound however you wish and, for a fee, delivered, or,” here he examined her coat with obvious and insulting judgment, “you may stop in for it.”

“I cannot take it with me? But the books.” She still could not find many words but what he said made no sense. There were stacks of volumes on shelves and every table.

He grew frostier. “Madam, this is not Lackington’s rag shop.”

She did not know what that was, and wondered if she should have gone there.

The outer world was just as full of disappointment as the world within doors, Isabel decided. Still, she’d come this far. She might not have the immediate satisfaction of taking her book home tonight, but she would have her book.

And she’d have her shopping excursion, and the excitement of not knowing what story she would find, or what would happen next.