Nadezhda Lapteva

Death, magic, and winter. A bitter cycle that Marzenya spins with crimson threads around pale fingers. She is constant; she is unrelenting; she is eternal. She can grant any spell to those she has blessed, her reach is the fabric of magic itself.

–Codex of the Divine, 2:18

The calming echo of a holy chant filtered down from the sanctuary and into the cellars. It was late afternoon, just before Vespers, a time where psalms to the gods were given up in an effortless chorus.

Nadezhda Lapteva glared up at the mountain of potatoes threatening to avalanche down over the table. She twisted her knife hard against the one in her hand, narrowly missing skin as she curled the peel into a spiral.

“A cleric’s duty is important, Nadezhda,” she muttered, mimicking the dour tone of the monastery’s abbot. “You could change the tide of the war, Nadezhda. Now go wither in the cellars for the rest of your life, Nadezhda.”

The table was covered in potato peel spirals. She hadn’t anticipated losing her entire day to remedial labor, yet here she was.

“Did you hear that?” Konstantin acted like she hadn’t spoken. His paring knife hung limp in his fingers as he listened.

There was nothing but the service upstairs. If he was trying to distract her, it wasn’t going to work. “Is it our impending death by potato avalanche? I can’t hear it, but I’m certain it’s coming.”

She received a withering look in response. She waved her knife at him. “What could it possibly be? The Tranavians at our doorstep? They have seven thousand stairs to climb first. Perhaps it’s their High Prince and he’s finally decided to convert.”

She tried to be glib, but the idea of the High Prince anywhere near the monastery made her shiver. He was rumored to be an extremely powerful blood mage, one of the most terrifying in all of Tranavia, a land rife with heretics.

“Nadya,” Konstantin whispered, “I’m serious.”

Nadya stabbed her knife into yet another potato as she glanced at him. It was his fault they were down there. His pranks, conjured from a mixture of boredom and delirium after early morning prayers, had been innocent at first. Switching out the monastery’s incense with lemongrass, or snipping the sanctuary’s candle wicks. Minor offenses at best. Nothing to deserve death by potato.

Filling Father Alexei’s washing bowl with a red dye that looked like blood, though, that was what had done them in.

Blood wasn’t a thing to be made light of, not in these times.

Father Alexei’s rage didn’t end in the cellars. After they scaled Potato Mountain—if they scaled Potato Mountain—they still had hours’ worth of holy texts to copy in the scriptorium.

Nadya’s hands were already cramping just thinking about it.

“Nadya.” Her knife slipped off course as Konstantin nudged her elbow.

“Damn it, Kostya.”

My perfect streak of fifty- four intact spirals, ruined, she thought mournfully. She wiped her hands on her tunic and glared at him.

His dark eyes were focused on the closed door that led upstairs. There was nothing but the—

Oh.

The potato slipped from her fingers, falling to the dusty floor. She hadn’t noticed when the service above had stopped. Kostya’s fingers dug into her sleeve but his touch felt distant.

This can’t be happening.

“Cannons,” she whispered, somehow making it more real by saying the word aloud. She shifted the grip on her knife, flipping it backward as if it were one of her thin-bladed voryens and not a half-dull kitchen blade.

Cannons were a sound every child of Kalyazin knew intimately. It was what they grew up with, their lullabies mixed with firing in the distance. War was their constant companion, and Kalyazi children knew to flee when they heard those cannons and tasted the iron tinge of magic in the air.

Cannons only meant one thing: blood magic. And blood magic meant Tranavians. For a century a holy war had raged between Kalyazin and Tranavia. Tranavians didn’t care that their blood magic profaned the gods. If they had their way, the gods’ touch would be eradicated from Kalyazin like it had been from Tranavia. But the war had never reached farther than the Kalyazin border. Until now. If Nadya could hear the cannons, that meant the war was slowly swallowing Kalyazin alive. Inch by bloody inch it was seeping into the heart of Nadya’s country and bringing death and destruction with it.

And there was only one reason why the Tranavians would attack a secluded monastery in the mountains.

The cellars shook and dirt rained down. Nadya looked at Kostya, whose gaze was flint-eyed but fearful. They were just acolytes with kitchen knives. What could they do if the soldiers came?

Nadya tugged at the prayer necklace around her neck; the smooth wooden beads felt cool against the pads of her fingers. There were alarms that would go off if the Tranavians breached the seven thousand stairs leading up to the monastery, but she had never heard them. Had hoped she never would.

Kostya grabbed her hand and shook his head slowly, his dark eyes solemn.

“Don’t do this, Nadya,” he said.

“If we are attacked, I will not hide,” she replied stubbornly.

“Even if it means a choice between saving this place and the entire kingdom?”

He grasped her arm again, and she let him drag her back into the cellars. His fear was justified. She had never been in real battle before, but she met his gaze defiantly. All she knew was this monastery, and if he thought she wasn’t going to fight for it, then he was mad. She would protect the only family she had; that was what she was trained for. He ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. He couldn’t stop her; they both knew it.

Nadya tugged out of Kostya’s grip. “What use am I if I run? What would be the point?”

He opened his mouth to protest but the cellar shook so hard Nadya wondered if they weren’t about to be buried alive. Dirt from the ceiling dusted her white-blond hair. In an instant, she was across the cellar and nearing the door up to the kitchens. If the bells were silent, that meant the enemy was still in the mountains. There was time—

Her hand touched the doorknob just as the bells began to toll. The sound felt familiar, as if it was nothing but another call to the sanctuary for prayer. Then she was jarred by the urgent screeching tone they took on, a cacophony of high- pitched bells. No time left. She yanked the door open, running the last few stairs up to the kitchens, Kostya at her heels. They crossed the garden—empty and dead from the bitter winter months—into the main complex.

Nadya had been told the protocol countless times. Move to the back of the chapel. Pray, because that was what she did best. The others would go to the gates to fight. She was to be protected. But it was all formality, the Tranavians would never make it this far into the country, all these plans were simply if the impossible happened.

Well, here is the impossible.

She shoved open the heavy doors that led behind the sanctuary, only managing to move them enough for Kostya and herself to slip through. The tolling of the bells pounded against her temples, painful with each heartbeat. They were made to pull everyone out of sleep at three in the morning for services. They did the job.

Someone slammed into her as she passed an adjoining hallway. Nadya whirled, kitchen blade poised.

“Saints, Nadya!” Anna Vadimovna pressed a hand to her heart. There was a venyiashk—a short sword—at her hip, and another, long, thin blade clutched in her hand.

“Can I have that?” Nadya reached for Anna’s dagger. Anna wordlessly handed it to her. It felt solid, not flimsy like the paring knife.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Anna said.

Kostya shot Nadya a pointed look. In the monastery’s hierarchy, Anna—as an ordained priestess—outranked Nadya. If Anna ordered her to go to the sanctuary, she would have no choice but to obey.

So I won’t give Anna the chance.

Nadya took off down the hall. “Have they breached the stairs?”

“They were close,” Anna called.

Close meant the very real likelihood that they would make it to the courtyard and find the Tranavians already there. Nadya pulled at her prayer necklace, her fingers catching across the ridged beads as she searched for the right one. Each wooden bead was carved with a symbol representing a god or goddess in the pantheon, twenty in all. She knew them by touch, knew exactly which bead to press to attune to a specific god.

Nadya once wished she could blend in with the other Kalyazi orphans at the monastery, but the truth was, for as long as she could remember, when she prayed the gods listened. Miracles happened, magic. It made her valuable. It made her dangerous.

She tugged her necklace until the bead she wanted was at the bottom. The sword symbol carved into it felt like a splinter against her thumb. She pressed it and sent up a prayer to Veceslav: the god of war and protection.

“Do you ever wonder what this would be like if you were fighting against people who also petitioned for my protection?” His voice was a warm summer breeze slipping up the back of her head.

Truly we are fortunate our enemies are heretics, she replied. Heretics who were winning the war.

Veceslav was always chatty, but right now Nadya needed help, not conversation.

I need some protection spells, please, she prayed.

Her thumb caught Marzenya’s bead, pressing against the symbol of an open-mouthed skull. And if Marzenya is around, I need her, too.

Magic flooded through her veins, a rush of power that came with chiming chords of holy speech—a language she only knew when the gods granted it. Nadya’s heart raced, less from fear than the intoxicating thrill of their power.

The wide courtyard was blessedly silent when she finally pushed through the front doors of the chapel. To the left ran a path leading to the men’s cells; to the right, another trailed off into the forests where an ancient graveyard that held the bodies of saints centuries gone was kept by the monastery. Snow from the night before piled on the ground and the air was frigid. It snowed most nights—and days—on the top of the Baikkle Mountains. Hopefully it would slow down the Tranavians.

Nadya scanned for Father Alexei, finding him at the top of the stairs. The priests and priestesses who trained for battle waited in the courtyard and her heart twisted at just how few of them there were. Her confidence faltered. Barely two dozen against a company of Tranavians. This was never supposed to happen. The monastery was in the middle of the holy mountains, it was difficult—almost impossible—to reach, especially for those unused to Kalyazin’s forbidding terrain.

Marzenya brushed against her thoughts. “What is it you require, my child?” spoke the goddess of magic and sacrifice—of death. Marzenya was Nadya’s patron in the pantheon, the one who had claimed her as an infant.

I want to give the heretics a welcoming taste of Kalyazi magic, she replied. Let them fear what the faithful can do.

She felt the press of Marzenya’s amusement, then a different rush of power. Magic granted by Marzenya felt nothing like magic granted by Veceslav. Where he was heat, she was ice and winter and cosmic fury.

Having their magic at the same time itched under Nadya’s skin, impatient and impulsive. She left Kostya and Anna, moving to Father Alexei’s side.

“Keep our people away from the stairs,” she said softly.

The abbot looked over at her, eyebrows drawn. Not because a seventeen-year-old girl was giving him orders—though if they survived he would scold her thoroughly for that—but because she wasn’t supposed to be there at all. She was supposed to be anywhere but there.

Nadya raised her eyebrows expectantly, willing him to accept her place here. She had to stay. She had to fight. She couldn’t hide in the cellars any longer, not while heretics tore apart her country, her home.

“Move back,” he called after a pause. “I want you all at the doors!” The courtyard was a cramped enclosure, not made for fighting. “What are you planning, Nadezhda?”

“Just some divine judgment,” she replied, bouncing on the balls of her feet. She was going to shake out of her own skin if she stopped moving and allowed herself to think on what was about to happen.

She heard his weary sigh as she moved to where the stairs met the courtyard. It was the only way for the enemy to make it to the monastery and even then sometimes the steps were so coated with ice they were impossible to climb. No such luck today.

How could the Tranavians know she was there? The only people who knew Nadya existed were in the monastery.

Well . . . there was the tsar. But he was far, far away in the capital. It was unlikely news of her had spread into Tranavia.

Her breath whispered out in a prayer of holy speech, symbols forming light at her lips and blowing out in a cloud of fog. She knelt, trailing her fingers over the top of the stairs. The slick stone froze, forming the stairs into a single block of ice.

Idly twirling the voryen in her hand, she stepped back. The spell was a ploy for time; if the Tranavians had a blood mage who could counteract her magic, it wouldn’t last.

No going back now.

FEBRUARY 18, 1943

Gestapo Headquarters

The cars screech to a
halt, officers pull
us out by the arms, haul
us inside and off to
          separate
rooms, my heartbeat
pounding
all the while,
boom-boom,
boom-boom.

They swing
the door shut, unlock
my handcuffs, order
me to sit, rush about with
coats, hats, cases, papers
as I try not
to give in to the
overwhelming,
          sickening
knowledge spreading through me:
the two of us are trapped
in this net because
of me.
Boom-boom,
boom-boom.

I take
a deep breath and prepare
to fight
for our lives.

INTERROGATION

I carefully blend
a cupful of lies
into the bucket of truth
spread out in front of me
as Herr Mohr shoots
question after question,
trying to catch me off-guard.

                                                  Fräulein Scholl, why were you carrying
                                                  an empty suitcase with you to the university?

So I could pick up clean laundry
from home.

                                                  And why were you at the university
                                                  if you were planning to head to Ulm?

So I could let my friend Gisela know
I couldn’t meet her for lunch after all.

                                                  Why were you and your brother
                                                  in the corridor upstairs?

So I could show him the Psychological Institute
where I take classes.

His eyes narrow,
his voice icy,
Herr Mohr is good at this,
but he doesn’t know
that I’m good, too.
Boom-boom,
boom-boom.

My voice sounds
so calm telling these lies,
I barely recognize
the words as my own.

Lucy

I am folding laundry at my kitchen table when the police car pulls up. There’s no fanfare—no sirens or flashing lights—yet that little niggle starts in the pit of my stomach, Mother Nature’s warning that all is not well. It’s getting dark out, early evening, and the neighbors’ porch lights are starting to come on. It’s dinnertime. Police don’t arrive on your doorstep at dinnertime unless something is wrong.

I glance through the archway to the living room where my slothful children are stretched across different pieces of furniture, angled toward their respective devices. Alive. Unharmed. In good health apart from, perhaps, a mild screen addiction. Seven-year-old Archie is watching a family play Wii games on the big iPad; four-year-old Harriet is watching little girls in America unwrap toys on the little iPad. Even two-year-old Edie is staring, slack-jawed, at the television. I feel some measure of comfort that my family is all under this roof. At least most of them are. Dad, I think suddenly. Oh no, please not Dad.

I look back at the police car. The headlights illuminate a light mist of rain.

At least it’s not the children, a guilty little voice in my head whispers. At least it isn’t Ollie. Ollie is on the back deck, grilling burgers. Safe. He came home from work early today, not feeling well apparently, though he doesn’t seem particularly unwell. In any case, he’s alive and I’m wholeheartedly grateful for that.

The rain has picked up a little now, turning the mist into distinct, precise raindrops. The police kill the engine, but don’t get out right away. I ball up a pair of Ollie’s socks and place them on top of his pile and then reach for another pair. I should stand up, go to the door, but my hands continue to fold on autopilot, as if by continuing to act normally the police car will cease to exist and all will be right in the world again. But it doesn’t work. Instead, a uniformed policeman emerges from the driver’s seat.

“Muuuuum!” Harriet calls. “Edie is watching the TV!”

Two weeks ago, a prominent news journalist had spoken out publicly about her “revulsion” that children under the age of three were exposed to TV, actually going so far as to call it “child abuse.” Like most Australian mothers, I’d been incensed about this and followed with the predictable diatribe of, “What would she know? She probably has a team of nannies and hasn’t looked after her children for a day in her life!” before swiftly instating the “no screens for Edie rule” which lasted until twenty minutes ago when I was on the phone with the energy company, and Edie decided to try the old “Mum, muuuum, MUUUUUM…” trick until I relented, popping on an episode of Play Schooland retreating to the bedroom to finish my phone call.

“It’s all right, Harriet,” I say, my eyes still on the window.

Harriet’s cross little face appears in front of me, her dark brown hair and thick fringe swishing around her face like a mop. “But you SAID…”

“Never mind what I said. A few minutes won’t hurt.”

The cop looks to be midtwenties, thirty at a push. His police hat is in his hand but he wedges it under one arm to tug at the front of his too-tight trousers. A short, rotund policewoman of a similar age gets out of the passenger side, her hat firmly on her head. They come around the car and start up the path side by side. They are definitely coming to our place. Nettie, I think suddenly. It’s about Nettie.

It’s possible. Ollie’s sister has certainly had her share of health issues lately. Or maybe it’s Patrick? Or is it something else entirely?

The fact is, part of me knows it’s not Nettie or Patrick, or Dad. It’s funny sometimes what you just know.

“Burgers are up.”

The fly screen door scrapes open and Ollie appears at the back door holding a plate of meat. The girls flock to him and he snaps his “crocodile tongs” while they jump up and down, squealing loudly enough to nearly drown out the knock at the door.

Nearly.

“Was that the door?” Ollie raises an eyebrow, curious rather than concerned. In fact, he looks animated. An unexpected guest on a weeknight! Who could it be?

Ollie is the social one of the two of us, the one that volunteers on the Parents and Friends’ committee at the kids’ school because “it’s a good way to meet people,” who hangs over the back fence to say hi to the neighbors if he hears them talking in the garden, who approaches people who look vaguely familiar and tries to figure out if they know each other. A people person. To Ollie, an unexpected knock on the door during the week signals excitement rather than doom.

But, of course, he hasn’t seen the cop car.

Edie tears down the corridor. “I get it, I get it.”

“Hold on a minute, Edie-bug,” Ollie says, looking for somewhere to put down the tray of burgers. He isn’t fast enough though because by the time he finds some counter space, Edie has already tossed open the door.

“Poleeth!” she says, awed.

This, of course, is the part where I should run after her, intercept the police at the door and apologize, but my feet are concreted to the floor. Luckily, Ollie is already jogging up behind Edie, ruffling her hair playfully.

“G’day,” he says to the cops. He glances over his shoulder back into the house, his mind caught up in the action of a few seconds ago, perhaps wondering if he remembered to turn off the gas canister or checking that he’d placed the burger plate securely on the counter. It’s the classic, unassuming behavior of someone about to get bad news. I actually feel like I am watching us all on a TV show—the handsome clueless dad, the cute toddler. The regular suburban family who are about to have their lives turned inside out … ruined forever.

“What can I do for you?” Ollie says finally, turning his attention back to the cops.

“I’m Sr. Constable Arthur,” I hear a woman say, though I can’t see her from my vantage point, “and this is Constable Perkins. Are you Oliver Goodwin?”

“I am.” Ollie smiles down at Edie, even throws her a wink. It’s enough to convince me that I’m being overly dramatic. Even if there’s bad news, it may not be that bad. It may not even be our bad news. Perhaps one of the neighbors was burgled? Police always canvased the area after something like that, didn’t they?

Suddenly I look forward to that moment in a few minutes’ time when I know that everything’s fine. I think about how Ollie and I will laugh about how paranoid I was. You won’t believe what I thought, I’ll say to him, and he’ll roll his eyes and smile. Always worrying, he’ll say. How do you ever get anything done with all that worrying?

But when I edge forward a few paces, I see that my worrying isn’t unnecessary. I see it in the somberness of the policeman’s expression, in the downward turn of the corners of his mouth.

The policewoman glances at Edie, then back at Ollie. “Is there somewhere we can talk … privately?”

The first traces of uncertainty appear on Ollie’s face. His shoulders stiffen and he stands a little bit taller. Perhaps unconsciously, he pushes Edie back from the door, behind him, shielding her from something.

“Edie-bug, would you like me to put on The Wiggles?” I say, stepping forward finally.

Edie shakes her head resolutely, her gaze not shifting from the police. Her soft round face is alight with interest; her chunky, wobbly legs are planted with improbable firmness.

“Come on, honey,” I try again, sweeping a hand over her pale gold hair. “How about an ice cream?”

This is more of a dilemma for Edie. She glances at me, watching for a long moment, assessing whether I can be trusted. Finally I shout for Archie to get out the Paddle Pops and she scampers off down the hallway.

“Come in,” Ollie says to the police, and they do, sending me a quick, polite smile. A sorry smile. A smile that pierces my heart, unpicks me a little. It’s not the neighbors, that smile says. This bad news is yours.

There aren’t a lot of private communal areas in our house so Ollie guides the police to the dining room and pulls out a couple of chairs. I follow, pushing my newly folded laundry into a basket. The piles collapse into each other like tumbling buildings. The police sit on the chairs, Ollie balances on the arm of the sofa, and I remain sharply upright, stiff. Bracing.

“Firstly I need to confirm that you are relatives of Diana Goodwin—”

“Yes,” Ollie says, “she’s my mother.”

“Then I’m very sorry to inform you,” the policewoman starts, and I close my eyes because I already know what she is going to say.

My mother-in-law is dead.

Robert Highstead’s workday ended with a letter thrust inside his pocket. Before that, it was spent in a second-story parlor in Kensington, squinting into a camera at a corpse.

Through the camera’s viewing glass, Robert watched a young woman lying as if asleep, her hands cupped against her breast like she’d been called to cradle a dove. She appeared upside down on the viewing glass as though floating. It was a pose Robert had witnessed hundreds of times in the past three years: the serene smile upon the lips, the closed eyelids, the awkwardly draped shawl across the shoulders that a loved one took upon herself to orchestrate. A last display of care before consignment to the grave. The only variant today was a small book, The Lost History of Dreams, by an author Robert had never heard of. The volume was splayed across the woman’s belly, as though she’d just set it down to rest her eyes.

The thin cry of an infant revealed the cause of the woman’s demise. From the blood-stiffened linens thrown in a heap against a limewashed wall to the slack-shouldered midwife napping beside the wash basin, Robert understood the woman had labored long and hard. “The noblest of sacrifices,” he’d told her sister and husband, to help them grasp whatever comfort they could. Their muffled sobs gave hint to the ineffectuality of language. The winter air inside the parlor was weighed with the tinge of iron despite the geraniums set on the window ledge, the ice beneath the coffin boards. Not that it mattered—after all, Robert had work to do. He needed to be in Belgravia in two hours for a thirteen-year-old consumptive whose family yearned for a last portrait while she could still acknowledge their presence.

Robert unlatched a long wooden box to remove the silver-coated copper plate for the daguerreotype. He’d already buffed it to a mirrorlike sheen before exposing it to iodine and bromine fumes. As he reached toward his camera, his eyes tripped to the clock on the mantel as he thought of his wife. She hadn’t come home the previous evening—a not uncommon occurrence in their three years of marriage. Nor did it help that this was the third corpse he’d daguerreotyped since breakfast. Though Robert was accustomed to such sights, today it felt too much.

The widower, who was dressed in the modest clothes of a merchant, approached Robert, the newborn in his arms bawling. “She . . . she was lovely,” he said, his eyes reddening.

Robert tutted between his teeth. “I’m so sorry.” The more often he repeated the words, the less currency they seemed worth. He set the frame containing the plate inside the camera with a slide that felt as visceral as anything he’d experienced of late.

“Now the camera is ready,” he announced, ignoring the slight stench already rising from the corpse; the ice wasn’t helping. “The process will take little time, sir. Less than a minute.”

The widower pressed a palm against his eyes. “I appreciate how quickly you arrived. Very good of you. My sister claims you’re the best daguerreotypist of this sort.”

“I promise to use all the skills of my art, sir.” Robert’s heart lurched with sympathy; at least he still had his wife, wherever she was. She always comes back. “If there’s anything else I can do to offer comfort . . .”

The widower’s eyes fixed on Robert with a wet desperation. “Can . . . can you make her look as she did when she was alive, Mr. Highstead?”

“Ah, I understand! The daguerreotype will record your wife so your daughter—”

“Son. We’re naming him Charles. After her.” The widower indicated his wife’s corpse with a tight nod. “My wife’s name was Charlotte. Those who care for her called her Lottie.”

“Then your son Charles will have something by which to recall his dear mother’s life.”

Robert next took out a thick binder from his satchel. “If you’d care to look at our Catalogue of Possibilities,” he said mildly, setting it before the widower. The leather binding was gilded with the motto “Secure the shadow ’ere the substance fade.” The catalogue showed a journeyman’s ransom of items to spill shillings on. The silver-bordered frame bearing a capsule for a lock of hair. The velvet-lined glass mounts. The alternate views of the departed. Images of the family gathered around the corpse, faces pinched from the effort of not shifting for the camera. The stillborn babies supported by black-cloaked figures.

“Are they alive?” the widower asked.

“Sometimes,” Robert replied. He possessed little pride for his ability to pose an infant in a mother’s lifeless arms without the exposure blurring. A few drops of Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup worked wonders, though he hated how it affected the child. Yet there was something about his employment Robert couldn’t turn from. Something compelling. He told himself it was because he was offering comfort by transforming loss into proof of memory. Sometimes the daguerreotype seemed like sorcery itself, especially when he saw the image emerge from the plate like a ghost from the ethers. But it was more than this.

“For an additional fee, the image can be hand-tinted,” Robert added, pointing at a colored daguerreotype. Pink-hued gum arabic over silver foil. Flesh over bones.

Once coins were exchanged and bills of sale signed, Robert began the delicate process of daguerreotyping the corpse. He steadied his breath as he stared through the glass. He took the lens cap off with a flash of his palm, letting light record shadow on the plate. He ignored the widower’s sobs, the tearful last confessions of love. After all, they weren’t directed for his ears, but to those who could no longer hear. As Robert counted down the seconds of exposure, he anticipated what he would find when he developed the daguerreotype. For he knew in each person’s image he would discover the lost history of their lives: the scars, the wrinkles, the dreams never fulfilled. Or, worse, the lack thereof.

And then a messenger had walked in and thrust the letter into Robert’s pocket.

“How did you find me?” he’d asked the messenger, a towheaded boy of no more than fifteen. But the messenger had no answer, for he was already out the door.

*

The letter remained unopened for the remainder of Robert’s afternoon. But it was not forgotten: he’d found himself unable to daguerreotype the consumptive in Belgravia, the first time he’d ever not shown for a client.

Instead of taking a carriage after he’d received the letter, Robert used his disturbance as an excuse to walk toward Clerkenwell. Toward home. He hoped the exercise would calm him. The simplest thing would be to read the letter. To learn the worst. He couldn’t. Not yet.

He detoured along Oxford Street, though it took him out of his way. Even on a frigid February day, Oxford Street offered the distraction of shop-lined pavements crowded with silk-clad pedestrians. Such was the effect of Robert’s step—he dragged his left leg to compensate for the weight of his daguerreotype traveling case—that some paused in his wake. Robert understood their interest wasn’t because he was particularly handsome. With his thick pale hair and fair skin, his were the type of looks better described as sensitive than arresting; even now, three years after he’d left Oxford, he resembled the scholar of history he’d been. It was because Robert understood that even they, strangers to him in every sense of the word, knew there was something about him. Something somber. He noted their attention, but he’d grown used to it in the same way a butcher ignores the flies buzzing about his shop. After so much time daguerreotyping corpses, Robert understood death hung off him. Sometimes he imagined it possessing a physical form, like a martyr in a Flemish painting. Other times he fretted he smelled of decay, though he washed his hands nightly in carbolic acid followed by castile soap. This regimen left the skin on his hands reddened, but he couldn’t bring himself to forego it.

By the time Robert approached Theobald Road, the shock of the letter still hadn’t worn off. He walked quickly, bypassing narrow lanes snaking up into fog-draped indistinction. His pace only slowed once he turned left on Grays Inn Lane at the intersection where it met Laystall Street. His boarding house.

He ascended the four flights of stairs to his room, ignoring his landlady’s solicitous greeting. He didn’t bother to ask whether his wife had returned home; he knew Mrs. Clarke never noticed Sida’s comings and goings. Anyway, for once Sida didn’t dominate his worries. Mrs. Clarke’s orange-striped tabby followed him upstairs, mewing plaintively. The cat understood Robert was good for a saucer of milk, but not today.

Once his door was shut, Robert settled the traveling case onto the floor in the room.

The room was enough for his needs. It contained a bed, a milk-painted dresser, a table the width of his lap for meals, and two wicker chairs. A long worktable held a glittering stack of silvered copper plates he’d begun polishing with pumice powder and oil; his business required a constant supply. Quarter plates, which measured about three by four inches, were Robert’s favorite, for they required only his compact Richebourg daguerreotype outfit. He didn’t like to work with daguerreotypes smaller than this—too hard to view without a magnifying glass. He possessed a camera expressly for this purpose, but preferred not to carry it along with the quarter-plate one. However, if business improved, he planned to invest in a newer American-style full-plate camera. As for the room itself, its walls were angled. No art could be hung on them, which perturbed Sida, who liked to draw, but the view from the windows was compensation. They looked out on chimney pots and muddled skies, where birds collected at dusk. On clear days, he could even spy St. Paul’s to the south. When it grew foggy, Robert swore he could see coal dust suspended midair. The dust would enter his room, lining the plates in grey even after he closed the windows. Regardless, he preferred the windows open despite coal dust and the occasional errant crow at dusk.

Tonight the room was empty of crows. It was also empty of Sida.

Robert sank onto their bed, uncertain if he was relieved or disappointed she wasn’t there. If the letter’s sender was as expected, it might upset her more than him.

Relieved, he decided. Better she not know. She’ll return. She always does. Yet he feared this time would be different.

What troubled Robert most about Sida’s absences wasn’t the possibility of her betraying him; he knew she was too devoted for that. Nor was it loneliness; Robert was the sort of man who found as much companionship in a book as he did in humanity. It was that he never understood the perimeters of her comings and goings.

When they were together, Robert knew his marriage was a fair trade. Apart, it was difficult to think of anything save Sida’s unpredictable ways. He often wished he could stay home to watch over her. He’d bring her pomegranate seeds and mint tea, red wine and gentle kisses. He’d provide her with peace. But this could never be. Though Robert was the son of landed gentry, he’d abandoned his land right after they’d married.

The letter reasserted its hold. He glanced anew at the door. What if Sida showed? To distract himself, he’d read. Ovid’s Metamorphoses would do. While at Oxford, he’d written an acclaimed history of Ovid’s world. His second book, a biography of Ovid, had been slow work: the poet had spent the later part of his life in undocumented exile.

Still, the comfort of old obsessions called. He shifted the book onto his chest and read in Latin: Eurydice, dying now a second time, uttered no complaint against her husband. What was there to complain of, but that she had been loved?

The words blurred before his sight. Sida or no, the letter would not be ignored.

He drew the letter from his pocket like it was a snake. It was postmarked Belvedere, Kent. Where he’d grown up. It was addressed in a hand he knew well, though he hadn’t seen it since his marriage. His brother’s.

“Shit,” he said.

Just then the door creaked open. He let the letter slide from his fingers.

Sida’s form was silhouetted against sunlight from the landing. She was wearing a blue-grey silk gown, the one she’d married him in. The sleeves were unusually full about the shoulders, a style she was fond of. He ignored the dark stains marring the bodice; they hadn’t been able to launder them out. Robert’s eyes passed hungrily over her. Sida looked as she ever did: petite, fine-boned, doe-eyed. Her ebony hair was unplaited about her shoulders, damp from an unseen rain. The moisture brought out the gleaming curls of her hair, which reminded him of a Titian Madonna he’d shown her at the National Gallery, the first time she’d ever viewed art in a museum.

“You’re back,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t notice the letter on the floor. “I missed you.”

Sida smiled in answer, letting her Kashmir shawl drop as she approached him. The shawl was one her father had brought from India; he’d been a lascar who’d married an English woman when the East India Company had brought him to London. Sida had been employed as a seamstress when Robert first met her. Later he learned her uncle had forced her into service after her parents’ death, but he hadn’t cared. His brother had.

He opened his arms wide. She slid into them, the gesture easy. This was what he’d needed—not money, not family favor, nor universities at Oxford. This was why he lived in this fourth-story room where birds trespassed at dusk.

How light she felt in his arms! How soft! It no longer mattered that his days were spent daguerreotyping the dead. Besides, he was good at it. Instead of writing about history, he was capturing it on a silver-lined plate for generations to come. As for Sida, what did it matter she wasn’t as she’d been before their marriage? Neither was he. All this was proof they were fated to be together. They’d never be parted.

“I love you,” he murmured. “Only you.”

Robert raised himself above his wife on their bed, ignoring the letter below. Whatever was in it couldn’t be more important than her. The candle beside the bed cast shadows along her cheek, accentuating the bones beneath. He wove his fingers into hers, his skin pale against her dusky hand. He grew aroused, but didn’t dare venture further. Instead, he rested his cheek against her breast, his hand on her waist. Her bodice was soft with moisture.

As the room darkened with the shadows of winter, husband and wife lay together on their bed, head to head, eye to eye, Robert’s breath the only sound in the room before Sida’s eyes lit on the letter.

Chapter One

She’d never gone this deep.

Gyre wriggled her armored body another centimeter into the crevice, then eased her bag of gear after her. The plating on the back of her calf scraped over the stone, and she winced at the noise. Nobody had warned her that the opening to the lower cave system was so small—or empty. To be fair, she hadn’t gotten a lot of warning or preparation. She’d been too eager to get below the surface to question if there should have been more than the limited orientation she’d received.

Still, when she’d signed up for the expedition, she had assumed three things:

One, that there would be a team assisting her, monitoring the readings from her suit from afar, pulling up maps for her when possible, and keeping her company in the dwindling light as she left the surface.

Two, that she would enter through a giant borehole into a mining camp, and would stage in that camp before pressing deeper into the ground.

And three, that the amount of money she was being offered would be directly related to the sophistication of the expedition.

And yet here she was, alone in a tiny crevice in an unknown site, her helmet speakers silent.

“Caver here,” she said for the fifth time. “Would appreciate contact, base.”

For the fifth time, there was no response. The only sounds were her breathing inside her helmet, the soft pulsing of the alert system displayed in front of her face, and the groan of her suit against rock as she contorted her spine and pressed through another few centimeters.

Gyre paused, leaning against the curved crevice wall. Maybe she should go back. Maybe her suit was malfunctioning. At the hospital where she had been fitted into it, she had gone through the regular check and double check of all systems, including communications transmission. Everything had been fine then, and her year of helping other cavers into similar suits told her that all systems were go. But she didn’t have a death wish, and going any farther without comms was suicide. Her eyes flicked over the readouts inside her suit again.

Everything was normal.

“Beginning to suspect suit is shot,” she said anyway, addressing the emptiness. “Preparing to abort.”

The speakers in her helmet finally came to life. “Negative. Do not abort. Caver, continue.” The voice sounded female, clipped and authoritative. More important, it sounded real—not a computerized response.

Well, that got a reaction. Gyre’s lips twisted into a bitter approximation of a smile. “Roger,” she muttered, and shuffled another few centimeters.

The crevice widened abruptly about half a meter farther in, and Gyre stumbled out, reflexively moving to dust herself off. But carbon polymer just scraped over carbon polymer, a frustrating reminder that for the next several weeks—or even months—she wouldn’t be able to feel her own skin. She shook her head.

Rookie.

The suit was her new skin, filled with sensors and support functions, dampening her heat and strengthening her already powerful muscles with an articulated exoskeleton designed to keep climbing as natural as possible. She wouldn’t even remove her helmet to eat or sleep. Her large intestine had been rerouted to collect waste for easy removal and a feeding tube had been implanted through her abdominal wall ten days ago. A port on the outside of her suit would connect to nutrition canisters. All liquid waste would be recycled by the suit. All solid waste would be compacted and cooled to ambient temperature, then either carried with her or stored in caches to be retrieved on her trip out. Everything was painstakingly, extensively designed to protect her from . . . elements in the cave.

And, all the while, her handlers would be monitoring her vitals and surveying her surroundings for her. It was Gyre’s job to move and climb and explore; it was her handlers’ job to document.

“Caver, continue,” repeated the woman from before.

Gyre scowled, then straightened up and looked around the cavern. Her suit used a combination of infrared and sonar pulses to generate readings on the surrounding topography, which was reconstructed into what looked like a well-lit but colorless scene on the screen in front of her. In an emergency, the reconstruction could be turned off and a normal light turned on, but it wasn’t advisable to have a lamp burning, giving off heat, attracting attention down in the cold darkness of the caves.

There was a reason, after all, that cavers could demand enough money that they’d be able to get off-world after only two jobs, maybe three.

Too many cavers didn’t make it that long.

Just one of the many reasons Gyre was going to do it in one.

“Continuing,” she acknowledged, but paused first to drink in the space. The ceiling was high and vaulted, the ground even and dry. Far off, she thought she could hear water. The surface had been in a near-constant drought since she was a child, but most of the deep caves in this area still had water flowing through them, and would periodically flood from harsh, sudden storms that destroyed settlements and washed away topsoil and structures on the surface. This was the first time she’d personally set foot in a chamber this deep.

It was beautiful.

It was also unnerving.

She made her way to a marker blinking on her HUD, clambering down a wide natural staircase, a duffel full of equipment and food slung over her shoulder.

“Where’s the mine, base?” she asked as she slid over one of the larger drops and landed in a haze of dust. “Is this new ground, or just a new entrance?”

Base was, of course, silent.

Maybe this was normal. She’d never heard of taciturn support teams from the senior cavers she’d talked to, but she also hadn’t been allowed in the topside command rooms. The problem was that if this was normal, the team would expect her to know that.

They didn’t know this was her first time down.

Gyre came to the edge of another, larger drop. Like the five she’d descended to get down to the initial crevice, this one had an anchor at the top, and a fresh, high-quality rope leading down. There had been other cavers here, and recently.

“Base, requesting a topside search,” she said, considering the rope. “Confirm that there are no other cavers ahead of me. I’m seeing signs of—”

“There is no mine, and no other cavers,” the woman said. “Equipment was put in and caches established in anticipation of your descent.”

Okay. No mine wasn’t ideal, but not unheard of; her boss must just be looking for deposits in new ground, sending people in one after the other. It wasn’t common these days, with most of the land already picked over, but in a true expedition like that, pre-stocked caches were a good idea. Given the pay rate on this mission and the sophistication of her equipment, this was clearly a high-end pursuit, and yet—

And yet so far she could only be sure of one person in the support room, and the techs who had helped calibrate her suit hadn’t been chatty or worn the logo of any of the major mining concerns. She’d known from the beginning that this was an individual-run expedition, and at the time, money and the quality of the equipment had eclipsed all other considerations. They’d been worth falsifying her credentials here and there to make her look proven. They’d been worth hiring a surgeon to redirect her bowels for a month—something she really couldn’t afford, but the payout from this job would more than cover it—just so that she’d have the appropriate scars when the expedition’s doctors cut her open.

But now that she was underground, she was beginning to wonder if she had made a giant mistake.

Of course, there could still be five or ten techs. Maybe they were all shy. Maybe the woman with the mic was territorial and a total idiot. It was possible.

If that was the case, she just had to keep going until shift change.

In the meantime, she reassured herself that expeditions were always top-heavy. They could afford to be, had to be. They were standing on a veritable mint deep below the surface of Cassandra-V, the only thing keeping the colony halfway viable, and decades of mining had taught them a few things.

Like the fact that early teams that went down to establish mines or take samples ended up dead. Ninety percent failure rate. Big groups, small groups, solo explorers . . . it didn’t matter. Something always killed them.

Something always killed them, until somebody got smart enough or desperate enough to try wearing a drysuit down, alone, into a cave. Even now, nobody was sure if it was because it blocked heat rising from the body, or smell, or something else, but one person, in an enclosed suit, could survive. One person, though, needed help keeping watch while they slept, and the suits became more and more elaborate to provide for longer and longer survey missions. Now missions had at least five or ten techs topside. She’d seen it firsthand, working support on two medium-sized operations. A year ago, she’d helped her first caver into a similar suit—a hotshot guy with two expeditions already under his belt—and it hadn’t been nearly as elaborate and high-tech as this one. This was top-of-the-line and must have demanded an even larger crew.

So where were they?

The sensible thing would be to call off the mission and walk back out, while she still could. But she’d sacrificed too much to get here, this deep, with this much money on the line.

She didn’t want to go through it all again. Next time, her embellished work history might not stand up to scrutiny. And if she was wrong, if there was a team, and she walked out? Nobody wanted to hire a caver who would breach contract. Not when there were so many others waiting to be picked.

Not when there are a hundred other kids as desperate as I am.

Chapter 1

Eliza

1914

It was a spring party like any other held in Southampton, with the usual games. Croquet. Badminton. Mild social cruelty. It took place at Mother’s house on Gin Lane, a sprawling white clapboard place surrounded by a swoop of tawny lawn, which eased down to meet the ocean. The Queen Anne cottage, known to most as Mitchell Cottage after Father’s people, stood with her sisters lined up along the treeless South Fork of Long Island, New York, like passengers on a ship deck facing out to sea.

If I paid more attention that day, maybe I could have predicted which of the boys who laughed over croquet wickets would soon die in the forests of Argonne or which women would exchange their ivory silk dresses for black crape. I wouldn’t have pointed to myself.

It was late May and too unseasonably cool near the ocean for a fete of any kind, but Mother insisted on sending our Russian friends, the Streshnayvas, off in style. I stood in the cool, wide living room at the back of the house. Like a steamship wheelhouse it provided the perfect view of the backyard through the picture window, the glass hazed with salt from the sea. It gave the scene a blurry look as guests drifted down the lawn to the dunes.

I felt two arms wrap around my waist and turned to find my eleven-­year-­old daughter, Caroline, already almost to my shoulder in height, her hair the color of summer hay and pulled back in a white ribbon. Her friend Betty Stockwell stood at her side, a complete opposite of Caroline, five inches shorter and already blossoming into a dark-­haired beauty. Though dressed in matching white dresses, they were as different as chalk and cheese.

Caroline held her arms fast around my waist. “We’re going to walk the beach. And Father says he’s sorry he dressed without your help this morning, but don’t deprive him of his Dubonnet.”

I smoothed one hand down her back. “Tell your father color-­blind men who insist on sneaking yellow socks into their wardrobes cannot be forgiven.”

Caroline smiled up at me. “You’re my favorite mother.”

She ran off across the lawn and down to the beach, past men who held on to their straw hats, their white flannel trousers flapping in the breeze. Ladies in canvas shoes and suits of cream linen over dainty lingerie shirtwaists turned their faces to the sun, back from places like Palm Beach, happy to feel northern breezes again. Mother’s suffragette friends, most outfitted in black taffeta and silk, lent dark contrast to the otherwise pale lawn, like strutting crows in golden flax.

Mother came and linked arms with me. “A bit chilly for a beach walk.” My seventy-­year-­old mother, Caroline Carson Woolsey Mitchell, referred to as “Carry” by her sisters, stood as tall as I did, six feet, a staunch New Englander sprung from ancient Yankee stock that had weathered as many heartaches as hurricanes.

“They’ll be fine, Mother.”

I squinted to see my Henry, Caroline, and Betty already walking down the beach, the skirt of Caroline’s white dress wind-­puffed, as if ready to fly her skyward.

“They have their shoes off?” Mother asked. “I do hope they come in soon.”

The wind stirred whitecaps on the ocean as the three walked, heads bowed.

Mother wrapped her arms warm about me. “What do they even talk about, Caroline and Henry?”

“Everything. Lost in their own world.”

The breeze grabbed Henry’s straw boater, leaving his auburn hair shining in the sun, and Caroline darted to pluck it from the surf.

“How lucky she is to have a father who dotes on her,” Mother said.

She was entirely right, as always. But would Caroline be up coughing again half the night from the sea air?

Henry waved from the beach, like a castaway stranded on a desert island.

I waved back. “Henry will burn with his fair skin.”

Mother waved to Henry. “The Irish are so delicate.”

“Half Irish, Mother.”

Mother patted my hand. “They’ll miss you.”

“I won’t be gone long.” Sofya and her family had been visiting from St. Petersburg for a month and I was due to travel back with them to St. Petersburg the next day.

“I do worry. Russia is so far. Saratoga is nice this time of year.”

“This may be my only chance to see Russia. The churches. The ballet—­”

“The starving peasants.”

“Keep your voice down, Mother.”

“They eliminated serfdom but the tsar’s poor are still enslaved.”

“I’ll go mad if I stay cooped up here. Caroline will be fine with Henry.”

“At least there’s no war on. For now.”

For those who read the papers thoroughly, reporters predicted conflict with Germany, but the world had been on the brink of war so many times, many New Yorkers treated the subject with only passing interest.

“Don’t worry, Mother.”

She hurried off and I stepped out onto the terrace, the salt wind in my hair, into a polite stew of conversation punctuated by great thuds of surf and the occasional knock of a croquet mallet. I pushed through the crowd, squeezing past smooth silks and cashmeres, in search of my friend Sofya.

Mother’s and Father’s friends split into two distinct camps. Though Father had been dead and gone for a few years, Mother still included his friends in any gathering. He was once head of the Republican Party for New York and his friends reflected that: fellow lawyers and their wives, financiers, and the occasional self-­made tycoon.

Mother’s friends were decidedly more lively: actors and painters, suffragettes of all shapes and sizes, and several members of the international set from far-­off places that Father’s friends only gossiped about: Nairobi. Bangkok. Massachusetts.

To find the Russian contingent, I simply listened for raised voices, since they were a refreshingly raucous bunch, prone to heated discussion in a mix of French, English, and their native tongue at any time of day. I passed the Streshnayvas’ physician, Dr. Vladimir Leonidovich Abushkin, a squat, balding man wearing a lynx coat over his morning suit, chest to chest with Mother’s physician, Dr. Forbes.

“I don’t care what they do in St. Petersburg,” Dr. Forbes said, his face drawn and heavily joweled from years of late-­night deathbed visits and baby deliveries. “If you want a healthy child born, Sofya should not be traveling. She needs bed rest and calcium.”

Dr. Abushkin threw back his head. “Ha. Calcium. We have two months before the birth. She’s sound as a roach.”

“But she is at high risk. Two miscarriages. Extended travel is risky.”

I found the Russians gathered on the far end of the back terrace, around my actor friends: silver-­haired E. H. Sothern, kneeling on bended knee, and his wife Julia Marlowe. Julia addressed them all from my bedroom window above as she and E.H. performed the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, one of their most famous.

“’Tis almost morning; I would have thee gone—­” Julia called out, one arm stretched over the crowd, my bedspread around her shoulders.

The Russians watched the little play, wearing serious expressions, while the rest of the party milled about, immune to the greatest American Shakespearean actor and actress of their day, having seen them perform often. One might ask how Julia and E.H. at forty-­eight and fifty-­four years old played the famously pubescent couple, but one only had to experience them onstage to be convinced of their talent.

Julia finished the scene to enthusiastic applause and Russian hurrahs from the Streshnayvas. They were a jolly group out there on the terrace. Ivan, the patriarch, cousin to tsar Nicholas II, stood and surveyed the pounding surf, his shirtsleeves fluttering. A kind, trim man with a certain European flair, Ivan had met Henry years ago when my husband was a young fur buyer for Poor Brothers Dry Goods and Ivan represented the Russian trade board.

Ivan’s second wife, the countess, stood with a decidedly pregnant Sofya and her soldier husband, Afon, and described at length how she sent her personal linen from Russia to Paris to be laundered.

Most guests were well-­mannered enough not to gaze openmouthed, but the aging Russian beauty was a sight to behold, dressed in last year’s French couture and festooned with sable stole, ropes of pearls, and diamonds the size of which had never been seen before the dinner hour in Southampton.

Sofya caught my eye, smiled, and raised an eyebrow. Pregnancy suited her; it left her with a respectable expectant figure, unlike my own before I delivered Caroline and looked as if I carried a Shetland pony.

The countess ignored the brewing fight between the doctors and pulled a housemaid aside. “Fetch me a soda water, would you, and do remember the ice?”

The maid rushed off and the countess lit one hand on Sofya’s shoulder. “You really must sit. Think of your miracle child and how long you’ve waited, dear. And do stop eating or Afon won’t touch you after the baby is born.”

Sofya shook off the countess’s arm. “Please, Agnessa, you’ve asked for two soda waters already and left them untouched.”

“Americans have ice cubes to spare, dear.”