With less than six months to go before the release of SkyBlue, I thought I'd treat all you readers to a look at the first few pages. Enjoy!
CHAPTER ONE
Poacher
I can only pretend to listen. The pastor’s remarks are longer than Papa would have liked, woody tones vibrating from his cords as if he had a cello caught in his throat. He speaks of death as a door, the Will of Fate unlocking it to usher us in. Fate, he says, is a map, and God is the master cartographer. Mamma hangs on his words like rope, her knuckles tight with grief around her twisted handkerchief.
If death is a door, then it’s too easily opened.
The cemetery is stifling, its headstones crammed, leaning with the centuries. Stone angels droop toward the graves in poses meant to venerate and bless the dead, but seem instead to pity them. Amidst the crumbling fieldstone, my brothers assist the undertaker in lowering our father’s casket into the earth, which had frozen in the night, taking several hours to dig. Byron grunts, the weight of our father dragging down his shoulders. A droplet of sweat courses Simon’s temple, proof to me that my brothers have rarely experienced such back-breaking labor. At harvest, when our orchard was ripe and hands were few, Papa elected to hire the sons of widows or the odd vagrant passing through to haul away the apple crates. To his sons he taught that a proper work ethic was rooted in the intellectual mind rather than physical labor. As such, Simon and Byron have hardly worked a spade, let alone the new military muskets strapped to their backs.
They step back from the grave, their chins pointed to their chests and their new cavalry uniforms of yellow-gold and black. They look like targets.
“Don’t worry,” they’ve said, as if such an inane comfort could possibly ever help. India is not war-torn, but the Crown has lent troops to protect the interests of the East India Company, our country’s monopoly on global trade. My brothers also neglected to mention the tigers and cholera, either of which could kill without remorse. Just thinking of it spins worry in my mind, and tears press against my eyes. I clench my jaw to hold them back.
My sister’s tears are enough for the both of us. At my side, Anna sobs into her hands, her breaths pitching like a ship’s sail torn loose. She looks at me and I can barely contain myself, though not just out of grief at losing our father. No, it’s much worse than that. Much worse because I’m a selfish creature, the truth of my situation a yoke of burden—fear pressing on my neck. If my brothers leave, then I must stay, and all my dreams with me. I don’t think I’ll get the chance to see the world as Papa saw it.
Reverend Moody’s black eyes lift from his Bible, cutting Anna a glance of distaste as she cries. He is shrewd and bigoted, believing women have no place at a gravesite or even in the world. I despise his callousness, his patronizing tone as he implies my father’s life was one lacking in heavenly fortitude. His business called him away on too many Sundays, too many sermons missed. Well, he’s present for this one now, and us girls—who don’t belong in this scene by the angels—all we want is to look at Papa one last time and say goodbye, cursing Death’s doors for ever opening.
The morning breeze lifts, a crow flitting over the pastor’s black-brimmed hat. For one blinding moment I wonder if Papa opened Death’s door on his own, welcoming the other side with his arms outstretched, the wounds at his wrists weeping out his life instead of saving him. Bloodletting, our physician said, would kill the consumption, so Papa lifted his hands and he looked at me, saying, “Take care of your heart, Beatrice.” And then his eyes went to Anna and to Mamma, and I realized what his words really meant. Once he passed, I would be their keeper.
My fists shake against my sides. I take a breath and the smell of wet earth sticks to my lungs. My brothers, their chests broad and yet so breakable, set sail for India tomorrow. At dawn, I’ll be left to care for our mother and sister alone.
The sky commences to drizzle out a misty English rain, muddying the open grave. My chest seizes, petrified that if we don’t bury Papa soon his body will decay before my eyes and then I’ll really have lost him. Already the worms—awakened by the rude disruptions of the undertaker’s spade—drag their intestinal bodies across the casket.
As if revived, a beetle breaks through the mud at the grave’s edge, climbing into the air. It hovers in front of my nose, wings blurred, colors shifting from black to gold to iridescent blue. My heart flitters as the insect zips through the sky across the cemetery where the crow dives for it in the air, crushing it in its mouth and devouring it. The bird alights on the headstone of an Irish cross, beyond which stands a man at an open grave, burying his dead alone.
It is Monsieur Dumas.
Intrigue, one of my cleverest and most incessant companions, settles my rampant heartbeats. I’ve never seen M. Dumas in the flesh before, though I know his broad figure from the titillations of drawing room gossip. Very little is known about the Frenchman, except that he’s an aristocrat with lineage extending back to Madame la Guillotine and that bloody war. One can easily see his arcane and gothic manor house atop Shakespeare Cliff, overlooking the harbor, but few have been inside it. Like some fox in the hedgerow, M. Dumas shows himself only when he wants to be seen.
His head isn’t bent in misery like mine, though his shoulders have the curve of someone unalterably depressed. News of his wife’s death rushed about town like a hurricane, obscuring Papa’s passing as if he were a transient who died in the outskirts—close to home but not close enough to pity him. The townsfolk have quickly forgotten their best merchant and tradesman.
I wonder what she was like, M. Dumas’s wife. I wonder if his love for her was more sincere than for the wives who came before her. There have been several of them, or so I’ve heard.
The crow squawks from its perch, and M. Dumas lifts his head in my direction. My gaze darts away before our eyes can meet, so I glimpse only a quarter of him: an eye, black as space, and one dark, arched brow.
Little shivers prick at my spine like witchcraft.