Prologue
Mearsall, Kent, May 1828
Avenge me.”
The raspy whisper stirred Nell Trim from her grief-stricken haze. She straightened in the hard wooden chair beside the narrow bed. Around her, tallow candles guttered. Outside the cottage’s mullioned windows, the night was dark and quiet.
She rose to smooth her half-sister’s covers. “Shall I fetch Father?”
“No.” Dorothy grabbed Nell’s hand. The late spring air was warm and Dorothy’s fever had raged for two days, but the fingers that closed around Nell’s were icy with encroaching death. “Listen… to me.”
Nell stared helplessly into the girl’s ashen face. Once Dorothy had been the village belle. Now her skin was gray and dry, and her large blue eyes sank deep into their sockets. She was eighteen years old and looked three times that. “Dr. Parsons said to rest.”
Dorothy’s cracked lips turned down. “There’s no time.”
Nell’s heart cramped with futile denial. “Darling…”
Her half-sister’s hold tightened, stifling the comforting lie. “We both know it’s true.”
Yes, they did. Dr. Parsons had relinquished all hope after Dorothy had lost her baby. Nell still shuddered to remember the sea of blood gushing from her half-sister’s slight body.
Since then, Dorothy had lingered through agony. Looking into her drawn face, Nell knew that lovely, vivacious, heedless Dorothy Simpson wouldn’t last the night. “I’ll get you some water.”
Irritation shadowed her half-sister’s face. “I don’t want water. I want your promise to take up my cause.”
Nell frowned. “But you don’t know who assaulted you.”
For months, Dorothy had hidden her pregnancy, until even her unworldly schoolmaster father had noticed. In tearful shame, she’d confessed that a stranger had attacked her.
Dorothy’s bitter smile was out of keeping with the frivolous girl Nell knew. But of course, frivolity had brought disaster, hadn’t it?
“It wasn’t exactly… assault.”
Horrified, Nell snatched her hand free. “What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean?”
Ever since hearing that Dorothy’s pregnancy resulted from violence, Nell had been angry. This hint that the story wasn’t exactly as presented—hardly surprising, Dorothy was often unreliable with the truth—left her bewildered. “You went… willingly?”
Dorothy’s expression conveyed a strange mixture of shame and pride. “I loved him.”
“Was it one of the village boys?” Nell felt queasy. Had someone they knew taken advantage of Dorothy? It seemed the most obvious answer, yet Dorothy had always scorned Mearsall’s lads as yokels.
A grunt that might have been a dismissive laugh. “Don’t be silly.”
“Then who?”