Sunset ^beta

Chapter Text

It was an early autumnal morning in Oxfordshire. It was not terribly cold, but it still was not the kind of morning most people would want to spend outdoors. Not everyone had the choice to be tucked away in bed or languishing by the hearth; some were shut inside a chilly coach without space to fully extend their legs, never mind the option to lie back.

And some people were stuck driving coaches for the spoilt men. Men like Edmund Morris would be seated just near enough to hear their passengers moan about the cold, all while they were the ones who were taking the freezing wind directly to their faces.

But it would not have been nearly so bad, Edmund felt, if he had been allowed to use any other coach or horses. Unfortunately for him, he had to work with what he was given – and he felt this misfortune keenly with every nauseating lurch of the coach.

The horses – a couple of old brown mares – seemed to stumble right towards every dip in the road, and lest he resort to giving himself a headache squinting through the greyish light, looking out for what dips to avoid, the rocking seemed to be an inescapable discomfort. Edmund wasn’t a lazy man, by any means, but it was hard for him to find it in himself to care enough about the passengers’ comfort to fight too hard against the road’s cruelty. Besides, the mares, bless them, were doing their best, and that’s all that mattered.

Had Edmund his way, he’d be home with his family. His new grandson would no doubt be up already, wailing at the top of his wee lungs, and Edmund would tell his daughter Alice to go back to sleep – that her little one would do just fine eating pap for this one meal – that she was doing a fine job, but a fine job demands fine rest, too.

Instead, Edmund was expected to take the two men inside the coach at least another five miles by noon. When he set off on the journey, he wasn’t sure whether or not the old coach would even make it five miles before collapsing and making kindling of itself.

He was tired, hungry, and aching. The only grace he was given was that the passengers hadn’t yet awoken. The moment they did, they’d just start up their complaining again – as if they weren’t the ones too cheap to fix their coach and buy fitter horses.

So, Edmund stared ahead at the Oxfordshire road as the sun spread its weak warmth over the land. The brown leaves of the trees were painted with a golden glaze. It looked to him to be a fine start to a beautiful day, even if it was bloody cold.

He felt a jolt come from behind him. He turned in his seat, afraid some part of the coach had finally given out. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the entire coach had finally separated from its seat; if he would look back to see the coach shrinking into the distance, left in its own dust.

But it was still there, all right. Edmund gave a puzzled frown.

It had only been a second or two that he had taken his eyes off the road, so one could imagine his shock when he turned back ahead and saw the lane was now occupied by a tall figure, dressed in red, holding a pistol up to the sky.

‘Fuck,’ Edmund softly said. He knew exactly what was about to happen, and he knew it wasn’t something that could be avoided – not with horses like these, which were trotting blithely straight towards the danger.

It had been many years since Edmund had been unlucky enough to be ambushed by highwaymen. So long, in fact, that he had not gone grey yet, while he was completely silver now.

He raised one hand high to acknowledge the stranger, using his other hand to tug lightly at the reins; the horses already moved so slowly, it seemed cruel to bully them into stopping any faster. Inside the coach, he heard the confused mumbles of the waking men. Edmund rubbed his face for a few seconds. He wished he had brought a weapon, but he hadn’t, and he didn’t suppose either of the men in back would be armed, either.

Lifting his head, he looked once more over the twitching ears of the nickering mares, at the armed man in the road. He had a pale, grimy, mean-looking face. He was standing somewhat lopsided, as though he might have been drunk. And his deep red clothes...

In an instant, Edmund’s unhappy resignation was swept away by fear.

‘Sirs?’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Sirs, there’s a man out here! He’s drenched in blood!’

‘My God, man – help him!’ said one of the men, sounding more indignant than concerned.

Edmund wasn’t sure how to explain his situation, so he didn’t respond. Instead, he slowly put both his hands up and rose from his seat.

‘Good man,’ the blood-covered stranger said, gesturing with his pistol for Edmund to continue his descent from behind the reins. Edmund was not stupid enough to resist. He could barely take his eyes off the man’s gruesome coat and breeches – just the sight of them, he imagined, would have been enough to make even a butcher pale.

There was a sharp knock at the window of the coach, followed by the sound of the door being opened. Edmund figured his passengers had finally become curious enough to leave their seats.

He was surprised when he heard a woman’s voice.

‘Get out,’ she said.

‘Good Lord, it’s Nelly Jackson!’ came the familiar voice of the younger passenger, Phillip.

‘Do not call me Nelly Jackson,’ said the voice again, her tone dangerous.

Nelly Jackson. Edmund couldn’t help it – he had to look. Sure enough, there was a woman there in the doorway of the coach. She had a pistol in one hand, pointed directly at the face of one of the men inside; her other hand gripped so hard at the door, Edmund thought she might snap the wood. He realised then that the jolt he had heard earlier had been from her jumping onto the side of the slow-moving coach.

‘You idiot,’ said the older of the two men to the younger one. ‘Don’t you keep up with the news? Jackson is a hero! She saved the Queen!’

‘Get out, now,’ said the woman as she backed out of the door to allow them room to obey. Edmund still hadn’t gotten a good look at her face, but he had seen all the drawings of Jackson that were circulating a couple months back. This woman’s black hair was plenty evidence for him that she wasn’t the renegade-turned-hero.

‘Of course I knew that, Roland,’ scoffed Phillip. His wig was askew, but he couldn’t fix it while his hands were held up in surrender.

‘Oh, I don’t believe you,’ muttered Roland as he followed. He hadn’t put his wig on in time before being forced out, and now his bald head shone in the weak sun.

‘I swear, I knew it wasn’t Nelly Jackson! Jackson wore men’s clothes, but this one’s in a dress,’ Phillip insisted, pink in the face. He nodded hard enough at his own words that Edmund almost couldn’t see that he was shaking. Sometimes it stunned Edmund to see just how much toffs ran their mouths in situations where anyone else would have had the sense to keep them shut.

‘Oh, really!’ Roland huffed. ‘I’m sure Nelly Jackson knows how to change attire.’

‘Stop,’ the woman snapped, ‘talking about Nelly Jackson or I swear...’

She did not finish her threat, for she had no need; the pair of men had finally laid eyes upon the bloodstained man; a sight which would make anyone fall quiet, if they didn’t scream. To their credit, they did not start shouting, like Edmund was expecting. Instead, Phillip brought a hand to his mouth, looking as if he might be sick. Roland’s arms fell weakly to his sides.

As the other two men gawked at the highwayman, Edmund turned his eyes upon the young woman – highwaywoman. She was certainly less physically intimidating than her accomplice, and not only because her clothes did not appear to have been laundered in a vat of blood. Her dress was clearly quality, even if its condition was deplorable, with holes about the ragged hem; and he assumed the entire garment was supposed to be black, not the dirty brown colour which it had absorbed from the woods.

Even the way she held her pistol was less certain than he’d expect from a practised highwaywoman. She wasn’t tall, though she seemed to try to make herself taller by holding her chin slightly up.

She reminded him of his Alice – particularly, his Alice when she was being defiant, usually over something silly. They had the same dark hair: long and thick. Alice had never allowed hers to be cut after the lice incident when she was six.

It was because of those little similarities that he felt a sting of pity for the woman, despite her involvement. He looked at the obviously-dangerous man whom she was with and wondered if she was even there of her own volition.

‘Get away from the carriage,’ said the vicious-looking man. He spoke through gritted teeth and breathed heavily between his words. ‘Go stand there – That’s right... Now stop right there. Good.’

Edmund turned around once he and the other two had reached the edge of the road. He cast a look at the two men beside him; he wondered if they were surprised to be treated no better than him, if they were offended. All he saw in their faces was fear. The horses were still calm, though. Nobody had shouted, no violence had broken out; they hadn’t sensed danger yet.

‘Would you look at that? We finally found some who know how to listen,’ the highwayman said, sneering at his companion. ‘How refreshing.’

The woman said nothing. Her expression was distant as she watched him draw nearer to them. His pace was slow and his jaw was tight, but there was a vicious eagerness in his eyes.

‘Here’s what is going to happen,’ he said once he was standing in front of the toffs; he did not seem to pay much attention to Edmund, much to his relief. The highwayman reached out and plucked the wig off the top of the younger man’s head. Though it was far and away cleaner than anything he had on his body, he still made a show of dusting it off before placing it upon his own head. Edmund looked over at Phillip, whose balding head was now on full display. The embarrassed pinkness in his cheeks had long since faded, leaving him white as a ghost.

‘We’ll be taking as much of what you have as we want,’ he told them with a nasty smile.

Edmund had driven a lot of toffs around over the years, which had given him an ear for accents – moneyed ones, in particular. It surprised him to hear one now coming from such a wretched man.

Behind the highwayman, the woman was focused on her accomplice, rather than their victims. Her worried eyes took in his grisly attire.

‘Please, sir, we don’t have much,’ said Roland, his tone weak and pleading. ‘We’ve only enough supplies to make it to Wantage this afternoon.’

The highwayman shook his head and gave an unsympathetic laugh. One of the mares began to dig at the ground with her hoof. The woman behind the highwayman shut her eyes and leant her head back against the outside of the coach. Edmund watched her place her pistol down on the seat near her. She looked unhappy and disappointed.

‘Listen,’ Edmund finally spoke up. He lowered his hands slowly, the whole time bowing his head just enough to show he wasn’t a threat. He had no pistol, after all, nor anything else to fight back with. ‘Listen...’ he repeated more softly. ‘You won’t find much in there. Just some bread, maybe a little lolly...’

Out of the corner of his eye, Edmund saw Roland turn to Phillip and mouth, ‘Lolly?’ in evident confusion.

‘Unless you think your sweetheart there would like horse feed, you’ll have to temper your expectations.’

Edmund didn’t know exactly what he said to cause the two robbers to recoil in disgust the way they did, but he figured it might have been the idea of eating horse feed.

But it was all the distraction he needed.

He yanked the pistol out of the man’s hand with more ease than he had been expecting, sending it flying off to the side.

Now, it had been a long time since Edmund had punched anyone – which wasn’t anything of which to be ashamed, in his opinion, as he was no ruffian. His fist made contact with the young highwayman’s face, firmly colliding with his cheekbone.

‘Thomas!’ shouted the woman as the man stumbled back from Edmund.

The punch had made Edmund’s arm ache all the way from his knuckles up to his shoulder. He gave the hand a shake, flexing his fingers. He couldn’t help but feel a little proud of himself for the solid hit.

But when he looked up to the woman with compassion in his eyes, he was met with a fury he never could have imagined.

His heart swooped within his breast – so did all his organs – as he was flung backwards. He hit the ground and was sent rolling from the force of – the force of what?

Gasping in pain and fresh terror, he tried to hold himself up off ground, for the sharp rocks and sticks were digging into his soft belly. He knew he wouldn’t be able to stand right away, so instead he dragged himself along the ground, trying to turn himself enough to see what it was that had even hit him.

His dull pain wasn’t centralised anywhere in particular, but at first, all he could assume was that the man had managed to get his pistol back; that he had shot him. Edmund then spotted the pistol near the stomping hooves of the horses, which were beginning to panic. The men he had been supposed to bring to Wantage by noon were cowering; the older man had taken a knee and looked as if he was trying to protect his bald head.

Edmund coughed a little as he looked to the woman next. If she had shot him, when he was only trying to –

But the expression on her face was so terrible – so cruel – that Edmund could no longer see any resemblance between her and his dear Alice.

She raised her empty hands slowly; it was not in itself a menacing gesture, but he felt the purest dread gathering within him as he waited for her to bring them back down.

He was right to be afraid.

Edmund screamed as he felt himself being crushed against the ground. All the sticks and rocks stuck into him and he was sure they were poking through his clothes and piercing at his flesh. Dirt spilt into his open mouth – for he was being pressed with such force that he was being ground right into the packed dirt of the road. There was an anthill near his brow which had become disturbed by his torture; he panicked as he saw the little creatures spilling out, ready to defend themselves.

‘Please!’ Edmund cried out desperately as the ants began to crawl upon his face – their creeping was even worse to him than the pain. He could not move an inch; not even his limbs nor fingers. His frantic blinking to try to keep the ants out of his eye only served to draw dirt into it. Oh, he hoped it was only dirt.

The last of the air in his lungs was being squeezed out and it was getting increasingly difficult for him to draw breath enough to replace it. He was quickly becoming dizzy, but still vividly felt the amassing of the swarm on his face – every sharp little foot, every stinging bite.

He forced his eyes back open, trying again to figure out what was happening to him.

The highwayman he had punched to the ground had not returned to his feet; he stared up at the woman not with pleasure or admiration, but with terror. Edmund closed his eyes tightly, taking no comfort in the sight of the other man’s fear.

There was a terrible pressure inside his head. In his teeth and gums, he felt his heart’s frantic pounding. His nose was filling with blood, which promptly spilt out of it, washing away some of the ants in a river of red.

‘Sofia! Sofia!’ he heard the man cry, just barely.

Thomas. His name was Thomas, hers was Sofia. Edmund’s brother had been named Thomas. It was a struggle for Edmund now, with all the pain and all the years gone by, but the image of his brother’s young face settled behind Edmund’s stinging eyes. Like Edmund’s breaths now, Thomas’s last few days had been laboured and painful; he had died of a wasting disease that made his lungs, he had said, feel like a spider had crept in and spun webs. The vision of his face faded into red, which then faded into black. Edmund felt one final vengeful thrust of the invisible force...

Then it was gone.

Edmund thought he died. He lay there, waiting to be taken to his brother, his parents, and everyone else he had lost over his many years. He hoped the aching would be taken away, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to hug them proper.

Slowly, the expectation of reunion faded, and his relief concentrated into consciousness – then fear once more.

It was painful, yet so easy now, to lift his face from the ground. He had already begun to brush off the ants before he realised he could work his limbs. He scrubbed at his beard and neck; he spat and spat, but still tasted dirt and blood – still felt unnatural movements within his mouth. He was shaking and twitching like a madman in his efforts to make himself clean.

He stopped himself, however, when he heard the low chuckle of the man on the ground.

When Edmund raised his watery eyes to look at the fearsome woman again, he saw that she was leaning back against the coach, her head lolled back with her face to the sky; she looked exerted, yet content, of all things, judging by the faintest of smiles which she bore.

He began to feel a sickness rising that had little to do with the physical suffering he had just experienced – what she had just put him through. The fact that neither of the pair were armed with their pistols now meant very little to Edmund.

‘You saw what will happen if you don’t comply,’ Thomas said, rubbing his cheek. He stood up with visible difficulty. Over his stomach, he had his arm slung protectively; his hand looked so pale against the garnet background of his clothes. He walked over to the frantic horses and scooped his pistol up off the ground by their feet, careful not to get too near. His face bore a grimace, but he hid it by the time he straightened back up.

‘Now, stand,’ Thomas said wearily, facing the cowering toffs. His pistol was pointed to the sky. ‘Stand and deliver. Strip yourselves – we’d prefer not to touch you.’

Sofia turned around and began to rifle through the contents of the coach. Edmund got up off the ground, but only onto his knees. He watched in an agonised haze as the toffs complied hastily; layer by layer, they reduced themselves to the barest of clothing.

So quiet was everyone as the evil deed was done, the horses had calmed themselves down. Even when Sofia walked over to the mares to look them over, to see their condition, they only nickered and snorted softly. Edmund felt his skin crawl as he watched her give the closest one a couple gentle strokes along its neck. He had always been taught that animals had a natural fear of witchcraft.

‘We will let you keep your shabby carriage and half-lame horses,’ Sofia said in a voice that suggested such an unearned authority, it made Edmund feel even sicker. ‘You may go.’

Her pistol had returned to her hand – not that it meant much, after her true weapon had been revealed. She gestured with it for Edmund to retake his seat at the reins. It took everything in his power to walk in her direction to comply, as getting any nearer to her was a hideous thought. Phillip and Roland rushed to the coach so quickly he thought they would compete for who would get to go in first. They weren’t so foolish, surprisingly. Phillip allowed Roland to go first before hastily throwing himself into the coach after him.

The horses, sensing their imminent departure, became alert. The mare on the left took a couple steps forward, but found herself held back by the dead-weight as the right one did not budge. The pair of them always did just that when it came time to leave, and clearly this was no different a circumstance than usual. Bless them, they didn’t know.

Neither the passengers nor the highwaymen gave Edmund the order to go, so he waited with a stiff back, an itchy face, and a nose that still dripped with blood.

‘Thomas, change right now,’ he heard the woman mutter. ‘Do it, before you attract animals to us.’

‘Give me just a minute,’ Thomas replied in a thick voice; it was clear that his mouth was full. They had already begun to feast on their ill-gotten food.

‘You’re disgusting and you’re going to make yourself sick if you don’t change first.’

The man groaned loudly.

‘Oh, God, at least try to wash your hands first!’

As he listened to them bicker, Edmund gingerly dabbed at the blood under his nose with his sleeve. His forearm bumped painfully against his nose when Sofia’s voice came from closer to him: ‘Go! Before your horses starve.’

Edmund didn’t need any more direction. He picked up the reins again and had the horses take them away from the hellish pair as fast as their old legs could.

Chapter Text

Two months.

It had been two months since Nell had faced what seemed like sure-death at Broadwater Hall. Two months – give or take a few days for travel – since she had heard Billy’s voice or sensed his presence. Two fucking months – give or take a few more days to account for the growing number that had been lost in the fog of her unending boredom. Two months since she had banished the rotten Blancheford siblings to the same uncertainty and discomfort she and her sisters had faced, thanks to their actions.

All right, that last thought brought a small smile to Nell’s face.

It was the first time she had smiled that week. Of course, it was only Tuesday. It was only Tuesday, so why did it feel like another whole week had passed?

Her smile faded as quick as it had come.

She had forgotten how time dragged on in sleepy Tottenham. She had forgotten how neatly most people fell into their comfortable little routines. For instance, John the weaver would come into the Talbot for a pint just after sunset, and he’d always greet her as Nelly, no matter how many times she’d correct him. He’d just wink and ask her for his drink, grumble about the price, and then find his usual place to sit by the fire.

Another John – this one a tanner, who of course always came in smelling like piss – would wander in not long after the first John. This John would always tell whoever was serving him to give him two beers right away, then always make the same joke about how maybe he should start asking for the third right away, too, because he won’t feel nothing until he’s on his fourth. Just the thought of the bad joke made Nell’s eyes roll.

And it was like that nearly every day: the same cast of characters, the same conversations, always in the same environment. Already, they had stopped inquiring about her recent escapades; she hadn’t minded at first, since she was getting mighty pig sick of telling the story, but now she had been left remembering just how much worse small talk was in Tottenham.

Nell suddenly groaned in frustration and chucked aside the handful of pebbles she had been throwing into an empty barrel for the last – well, she didn’t even know how many minutes it had been. The little stones clattered against the packed dirt, then were swallowed up by the patchy grass which peeked out from under the fence.

So, this was Nell’s hard-earned happy ending. The Queen herself had given Nell’s family back their pub. At least nobody had been singing as they had ridden home with the sunset lighting their path. Charles had told her there were already ballads being written about her, which was a thought that made her cringe.

‘Fuck,’ Nell whispered loudly. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck. Why am I here again? What have I done?’

She had said the word ‘fuck’ so many times in the last month alone that George had decided that it was a valuable enough word to learn how to write. She told Nell it was like ‘luck’ but with an F – whatever that meant. Roxy found it embarrassing. Amadin tried to hide his amusement, so as to not encourage her. Nell knew that if she herself had learnt how to read and write, she’d have spent her whole childhood scratching that word and others into trees and tables and the like.

George and Roxy. They were the only reasons why she hadn’t left the town full of dead legs – not yet. It was rotten of her, she knew, to be so eager to abandon the sisters she had only just rekindled a relationship with. Especially George, who had been too young to know her at all when she left – but especially Roxy, who had known her enough to miss her.

Then there was Amadin. She liked him enough, but seeing Roxy and him whispering to each other, holding each other close in quiet parts of the house – sometimes even kissing, revoltingly enough – was altogether too much for Nell. She could have gone her whole life without walking in on him holding Roxy’s face and staring adoringly into her eyes, her looking up as if he was the only person she ever wanted to look at.

Nell got to her feet, shaking the disgusting image out of her head; she brushed her hands against each other to get rid of some of the dirt on them.

It felt as if there was nothing she could do to get out of her situation, not without hurting the people she loved. It was one thing, leaving home, when their dad had still been alive – before that bastard Thomas Blancheford had killed him.

Scowling at the thought, Nell turned her head in the direction of Broadwater Hall – or where she knew it lay, anyway, for it wasn’t as if she could see it from there. The thought of that big, horrible house and what had happened there to her – to Billy – made her heart hurt.

When she had come back to Tottenham from London, the first thing she had done was go alone back to Broadwater Hall. It had been left empty after the Blancheford siblings had fled; the servants had not yet returned and whatever squabble there was over inheritance of the estate seemed to be taking place elsewhere. She was sure that some equally rotten family would end up in the house, eventually, as was always the case. But for that one night, Nell had wandered through that gloomy place, hopelessly calling for Billy. The only soul she had seen that night was in her own reflection, another Nell trapped within a mysterious broken mirror in one of the bedrooms. She had lowered herself into the seat across the narrow room from it and watched her shattered double weep with her for her friend’s fate.

For Billy never did return to her after he fought off the wicked magic that was killing Thomas. He had been the best parts of her – the strongest, the soundest, the most selfless parts. He was the one who deserved all the praise and rewards she had been given for his sacrifice. Yet nobody knew he had even existed.

Now, Nell wasn’t special at all, really. Sure, she could still beat most of the fellas around town in a fight, but not like she could with Billy – not even close. She didn’t have the strength of ten men and the speed of a cat; she could not hope to dodge a bullet, never mind catch one or bat it out of her way.

As a girl, she would have been more-than-satisfied with what skills she had picked up while travelling with Captain Jackson; she could, after all, still throw a mean punch and tackle most people to the ground. Rarely did she keep her pistol loaded after the Battle of Blenheim, nor was her sword finesse anything to boast about; but still, she could fight well enough with such weapons, if pressed. But it was an ordinary talent for fighting, at best.

If she hadn’t gotten a taste of the power she had with Billy’s magic, maybe she wouldn’t be so miserable to have lost it. But she’d still have just lost her most faithful friend; the only one she never had to worry about protecting; the only one who would never leave her, not until her last breath, or his – if he had even needed to breathe. It wasn’t like she could ask him now.

Never before had Nell struggled so much to accept death.

And never had she felt more like she was dying – but this was was from boredom.

‘I’m really going to die here,’ she groaned, kicking at the dirt. ‘Here, in fucking Tottenham.’

Sudden anger surged through her. She picked up the crate she had been sitting on, held it high over her head, and flung it as hard as she could across the garden; it tumbled through the air and landed nowhere near as far as she had hoped.

‘Fuck!’ she shouted.

Coming from the open window above her, she heard hurried footsteps. She looked up in time to see Roxy’s face appear in it. Nell watched her sister’s wide eyes scan the back garden for danger.

‘What’s going on, Nell? Are you all right?’

‘Banged my shin, that’s all,’ she said, lifting one hand from her hip and giving her a dismissive wave, then turning away from her sister. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

‘And that’s deserving of shouting that word for everyone in town to hear?’

‘Mm-hmm.’ Nell nodded earnestly, looking back up at Roxy. Very seriously, she said, ‘Absolutely. I probably should have been even louder, just to be safe, don’t ya think?’

‘Right, that’s certainly what you should have done.’ Even from down there, she could see the whites of Roxy’s eyes as she rolled them.

‘Think it’s too late?’ Nell said, then abruptly tilted her head back and took an exaggeratedly deep breath, as if readying herself to shout. But Roxy called her bluff and disappeared from the window before she could bother. Nell’s brattish smile faded once her sister left.

She stood there in the garden in which she had played as a child. Usually it had been some game where she was a soldier, nobly fighting with whatever boys she could rope into playing with her. Once she had seen firsthand the discipline and the less-than-idealistic requirements of an actual soldier, she’d found it humorous that she had as a child so badly wanted to be one.

Alone in the garden with old, childish, dead dreams, that familiar feeling of emptiness seeped almost wetly into her, as if she was standing under a raincloud of her own misery.

‘I’m going to die in bed, after all,’ she sighed.

So miserable was she at the thought, it took her a while to even notice the annoying chanting that had begun to spill through the windows of the pub, slowly getting louder. It was even worse when she recognised the tune.

‘Oh, not that bloody song again,’ she groaned. ‘George!’

She rushed inside just in time to hear a whole chorus of people singing, ‘So don’t blame Nelly, she’s brave and true!’

‘George! I told you to stop teaching people it!’ she shouted as she burst through the door. ‘No calling me Nelly!’

‘Nelly!’ cried a familiar voice.

She skidded to a halt, searching the crowd of half-drunken singers. She caught sight of a hand which waved over the heads of the other patrons. Or rather, it was the shimmering of a ring on that hand which caught her eye; it was large enough, she reckoned, that its weight would have been felt in each sway of the hand. Beneath it, she was not sure whether she’d see the white puff of a wig or dark hair, but she had a specific face in mind to match the gaudy piece.

‘Devereux?’ she called, pressing between a couple of patrons.

‘I think you mean Sir Devereux,’ he said, coming into view as he side-stepped around one of Roxy’s friends, one of the girls she used to wash clothes with; she looked him up and down, apparently with some interest. He didn’t have on his stupid toff wig; his brown hair was neatly tied back, leaving his large smile in plain view.

‘Aw, kiss my arse, Dev. I’m never calling ya that.’

Despite her words, she beamed as she made her way to him, weaving between patrons. When she came face-to-face with him, for the first time in at least a month, she hesitated. Even if she liked him enough to call him a friend, she wasn’t keen on hugging him.

Her hesitation was one-sided. Charles flung his arms around her, trapping hers at her sides. His grip wasn’t viselike or nothing, but it still made her feel a bit like a captive. She patiently waited, groaning, for him to let go, then gave his shoulder a clap, to return the friendliness in her own way.

‘Come here,’ she said, hand on his shoulder so she could guide him to one of the tables.

‘Ah-ah, just a moment.’ She frowned as he pulled out of her grip, disappearing again into the crowd; his reason for leaving became clear when he came back with a full glass. ‘Now you may do as you please with me.’

‘Just don’t start singing again and we’ll be fine.’

To Nell’s pleasure, her favourite table was empty – if only because someone had, by the looks of it, spilt beer on it. Charles made a disgusted noise when she wiped it with her sleeve. She took a seat, kicking under the table at the chair across from her – her own way of courteously pulling it out for him. He took his seat, leaning back in his chair so he could take her in.

‘Look at you!’ Nell said, speaking first; she gestured at his stupid face. ‘Is that moustache real? And the chin whiskers? I didn’t think you could grow a proper one.’

‘We aren’t all as blessed in that area as you are,’ he said with a vague gesture to Nell’s lower face. She rolled her eyes and rubbed at her chin; there was only peach fuzz, of course, but it had still given her a pause, and made her a little self-conscious as he continued to appraise her with open fondness.

‘It’s good to see you again, Nell.’

She returned the sentiment with a smile, but wasn’t willing to say it back.

‘What've you been up to, hmm?’ She tried unsuccessfully to keep from sounding too eager. ‘What’s the news in London?’

‘What’s the news in Oxford, more like.’ He raised his eyebrows expectantly at her, as though she should know what he was talking about.

‘Well?’ she sighed, playing along. ‘What’s the news in Oxford, then?’

‘Oh, just some highway robberies,’ he said, trying to sound mysterious. He drank from his glass, his eyebrows raised, awaiting her response.

‘Oh, so you’re back to that, are ya?’ she said, unimpressed, after a few seconds; a scowl had formed on her face. ‘Isambard Tulley strikes again? After everything? After you’ve been –’

‘Knighted, yes. I’m so glad you brought that up!’ He flashed his teeth. ‘But no, no. Nobody quite so dashing and lovable.’

‘Uh-huh,’ she said, reaching to take his drink from him. She used her dirty sleeve to wipe at the rim before taking a sip.

‘Such standards of cleanliness,’ he tutted, patting searchingly at his breast. From the inside of his jacket he fetched a news-sheet. He gave it a little wave before placing it between them on the table.

‘Still can’t read,’ Nell said dully, shaking her head.

‘If you bothered to look...’ He gave a meaningful glance downwards. She rolled her eyes before obliging.

On the paper between them was a two-person portrait: a pair of sharp faces – one a man’s, one a woman’s – scowled up at her. The man had been given slightly pointed teeth. The woman had been given enough frown lines to age her twenty years, at least. Both had spotted faces and overgrown eyebrows. Under both their eyes were dark circles; yet it was their eyes, of all things, that gave Nell her initial clue as to their identities; even without colour, the eerily pale blue was easy for her to envision. The man’s sneer and the shape of the woman’s lips were characteristic enough to give her more certainty. Had the portraits been shown to her separately, however, she might not have even known who they were meant to depict.

‘Them two are supposed to be the Blanchefords, are they?’ She raised her eyebrows. Charles nodded. Nell looked down at them again and found herself frowning. ‘Not aiming for accuracy, by the looks of it.’

‘Not all artists can capture a person’s likeness as well as Honthorst –’ (Nell interrupted to say she never heard of him.) ‘– or van Dyck –’ (Nell chuckled at the funny name.) ‘– or whoever it was that made you look so appropriately ratty in your – Ow!’

She had kicked him under the table.

‘Nor whoever it was that managed to capture just how much your nose looks like a dog’s cock. I mean, really, it’d be impressive if it wasn’t so unsightly.’

His delighted reaction surprised her. ‘Oh, I missed you! No, I did!’

She couldn’t help but grin back at him. Giving a humble shrug, she was about to finally admit that maybe she had missed him, just a little.

But then he ruined it.

‘You’re my kind of woman.’

For a moment, she just stared at him, waiting for him to spin it into a joke. He took too long, and the apparent sincerity made it far too awkward for Nell; she grunted in disinterest and quickly pulled the news-sheet closer to her.

‘So, what have these two shit-sacks been up to, Dev?’

‘It seems being Jacobites wasn’t exciting enough for them,’ he said, with an insincerely-sombre shake of his head. She appreciated his willingness to carry on with their previous conversation. ‘It seems they have made a hobbyhorse of – if you’ll believe it – highway robbery.’

‘I’d believe it.’ She shrugged. In fact, she would believe a lot worse from them.

‘Oh, with menaces!’ came the voice of a nearby stranger. ‘And grievous bodily harm!’

Charles jolted with a little cry, whipping around in his seat to stare at the interloper; Nell leant to look around him, fixing the man with a disgruntled stare. He gave a friendly little wave, blind to their bafflement.

‘Wicked pair, I’ve heard,’ said the man – a logger, whose name escaped Nell. ‘Old man Blancheford must be rolling in his grave, seeing what his children have become.’

Charles turned back to Nell, his expression comical. ‘Is he talking to us?’ he mouthed, which she ignored.

‘Yeah, well, their old man weren’t exactly a saint, neither,’ Nell told the man defiantly.

‘I suppose I’d believe it about the boy, rotten as he was,’ the man continued, as if he had been invited to give his opinion. ‘But Miss Sofia had always been very polite – kind, even. Why, when she was a girl, she would sit with my Anne and have conversations with her sometimes when her family came through the village. Treated her like an equal, my girl always said, and seemed interested in whatever silly things Anne liked to talk about back then.’

‘Why is he talking to us?’ Charles whispered, intentionally loud enough to be overheard by the man.

‘Listen, can’t you find another seat?’ Nell asked the logger. He got up, giving her a questioning look, so she urged him on: ‘Go on, now. Yeah, over there somewhere. Bye-bye.’ She scoffed disbelievingly and looked back at Charles. ‘I’m bloody sick of these people here. I’m not certain they think I’m a person anymore. I’m not just some spectacle who doesn’t need no privacy!’ She raised her voice enough so the logger might hear the last sentence. 

‘Sick of them, are you?’ he asked, fixing her with a cunning look. ‘Just how sick, exactly?’

Nell glanced over at Roxy, who was manning the bar; she could tell by the swinging of her long, let-down hair that she had just turned away – no doubt trying to hide that she had been watching them.

‘Sick enough to come with me on a short adventure?’ he continued. But he already knew her answer, and his smile showed it.

Nell looked down again at the ugly drawings of Thomas and Sofia. She imagined the pair scaring travellers, beating them and taking their belongings. Somehow, she doubted they would stop at taking only what they needed, like she at least tried to when she was in their position.

‘Witchcraft, too, has been attested,’ he whispered, trying to sound enticing.

‘Wilmot,’ Nell disdainfully said. ‘Typical. Of course she’s still using magic.’

‘Then wouldn’t you agree,’ he said slyly, ‘that like must be fought with like?’

Her heart sank. Billy. Without him, she could do little to fight Sofia’s magic – and even Thomas might give her trouble in a fight. But she wasn’t going to let Charles know that, and she wasn’t going to let it stop her.

‘Oxford, you said?’ She tried not to sound as interested as she was actually.

‘Those are the latest sightings, anyway. The pair seem to have stuck together.’

‘Of course they did,’ Nell said dismissively. If she had to give Sofia anything that could be taken as a compliment, it was that she was loyal to her brother. ‘She wouldn’t leave him, even when...’

In her mind’s eye, she saw Billy diving into Thomas’s wounded chest to save him from Poynton’s cursed pendant. She could recall vividly the wrenching pain as her connection to him was severed. The loneliness she felt ever since she lost him throbbed within her like a scar.

But then came a thought.

What if Billy was still with Thomas Blancheford? Would that not make sense?

What if he was trapped? What if he was held hostage? Those were chilling thoughts – ones that made her hate Blancheford even more.

If he was still with Thomas... Was there a way in which she could get Billy back?

Her heart began to race at the thought. She cast an agitated glance around the room, her eyes landing on Roxy, whose face she caught a glimpse of before it was again turned from her; so she stared at her hair instead. Her mind was racing even faster than her heart now.

‘Charles, I need to find him – them. I need –’ she muttered like a madwoman. She slapped a hand against the table; there were still a few drops of beer that she had missed, but the wetness made no impression. She looked up at Charles, eyes wide. ‘Let’s go. Let’s go right now.’

‘Right now?’ he scoffed. He was looking at her just as strangely as if she had begun to undress in the middle of the room.

She nodded emphatically. ‘Right now. It’s too important to wait.’

‘I just got here!’ he laughed. ‘No, Nelly, no! We’ll go tomorrow.’ When she opened her mouth to protest, he cut her off: ‘In the morning. I promise. Besides, don’t you need to – I don’t know – say your good-byes?’

Nell cast a guilty look at Roxy. George’s heart-broken face came clear in her mind.

‘Right,’ she said, sounding disoriented. ‘Of course. You’re right.’

‘Of course I’m right.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Her eyes were still stuck on the back of Roxy’s head. ‘Let’s just hope they take it well...’

Chapter Text

The moment Charles had strolled into the Talbot that morning, Roxy knew she’d be losing her older sister soon. It was Captain Jackson all over again: a man walking in with a swagger in his step and a better offer for Nell than anyone in Tottenham could ever hope to muster.

Nell had been aching to leave for weeks now. Even when she thought she was being subtle, she was as obvious as a dog who needed to be let outside to do the necessary.

Twice, Roxy had caught Nell sneaking out at night, and both times, she had thought that Nell would not return in the morning.

The first time, Roxy had been woken by the clunk of the wooden gate in the back garden; she had made it to the window just in time to see Nell jogging away from the Talbot, fully-clothed. To be sure it had been her sister, and not some village boy trying to see if he could get inside to steal beer, Roxy had crept into Nell’s room; it was the room their father had put her in when she had first come back to Tottenham, as she no longer had wanted to share a room with her sisters. To Roxy’s relief, most of Nell’s scarce belongings were still there, including her sword and purse, which she knew she would not have left behind. So Roxy had gone back to sleep and had tried to forget about it.

The second time was recent, no more than a week or two ago. That time, when she heard Nell’s not-so-stealthy departure through the garden, Roxy was certain she would be gone in the morning, sword and purse included. She knew deep down her suspicion was probably unwarranted, that Nell wasn’t going to desert them – but it was difficult for Roxy not to expect the worst, on account of all the times they had recently been subjected to the worst life had to offer.

Not wanting to have her suspicions confirmed, Roxy had stayed in bed, kept awake by her nerves. She had spent so long lying there, worrying about how George would take it, that she had been awake to hear Nell’s heavy breathing as she came in again through the back garden around dawn. She had sounded as if she had been running. Soon after Roxy heard the door to Nell’s room shut, her mind had finally found the relief needed to still itself, and sleep came easy.

But she had been wrong both times about Nell leaving – and somehow, being wrong those times made it easier for her now to say goodbye, because Nell was doing it properly: just the two of them, over a couple of beers.

It had been hours since the Talbot had closed early for the night. Charles had retired first, having been worn out by the journey; but he also took a good forty minutes to finally get on with it, since he kept talking to them from the stairs. George had been very reluctant to go to bed and she only complied when Nell promised her she wasn’t going to just take off at the crack of dawn; Amadin had gone upstairs with George, to make it seem less unfair. Then Roxy finally had Nell all to herself, but it still seemed like she didn’t have her full attention.

She hadn’t cried yet over Nell leaving. It was hard to feel too sad when Nell and Charles were bantering, being witty; when Amadin was doing fun impressions – and being distractingly handsome, Roxy thought, even while doing the silliest voices.

But now that she and Nell were alone, she knew it was only a matter of time before the tears came.

Roxy felt like she had squandered the last month with her wayward sister; like she had taken it for granted that she’d be staying for good this time, because of all that the family had been through together. Now all Roxy had was a single night to talk about everything she wanted to with a sister who was heading straight back into danger.

‘Nell?’

‘Hmm?’ She sounded distracted, as usual. It took her a moment for her to even look in Roxy’s general direction.

‘You still haven’t told me what you plan to do with the Blanchefords when you find them.’

‘I have some ideas,’ Nell said vaguely, still not quite looking at Roxy.

‘You’re not gonna kill them, are you?’ Roxy raised a hand to keep Nell from responding right away. ‘I know they’re rotten and that they’re hurting people, but...’

‘If they keep stealing from people, sooner or later they’re gonna get caught, and... Why, let’s face it: we know what they do with traitors and witches, never mind those unlucky bastards who are both.’

Roxy shut her eyes tightly as memories from the plague village came to her mind: of applying ointment to George’s wound, and the dreamlike haze under which she had prepared the mixture. It had all seemed very average at the time, and she hadn’t thought twice about it even as she stumbled over the words in the book she could not naturally have read.

She thought, too, about Thomas Blancheford and his suffering which she had felt from afar; a suffering so unbearable that she had taken up a rifle and prepared to march into the house, without so much as a thought about what she would do once inside.

‘I was thinking...’ Nell said, breaking her out of her thoughts. ‘Now, I know this might sound harsh, but...’

She stopped, as if waiting for Roxy’s permission to continue – something that was very strange, in most circumstances.

Nell continued in somewhat of a rush, ‘So, if Amadin wants to go to Benin to find his family, we’ll need a lot of lolly. Thomas and Sofia Blancheford – Wilmot, whatever – same bitch –’ Again, she paused for a moment. ‘If they have a ninety-pound reward on their heads, even just one of ‘em’s bounty would be more than enough to –’

‘Nell, wait!’ Roxy felt like she needed to catch her breath. ‘Have you talked to him about this?’

‘Who? Oh, you mean Amadin?’

‘Who else would I mean?’

‘Uh, right.’

‘Nell, I don’t think...’

‘As I said, I was only thinking about it...’ Nell talked over her. ‘Just a thought. Forget I said anything.’

It was hard for Roxy not to stare at her. She knew it was logical that Nell would turn in the criminals she was going after; she knew how much just the idea of finding his family meant to Amadin; she knew how much even just half of a ninety-pound bounty could do to help him. But she also knew that by turning them in, Nell might as well be lowering the noose around their necks herself.

‘Could you live with yourself?’ Roxy asked, truthfully not knowing what Nell’s answer might be.

Clearly, judging by her shrug, Nell didn’t know, either.

‘All I know is that right now, I need to find ‘em. I have some questions for ‘em.’

Roxy didn’t know what those questions could possibly be, but the entirety of the conversation was unnerving her so much that she wanted nothing more than to find a less grim topic.

‘Well, try not to get into too much trouble, Nell, or they’ll be adding new verses to your song.’

That got Roxy exactly the reaction she wanted.

‘That bloody song! I thought George must’ve been down here earlier, roiling people up, but actually, she’s just taught it to so many fucking people now that they’re doing it without her getting them started.’

Nell sounded so harassed by it all that Roxy couldn’t help but laugh at her. Nell’s quick response was to dip a finger into her glass and flick droplets of beer right at Roxy’s face.

‘Stop!’ Roxy yelped with laughter. ‘Watch it or I’ll start charging ya!’

‘And I’ll just start nicking it when you ain’t paying attention,’ Nell said in an obvious tone.

‘Yeah? How will you do that when you aren’t here?’

Although Roxy’s smile fell when she said it, Nell’s didn’t waver.

‘You’ll take care of George, won’t ya? You’ll see to it that she keeps learning to read and write – all that good stuff?’

‘She’d do it, anyway. She likes it. Besides, who else is going to read us all the letters you’re definitely going to send this time?’

Nell raised her glass, giving Roxy a solemn little nod.

‘I’m taking that as a promise, Nell,’ she said, raising her glass, too, and lightly clinking it against her sister’s.

‘Yeah, yeah. I will.’ She went to take a drink, but stopped suddenly, sticking her finger out from her grip on the glass to point warningly at Roxy. ‘If anything in the letters seem off, they’re definitely Charles’ additions.’

‘What do you think he’ll add?’

‘Lord only knows what sort of shit goes through that fella’s mind.’ She rolled her eyes and finally took that sip. ‘I just know he’ll find something.’

‘Well, I think I know you well enough to figure it out if he does.’

‘Yeah. When he does.’ Nell leant back in her chair, narrowing her eyes, no doubt thinking about what she would do to him when he inevitably did add embellishment to the letters.

Roxy shook her head fondly at her sister. Nell really did look like their mother, from what Roxy could remember; by far, out of them three, she resembled Elizabeth Trotter the most. But her expressions and mannerisms didn’t quite belong to either of their parents; she was distinctly and utterly her own person – and that was one of many things about Nell which made her entirely irreplaceable to Roxy.

‘I wish you were staying,’ Roxy said weakly. At the look Nell gave her, she quickly added, ‘I know you can’t! Really, I know. I just wish you were able to be happy here, that’s all.’

‘Aw, c’mon. At least you’ve got George.’ Nell blinked hard, as if suddenly remembering something. ‘Oh, and Amadin. I’m sure he ain’t gonna run off. He’s a good...’

Roxy saw a look come over Nell’s face: like she wanted to say something, but didn’t know how – or had to say something, but didn’t want to. She felt dread settle in her stomach.

‘Oi. Do you remember when we got those two kittens? We thought they was both girls, right?’

‘Nell...’ It came as a mortified whisper. She drew her glass towards her protectively as she leant away from her older sister. She prayed she would not finish her thought.

Unfortunately, Nell continued: ‘Well, do you remember how we found out –’

‘Nell!’ pleaded the younger sibling.

‘– was ‘cause out of nowhere – just a couple months later, at most, I’d say – one just kept mounting the other, like she were some kinda fucking pony –’

‘Nelly!’ Roxy’s half-shout was mostly swallowed by the wood of the empty room, but she still worried it might have carried upstairs and disturbed George.

‘Oi,’ Nell said, playfully warning her with a grin and a shake of her head. ‘Don’t call me that.’

‘Stop! Just stop!’ Roxy begged, heart in her throat. ‘I’m begging you! Don’t talk about kittens! Don’t talk about – that.’

But Nell wasn’t listening.

‘Bloody disgusting,’ she whispered, chuckling softly into her glass. Then she hummed, as if she just remembered where she was going with her awful story: ‘Mm-hmm, yeah, so – y’know, don’t do that! You might end up being with child, and you might die from such a condition.’

Nell began to nod very seriously, her eyes wide. ‘Oh yeah, that happens all the time! Loads of ‘em army wives dropping like flies, back when we was all marching south. We must’ve lost at least half our women from it.’

Roxy narrowed her eyes at her sister’s far-fetched statement.

‘Honest!’ Nell said, scoffing.

‘Now you’re just lying to try to scare me.’

She watched Nell take a long drink from her glass. 

‘Look... Me and George are way too young to be aunts, and you... Y’know?’ Nell clearly didn’t want to finish saying it, and Roxy wasn’t keen on letting her.

‘He and I only kiss,’ Roxy whispered, looking down into her glass to try to hide her red cheeks.

Nell swallowed her mouthful of beer in a hurry, frantically tapping her hand against the table to get her attention.

‘No, no, no – That’s how it goes! That’s bad as is, but then... See, first it’s kissing, then it’s – well, stuff – and, out of nowhere, within the year, you’ve got a nipper of your own stuck on your chest like a leech.’

‘Stuff,’ Roxy echoed, sounding unimpressed. ‘Yes, well, like I said, we’ve only kissed.’

‘That’s what I’m telling you!’ Nell sighed desperately. ‘A man and a woman will be kissing one minute, and the next, a baby’s coming! Just like that,’ she said, snapping her fingers.

Nell’s nonsense made Roxy feel drunk, which she knew she wasn’t; but she had a feeling that a sober Nell would be just as incoherent and wrong about the subject at hand as the drunk version sitting next to her.

‘Do you even know what you’re talking about, Nell?’

Her older sister closed her mouth and gave her a funny look.

‘Sure, I do,’ she said in perhaps the least convincing tone Roxy had heard in her entire life.

‘No, you don’t.’ Roxy sounded as puzzled as she felt. ‘How do you not know –?’

‘I’m getting another beer,’ Nell said, hurriedly standing up.

‘You’re already drunk!’

‘Not even close,’ Nell said confidently, all while knocking into her chair. ‘Fuck.’

Ducking her face to her hands, Roxy rubbed at her heated cheeks. She heard her sister hop the bar, rather than walking just a little further to get behind it properly.

‘You were my age, Nell, when you went off and married Captain Jackson.’

Still with her head down, she listened to liquid being spilt into a glass. When Nell didn’t say anything, Roxy lifted her face from her hands to watch her. Nell was looking in the direction of the door she had walked out of four years earlier.

‘Pfft! Completely different circumstances, that was,’ Nell said, shaking her head and laughing – almost like she believed the truth of her own words.

‘How was it different?’ Roxy asked, beginning to lose her patience. She didn’t want to have this talk, as she didn’t feel she even needed it, especially from someone who clearly knew even less than Roxy’s much younger friends; but she wasn’t going to let Nell end it thinking she had won.

Her sister was looking down into her glass as she swung it in a gentle circle, making the liquid inside whirl. Nell met Roxy’s gaze after a moment and the two young women frowned at each other.

‘I mean, I know you didn’t love him when you left.’ Roxy shrugged. ‘I guess I figured you might have come to love him eventually.’ When her sister’s frown turned into a barely-suppressed smile, Roxy continued, ‘You got on well with him immediately, so I thought at first you really must have liked him.’

‘Liked him,’ Nell echoed Roxy’s words teasingly.

Roxy screwed up her face in annoyance. She seized the rag she had draped over her lap and flung it at Nell. It sailed through the air, way off-course, and landed nowhere near her sister’s stupid face.

‘That was embarrassing,’ Nell said, gesturing with her raised glass to where the rag fell.

‘You did, though! You liked him. Didn’t you?’

‘Huh? Oh, yeah, we got along well enough, when he wasn’t being a cocky arse to everyone.’

Already, Nell was pouring herself another glassful of beer; a little spilt on her hand, which she raised to her mouth to lick off like an animal. Then she sighed and set her glass down so she could hop the bar again without spilling it all over the place. Once on the other side, she scooped up her glass again and came back to the table Roxy was seated at. She pulled her chair out further, facing it sideways and perching herself unconventionally on it; she had a knee up, resting against the table’s edge, while her other leg stretched out in a way that would trip Roxy if she were to stand. Roxy wondered if she was intentionally blocking her in, or if Nell really just somehow never learned how to sit properly.

‘He could be like that sometimes,’ Nell said offhandedly. It took Roxy a second to remember she was talking about her husband. ‘Unlike a real toff, though, he didn’t get all high-and-mighty when me and our friends told him to shove his attitude up his arse.’

Had their father been there, he would have told Nell off at least seven times by now for her coarse language. It had been around a month since Roxy had officially given up on trying to keep Nell from swearing like a soldier.

‘But you never loved him?’

Nell threw her head back with a groan. She blew out a breath and fixed her eyes on Roxy’s face.

‘All right, Roxy,’ said in a way that did not bode well. ‘You really want to know about marriage?’

‘I don’t know that I do, now...’

‘Too bad! You’ve got me started!’ Nell’s attempt at a wicked smile, however, looked a little strained.

Roxy gripped at the edge of the table, bracing herself for the worst.

‘I married him because I wanted more out of life than Tottenham could give. I’d probably have taken up any traveller on the offer, if it meant I’d get out of here.’ Nell shook her head and smiled almost wistfully, taking another sip. ‘But a captain? Now, those don’t come through here every day, do they?’

Nell reached over and set her glass down on the table, then drew her knee in closer, hugging it to her chest. Roxy could tell by her expression then that Nell wasn’t seeing her as she was now, sixteen years old, but as the eleven-year-old girl she had left behind.

‘Remember how long he was here for? No? Not long. He had less than a week to convince me to marry him, and he made it clear to me that he wouldn’t take me otherwise.’

Tears had begun to bud in Roxy’s eyes. She tried to ignore them.

‘He had already gotten me to agree to marry him by the end of the third day. Then we was married on the fourth, and... that night I came back as Nell Jackson instead of Nell Trotter,’ she said, her smile growing unhappy, ‘and broke Pa’s heart.’

‘And mine,’ Roxy mumbled. She pressed a hand against her eye when a tear threatened to spill over. She knew Nell would be able to tell she was crying just by the way her voice shook, but she still felt like she needed to hide it.

‘Yeah,’ Nell sighed. Then she made a visible effort to perk up. ‘But you have to hand it to him: the man was efficient, getting in and out of town in half the time he needed to – and with a marriage! Very respectable.’ There was genuine admiration in her tone.

‘Where did you even spend your wedding night?’ asked Roxy, her heart still aching.

‘Ah,’ Nell uttered, suddenly with a queer look on her face. ‘I mean, we... found a place near Hackney. Quiet place. Not many rooms left, on account of all the soldiers in the area.’

‘And that’s where you two...’

‘Where we rested up,’ Nell said slowly, ‘so that we could march in the morning, bright and early.’

It was difficult for Roxy to judge whether Nell was being oblivious on purpose or not.

‘When people marry, don’t they sleep... together, in the same bed?’ Roxy said, trying to be as obvious as she could be.

‘Not everyone.’

‘Well, I heard they do.’ Roxy tried to lead her, but Nell was making it very difficult.

‘Well, shows what you know,’ Nell teased. ‘You ain’t the one who was married for three years.’

‘A couple sleeps together after they’re married, Nell.’

‘Huh?’ She frowned, shook her head. ‘Uh-uh. That doesn’t sound right.’

‘They sleep with each other.’

‘Fuck,’ Nell said, sounding defeated. ‘“Sleep with”! Where did you learn such language?’

‘Do you even know what fuck means?’ Roxy blurted out.

‘Roxy!’ cried Nell, a thrilled smile overtaking her face. ‘So vulgar! You watch your bloody language, now.’

As her older sister laughed at her, Roxy sunk deeper into her chair and seethed. She thought then that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, Nell leaving for a little while.

‘So, you never slept with him,’ Roxy stated. It still wasn’t something she really needed to know, but she wanted Nell to stop laughing at her.

It worked. Nell shook her head, her smile disappearing.

‘Oh. No.’

‘Did you even kiss?’

Nell gave a halfhearted groan. At Roxy’s pressing look, she rolled her eyes and drew in a deep breath.

‘He wanted a kiss when we was at the chapel, so I let him have one.’ She took another drink, frowning over the rim of the glass. ‘It was not very nice. So many whiskers.’

‘Did he get better?’ Roxy couldn’t keep her judgement out of her tone.

‘At kissing?’ Nell’s puzzled, mildly-repulsed expression made Roxy laugh. ‘No, I doubt it.’

‘Oh, so he didn’t want to kiss you again afterwards.’

‘Oi!’ Nell grinned. ‘He’d ask me sometimes if I wanted to come to his bed for –’ She blinked, looking almost embarrassed. ‘But I’m sure he knew I’d never agree to it. I’m sure that he was just saying it to be a prick.’

‘But I heard from my friends –’

‘Oh, God, what did you hear from your friends?’ she groaned.

‘I heard...’ Roxy started, readying herself to talk over her sister if she kept blathering. But Nell let her speak. ‘I heard that when people marry, they’re supposed to...’

Nell was nodding, urging her to go on.

‘That they must consummate the marriage.’

‘Oh.’

Roxy waited, pained, as the seconds dragged on.

‘Otherwise the marriage isn’t valid,’ she continued.

Nell sucked at her teeth and stared off towards the wall. She seemed in no hurry to respond, if she was even still paying attention.

‘You did that?’ Roxy said disbelievingly.

She wondered if she had to repeat herself now that her sister’s eyes had focused again on her.

‘Hmm?’

‘Nell?’

‘Look...’ Nell said, sounding like she was being inconvenienced. ‘There are loads of things people want from you – expect from you – whatever! – when you’re, y’know, a wife.’

Once again, Roxy was struck by the impression that she was talking to a widow who somehow had no idea what she was talking about.

‘And sometimes, you just... don’t do those things,’ Nell said with a little nod, looking mighty pleased with her terrible explanation.

‘Nancy said that people will wait outside the bedroom to listen, to make sure you’ve done it,’ Roxy blurted out. She covered her mouth after she finished.

For a moment, Nell stared at her in surprise. Then she began to laugh.

‘No, no!’ Nell grinned widely, looking relieved. ‘That’s the beauty of it all! See, we’re people who nobody cares enough about to... check? – watch? – listen? – whatever. Nobody cares! I mean, you can go your whole marriage without doing it once!’ She reached out to squeeze Roxy’s arm. ‘So it’s all good, Roxy! In fact, that’s what you and Amadin will do if you get married, yeah? No Aunty Nell and no Aunty George.’

Roxy looked upon her widow sister in disbelief.

‘Were you even actually married, Nell?’

Her sister defiantly held up her hand, pointing at the ring on her finger.

‘Why do you still wear that if you didn’t actually love him?’ Roxy asked, rolling her eyes.

‘It’s gold,’ Nell said with a scoff. ‘It’s a gold ring that my good friend gave to me.’

She tugged at it, wiggling it back and forth around her finger, and then finally got it off; she set it in the palm of her other hand and lowered it so they could both take a look. It was plain, but still shone dully in the dim lighting of the pub.

‘And now he’s dead.’ Nell shrugged, looking not all that more upset than she would be if she had just dropped something and was feeling too lazy to pick it back up.

Any illusions Roxy had as to her sister just having a funny way of showing her love for her husband had finally been shattered – and that realisation made Roxy smile.

Truthfully, she had never really expected Nell to marry. Something about the idea of it seemed queer, for she’d never had a sweetheart or anything close to one. Even Roxy had held hands with a boy and fancied herself in love with him, when she was ten or so – up until Nell threw him over her shoulder and carried him screaming halfway out of town. She had only put him down once he said he’d leave her sister alone. Even at the time, Roxy thought it was too funny a sight to be mad at her for it.

If anything, she always thought it seemed like a sad fate for Nell: stuck married to someone she only wanted for a ride out of Tottenham, dying alongside him at the Battle of Blenheim.

‘Nell?’

Her sister had a faint smile on her face when she looked up from her gold ring.

‘Roxy?’

‘There’s never been anyone?’

Her fingers closed over the ring; she took her hand back. As she put it back on her finger, she shook her head and gave a forced little laugh.

Nell stared down at the gold band as she asked quietly, ‘Why does everyone always act like there has to be?’ Her smile was fragile.

When Roxy stood, Nell tilted her head up at her. She seemed almost wary, as if she thought Roxy was about to challenge her on it. Instead, when her little sister’s arms settled around her, she relaxed and allowed herself to be hugged.

‘You’re plenty on your own,’ Roxy murmured, resting her chin on her sister’s head. She felt Nell swallow, then felt her arms come up around her to return the hug. ‘Besides, you’ve got terrible taste in friends, sometimes –’

‘I’ll be telling Dev you said that in the morning!’

‘– and you’d be no better at picking out a sweetheart.’

‘Your friend that told you all that shite, Nancy – isn’t she the one who sometimes pissed herself when she was scared?’

Roxy grabbed at the sides of her sister’s head, giving it a little shake. Her sister’s tawny hair, which was let down for the night, became messy – messier still when Roxy pulled away and Nell herself gave it a great shake, as if trying to get rid of whatever grime Roxy’s hands might have left behind. The two girls were both laughing by the time Roxy settled back in her seat.

‘I love you, Nelly. I’ll miss you.’

She waited for her sister to tell her not to call her Nelly, but she only looked at Roxy with fondness.

‘You ain’t so bad,’ she finally said, looking off to the side and smiling fully.

‘Nelly.’

‘Fine!’ She turned back to Roxy, meeting her eyes. ‘Love ya, too, Roxane.’

 The face Roxy unconsciously pulled had Nell laughing yet again.

It wasn’t long afterwards that they both started yawning, making conversation increasingly difficult. With reluctance, they got up and cleaned up after themselves, blew out the lights, and made their way upstairs, knowing that in the morning, it would be time to say their final good-byes.

The bridge from the front door of the Talbot to the road felt like the last stretch between Nell and freedom – and it took everything in her willpower not to run across it. Instead, she walked slowly with George at her side, hands clasped, and with Roxy and Amadin behind her.

When she reached the end, where the horses and Charles were waiting, she looked back at her family and found that she wasn’t sure what to say to them. Perhaps an apology was in order, but a simple ‘I’m sorry’ didn’t seem like it would cut it, and she didn’t know what else she could say that would make her leaving them any better.

‘Well, I guess...’

‘I’ll be watching, Nell,’ Roxy said abruptly, immediately looking puzzled by her own words. It was a little ominous, but when Nell looked down at George, she saw a reflection of her own bemused expression on the little face.

‘Very well,’ Nell laughed. ‘I’ll be on my best behaviour, then. Maybe I’ll try to curse a little less, if you’re listening.’ Roxy looked troubled, like she was not fully listening to Nell. ‘Oi. What’re you on about, Roxy?’

Roxy shook her head. Even Amadin didn’t try to hide his confusion, but he put an arm around her shoulders and gave her a little squeeze. Nell rolled her eyes at the sight.

‘Right. I’m getting out of here before you two start making eyes at each other.’

‘You can sit behind me on my horse, Nell – turned backwards to watch them as we leave.’

‘You know what, Charles? Thank you, you just gave me something even worse to imagine.’

Nell mounted her horse; it felt strange after not doing it in so long. ‘So, thanks again for that, you arse.’

‘I’m always happy to help.’

‘Oi, nipper,’ she said, catching George’s attention. Her spectacles reflected the sunlight, causing Nell to squint down at her. ‘Don’t you even think about getting any taller. It’s bad enough Roxy grew up taller than me. If you do it, too, I’ll have to take drastic measures.’ Nell patted at the hilt of her sword, giving George a playfully stern look. ‘Got it?’

George let out a giggle. Nell found it to be far too giddy for someone whose legs were being threatened.

‘Nell!’ Roxy’s laugh ruined her attempt at chiding.

Then Amadin, with a rather solemn expression, stepped forward from Roxy’s side; he came all the way to the flank of Nell’s horse, and he couldn’t seem to help but give its white coat a pet. When he tilted his face up at Nell, his brown eyes were sad and seeking.

‘I don’t know what you plan to do with the two of them,’ he began. His voice was low enough that only she would be able to hear him. ‘And I don’t know that I want to, really. I know they’ve brought this upon themselves, what with trying to kill the Queen, but...’ Nell felt the horse lean into his touch as he moved his hand from its flank to its neck. ‘She was my friend, once – probably even my best friend. Thomas, he was always a bully, but Sofia was...’

‘Sometimes people change, Amadin.’ Nell looked up at the sky, feeling uncomfortable – feeling like he wanted her to make a promise she didn’t know if she could keep. ‘Sofia’s not just stealing from people like we did – she’s using magic and –’ Unfortunately, Nell realised her own hypocrisy, and couldn’t finish her sentence.

‘I suppose you’re right.’ He had a defeated look on his face. She gave him a slightly-apologetic look.

‘Take care, Amadin – of yourself, but also these two,’ she said, nodding towards her sisters. Nell wanted to tell him to keep his hands to himself, but it seemed harsh for her to leave Roxy all pouty.

She faced straight ahead, getting a better grasp on the reins.

‘We’re taking the good road, right?’ suddenly came a queer, high voice. Nell frowned down at the top of her horse’s head. ‘And not the one with all the bumps?’

‘What the –’ Charles started.

‘Amadin!’ Nell exclaimed.

He laughed, stepping away from the horse and clapping, seeming proud to have fooled them, even just temporarily.

‘You’re a strange man,’ Nell commented, frowning slightly. ‘I won’t miss hearing random objects talking to me.’

‘Don’t speak so soon,’ Charles butted in. He gave her a thorough look of appraisal, the corners of his lips twitching. ‘Madness might be just around the corner for a woman of your years.’

Judging by her laugh, George was absolutely delighted by Nell’s two-finger response to him.

‘And with that,’ Nell said, pushing her hat further upon her head, ‘I’m off to hopefully make the world a better, fairer place.’

‘Good luck with that!’ George said, seeming cheerier than any of the others Nell was leaving behind.

Nell quickly glanced at them one last time before spurring her horse onwards, to get her the hell out of Tottenham – before another wave of guilt could hit her.

Chapter Text

Sixty-five days.

It had been a little over two months since Robert Hennessey, the Earl of Poynton, was killed during the Queen’s rescue at Broadwater Hall in Tottenham.

For two months, the nation publicly celebrated Nell Jackson as a heroine; a longer length of time, now, than the woman had suffered as a dreaded monster and enemy of the London area.

Privately, not all looked upon Jackson with such admiration.

The last sixty-five days had been miserable; hardly the mild summer weather Jackson had enjoyed while she travelled with her merry band of misfits. In that last week of September, the unspent heat of the summer seemed to accumulate and punish everyone stuck outside; even through the grim layer of clouds, the heat of the sun beat mercilessly down upon England’s south, most days, leaving gardens and forests alike weak with thirst. When it did rain – which was, of course, still often – it drenched every living thing in an inescapable humidity; then, as predictable as the blackening of the sky each night, a sickness-inducing chill would settle upon the land. Then, starting in October, that same chill had begun to expand, claiming even the daylight hours; the rain came breathtakingly cold and sometimes had ice mixed within.

It was one of those cold nights following one of those rainy days when Thomas Blancheford and Sofia Wilmot came to the distressing realisation that they were out of food – again.

‘You shall have the last of the bread,’ Sofia said in a tone that she hoped would leave no room for argument, just loud enough for her brother to hear her over the drizzle seeping through the forest canopy. Her filthy garment had become much looser after two months on the run, giving the rain an easy path as it dripped between the greasy strands of her disorderly hair, under the neck of her dress, and down her spine, causing her to shudder every now and then.

‘What, and crack my teeth? It went stale a week ago,’ her brother said through chattering teeth. She was tempted to point out that they had not had the bread for more than a few days, but it seemed unnecessarily pedantic, considering his condition. He was never in a good mood when it came time to change his bandaging.

Warily, he watched her unpack their meager medical supplies. Even before her hands came near him, his face twisted in pain. His palpable misery hurt her heart and made her hands move with even more gentleness than she already employed whenever tending to his wounds.

Not that he was ever truly happy now – nor had he been, ever since he killed their father. It was only when they had stolen spirits to drink that he was anything besides morose. Sofia did not like spirits much, as they made her feel stupid – something she hated feeling or being seen as. The numbing effect they offered was not worth it to her. Even worse, she disliked the version of Thomas he became when he drank.

‘Soak it to soften it,’ she hissed. ‘Obviously. Surely, you know this by now.’

She looked up at her brother’s pale face, which still plainly expressed the immense pain he was in. While she had insisted to him for the better part of two weeks now that he did not have wound-rot, the realist in her knew she was lying to him, but the loving sister in her was too afraid to voice the truth.

‘Do you know if the water is boiling yet?’ she asked as she stood up. She went to wipe her bloody fingers on her dress, but stopped – even in its wretched state, she did not want to befoul it further.

‘No,’ he softly said, even though he did not check. Instead, making a faint noise of discomfort, he reached around himself to finger the bandaging she had just finished tying around his abdomen. She reached down and pulled his hand away to stop him.

‘Don’t.’

He sighed through his nose, his face pulled into a grimace. She thought she saw, in the fire’s glow, his eyes watering with pain. Gingerly, he lowered himself until he was reclining upon the blanket; like most nights, they had it stretched out upon the uneven ground to serve as the closest thing they had to a bed.

Sofia sat down near him, her back in front of his knees.

He wasn’t being too grumpy that night – a fact which only made her nervous.

‘I wish we still had the boar meat.’ He had said the same thing every night for over a week, ever since the carcass had begun to rot. He had still said it even after they had both gotten sick from eating it.

‘We would probably be dead if we were still eating it.’ Sofia rolled her eyes.

‘Maybe we should try to kill another.’ It was another suggestion he had made repeatedly.

Sofia turned to fix him with a stern look; he only stared at the flickering golden-hued stretch of ground that lay between their blanket and the stones they had laid in a circle to contain their small fire.

‘You were gored by the last one.’

‘And now,’ he said heatedly, ‘I know what not to do!’

‘And now you’re injured and could be –’ She stopped herself short of putting words to his possible fate. More gently, she told him, ‘Thomas, I don’t have it in me to help you kill a boar.’

Thomas laughed a little, to which she raised an eyebrow at him.

‘I’m not sure I’d want your help, after the way you butchered the last one.’

It had been Thomas who had started butchering the carcass after they had killed the creature; he insisted he do it despite the fresh injuries to his arm and abdomen, which had been its parting gifts. As revenge, after it was dead, he had tried to snap off one of those red-tinged tusks from its lifeless face – but it was too difficult with only one good arm. When he had finally given up on defacing the corpse, he had taken up their only knife – hardly the ideal tool for the task at hand – and then stared down at the hairy belly of the beast, trying to decide where to begin cutting.

Neither of the siblings had ever needed to prepare their own food, never mind butcher an animal. Perhaps they should have aimed for lesser prey once their supply of stolen food had been used up; but it was a boar they had crossed paths with, and a boar that Thomas had slain with a lucky shot of his equally-stolen pistol.

Butchering proved to be a far more difficult task than either of them had been equipped to handle, which led to them arguing. Sofia would tell him where he should cut and he’d snap at her, telling her not to distract him. Hunger had made their tempers fierce.

Next thing they knew, the boar’s belly had burst open from the inside. The creature’s insides gushed from it in a great arc: blood, fat, sinew, offal, and – as they discovered later, amongst the leaf litter – two of its ribs were cast in a horrible spray all over Thomas and everything else that had been in his direction, including their supplies; but it had not hit Sofia, for she had been stationed on the beast’s other side. The crouching pair had frozen in shock. It was the look of terror on her Thomas’s blood-saturated face which made Sofia remember the danger of her magic – something which had, at some point in their survival, grown volatile and unpredictable and ceased to be caged by Latin incantations.

What boar meat had remained intact they had made last as long as they could. It had been difficult for Sofia to be near Thomas, never mind eat with him, because of how badly his clothes reeked; and the only replacements he had were equally ruined, also having fallen victim to the gory deluge. Sofia wanted to say that it was purely coincidence that it had only come from the beast's stomach, which kept her from being hit, but she knew, in reality, that her accidental burst of magic had been targeted at him, because of their arguing.

‘Thomas, I’m...’

‘There was a certain style to it,’ he said with a weak grin. ‘I looked fearsome.’

‘You looked vile.’

‘Yes, but it was effective, Sofia!’ He groaned from raising his voice; he continued in a murmur which was hard to hear through the drizzle: ‘They were quick to line up after they saw me.’

She reached out to touch the yellowish bruise on his cheek, the one the carriage driver had given him. He shied away, turning his face.

‘Yes, Thomas,’ she drily said. ‘They were all very compliant.’

‘Old bastard,’ he muttered. Then he turned his glassy eyes upon her. His expression was something between admiration and unease. ‘You put him in his place.’

For just a second, the corners of Sofia’s lips pulled up slightly; she couldn’t help but take some pleasure in the power she had been able to draw in that moment when her brother needed protection.

‘I won’t be able to do that again,’ she whispered. Frustration began to simmer within her.

It was not for a lack of want.

Sofia's magic was waning. At first, she thought it was due to having no books to study, to use to refresh her memory of spells, so she had taken to practising what she could remember. Eventually, she realised with dread that her impotence was due to the very same lack of energy that had made her slow and weak; an effect of sixty-five days with limited food, constantly being on the move, and poor sleep – for how could anyone feel rested when they hadn’t retired to an actual bed in two months?

It made her sick to think of herself as broken, like some once-spirited horse, but it was a thought that plagued her incessantly. In her life, she had endured years of unhappiness without complaint; without weeping or allowing herself self-pity; without showing weakness to anyone – and in two months, that fount of willpower – once brimming and seemingly endless in those naïve days of childhood – had finally run dry.

If Poynton hadn’t given her a taste of what life was like with personal agency, perhaps she would have been less bitter over her fate. The experience of being valued for her intellect and competence was intoxicating, much like the magic. The power she finally had held – that of a kind which was normally only given to men – was nothing like the limited functions and qualities her sex was afforded, and it had made her feel alive for the first time in many years.

She had not felt such security since she had outgrown the confining safety of girlhood, when she had been dragged kicking and screaming into the future that awaited her as a woman. In the glaring clarity of her inescapable fate, she had finally noticed the framework that had been built around her while she spent her childhood playing and believing herself to be wise beyond her years. That dreadful illumination had come far too late – the new life closing in around her, sealing her within those social standards as solidly as brickwork, would be her lifelong coffin. At times, because some aspects of her personality already aligned with those expected of all proper women, Sofia would find herself disliking some parts of herself: her innate quietness and thoughtfulness, her responsible nature. But she did not want to – would not – deny who she was in a vain attempt to reject growing up.

Be pleasing to the eye. Be modest. You must not interrupt when men are speaking.

Typical instructions she had been taught long before she could understand the inequality inherent in them.

‘I know that women are, at times, put in situations that seem very unfair. Such is the duty of your sex, I’m afraid; just as we men have our own great burdens.’

Her father had once told her that in a moment when she had sought comfort. It had made her feel immeasurably worse, but had also made her realise that, no matter her feelings, she was fighting an inevitability; the jaws of a lion were closing in around her head and her arms were too weak to maintain her grip on its slimy teeth – and it would be in her best interest if she could only find the will to shut her eyes, accept her fate, and brace herself for the snap of its jaws. Maybe then the pain would be made more bearable by the illusion of choice.

It had been a conversation about her looming marriage, naturally, during which her father had shared that wisdom.

Now, after two months of clawing for survival, she wondered if she would willingly endure another three years of being married if it meant she and Thomas had a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs.

Sofia tried to keep her shaky, despondent sigh quiet enough so her brother would not hear. Her eyes stung and her throat ached from the fire’s smoke.

‘Thomas, we need to find you a surgeon. Before this gets worse.’ She turned to face him, tears sliding down her cheeks and melting the icy raindrops. ‘Before this kills you.’

His expression was unfathomable. Through his new shirt – already dirty – she could see his chest rising and falling in shallow, pained breaths. She turned away from her slowly-dying brother in anguish, eagerly accepting the rage that surfaced inside her as a replacement.

‘Damn Jackson,’ she growled. ‘Damn her to Hell.’

The fire flared unnaturally bright for just a moment, then faded to its former weak glow; it was hardly enough to boil the water they had put on, and a few seconds of the intense blaze would not change that.

‘Sofia, don’t,’ Thomas warned.

‘It was so noble of her, letting us go free like this –’ Sofia gathered a handful of her once-beautiful skirt, lifting it just enough to show the ragged hem, then threw it back down. ‘– to live like hunted animals.’

Just as she had grown impatient with Thomas’s whining about food, he had grown weary of her rants about Nell Jackson. Nevertheless, she was fired up, so she continued:

‘And now, winter is nearly upon us, and we shall freeze.’

He said nothing; his mood was one of sulking rather than anger, it seemed. Sofia reached past the edge of the blanket and picked up a little stick, which she began to break into pieces. They sat there, waiting for the water to boil; Thomas fidgeted with his bandages with a grimace on his face; Sofia used her already-dirty nails to pick the fine layer of bark off the pieces of stick, her expression that of a scowl.

‘Sofia?’

‘What?’ she snapped. Then, feeling guilty, she more gently repeated, ‘What?’

‘I dare you to try some of the horse feed.’

The worst part was that Sofia was so hungry, she almost considered it. They had nothing else. It had been a miracle that they had even found a pot with which to cook what little food they had obtained – through theft, like nearly everything else.

Sofia had little compassion now for their victims, but at first, it had made her feel very guilty; after all, they themselves had been robbed within a week of their departure from Broadwater Hall. The irony of fate had been cruel.

In one fell swoop, they had lost nearly everything they had, besides only the clothes on their backs. Their horses, jewellery, supplies, garments to change into – all had been taken by a band of highwaymen.

But the worst of the losses, in Sofia’s opinion, had been the documents, letters, and books which she had gathered in a hurry: Poynton’s belongings which he had taken to Broadwater Hall. Incriminating, yet useful letters; formal agreements with his signature and those of other Jacobites; and – what she desired above all else – his books on the occult.

In the rush that followed Jackson’s merciful sparing of their lives, Sofia had taken whatever she could from Broadwater that she hoped would be useful in getting the support of Jacobites whom she and Thomas had known, particularly ones who would see Poynton’s death as an opportunity for their own advancement within the future king’s court. She had thought that, whether through coercion or by proving their continued loyalty to the cause, Poynton’s papers would have been their greatest assets.

They had come out of the robbery stripped of nearly everything. Sofia knew she should have felt grateful that the highwaymen did not take the clothes off their backs, but she was far too bitter over their sustained losses. But it was by their one mercy – that of leaving a lady clothed – that she and Thomas had kept their one tool, the one which aided them when they chose to resort to highway banditry themselves: for nobody had looked up her skirt, and thus, nobody had found the pistol she had quickly stowed within her stocking. Luckily, one pistol had been all they needed to rob a group of travellers themselves – and one pistol had eventually led them to acquiring a second, so they could each wield one.

But Sofia no longer had it in her to be grateful for what little they had; not when they could have kept everything, had Nell Jackson only listened to her. She and Thomas should have been in their home these last sixty-five days. Sofia should have been reading in her room that night, not in the woods watching a fire struggle against the oppressive dampness.

All her losses had plagued her for the better part of two months, consuming any quiet moments when she was not actively planning their next move. The likelihood of the blasted highwaymen even being able to read proficiently seemed slim; there was every chance that they had no idea the value of what they had taken – especially the books. The thought of them being burnt for warmth or else sold to someone unable to use them ate away at Sofia’s thoughts.

She put the blame on Nell Jackson just as much as the fools who had taken from them.

‘I will not forget this.’

She thought often of that promise she had made to Jackson. At the time, there was some gratitude in the statement; now, any gratitude she felt toward Jackson for not turning them in had since burnt away, leaving only a grudge.

One day, Sofia would make her feelings known to Nell Jackson. Until then, their survival was Sofia’s focus.

‘In the morning, let’s move closer to that town. We’ll catch the first person we see.’ Sofia nodded in determination as she spoke, but Thomas had turned his face away from her.

‘I will not let you die. You’re my responsibility. And... Thomas...’ Her voice broke as she turned teary eyes upon her wounded brother: ‘You’re all I have left.’

She spotted him once again fidgeting with his bandages; she again grabbed his hand and dumped it on the blanket, far away from his wound. He plucked at a loose string there, instead.

Sofia stood and checked the water, which was finally ready. She found the near-empty bag they were keeping their food inside and reached into it, fishing out the rock-hard piece of bread. She and Thomas had learnt by that point that it was wise to give any food they had a thorough brushing with a clean cloth or at least their hands, lest they find out the hard way that ants had gotten at it. She dipped one side of it carefully into the hot water, holding it there.

‘I will fix this.’ Sofia’s voice was thick. ‘I’ll get back what was taken from us – everything.’

‘We don’t even know where they went with our stuff.’

‘Our house, our land,’ Sofia continued. She held out the soggy bread for her brother to take. ‘I will find the books and papers, and I will get us back our dignity and our good family name.’

Thomas shook his head at his sister’s words, clearly at a loss. He sighed and finally bit into the meal. Her stomach ached with hunger at the sight.

‘I promise,’ she said too softly for him to hear.

The drizzle waned as the night went on, leaving the crickets and nightbirds to fill the silence that fell between the forsaken siblings.

Chapter Text

The chirping of birds. The distant gallop of a horse. A sharp intake of breath right by Thomas’s ear.

His sister’s face hovered close to him; she was always near and at the ready to catch him if, in his weakness, he stumbled – regardless of her own exhaustion.

The two of them could only hope that the horse was heading in their direction.

Thomas turned to face Sofia. She was paler than ever, except for her nose, which she had just been rubbing for warmth. Between her uncharacteristically wild, knotted hair peeking out from under the hood of her cloak and her reddened nose, it was only her pensive, sad-eyed expression which kept her recognisable as his sister.

‘That sounds like a single horse. Please, please let them be coming this way,’ she said, her eyes shut as if she was praying. Her voice was shaky from chattering teeth and gravelly from hours of waiting in silence by the roadside. Whenever Thomas had begun to doze, she would shake him awake. Judging by her shaky gasps of relief each time his eyes reopened, she was not punishing him for falling asleep, but rather, she was fearfully checking if he had silently passed away from his infection.

Part of him wondered why Sofia even bothered. Part of him thought that perhaps she needed the challenge to distract herself from her own misery. Without the burden of him, she would not have been half as conspicuous; she could have hidden her identity, found somewhere better to hide than forests.

His sense of self-preservation had begun to dwindle nearly a week ago. Regardless of all her efforts to keep him alive, he was no more useful than dead-weight; soon that would not be hyperbole. Yet here she was by his side, jaw quivering from the cold, with her face lifted anxiously to better listen for the approaching horse.

As the pounding of hooves drew nearer, the terrifying hunger in her eyes grew.

‘Up,’ she commanded, rising to her feet and yanking him with her, too hurried to be gentle. ‘If he rides right past us, we’re as good as dead.’

He was half-dragged by her into the middle of the dirt road – where the rider would have to either stop or else risk running them down.

‘And for the love of God, Thomas, let me do the talking.’

Thomas had not been convinced that they would get more attention as a pair than if she appeared to be a lone woman lost in the outskirts of the forest, but he was grateful for the body heat.

Brightness caught his eye. Shiny metal caught the morning light as she adjusted her grip on her pistol, exposing it temporarily from under her cloak. It was concealed long before the rider came into view.

They had been correct: one horse, no carriage. Not a great many supplies, then. At the sight of the lone rider, Sofia made to greet him; judging by the way she nearly lunged towards the stranger, Thomas knew that she did not care how meager the gains would be.

‘Good morning!’ she called, loud enough to be heard over the horse’s hooves; its rider had already slowed it to a trot at the sight of them.

‘And to you,’ the man replied, touching his hand to the brim of his hat. His voice was muffled by the handkerchief he wore around his lower face. ‘A little cold for a walk, however, no?’

‘We did not mean to come so far.’ Sofia’s chattering teeth, so easy to hear in her voice, could have been an affectation to draw more pity, but Thomas doubted it.

‘You been out here long, have you?’

‘All night,’ she responded miserably. ‘We’ve been hoping to find someone. You’re the only person we’ve seen. Please help us.’

The horse had been coaxed to a stop some feet away from them. The way he looked down on them from the top of his horse made Thomas feel even smaller and weaker, and he was in too much agony to straighten up.

‘I’m terribly sorry to hear that, miss,’ he said, although he did not sound all that sympathetic; he sounded like he was busy, like he had only stopped out of basic decency. ‘I wish I had something to offer, in terms of food or clothes, but I’ve only the clothes on my back and not a crumb to spare.’

‘Not even in your pack?’ She pointed at the bundle tied to the back of the horse’s saddle.

‘That’s a little presumptuous, isn’t it?’ His tone was quickly becoming impatient. ‘Besides, it ain’t mine to give. I’ll be taking my leave now. Good luck to you.’

When the rider commanded his horse to go around them, Sofia stubbornly moved to block its path. Thomas was pulled along with her, just like the stranger’s horse was by the reins, and he groaned loudly in pain. He suspected that if Sofia had the privacy to tell him to be quiet, she would have.

‘Please,’ Sofia said. Her tone made the word sound more like a warning than a request.

‘It isn’t my fault you stupid children got lost,’ the man spat, his sympathy gone due to their insistence. ‘Just follow the road, you beggars.’

‘Give us your horse,’ she growled.

The man only laughed at her.

Shaking his head in disgust, he lifted the reins and got ready to spur his horse into action. But Sofia and Thomas had both been waiting for a reason to draw their concealed pistols, and the man had finally given them one.

‘Hands up!’ Sofia’s sudden shout spooked the horse. The agitated movements of the large animal caused the two robbers to step back.

Once at a safer distance, Thomas returned his gaze to their intended victim, and this time found himself looking up at the muzzle of a pistol.

‘You want to re-think your fucking command, girl?’ the man yelled. With a hard jerk of the reins, the man was able to calm his horse back down. ‘This ain’t my first time dealing with highway scum.’ In a slow sweeping motion, his aim pivoted between Thomas’s face and Sofia’s, then landed on Thomas’s to stay. ‘Now, why don’t you put your bloody guns away before I leave you dead in the dirt, right where you belong? Don’t make me shoot –’

The man was cut off by the sudden thrashing of the horse beneath him. Thomas looked to Sofia, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling. Her gaze was fixed upon the horse. He could see her mouth moving, and he was certain that if it wasn’t for the horse’s tormented whinnying, he’d hear her whispering in Latin.

His sister’s pistol was still raised, swaying unsteadily from one side to the next as she followed the erratic movements of the man struggling to hold onto his horse.

He realised then that she was not threatening him, but actively taking aim. Just when the horse calmed down, Sofia took her shot; the way she jolted showed him that she had been unprepared for the shock the weapon's blast sent up her arm.

She missed.

As if time had slowed, Thomas saw her turn to him, her eyes falling upon his loaded pistol; he saw her hand reaching for it.

But there was a second crack of gunfire that morning: this time, it came from the mounted stranger’s pistol – and he was a much better shot than Thomas’s sister.

Thomas flinched, bracing himself for the impact – hoping to be dead before the bullet could come out the other side of his skull.

He thought of his father with a hole in his forehead; he thought of how they would now match.

But too much time had passed without anything happening.

When he opened his eyes, he saw the bullet suspended in the air just inches from his face. It hung there for a few seconds, then fell, just as unassumingly as if it had been dropped from an invisible hand. There was a little thump as the metal ball hit the ground.

Sofia began to sag next to Thomas, then began to slip through his arms, forcing him to hold her more tightly to keep her upright. He felt a ripping pain coming from the gash on his abdomen, and the wound on his arm felt like it had been set on fire as the weight of her pressed upon it. Her eyes closed and her head dropped forward, signalling that she had fallen unconscious.

‘Sofia?’ His tone was desperate. ‘Sofia, are you –’

‘Witch!’ said the man, who had wrestled his horse into compliance; its head still shook from side to side in a panic. ‘May you freeze! Devil take you both!’

The man yanked the reins to guide the horse around Thomas and his limp sister. Thomas saw him pull his handkerchief down from his face, saw something drop onto the hood of Sofia’s cloak as the man passed. He watched with hopelessness as the horse broke out into a gallop, taking the man and his belongings far from them.

He raised a hand to check her head, to see what he had dropped on her, and his fingers made contact with a gob of saliva. Thomas’s face twisted in rage as he pushed the hood off her head, to get it away from her. Her tangled hair hid her face.

The blood seeping into his shirt was already beginning to freeze by the time he had dragged his sister back into the safety of the woods. He knew there was no way they could flee the area before the man sent people after them.

He stumbled and fell, shoving Sofia out of the way so he did not land upon her; he hit the ground hard, landing upon his bad arm; his scream made his throat raw. He gasped in pain as he moved them further into the woods, trying not to trip as he dragged them both through the brambles and over fallen logs that they had so carefully skirted around before.

Thomas set his sister down gently, lacking the strength to keep going. He sat at her side, hunching forward. Besides his breathing, there was an eerie silence; it seemed that his shouting – or perhaps her magic – had frightened the birds.

‘He’s going to report us,’ came Sofia’s low voice. She had not lifted her head, but he saw her eyes had opened. ‘Why didn’t you take the shot?’

He shook his head, beginning to weep. For what felt like a punishing stretch of time, she said nothing, even as sobs had overtaken him – and got worse as his pain mounted. When she finally did acknowledge him, it was to put her hand to his forehead, to check his fever, and he leant into it pitifully.

Neither of them were foolish enough to suggest they flee the area in their current conditions. Instead, with no other options, they stayed and held themselves for warmth, and waited to find the strength to retreat once more into the depths of the forest.

It was remarkable how much a week away from Tottenham could lift Nell’s spirits – even if it did make her feel guilty to have left her sisters. And she did miss them, of course! But wandering between towns in search of murderous Jacobites with a personal grudge against her wasn’t something Nell wanted to put Roxy and George through just when their lives were getting good.

Luckily, she did have Charles. Unluckily, he could be awfully annoying.

‘Well, are you going to tell me why you’ve been avoiding me?’

‘Haven’t been,’ she said simply, shrugging her shoulders and not taking her eyes off the road straight ahead of her. ‘Just haven’t been seeking you out.’

‘I’ve sent letters!’

‘Can’t read,’ she reminded him yet again. ‘Can’t write back.’

‘Yes, but George...’ He sighed, being sure to do it loud enough that their horses’ steps wouldn’t drown it out. ‘You know, you should consider learning. It’s useful.’

‘Why would I waste my time with that muck? I’ve got better things to do.’

‘Like making a ruckus in the garden?’ He raised his eyebrows at Nell when she looked at him suspiciously. ‘George told me you’d been beating up old furniture and such. Punching the outer walls of the Talbot. Oh, and running off into a field and sword-fighting with invisible people. Now that one I would have loved to see. Care to demonstrate sometime?’

‘Fuck. I knew she was spying on me that day.’ Nell huffed. ‘Yeah, well, I have to get it out of me somehow.’

‘Get what out of you, demons?’

‘Oh, I dunno! Maybe I do stupid shite sometimes when I’m bored. At least I didn’t take up robbing for fun, unlike some people!’

‘Ahem! Fun and money,’ he corrected. ‘But surely, if you wrote to the Queen – had someone write to her, that is – she’d grant you the role of bodyguard again, all in a wink of her shiny royal eye.’

‘Dev, are you in love with Queen Anne or something, now that she’s knighted you?’

‘Do I detect jealousy?’

‘I’m not in love with her,’ Nell said, baffled by the suggestion. She ignored the disbelieving scoff he gave and continued, ‘Besides, I don’t want to be no guard. I just want...’

The problem with Nell starting that sentence was that she had no idea how to finish it. All she knew was that she didn’t want to be stuck in Tottenham; that she’d prefer not to stand on another battlefield, men dying around her; and that she couldn’t fight anywhere near as well as she had been able to with Billy, no matter how many pieces of old furniture she smashed up behind their house in a sloppy attempt at training – especially when she nearly broke her hand at least twice. But if she could get Billy back...

‘You want what?’ he pestered. He guided his horse into walking nearer to hers, close enough that he could reach out and touch her – and she could pretend like she was about to push him off his horse, if he did.

She rolled her eyes and blew out a breath.

‘I want to find these two useless piles of ribbons, that’s what. Then, we’ll figure out what we’re doing after we’ve dealt with them.’

‘We?’

He really was being annoying and she couldn’t see what he thought he would gain by it. Even when she looked at his face, she couldn’t quite read his expression – but it was somehow off-putting to her.

‘Well, let’s hope that “black-haired witch with eyes cold as ice” and her “sallow-looking butcher” companion that poor man reported are the same black-haired witch and sallow fellow we’re looking for, yeah?’

‘The man was a poet. I wish someone had described me half as beautifully when I was still doing that old thing.’

‘You mean robbing people.’

‘Yes. Very astute. Of course, this was before I was –’

‘If you mention being knighted one more fucking time, Dev...’ Nell warned. His pleased little giggle made her roll her eyes. ‘Between trusting that bastard Poynton and now knighting you, I’m not so sure Annie’s all there in terms of judgement, if you know what I mean.’

‘You should have accepted her offer of knighting you, too! Then we’d be a matching pair.’

‘I don’t want to be Dame Eleanor Jackson,’ she said disdainfully. Even just saying her full given name made her grimace. ‘And she would never make me a sir, I just know it.’

‘Is that the only reason you turned it down?’

‘No! I had loads of reasons. Poor company I’d have in fellow knights.’ She nodded playfully towards him. ‘They let all the riffraff in these days. There’s no honour in it.’

He tilted his head back to laugh.

‘Oh, I missed you,’ he said for what must have been the tenth time since he had shown up at the Talbot a little over a week earlier.

‘Ah, sure you did.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Now, let’s see what this next town has to say. I still like the plan of taking a cart, filling it up with goodies, and making ourselves look easy to take, once we know we’re in their area.’

He gave a loud yawn, nodding his head.

‘Bait-and-switch.’ He perked up a little when he added, ‘But violent! I like it.’

‘Let’s hope they don’t put up too much of a fight.’

The next day.

Nell couldn’t take it anymore. Charles had been rambling for half an hour from the seat of the open-backed cart; she was in the back, hiding beneath a canvas and surrounded by crates which they had stuffed with hay to add visible bulk. They had borrowed it from a nearby village – or rented, really, since the woman they had got it from wasn’t willing to part with it without compensation, even if they were Nell Jackson and her knight companion. Fair enough. They had left their horses with her, taking one she lent which was more used to pulling carts.

For hours, Nell had been stuck in an uncomfortable crouch; she needed to be ready to spring into action the moment the Blanchefords struck. She prayed it would be soon, if only so Charles would stop talking for a little while.

‘You know, I think it was that exact moment when I realised that I had been wasting all my time, because I could barely even taste a difference between –’

‘I don’t think most grocers talk this much to their turnips, Dev,’ she said loudly in the hopes he would finally stop comparing types of cheeses.

‘I thought you were liquor, were you not?’

‘That works, too, I guess,’ she said disinterestedly, massaging her cramping leg through her breeches.

‘No, no. Turnips really suit you. I should have thought of that!’

‘Where did I put my sword, again?’ she subtly threatened.

He fell silent. She at least expected a laugh.

‘Don’t tell me that hurt your feelings,’ she scoffed. ‘Fine, I promise –’

‘Hush,’ came a very soft reply. ‘I see them.’

His uncharacteristically serious tone sent a shock of relief through her.

It was finally happening.

Slowly, she shifted into position beneath the canvas; but not so much that anyone would be able to detect the movement from a distance.

‘Stand and deliver!’ came a familiar woman’s voice, fierce and commanding. Nell’s eyes shut in delight at the sound.

‘Please don’t hurt me! I’m just a simple grocer!’ Charles blubbered, perfectly playing his part of a terrified driver. She was just relieved that she had successfully talked him out of speaking any French – she hoped.

‘Grocer!’ the woman repeated. She sounded almost breathless with pitiful excitement. ‘Stay there.’

‘Oh, my precious turnips! I can’t watch!’ He sure couldn’t help himself, either, it seemed.

Nell wanted to tell him to shut his mouth, before his luck ran –

‘If you don’t stop talking,’ Sofia Wilmot warned, ‘I will shoot you.’

It would have been funny, Nell thought, if she didn’t hate her. Instead, she held her breath and listened to the footsteps coming close to the cart...

Billy or not, she was ready for her.

As the canvas was pulled away, Nell held her fist in position to strike. It would have been embarrassing to miss, at that range. She saw that sharp face looming over her, pale as the moon, and with sunken eyes full of hope for turnips.

What she got was a big surprise and a punch in the face.

Sofia’s pistol clattered upon the ground somewhere nearby, but Nell had no time to look for it, because at that moment, she had eyes only for her.

Nell hopped to her feet to pursue the other woman as she careened backwards from the force of the blow.

‘Fancy meeting you here, Wilmot!’ Nell said cheerily, rubbing her stinging knuckles.

She jumped down from the back of the cart, not taking her eyes off her for even a moment. Behind her, she could hear Charles’ scuffle with Thomas; his victorious cry assured her that he had the man handled and didn’t need her help.

Sofia’s hand protectively covered her cheek and mouth; on the uncovered half of her face was an expression of purest hatred. The once-proud woman might have been unrecognisable in that tattered dress and with her hair so tangled. Standing in front of Nell now, Sofia Wilmot looked as if the wilderness had halfway claimed her as its pet. The dangerous, desperate look she had to her should have been a warning to Nell – but Nell never did take warnings very seriously.

‘Well?’ Nell goaded, stepping towards her. ‘Happy to see me?’

She was caught off her guard when the woman suddenly rushed her. Quickly, she bolted out of the way; Sofia caught herself on the cart, rather than slamming into it fully, and all while groaning like some wretched creature. She recovered faster than Nell ever would have expected and managed to get a handful of her shirt, preventing Nell from being able to get away.

‘You!’ she snarled, trying to drag Nell closer to her.

‘Hands off!’ Nell scolded Sofia as she tried to pry her filthy – bloody – fingers off the garment. ‘What, are you trying to tear it off me? Let go! You’re going to –’

Sofia’s other hand came up and swatted her face repeatedly. Nell felt pain throughout one side of her jaw, but didn’t feel any loose teeth, thankfully. She was able to grab Sofia’s arm, which was enough to stop her from being able to continue swinging at her face – but then the devil woman still managed to get her hand close enough to Nell’s cheek to claw at it.

‘Such a lady!’ Nell said through gritted teeth, feeling certain that blood was being drawn.  ‘Real fucking civilised!’

Well, Nell wasn’t above fighting dirty, either.

Her leg came up in a familiar motion and her knee collided with Sofia’s groin. As it turned out, it wasn’t anywhere near as effective as it had been on men. In fact, the woman looked more offended than pained.

She ripped Sofia’s hand away from her face, before she could start clawing at her eyes next. A hard shove was enough to get Sofia to release her shirt; Nell immediately looked down to make sure Sofia hadn’t pulled hard enough to leave her in an indecent state – she had pulled it out from where it had been tucked into her breeches, but Nell could see no damage.

Upon looking back up, she saw that Sofia had backed away until she was leaning against a tree, cornering herself.

‘What?’ Nell taunted her, grinning widely as she gave chase. ‘Is your magic too good for me now?’

Every fibre of Nell’s body was tensed, waiting for the woman to indeed throw fire from her hands or something else nasty. But Sofia only panted in exertion, head tilted back against the bark. She looked like she would have fallen without the tree at her back.

She reached out to pin Sofia against the tree by the shoulders, leaning all her weight against her; the woman’s arms came up to grip Nell about the elbows, but she made no attempt to pry her off – rather, it seemed like she was holding on for support. Nell took the opportunity to catch her breath, staring at the blood dripping down Sofia’s chin; the little trail of red came from where Nell had split her lip with her punch.

‘You had no problem using magic on them others,’ she whispered fiercely, trying to intimidate her by getting in her face. ‘What’s stopping you, Sofia?’

In the silence following her question, Nell heard a grunt come from back near the cart, reminding her of her friend’s own battle. 

Nell gave the listless woman a good look, trying to judge whether her pitiful, defeated look was real or a trick. She gave her shoulders another hard shove, to try to scare any deceit out of her, but she only groaned. Sofia opened her eyes just enough to peer at Nell; a sliver of blue burned with frustration.

‘Leave her alone, you bitch!’ came Thomas’s sudden cry. Judging by his strangled voice, Charles was closing in on the same victory as Nell. She turned her head to watch, her scratched cheek twinging as she grinned.

‘How very uncalled for! What a terrible way to speak to her!’ Charles laughed amiably, which only added to his menace. Nell saw that he had employed the same tactic as Sofia, holding Thomas back by his stained shirt. ‘And to think, you were raised to be a gentleman!’

Charles let Thomas get a few feet out, then yanked his sleeve with enough force to spin him back to face him; a fist waited at the ready and he wasted no time in sinking it hard into Thomas’s gut.

The scream that ripped its way out of the man’s throat was such an awful, suffering sort of sound that it made Nell’s heart skip a beat – even if he was her enemy. He sank to his knees, then fell face first into the leaf litter. Sofia had begun to thrash against Nell, her panicked eyes locked on Thomas.

‘Stop! We surrender! Please, stop!’

Nell loosened her grip, allowing Sofia to shove her arms away so she could go to him; she fell on her knees the moment she reached his side, then groaned with effort as she rolled him onto his back. Nell thought for a moment that she might slap him, like she had in Broadwater Hall, but this time she only patted rapidly at his cheek to see if he was responsive. As Nell drew nearer, she heard Thomas give a whine.

‘Did you stab him?’ Nell confusedly asked Charles.

‘Of course not! Unless – Did I? I mean – No? Let’s see, my hands were – ah, yes – empty.’ He looked just as baffled as she did; he raised his hands, fingers spread, with no sharps in sight and then threw them up in a shrug.

‘He was already injured,’ Sofia growled. Hurriedly, she began to gather his shirt up. Instinctively, Nell averted her eyes, not wanting to see the man’s bare chest.

‘Ooh, that’s...’ Charles said with a wince. ‘Well, you can’t blame me for all of that blood. Just what’s on his face – but that will clean up easily, won’t it? The face? Maybe not all that, though, down there...’

‘Stop talking. Now.’

Nell reluctantly looked back at the injured man. Her nose wrinkled in disgust at the sight of his wound; the flesh that peeked around the blood-soaked bandage was pink and inflamed. Nell had seen enough wounds to know that his condition must have been precarious even before Charles’ punch.

‘You’ve reopened the wound, damn you.’ Sofia’s hands hovered over him, too afraid to touch him and potentially do him further harm. And yet... ‘I need – If I had a needle of some sort, I’m certain I could sew –’

Thomas opened his eyes, shaking his head frantically at his sister.

‘No, no – please no, Sofia!’

‘It’s either that or you bleed out, you fool.’ Her sentence started so stern that it was almost cruel, but fell into a whimper by its conclusion.

‘Hold on,’ Nell butted into the conversation. ‘Sofia, you don’t know what you’re doing. You’ll just end up putting holes in his gut, and then how much better off will he be? Ugh, just move over and let me...’ She crouched down beside Sofia; she ended up closer to her than she was comfortable with, so she tried to gesture with a nod to get out of her way, but she was ignored.

‘You... You...’ Thomas whispered, recognition dawning in his watery eyes.

Nell expected he was just going to repeat what he said earlier, so she saved him the trouble: ‘“Bitch”, I know.’

She reached down, trying to find a clean portion of his bandages to grab so that she might begin to undo them. As soon as she peeled back the cloth, blood welled up quickly from the wide wound. He bared his teeth in pain; there was a scream in his throat that he was barely holding back.

‘Blimey, that’s not pretty. This from a bullet? Is it still in there?’

‘No, it’s from a boar,’ Sofia said softly. She was unpleasantly close; her breath stirred Nell’s hair. Rather than tell her to get away, Nell allowed it this time, due to the circumstances.

‘A boar?’ Nell nearly laughed in surprise. ‘You got tusked by a fucking boar?’

‘Hungry,’ Thomas grunted.

‘Yeah, me, too. But let’s stay on topic,’ Nell replied as she tried to get the crustiest, filthiest bandages off; they had adhered to the wound, so pulling them away meant some of the scab got peeled off along with them.

When Sofia’s hands came close to Nell’s, to assist her, she was tempted to slap them away; the only reason she didn’t was because if she missed, she’d hit the man right in his open wound, which she didn’t want to make contact with any more than strictly necessary – never mind have to listen to him screaming again.

‘Get your filthy hands out of here, Wilmot. You don’t know what you’re doing.’

‘And you do?’

Nell had caught a glimpse of the scar on his chest from Poynton’s pendant. She tore her eyes away from the unnatural-looking thing when Sofia grabbed her by the sleeve to get her attention.

‘Tell me that you know what you are doing!’

‘Yeah, I know!’ She gave her arm a little shake, trying to dislodge her strong little fingers, even if what she really wanted was to shove her away entirely. ‘I dressed all sorts of wounds when I was in the army. I know more than you do about this.’

Sofia appraised her for a moment. Her fingers uncurled, but her hand still rested on Nell’s arm. Naturally, Nell wiggled it, giving her a pointed look.

‘I see,’ she said, beginning to calm. ‘Then do whatever you can to help him.’

Nell had been fully expecting Sofia to challenge her, but she instead took her hands away and leant back to afford her more room. Nell looked down at her ruffled sleeve to make sure – again – that she hadn’t damaged her shirt.

‘Don’t expect any bloody miracles, now.’

Sofia either scoffed or sobbed, but she did not care enough to check – she was busy.

They hadn’t pulled his shirt back fast enough to spare it from the blood; its cheap, coarse material had a large, dark crimson spot on it.

Reluctantly, Nell lifted the shirt the rest of the way and – with Sofia’s ready help – pulled it over his head. She didn’t bother keeping the disgust off her face as she bunched it up; she tucked the wet spot underneath the rest, leaving one side clean. She was tempted to yank his head up by his hair, but instead she cupped her hand under the crown of his head and slid the shirt underneath, clean side up, as a pillow.

‘So, this is how you’ve been scaring people? You rubbed pig guts all over your clothes to look fierce?’

‘You heard of us?’ Sofia asked cautiously, not answering her question.

‘Yeah, and a poor man a couple days back said you were frightening his horse, making it see demons or something.’

‘So you found us through rumours.’

‘From your victims. You ain’t been subtle.’

‘You found...’ Thomas muttered. He was looking just above her eyes, which unnerved her.

‘Oi, my eyes are down here,’ she said. ‘What, is his sight going or something?’

‘He has a fever.’

‘Obviously,’ Nell scoffed. ‘That’s what happens when a wound gets like this. First it’s bleeding, then there’s a fever, then it’s –’ Well, they could guess where she was going with it, Nell thought.

‘A miraculous recovery?’ Charles suggested, nearly making Nell laugh, and earning a glare from Sofia.

‘You did this to us, Jackson,’ Sofia said, once again in her soft, sad, victim’s tone.

‘Right, I definitely am the one who put it in your head that you could kill a boar without any trouble.’

Sofia said nothing; she only watched Nell try to tend her brother’s wound.

It was a nasty wound to look at, to be certain. As much as Nell didn’t want to use one of her own handkerchiefs on him, she knew it would be cruel not to at least make an attempt at helping dress his wound. Billy would have wanted her to help, if it was possible – and she wouldn’t know if it was possible or not if she didn’t try.

Both Thomas and his sister were paler than she remembered, even though their filth suggested they had spent a great deal of time outside; there was a greater hollowness to their cheeks than she thought was healthy. Beside her, Sofia still seemed winded from their fight. Below her, Thomas was limp; only his eyes moved, still not looking quite at her.

Seeing the pair of toffs, sick and in pain, an unwelcome feeling came to her: it was guilt.

She had figured they would have quickly found some other toffs who didn’t know what scum they were, or more likely just didn’t care. Surely, they’d have family that would take them in, regardless of what they had done. And they must have taken plenty of valuables on their way out of Broadwater, which someone would have paid them good money for, no?

Instead, here lay Thomas Blancheford, bleeding out in the middle of the woods, and sure to die if they didn’t get a surgeon for him. Beside him, a sniffling, starving sister who would stay by his side until his last breath – and then what would she do?

If Thomas Blancheford were to die, would Billy be free to return to her? It was an awful thought – one which Billy himself never would have allowed her to consider. Even if the pathetic, childish man had murdered her father, then killed his own and framed her, she still wasn’t sure she could condone allowing him to die without at least trying to save him.

Nell pressed the back of her forearm against her forehead, holding it there as she thought about what to do. Her face itched where Sofia’s nails had dug in, and she imagined that she had blood seeping from the little claw marks. Her jaw still ached from the lady’s unexpected punch.

‘Here’s what we’ll do,’ she said, putting on her best leadership voice. ‘Either Charles or I will go into town, see if we can find a surgeon –’

‘To operate on him here in the woods?’ Sofia laughed scornfully. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Oh, so you want to go to a town where everyone’ll be on the lookout for – I don’t know – some black-haired witch with eyes of ice?’

Sofia’s frown became more pronounced, more puzzled, as she took in Nell’s words.

‘Don’t forget the slit pupils and forked tongue,’ Charles added. He was still standing, looking idly at their wooded surroundings.

The noise of disgust Nell made at his words caused Sofia to look at her strangely. Then she shook her head at Nell and gave her a false smile.

‘You are Nell Jackson,’ Sofia said bitterly. Nell was a little surprised she didn’t call her Nelly. ‘You’re England’s newest heroine. You saved the Queen from the Jacobites.’

‘Hero is fine. You can just say “hero”.’

‘I was knighted,’ Charles chimed in.

She ignored them both.

‘Surely, you will protect us from a few angry villagers. You will pretend that we are not Sofia and Thomas Blancheford, but friends of yours –’ The idea of feigning friendship made Nell, Charles, and even the delirious Thomas chuckle.

Sofia tried another angle: ‘Or perhaps he and I are just some unfortunate nobodies whom you just rescued from highwaymen. That will explain all our fresh injuries.’

‘Of which I have none,’ Charles said with a little bow, looking at Thomas. ‘Can’t say the same for you, Nelly. Have you lost your magic touch?’

Nell shut her eyes and bitterly shook her head at him.

‘I need you to do this,’ Sofia pressed. ‘Otherwise, his death will be on your hands.’

‘Stop talking like you’re in charge,’ Nell warned. The way Sofia’s shoulders fell but her chin lifted made her disdain clear.

‘I fucking hate being the hero,’ muttered Nell.

Chapter Text

After over two months on the run, it had apparently taken Nell Jackson and her companion only a week to find Sofia and her brother.

As if that was not humiliating enough, Jackson had not even made use of her unnatural abilities in her scramble with Sofia – who knew she should have been grateful, because if Jackson had thrown her dozens of feet, the landing just might have killed her, especially in her weakened state. Nevertheless, the wound Jackson’s mercy left upon Sofia’s self-esteem would still be bleeding long after her bruise and split lip healed.

Of course, it seemed only natural that Nell Jackson would have such an easy time. How could she have otherwise survived being hunted for two months without either divine intervention or else unparallelled luck?

Sofia did not feel she owed her survival to anyone or anything except for her own stubborn will to live. If God had played any part, He clearly had less of a distaste for witchcraft than she had been led to believe.

It sickened her to see her salvation take the form of the woman whose blood she had spent months lusting after.

Even more shameful was how little it had taken for Sofia to acquiesce and surrender to them: it had taken no more than the offer of medical aid for Thomas and a piece of dried meat that Jackson held in front of her nose – because the Queen's hero was no better than a bully teasing a starving stray.

Ultimately, Sofia had put up no fight when Charles scooped their weapons up off the ground and put them with his and Jackson’s own belongings. In that moment, it felt like a worthwhile trade.

While Thomas had complained that he was in too much pain to eat, Sofia had eaten the meat and bread offered with such haste that it seemed to burn inside her stomach. The ride in the back of the shaking cart did nothing to ease that discomfort, and she had to will herself to keep the meal down. It was a task that left her quiet for most of the trip towards civilisation.

Their two captors – or rescuers, as they no doubt believed themselves to be – talked about stupid, idle topics, acting as if Sofia and Thomas weren’t there. Normally, it bothered Sofia when people spoke as if she was not present, no matter how accustomed to it she had been; this time, it was strangely comforting to listen to chatter that wasn’t centred around hunger, pain, or vengeance.

By the time they reached the village, she could not have recounted what the two had discussed. Sofia’s brow ached from glaring at the back of Jackson's head.

Jackson pulled the cart over to the side of the road and stood up. Without warning, she abruptly took off her hat and flung it at Sofia. Before Sofia could ask why she had done it, Jackson had begun to shrug off her jacket; in a moment, that too was dumped in Sofia’s arms.

‘Right. I’ll find someone willing to help this idiot,’ she said, of course referring to Thomas. ‘You put those on and stay here. Try not to draw attention to yourselves.’

It was not much of a disguise, but it was another layer against the cold.

Despite Jackson’s instructions, Sofia left her brother with Charles and followed her as far as the fence that marked the edge of someone’s property; the overgrown grass that Nell walked through on one side of the fence differed little from the wild grass that rustled against Sofia’s skirts on the other side. At one point, Jackson turned back and saw Sofia standing there, but only shook her head before continuing onwards.

Sofia felt a longing all the way down to her bones at the sight of chimney smoke. In the last two months, there had been times when she wondered if she would survive long enough to experience again the comforts of being indoors; of having a bath or wearing clean clothes.

For the first time in weeks, she allowed herself to take in her own appearance as best she could without a mirror, starting with her hands: they were as black as if she had crushed charcoal between them; there was dirt under every fingernail, with the addition of dried blood on her right hand from where she had – in a moment of wild, hate-filled passion – begun to claw at Jackson’s face. Her mouth twitched into a brief smile at the memory.

As for the rest of her body, her dress concealed her, despite its many tears. It hung loosely in places it should have been tight. The way she had needed to tighten her stays just a little more each passing week had made it impossible for her to ignore the outward effects of starvation. She indignantly balled her hands into fists, digging her nails into her palms.

Twenty minutes later, Jackson came back into view; Sofia spent that time seething.

Without her hat, the woman’s hair was even easier to recognise at a distance; it seemed startlingly red in the evening sunlight; she ran a hand over it to smooth it down as she walked towards Sofia, looking back and forth at her surroundings, almost as if expecting an ambush.

When she reached the fence upon which Sofia was leaning, she rested upon it from the opposite side. Neither of them looked directly at one another, even when Jackson began to speak.

‘So, I found someone, and even though he ain’t a proper surgeon –’ She held up a hand to keep Sofia from interrupting, still without looking at her. ‘– he’s the best we’ll find in miles, it sounds like.’

Sofia shook her head bitterly at the thought of her dying brother’s life being in the hands of some novice herbalist, but she knew not to complain.

‘Y’know, it’s funny – he was all aghast over this little bruise and the scratches you gave me, and I was all, “But you should see the other fella!”’ Nell gave a pleased laugh. ‘And it’s great, because he will see you, right? But he won’t know it.’

‘Did you even talk to him about Thomas?’

‘‘Course I did. Keep your hat on.’ Nell cocked her head at Sofia and needlessly clarified, ‘By which I mean my hat.’

Sofia rolled her eyes, which made her head ache even more. ‘And you’re sure he can help my brother?’

‘Better than anyone else in miles. Didn’t I say that?’

‘Forgive me. I forgot at some point while you were rambling.’

Jackson gave her an insincere smile.

‘So, are we wheeling him in on the cart or can he walk?’

‘He’ll walk,’ Sofia told her. ‘Let’s not draw attention to ourselves.’

‘Ah, right. Speaking of which...’ Her eyes lit up in amusement. Giving the hat on Sofia’s head a nod, she said, ‘I’ll find you a comb for your hair. You’ll scare the children if you keep it like that for any longer.’

‘Good,’ Sofia said drily. ‘Because apparently I’ve been eating little girls and boys everywhere from here to Leeds, and not starving in a forest like I had thought.’

‘Ah, save your confessions for a priest,’ Jackson said, straightening up from the fence.

‘Will he provide food?’

‘Nah. From the sounds of it, his girls moved out and married years ago. Though I suppose that means that they’re far too old for you to find appetising.’

Sofia did not laugh. In fact, she slowly, pointedly blinked to quash any expectations from Jackson that she would laugh at her jokes. Jackson made up for it by leaning forward and giving a loud, exaggerated laugh. When she was done, she scowled right back at Sofia.

‘Anyway, he’s letting us stay in their old room. He’ll probably even let you wash up, if you ask nicely. You can ask nicely, can’t ya? I’ve certainly never seen it.’

Sofia had stopped listening to her after she mentioned the chance for her to wash herself. Jackson had turned west to watch the last sliver of sunset slip away.

‘It’s probably dark enough. We’ll get yous two inside quick, before anyone can look too close.’

After another minute, the sun had finally disappeared into the far western fields, and Jackson began to walk back towards where they had left the cart. Without even checking to see if she was being followed, she whistled at Sofia like she was a dog and gave a little, ‘C’mere.’

It would have been so nice, Sofia thought, if one of her attempts to kill Jackson had been a success.

The plan to get the Blancheford siblings inside was executed under the cover of dusk. Both the healer and his wife had readily believed that the two siblings – injured and dirty as they were – had been the victims of a highway robbery, rather than the perpetrators of several. They did not question that Nell Jackson and Sir Charles Devereux had saved them after having fortuitously crossed paths. Best of all: they did not press for details, although Charles would have been more-than-happy to spin a whole story.

The healer had taken one look at Thomas and immediately led them to a tiny room that smelt strongly of herbs; it had a shelf beside the narrow bed that was filled with bottles of various shapes and sizes, all of which looked as if they held samples of the flames of the fireplace that they reflected.

Nell stood in the doorway, watching up until the point Thomas’s chest was bared again; she turned away and found Sofia just behind, looking anxiously past her at Thomas.

‘There’s the man's wife,’ Nell whispered to her. ‘She’ll take you upstairs to our room.’

‘I’m not –’

Nell hushed her, nodding at the woman waiting by the stairs. Sofia glanced over at the woman, visibly frustrated with being told what to do. Clearly, she judged that the woman was too near to avoid being overheard, so she gave Nell one last sour look.

‘Tell me everything he says.’

Sofia took the stairs behind the healer’s wife, stopping abruptly when Thomas gasped loudly in pain. Her eyes met Nell’s one last time before she disappeared.

The first thing the healer did was give Thomas something for the pain: he uncorked a black bottle and put a few drops of reddish-brown liquid into a glass of water. The injured man quieted down very soon, prompting Charles to ask if he could have some of what the man had given him – he was ignored.

It all seemed rather mundane and familiar to Nell, even if it had been over a year since she had watched soldiers being tended. There had been George, of course, but she had been braver and whinged far less than any man Nell had ever seen being operated on.

After Thomas had been drugged, cleaned, and tended, the verdict was much the same as when Dr Tuplow had examined George: only time would tell. All they could do was wait, and Nell would rather pass the time in bed rather than at Thomas Blancheford’s bedside.

The stairs were dark, so she took them slowly; the upstairs they led to was even blacker, with the only hint of light peeking from under a closed door. Without giving much thought to privacy – or that it could have been the married couple’s room – Nell reached out and opened the door. She hoped Sofia would already be asleep, so she wouldn’t have to deal with her.

‘How is he?’

Nell nearly jumped out of her skin. It was as if she had conjured the woman from the shadows with just a thought – which was truly one of the last powers Nell would ever want to possess.

‘Really? Of all places you could be, you just had to stand by the bloody door?’ Nell said, closing it behind her. ‘You couldn’t have just stood somewhere visible? You had to lurk in the darkness, like some kinda –’

‘I am a fugitive,’ she whispered harshly. ‘I’m just being careful.’

Nell waved her hand in a shooing gesture; Sofia backed away slowly, looking at her hand through narrowed eyes.

‘Here I thought you’d jump at the chance to lie down in an actual – well, it’s a small bed, but it’s a bed, no? Oh. I got something for ya.’

Nell reached into her pocket and found a wooden comb. She thought she had lost the handy thing somewhere around Watford, but upon reaching into her pack just before entering the house, she had felt what seemed like something trying to nip at her – and combs did technically have teeth, didn’t they?

She held the comb up and gave it a little shake to get Sofia’s attention, but gave her only a second to prepare before she tossed it at her. Nell watched it bounce off Sofia’s chest and fall into her open hands – hands which had evidently been scrubbed, along with her face, to remove as much of the filth as possible in a single sitting.

‘Tell me how he is,’ Sofia prompted, clearly not even considering thanking her for the comb. Nell was slightly disappointed by her lack of indignation over it being thrown at her.

‘It’s too soon to tell.’

‘Has he given a prognosis?’

‘What did I just say?’

The glare Sofia levelled at her was a nice little reminder that Nell was going to have a terrible, sleepless night ahead of her.

‘This bed’s mine,’ Nell informed her, plopping herself down upon the one closest to the door. She set to work untying the handkerchief she had around her neck. ‘You’ll be taking that one across the room.’

‘You mean, the only other bed in the room? Thank you for clarifying.’

If Sofia had rolled her eyes, Nell had missed it, because she had been busy doing the same.

‘Ah, so it is,’ she said with a shrug, which extended into a long stretch; she grunted a little and her muscles quivered as she reached its peak. ‘Either way, I don’t see why you’d have any complaints.’

‘If you’re taking that bed because you think I’m going to try to run in the night...’

‘Yeah? Or maybe I just want this fucking bed.’ Nell gave the blanket next to her a little slap. ‘What, are you really gonna fight me on this?’

‘Why can’t I just share a room with Thomas? The thought of sharing one with you makes me sick.’

‘Can’t always get what you want, now, can ya?’ Nell said, lifting up her foot to tug off a boot. Before she had even finished with the first boot, she reached up to take her hat off. She sat there, staring at the window for several seconds. ‘Look, if you –’

‘What is that on your cheek?’

Nell reached up to see what she was talking about. She winced when her fingers made contact with the scratch wound; some of the sticky and fragrant ointment clung to her fingers when she pulled her hand away.

‘Same ointment he gave your brother.’

Sofia narrowed her eyes thoughtfully and pursed her split lip.

‘Did he say what it is made from?’

‘Do you always ask so many questions?’ Nell didn’t give her a chance to respond before saying, ‘Look, I’d tell you to ask the man himself, but it’s late. Thomas was given something for the pain and it put him right to sleep. Try to do the same, won’t ya?’

‘Charles is with him?’ Even though Nell turned her head towards her, to ensure Sofia could see her eyes rolling, she still asked another question: ‘You’ve told him to come let me know if anything happens?’

Nell shook her head and groaned in disbelief. ‘You don’t talk in your sleep, I hope?’

‘I might,’ she said a little too quickly. ‘So, let me stay with my brother, if that would bother you.’

‘Nice try. Not gonna happen.’

The woman pulled the exact sour face Nell usually envisioned whenever she thought of Sofia Wilmot. After a moment, Sofia sat down on the bed she had been assigned; she had removed her petticoat, so at least she wasn’t getting dirt all over the clean blankets. She turned the comb over in her fingers while Nell worked on taking her boots off again, having only just remembered she had never finished the task before.

When she looked back at her, Sofia was still studying the comb.

‘So, the way you use one of those – oh, and they’re called combs, by the way – is by putting its teeth to your hair and –’

‘Stop mocking me,’ she quietly warned. After casting a moody look at Nell, Sofia drew a lock of tangled hair in front of her face to examine it; half her hair moved to follow, so interwoven it all was. There was a real danger that the comb would not survive the task that lay ahead of it. She turned her face away from Nell and finally set to work on taming her hair.

‘Should’ve kept it in a plait,’ Nell tutted. ‘‘Course, you could just shear it off. That would be a lot simpler.’

‘Never,’ she hissed – probably due to pain, judging by the way the comb had caught immediately.

Nell was sure she could make a small fortune if she sold it, once it was returned to its naturally sleek state. It was the sort of hair that was usually the product of a life of luxury, one of only spending time outdoors for leisure; the sort of hair that could never survive the hard work most women spent their days doing. It was an object of pride for women of Sofia’s status; and she was not an exemption, judging by the way she turned her body further away from Nell, as if to hide her face as she continued fighting with the same knot with which she had started.

It was clearly going to hold her full attention for a while. Nell took the opportunity to slip her pistol underneath her pillow while she wasn’t looking. Loaded or not, it seemed safer to have it at the ready, in case Sofia decided to show her lack of gratitude by choking her in her sleep.

In fact, because that was such a realistic worry, Nell was committed to not falling asleep until after Sofia did. Even when she crawled under the blankets, having stripped down as much as she was comfortable with, she kept herself sitting up a little too straight to be comfortable, so as to not risk falling asleep.

There wasn’t much else to look at in the room, so with glazed-over eyes, Nell spent the next hour watching Sofia’s jerky motions and listening to her soft noises of pain.

‘Not used to doing that yourself, I bet.’

Either Sofia had reached an especially stubborn tangle or Nell’s voice had startled her, given the way she jolted. When she turned to glare at Nell, the soft lighting of the room was reflected in her watering eyes. Nell grimaced at the sight, running a hand over the top of her own hair, then pulling her plait over her shoulder to give it a look; it had gotten loose, but she didn’t feel like redoing it just then, since it was far more entertaining to watch Sofia struggle.

‘Does it make you feel better about yourself, that you’ve had to do your own hair?’

She thought about Roxy, who had always liked that sort of thing more than she did, and was far better at it. Nell knew enough about noblewomen that clothes like theirs and hair like theirs often necessitated a helper; and all Sofia had for two months had been her brother.

Feeling some pity for her, Nell asked, ‘You’re at least starting from the bottom, right? Since it’s so bad.’

‘What do you mean?’

Nell couldn’t help but laugh. She almost felt guilty for not saying it sooner.

‘Less work that way, and less painful.’

Sofia pulled the comb away from her head; knotted strands of black hair clung to the comb’s teeth. Her hand – her entire body – quivered with rage. Sofia drew a shaky breath before saying, ‘You should have told me that when I started an hour ago.’

‘I didn’t think about it ‘til now.’

Sofia looked like she was about to snap the wooden comb. As if realising that it would be of no use to her as splinters, she dropped it on the bed beside her to spare it from her wrath.

‘I’ll do the rest in the morning,’ she muttered.

‘You got half of it done.’ Nell realised she spoke too soon when Sofia turned her head to glare at her. It was a funny sight: the portion she had brushed was several inches longer than the rest and it didn’t look like it even belonged to the same head. Nell corrected herself: ‘Well, a quarter, I should say.’

There was an angry little twitch that had taken control of Sofia’s left eyebrow. 

She stood up abruptly, whipping around to turn her back to Nell. With discomfort, Nell realised that Sofia was preparing to strip down to her shift to sleep in. She watched with a sort of muted horror as she took off one layer, then another, and...

‘Can’t you leave the room?’ Sofia asked, finally looking at her.

‘What?’ Nell asked distractedly.

‘If it were you, I’d give you privacy.’

‘Oh. You know what? Fine. Here.’

The last thing she saw before she covered her eyes with her forearm was Sofia’s relieved, almost-grateful expression turning into a scowl, once she realised Nell had no intention of getting out of bed for her.

The darkness and pressure against her eyes made them ache with tiredness. Nell wanted Sofia to finish so she could finally sleep. For all her misery being stuck in Tottenham, there was something to be said about having a comfortable bed waiting for her at the end of the day.

Once all sounds of movement had ceased, Nell opened her eye a just crack to see if she had finished. The woman had her hands on her lower back as she stretched her spine; Nell caught a soft wince. It seemed likely, now that she thought about it, that Sofia had spent many nights sleeping in her stays – a hellish prospect, in Nell’s opinion.

Sofia stood there, now with her hands on her hips, still not getting into bed. It was difficult to tell, because of her hair being in the way, but she seemed to be looking down at herself.

‘What’s keeping you up now?’ asked Nell impatiently.

‘My shift.’

Nell sat up abruptly. ‘Well, you’re not taking it off!’

‘As if I –’ She paused and Nell could imagine the bitter look on her face. ‘I need a new one. This one is ruined.’

Like her dress, it was a once-fine garment that had experienced far too much distress; the last barrier between Sofia’s body and squalor, and it had sustained lasting damage from both sides over the course of two months, including some blood – a sight which made Nell finally avert her eyes.

‘Don’t tell me I’m being unreasonable,’ Sofia said defensively. ‘You can’t fault me for wanting a replacement.’

Nell’s first thought was that they could steal one easily on their way out of the town, as someone would surely be drying out their linens.

‘Look... I’ll see if his missus is still up. Maybe she’ll let you wash up more, too. I’ll say that it’s urgent – that you’ve fleas or something. Probably not even a lie.’

With a great groan, Nell sat back up in her bed. After grabbing her pistol out from under the pillow, she exited the room, cursing herself for getting into the situation at all.

Over the last several years, Nell had slept through chatter, weeping, the agonised moans of injured and dying soldiers – even through the unending cracks of distant gunfire.

Sharing a room with the woman who had tried to kill her, however, was proving to be more difficult than she could handle.

Her tricorn hat rested upon her face, blotting out all light and trapping the scent of hair against her. She had needed to put her hat there, because before she did, she couldn’t keep herself from looking over at the other woman.

Every time she had begun to slip into dreams, she had felt as if Sofia was suddenly atop her, ready to kill her. So vividly, she would feel the weight of her upon her legs and torso, pinning her down; she’d feel her fingers and nails digging into her neck. Over and over, Nell had jolted awake in her attempts to physically buck her off.

Of course, the other woman wasn’t doing anything of the sort. She had no need to resort to that sort of barbarism, even if it was hard to imagine that Sofia didn't still want to kill her, at least a bit; after all, she certainly had been quick to fight back after Nell had punched her in the face.

Nell thought of how ghastly Sofia had looked when they had met earlier that day: all haggard and with blood on her bared teeth, like the monsters people make up to scare their children into behaving. She really had looked like a witch, just then.

Now, after some washing, with clean clothes, and when set against the background of the cosy room, the woman was different. The Sofia she had seen in the glow of the candles had looked more like a victim – like some battered woman with nowhere safe to sleep, and nowhere to go still when morning came.

Nell knew better than to trust the version of Sofia that had run her hands over the new shift she had been given, as if marvelling over the cleanliness of the simple linen; or the one that had spent several minutes adjusting her pillow, as if she had forgotten how to use it; or the one that had mumbled what could have been a ‘thank you’ a few minutes after they had both gone silent. Nell had ignored her, of course.

It was easier to think of her as the hag she punched in the forest than the woman whose face she had bruised. She was in no mood to feel bad for someone who had given her more than enough incentive to have left her and her monstrous brother to die out there in the cold.

Nell was tired, achingly so. It took effort, but she was able to clear her mind, fill it with some tavern song she had heard hundreds of times. She focused on the comfort of having a bed beneath her, warm blankets weighing upon her, and soon...

Sofia was back at it – pinning her to the bed, gripping her neck, and laughing with all the subtlety of a villain from a play. This time, Nell had one hand free, but it flailed rather uselessly when she tried to reach under her pillow –

‘Will you stop moving?’ Sofia’s sharp, irritated voice came from the other side of the small room.

Nell pulled her hand away from where she had been clutching her own neck. Her breaths came so quick, it was like she really hadn’t been breathing. Abruptly, she sat up – felt the world spin a little – and was eventually able to pick out the other woman’s form in the darkness.

‘Good,’ she breathed. ‘You’re still over there.’

‘Yes,’ Sofia said obviously. ‘I will not leave Thomas.’

‘No, no, I – Oh, never mind,’ Nell said, trying to burrow back into the bed. She rubbed her clammy face against the pillow; the pistol’s mechanisms rattled softly beneath.

‘I thought you were having a kind of fit,’ Sofia admitted.

Nell only grunted.

‘It was... disturbing.’ She lifted a hand to gesture towards Nell’s bed, adding, ‘And loud.’

‘Thanks for your concern,’ Nell said sarcastically. She almost wanted to tell her that she was the cause of the bad dreams, but maybe she would enjoy hearing that – Nell didn’t know her enough.

Sofia’s bed gave a tormented creak. Reluctantly, Nell lifted her head back off her pillow to look over, and she was peeved to see her getting out of the bed.

‘What are you doing?’ Nell asked suspiciously, sitting up fully as the woman came towards her. Sofia did not answer.

When she got too close, Nell put out a hand to stop her. Due to the blackness of the room, she couldn’t see where on Sofia’s body her hand had landed; but wherever she was touching was soft beneath the linen shift. Sofia froze in place. Nell was tempted to try to feel around, to see if she could determine what the hell she was touching.

‘Don’t ever touch me,’ Sofia said, sounding equally bewildered and angry. She did not step away, however, or remove the hand that lay upon her, so Nell herself took it back.

Still, she didn’t like Sofia’s tone.

‘Oh, sorry...’ Nell mocked. ‘I forgot you’ve never been touched by a peasant before.’

A small, haughty scoff in the darkness was all it took to fire Nell up, after the day she had and the nightmares she had been giving her.

Nell reached for her again, this time finding the sleeve of Sofia’s borrowed shift. She shook it about and twisted it – just enough to leave it dishevelled, and its wearer flustered, but not damaged. She would have done something to Sofia’s hair, instead, if she had been able to reach.

Sofia slapped at Nell’s forearm until she finally let go, then stepped beyond her reach. Nell could hear Sofia’s heavy breathing alongside her own; she could feel those cold eyes glaring at her through the darkness. She couldn’t help but grin a little at having known she had just taken her by surprise.

‘What was you coming over here for, anyway? Didn’t we agree that this was my side of the room? I ain’t swapping with ya.’

Nell watched as the shadowed figure suddenly stooped down. She sat up further to look over the side of the bed, to see what in the world she was doing. Nell reached under her pillow, finding the grip of her pistol. Silently, she drew it and pointed it at the space where Nell figured that Sofia’s head would be when she reappeared.

When Sofia saw the pistol, she froze. It seemed like she was waiting for Nell to shoot her; and Nell was waiting for her to give her a reason. When neither of those things happened, Nell tossed the pistol down into her lap; it sank into the hollow between her ajar thighs, nestled in the blanket, very near to her crotch. Nell hadn’t intended to put it there, but she wasn’t exactly going to reach down and adjust it. She just hoped Sofia hadn’t seen.

Returning her gaze to Sofia, she found her view of her interrupted by something large, which was being held out to her. Nell tried to hide her confusion as she reached for it. The stiff felt and weight of it was immediately familiar to her.

‘Oh, I didn’t know it fell,’ Nell said as she ducked her head, tipping the hat onto it. Tilting it in a show of gratitude, she reluctantly added, ‘Well, thanks for coming over and fetching it for me.’

‘I didn’t. I would never have come over for that,’ she said, reaching for the door handle. Nell blinked against the light that flooded into the room, however dim. Sofia stepped into the light, but her face was turned in such a way that it was still left in shadow.

‘It was in my way.’

The door clicked shut behind Sofia.

‘Well,’ Nell replied, despite her lack of company, ‘I guess it’s lucky you didn’t blow it up, like everything else in your way.’

For at least a minute after shutting the door, Sofia waited, trying to fix the sleeve that Jackson had ruffled. Sofia expected she would come after her, either to stop her from seeing Thomas or because she didn’t trust her to go alone. Sofia listened to Jackson’s shifting on the bed; she could hear that she was mumbling to herself.

When the noises ceased, Sofia made her way to the stairs. It felt strange to be barefoot; strange to not be freezing, despite wearing only a shift. She tried to ignore how bare she felt without all the layers she had been stuck in for two months. As she went down the stairs, she trailed her hand along the wall next to her, ready to lean upon it if she became breathless from the exertion; even her little scuffle with Jackson moments before had tired her out.

The knowledge that she’d be going back into that room – that she was expected to sleep with her so near – left Sofia scowling by the time she made it to the open door of the room where her brother rested.

He appeared to be asleep, as did Charles – his gaoler. Her bare feet aided her in silently moving across the room to reach her brother.

Thomas looked so small to her in that narrow bed, boyish and fragile. He was covered by what appeared to be several blankets, despite the impressive heat coming from the little fireplace. It was the first time in at least a week that he was not shivering from both cold and fever.

She looked around the room in search of something to sit upon, and her eyes fell upon a short stool; she carried it to his bedside, setting it down gently so as to not disturb the sleeping men. She settled onto the stool and studied her brother’s peaceful face.

After an indeterminate amount of time – in which she had nearly fallen asleep, and had only caught herself because of the sensation of falling – she saw Thomas’s lashes flutter, then part to reveal his blue eyes; his pupils were tiny and his eyelids seemingly couldn’t open more than halfway.

‘Sofia.’

She smiled at his sleepy voice. Had his hand not been tucked beneath the blanket, she would have taken it. Instead, she leant closer to him and reached out to rest her palm against his cheek.

‘Sofia,’ he repeated. She nodded, waiting for him to say something else.

‘Poynton,’ was what he said next, causing her to recoil.

Sofia frowned and cast a look at Charles, who appeared to still be asleep.

‘Poynton is dead. He died two months ago. I killed him.’

‘Are spirits the dead?’

It took her a moment to try to figure out what he was asking. For clarification, she asked, ‘What do you mean by that, Thomas?’

‘Can you control them?’

Sofia cast another look towards the man she had passed when she came through the door.

‘I have communicated with – I think – spirits, but I don’t know anything about them.’

‘They’re people –?’ It sounded like it could be a question, but she wasn’t certain.

‘I don’t know, Thomas.’

‘You... should.’

It was disturbing to hear him speaking like a child. She reached over and lifted the tiny bottle she found by his bedside, which she assumed was one type of medicine he was being treated with. She couldn’t make out much of the stained label besides that it began with the letter L. She set it back down carefully.

‘Are you in very much pain right now?’

He shook his head and smiled at her, but the tip of his tongue seemed to have caught between his teeth, making him look silly. He was drunk. Whatever he was given clearly had alcohol as one of its ingredients – a fact which made her stomach drop.

‘Good,’ she said, forcing a smile and leaning close to place a kiss on his clammy forehead. ‘Your recovery is all that matters to me.’

‘Sofia, you should know.’

‘Know what, Thomas?’ she asked, keeping her voice gentle.

‘The spirits.’

She shut her eyes. She was now understanding why Jackson had been so annoyed with her earlier for the sheer volume of questions she had asked.

‘You should find out. Otherwise... use you.’

‘Have you slept?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Then go to sleep. We’ll talk when you’re not –’ She paused, thinking about how to phrase it in a way that did not sound like she was unnerved by him. ‘We’ll speak when you’re feeling better.’

‘What if don’t?’ he slurred as she carefully rolled him onto his side. If he was as drunk as he sounded, she did not want to risk him vomiting in his sleep and suffocating.

‘Sorry if I haunt you.’

‘Thomas, be quiet,’ she said firmly. ‘I don’t want to hear this. You’re being treated now and you will recover.’

Her hand passed over his hair, not lingering long enough to catch its oiliness on her fingers; she had spent too long scrubbing them clean to take the risk. His whiskers were even more overgrown than his hair; his beard had grown in uneven, scragged patches upon his jaw and cheeks.

Once more, she lifted up the bottle with the mottled label that started with an L. She squinted through the dim lighting and tried to make out more letters, but could only decipher that it ended with an M.

Mildly frustrated by the mystery, she set the bottle down with a frown. To her relief, she saw that her brother’s eyes had shut; his slack jaw and deepening breathing brought a small smile to her face. She was tempted to pat his cheek to praise him for listening, but she didn’t dare.

Very slowly, she got up from the stool, trying not to let it creak or scrape against the floor; she put it back exactly where she had found it, then looked to make sure she had set the bottle down in the same place it had been before she lifted it. For whatever reason, she felt as if she needed to leave no signs that she had been there.

As she turned to look back into the room one last time, she saw Charles’ eyes snap shut. It didn’t surprise her. It was not as if she was expecting privacy, after the way Jackson had refused to let her undress in peace.

She hated the situation, but she knew that if the two had not found them, or had not chosen to help – decided against ‘being the hero’, as Jackson had phrased it – Thomas would not have survived. Even if he did not survive now with their help, she still recognised that it was by their mercy that he was given a chance.

Sofia despised Nell Jackson, but she was determined not to forget this act of compassion, even if it started with a red cheek and a bleeding lip.

Chapter Text

As troubling as Thomas’s words had been, and as unsettled as they had left her, by the time Sofia returned upstairs, irritation had risen and become her dominant emotion. When she reached the door, she held out her arm and turned it to and fro, checking to see if Jackson’s assault on her sleeve had left any lasting damage.

Her jaw clenched as she pushed open the door. She tilted her head just enough to see the nearest bed; it was still occupied, but there was no reaction to the small amount of light spilling in from the hallway. Jackson’s face was once more covered by her hat. Her chest rose and fell slowly; when she breathed out, Sofia could hear her respiration collecting noisily inside the hat, like a softer version of blowing into a bottle.

In that moment, Jackson would have been so easy to kill. She let that thought pass, however, and made her way back to her designated bed, taking a seat. After spending months without a bed, she would have expected sleep to come easily, no matter how unbearable the company.

Sofia could only hope that the woman wouldn’t start snoring, or thrashing in her sleep again. Even the soft muttering from before had been unnerving. At first she had thought Jackson was saying ‘bully’ and thus accusing her of being one in whatever dreams she may have been having about her. Then she recognised it to be the name Billy, and put two and two together: it was surely the name of her dead husband, one Captain William Jackson.

If she remembered correctly, there had been soldiers passing through Tottenham a few months before she herself married Lord Wilmot in 1701, and those soldiers – for reasons she could never quite comprehend, from the standpoints of neither logic nor desire – had on their way out of the village taken with them several eager young women, all of whom were willing to enter hasty marriages for the sake of... Sofia did not know. She never found soldiers to be intriguing in any sense, least of all as possible conversation partners. Perhaps the village had a distinct shortage of eligible men at the time – a number which was only made smaller by how many would join the soldiers with similar enthusiasm, excited to prove their mettle.

Even Thomas had threatened to join them, expressly to anger their father. He was, after all, the only Blancheford child that could possibly be considered as an heir.

Feeling like she should be doing something more productive than glaring at Jackson, she picked up the comb she had been given and set to work. She winced softly when it immediately got caught in a tangle. Her eyes watered as she fought her way through it. She cast another look at the sleeping woman, who had not stirred.

There was something so odd about thinking of Nell Trotter as ever having been one of those Tottenham girls who were so eager to marry; based on what she had heard and seen of her, Sofia found it hard to believe the woman had been willing to marry at all – to become Nell Jackson, a man’s wife. Sofia figured she must be quite a different person when in love – very different indeed from the boyish, roguish archetype she seemed to perfectly encapsulate, despite her sex. She assumed her husband must have been able to either smooth or else ignore her coarse edges.

It was difficult for Sofia to relate to love of the kind that would lead to voluntary marriage. She knew the protective love she had for her brother, and once for Rasselas. She had never been able to change the obedient, disappointing love she had for her father, but recognised it in the immediate grief she felt when she knelt beside his bleeding body. She knew the duller ache of mourning she still felt when she thought of her beloved mother. And Sofia knew all-too-well the misery of waiting for any semblance of affection to save her – to deliver to her that love she had been expected to develop for her husband. She knew the feeling of looking over at him in the night, wishing he’d disappear, or that she’d wake from her endless bad dream.

Marriage for her had nothing to do with love, only duty. She knew it not to be an uncommon sentiment; she knew marriage to be a contract, an exchange or rebalancing of status. It was more than that for some women, but it could never be for her.

At a very young age, Sofia had realised that she would never marry a man for love; she’d marry because it was expected – nay, required – of her, no matter how distressed just the thought of it made her feel. Even if her father wouldn’t explicitly use her for personal gain or status, she still had known herself to be something he would need to eventually give away – or else, what would a woman like her do with her life?

Besides, people would assume there was something wrong with her if she never married.

They would be right to assume that she was defective, in a certain sense, because there was something wrong with her: something deeply shameful that had always lurked at the corners of her mind; the thing which took her breath away when she passed by a certain painting kept – for modesty’s sake – in the least-used corridor of Broadwater Hall; the reason she had always been afraid to spend too much time amongst the girls her age in Tottenham. Sofia had vowed that she would never allow anyone to notice, thought that she could stamp it out – but it had only worsened with age. No matter what, she had refused to be a burden upon her family or the object of tawdry gossip. She knew that her best bet was getting married, no matter her personal feelings.

Still, it had shaken her when she had been informed of her first marriage proposal, not long after she had come out – that is, made her formal entrance into society as a woman. Immediately, she had pleaded with her father not to be forced to marry the man. She had been lucky, because he had disapproved of the match; the man was known to be less-than-honourable in his personal life, and Lord Blancheford would not see his only daughter degraded by such a person, no matter their wealth. Emboldened by his protectiveness of her and his lenience, Sofia had gotten away with rejecting the next three suitors, too – but she soon had seen that her father’s patience was waning.

In the end, it had bought her only three months of additional childhood, for soon there was another proposal: this from one Lord Wilmot; he was a wealthy, respected man – who just so happened to be old enough to be her father. But he did not live overly far from Tottenham, unlike some of the other attempted suitors, and was always spoken of positively by all who knew him.

Lord Wilmot had become a widower half a decade earlier and had ostensibly been too full of grief to seek a new wife until that point, but like the others who had asked for her hand, he had seen Sofia in court and... Well, she was never told specific reasons why she was desired by any of them, but as she had never interacted with a single one of them, she was left to assume they simply thought she was attractive – a thought which made her wish she had shown up in court wearing rags and speaking in tongues.

She knew Lord Wilmot was likely the best man she would find, yet her first instinct had been to plead – crying and whimpering pathetically – once more with her father to be spared.

Once her initial panicked, childish willfulness had been broken and her crying had quieted, her father had finally entertained her pleas to have a conversation about it with him; he had refused to take her seriously until after she had settled down and started acting like an adult.

‘Marrying Lord Wilmot, Sofia,’ her father had told her, his voice patient, ‘will guarantee a life of comfort for you that I will not be able to ensure you will have once I am gone.’

She had felt a tear slide down the bridge of her nose; it was shaken from the tip as she nodded to show she was listening. She had been afraid to sniffle again, in case it made him go back to ignoring her, punishing her for her immaturity.

Her father had continued, and like when he had spoken to his own mother on her deathbed twelve years prior, his voice was gentle: ‘Sofia, once you are wed, you shall be his responsibility. Lord Wilmot is not one to take his responsibilities lightly.’

Sofia had pressed her hand to her cheek to trap another tear as it slid.

‘He was, by all accounts, loyal to his last wife to the very end. Just as I was to your mother.’ As if he was talking to a child, he had asked, ‘Do you remember?’

She had bitten her lip to hold back her frown, to keep from showing in her expression how his comparison disturbed her.

‘What I’ve heard, too, is that he has raised a fine young man. Thomas and Lord Wilmot’s son are close in age – you’ve heard?’

How could she not have heard that the man she was to marry had a son who was nearly her own age?

When she had not responded, her father had sat up a little straighter and fixed his eyes upon her with more scrutiny.

‘Your alternative, of course,’ her father had said, his tone now normal once more – that is to say, sharp and authoritative, ‘is to stay unmarried, leaving you under Thomas’s care. I need not tell you that he is not the responsible sort.’

Again, she had given him a reluctant, obedient nod – a motion which had made her tight throat ache.

‘Please, Sofia. Accept Lord Wilmot’s marriage offer graciously, before he rescinds it. I do not want to have to worry about your future.’ Then he had put his hand on the crown of her head and began to stroke her hair awkwardly with his thumb. ‘I know... that you are...’

His words had made her look up at him with sudden anxiety. From his frown, it had been clear to her that he was trying to figure out how to bring up a difficult topic. The hairs on the back of her neck had begun to stand on end, and she had worried he’d feel a change on her scalp beneath his firm palm.

‘I know that women are, at times, put in situations that seem very unfair. Such is the duty of your sex, I’m afraid; just as we men have our own great burdens.’

Sofia had allowed him to speak, to compare her future as a wife to the futures of men her age who felt similarly ill-prepared to make their way in the world – the world of men. A world into which she would only ever be able to glance, furtively and covetously, and only while standing behind a man to whom it was being offered – often undeservingly.

Her father had continued to pet her hair clumsily; his artlessness at comforting her was, she had known, born from many years of limited physical affection towards his children. His petting merely had made a mess of her dark locks, at that point; she would later take her hair down entirely and redo it – even though she had not planned to be anywhere except shut away inside her room, and she would not care what the servants would think if they saw her in such a state. She simply disliked having messy hair.

‘As I’ve told you before, neither your mother nor I were eager to be married, when we first met. You feel too young, don’t you?’ He had waited until he felt Sofia nod against his palm, then continued: ‘Well, I would say that until a woman marries, she’ll forever feel like a child, and undoubtedly continue to be viewed as one. Don’t you want to grow?’

Sofia wanted to grow, but not like this.

‘A couple months into our marriage, I would say that your mother had become a new person.’

Sofia did not want to be a new person; she wanted only to have better options than were afforded to her. She had felt another whimper climb up her throat in search of an escape she refused to give.

Lord Blancheford’s hands had moved to take his daughter by the cheeks, handling her with all the cautiousness he would a fragile doll, and had tilted her head up so that she was forced to look into his eyes: pale blue and slightly glassy like her own – her only unconditional inheritance from him.

‘Your mother did grow to love me, Sofia, and I her. Love simply cannot be reasonably expected to happen before marriage. People need time, and believe me when I say that marriage will give you ample amounts of that.’ He had smiled down at her, although she had recognised the smile to be affected. ‘Children will also help, when the time comes.’

Her cheeks had grown bloodless beneath the cover of his hands. She had fought the urge to shudder. Her looming wedding night, and all that it would entail – many of the details still outside of her knowledge, at the time – had been so poignantly dreadful for her to think about, she had grown accustomed to separating her specific fear of it from the dread she held for all other aspects of marriage.

‘I don’t need to say that your mother loved you, I’m sure. You and Thomas.’ His mouth’s corners had tipped into a frown when he spoke his son’s name.

He put on another smile and, with such sincerity, went on to say something that Sofia would never forget: ‘You know, Sofia, I believe that a woman’s unique capacity for love is her greatest strength.’

His words had stolen the breath from Sofia’s lungs. She had blinked fiercely, fighting against the fresh tears welling up.

She had felt no comfort from his belief as he voiced it, but rather a sense of being stripped of something deep and unnameable which she cherished, but could not quite place. Nonetheless, with nowhere to hide due to the way his hands held her face, she had managed to keep her gaze soft, as empty as she could; feminine and palatable; the agreeable mask she wore, well-cultivated from a life of near-constant use.

Love. A woman’s greatest strength: love. For whom? A husband? Children? Sofia had felt a bubble of unvoiced laughter as she thought, Her brother? Thomas would have sniggered, had he been in the room. He would have been jeering at their father’s words the whole time.

Yet she had wished in that moment that Thomas had been there with her in the room. For all his deplorable manners, she had known that when it came to the subject of her marriage – and her accompanying dread – he had been her only ally. Though he had not yet met Lord Wilmot, he would insult him whenever he was brought up in conversation. The insults were completely baseless, often juvenile. Their father had scolded him repeatedly for what he presumed was Thomas trying to upset her – but she knew he wasn’t. Sofia knew her brother, and she knew he had been doing it to say, ‘She can do better. She deserves better.’  

‘Love,’ her father had repeated, dragging her out of her thoughts again. He had said the word as if it would soothe her, when in actuality, something about his repetition only made the moment feel more unreal, more eerie and unsettling.

In that moment, like many others, Sofia had felt that her supposed feminine capacity for love only existed to be a shameful weakness; a dark bruise she needed to hide, lest its visibility tempt someone to prod it, just so that they might watch her squirm. Thomas would do that sometimes, when they were children, because he enjoyed getting her attention – even if that attention was in the form of a silent glare. She had always been expected to be mature, to compensate for his poor behaviour.

For as long as she could recall, she had always sought to be above him and his childish ways; to be recognised by others as being the more honourable of the two Blancheford siblings – even if they never were to be equals, socially, and thus she knew her efforts would never be rewarded with anything more than occasional praise. But praise given to her at her brother’s expense had been the most reliable praise she could get, and it became more abundant as Thomas’s relationship with their father soured. And God, was Sofia desperate for it. Of course, she would only come to realise the severity of her desperation years later, after shamefully reflecting upon how easily she had been cajoled by Poynton into his regicide plot.

Thomas’s habit of pestering her whenever she happened to have a bruise was something of which he had, blessedly, grown out – if only because she had taken revenge upon him for it when they were in their younger teenage years: She had been directed to spend time reading to him while he had been recovering in bed after taking a small fall from his pony – leaving him to her sisterly mercy. (He never did seem to forgive the horse; he wanted it replaced before he’d agree to go riding again.) He still didn’t trust her if her hand came too near to his left hip.

‘Sofia?’

She had raised her eyes to her father’s, blinking back visions of a chestnut horse’s coat and the gentle hands of a familiar stableboy.

‘Yes?’ Her voice had come rougher than usual. She gave her throat a little clear, done softly so as to not be unpleasant – too softly to do anything to dislodge the lump in her throat. Bitterly, she had made the decision not to clear it again, at the risk that it would not be feminine of her.

Her eyebrows had drawn together as she waited for her father to speak his mind – something she feared she would never do again.

‘I want you to give your heart to him, darling, so that you may never live a life of uncertainty.’

The breath she had then taken drew the weight of her fate into her lungs, where it would stay, she thought, for the rest of her life.

‘I will.’

She had spoken those same two words a couple weeks later, but to a different man, and in an altogether worse context.

Sofia had been careful to never again show signs of her hesitation towards marriage – and later, towards her husband – after that day in her father’s office. Even more careful had she been to hide her unhappiness from her father and brother whenever they had visited her at the Wilmot estate. Only the servants would see her lethargy; would recognise her sighs and vacant stares as melancholy, rather than personality – although nobody in the estate ever attempted to help or comfort her. She had suspected it had been out of fear that if they drew her attention, she would take to making their lives miserable as a way to fill her time – as unhappy wives sometimes did when their own lives were beyond their control.

The worst days of her marriage were usually the ones where Wilmot’s son – the man she had to call her stepson – came to visit, when he had time off from his education. She had understood immediately upon meeting him that he could no more see her as a mother figure or family than she could see him as – well, anything to her, other than an unsettling reminder that she had been brought to her new home as a replacement of what had been lost. 

Nicholas Wilmot was intelligent, ambitious, curious – and he held the sincerest conviction that a woman could be none of those things, for they were all traits limited to the realm of men. His own father would occasionally challenge him when he was being particularly antagonistic towards Sofia, so long as she did not first rise up to his taunts – but that required a level of self-control she did not always possess.

Usually, their fights would begin with Nicholas gloating about his schooling. Sofia would offer him an innocuous compliment or simply congratulate him; which he would then – making full use of his studies of philosophical debate – twist and turn into a slight against him.

Rarely would Lord Wilmot intervene once the quarrel had started. She was always perfectly aware of her husband’s annoyed and disapproving looks, but she had operated under the assumption that he would stop her if he decided that she had crossed any lines. She had always kept her tone mild, never raised her voice, and did not stoop to personal attacks – unlike Nicholas.

As much as she had despised him, there was a part of her that had almost felt relief the moment she’d see him begin to sneer; when he’d put his drink or his knife and fork down, very civilly, and straighten up in his chair to use his height against her, so that he may better look upon her with disdain. She had hated him and she had known that he took nothing she said seriously – besides, of course, the veiled insults he provoked. Least of all did he ever recognise her ability to keep up with him in a fight, despite the fact she had not been afforded the same higher education which he enjoyed. She held nothing but contempt for him and wished she never had to suffer his presence, but when they had fought, it had been the only time she had allowed herself to express her rage and misery – even if she still had to hold back considerably.

Usually, their fighting would end when Lord Wilmot finished his meal. Occasionally, if she was winning, Nicholas would rise out of his chair and smile bitterly at her; he would tell her that he was not going to expend any more energy in debating an ignorant person. Not once in her three years of marriage had Sofia been the one who gave up first.

The servants doted on him, the same way Mrs Belgrave would on the rare occasion that she returned to Broadwater Hall – usually directly after Christmas, once her duty to her new household was complete and the celebrations at the Wilmot estate had ended. To the servants who had watched him grow up, he was still the little boy who hid behind his mother’s skirts when dogs got too close; who picked flowers for her at every chance he got.

To Sofia, he was an obnoxious man whom she could not reconcile with that boy, no matter how many sweet stories her handmaid told her – against her wishes – as she dressed her; she talked about him the most on the days when they awaited his arrival. At least his presence had been only an infrequent torture for Sofia; there were times of the year when she did not have to see him for months.

The guarantee of his presence in December, however, made it a month she dreaded, and it was on Christmas in 1704 that Sofia and Nicholas had their worst fight of all.

Sofia had needed only to survive one more party: just one more evening of being ignored by Lord Wilmot’s friends of his own age, who did not know how to speak to such a young woman; one more evening of hearing Nicholas loudly boast about his quickly-growing list of academic accomplishments; one more night of sleeping so far away from her husband that she was in danger of falling off the bed.

Then she would be free, at least for a couple weeks. She’d be on her way home to receive her twice-yearly hug from her father. She’d get to sleep in her childhood bed, one in which no man had ever slept. She’d see Rasselas, however fleetingly. Mrs Belgrave would call her a sweetheart and show Sofia in a dozen little ways that she was by far her favourite Blancheford child. Thomas would no doubt be drunk most of the time, but she knew she could handle whatever moods the alcohol put him in; that he would somehow still be better company than anyone at the Wilmot estate. Sofia would politely avoid questions about her life away from Tottenham, out of the simple want to spend as little time as possible thinking about the place and people to which she would all-too-soon be returned.

But before her trip, Sofia had needed to get through that last party.

Christmas had been the previous Lady Wilmot’s favourite time of year, according to the servants and guests who would incessantly inform Sofia of that fact, with ample tales of her goodhearted cheeriness, every single year. The woman had apparently been the very embodiment of what all ladies should aspire to be: hospitable and dedicated to making others around them happy.

With each passing month of being a wife, Sofia lacked more and more of those qualities for which her predecessor had been lauded. It got harder to get out of bed each morning, and it was only the idea of her husband returning to the bed and wanting something from her that made her get up some days.

Still, she had tried her best to make a good impression upon the guests that Christmas, to limited success.

‘And you, Lady Wilmot? Pardon, but how old did you say you were?’

She had looked up from her wine, searching the faces of the small crowd that had gathered, which she had forced herself to join. The wine had not helped as much as she had hoped, and had only made her feel slow and numb. She did not know how the conversation had arrived there, nor if she had said her age already.

Nicholas had unfortunately been within that crowd, and the usage of her title made him sneer.

‘I’ll be twenty-four in three days,’ she had answered the group as a whole, because she had not been able to decipher who had posed the question.

When a few people murmured their congratulations, she had put on a smile and bowed her head graciously. No matter how uncomfortable she felt at such parties, it was rarely the fault of any of the guests; they were tactful enough to keep any gossip beyond her earshot. Even if she had suspected that many of them found her to be aloof, boring, and overall lacking in most qualities that had endeared the late Lady Wilmot to them, they were too polite to show it.

‘You know that many consider it to be obscene to be born on the same day as Christ?’ said Nicholas. While she had fought to keep her immediate flash of anger invisible, he had raised his voice so more people would hear him: ‘You certainly cut it close, didn’t you?’

‘You understand that the day on which a person is born is not something they can control?’

‘Only twenty-four,’ he had said with a tut, flashing a white-toothed grin at everyone – except Sofia. ‘You wasted no time, did you?’

Sofia had turned her face away in an attempt not to let him goad her into responding.

‘What do you mean, sire?’ had asked one of the men, a puzzled smile on his powdered face. He had been unfamiliar to her when he arrived, and the wine muddled her memories of their introduction. But he clearly had not yet picked up on the animosity between stepmother and stepson that the others so deftly ignored.

‘What, is it not every little girl’s dream to marry young? Marry rich, if they can.’ If Nicholas had noticed the uncomfortable way some of the women had looked down at their glasses or towards their husbands, he had ignored them. ‘To burden a good man with her company, to stifle his intellect and ambitions with her feminine presence.’

Even the men who had been listening had begun to look uncomfortable. She saw one man take his wife’s hand, lacing their fingers together; the sight had only made her more bitter.

‘Your father will be pleased,’ she said with a tight smile, ‘to see how much you’ve enjoyed the punch tonight, Nicholas.’

‘Don’t,’ he began sharply, ‘you scold me. I am no child.’

‘Thank the Lord for small blessings,’ she had said into her glass as she took another long sip of wine. Shutting her eyes, she had willed for him to stop talking to her; to find some other conversation; for someone to intervene and redirect his attention. But if will alone could have gotten her anywhere in life, she never would have ended up married in the first place.

‘Oh, but you’re too selfish to be a mother, aren’t you? Although I’m sure if my father didn’t already have an heir, then you’d be willing –’

‘You’re dishonouring your father.’

Anyone slow enough to have thought them only bantering before had by then realised, no doubt with great discomfort, that there was no love or even teasing respect behind their interactions.

‘He dishonoured himself by marrying you!’

At the sound of his son’s raised voice, the elder Lord Wilmot had finally taken notice. Sofia could see him frowning in their direction from across the room.

‘Look at you! Twenty-four. What kind of awful woman marries a man with a son her age?’ He had put a balled fist to his chest, making eye contact with a man standing near him, clearly trying to appeal to him when he said, ‘I’m twenty-one! This woman, this girl – She thinks she’s my mother’s equal, just because my father lets her wear her jewels, her gowns, use her title –’ he hissed, ‘– sleep in their bed!’

‘Your mother is dead,’ Sofia snapped. The wine had loosened her tongue. ‘Get over it and grow up.’

‘Stop trying to replace her! You’re nothing, nothing compared to her!’

‘Look at you!’ she had echoed his earlier words, mocking him. ‘Twenty-one, highly-educated, and yet wailing like an infant over your mother! Then again, she was, I’m sure, the only woman that will ever love you.’

His face had grown redder than it already had been under the effects of the strong punch. He had suddenly gasped for breath, so greatly had his anger begun to affect him.

‘I hate you!’ he had shouted at her, taking a step towards Sofia. He sounded so petulant, she had nearly laughed.

Lord Wilmot had already begun to make his way over to them, and his pace had picked up at the sound of his son’s outburst.

‘Sir, please! It’s Christmas,’ someone had pleaded. Some people had stared at Nicholas, others at Sofia, and others at their own shoes or into their glasses of punch.

Sofia had felt her arm being taken by Lord Wilmot; his grip on her was not rough at all, but she still could not have shaken it off without a struggle. He began to take her to the nearest door.

‘Merry Christmas!’ she had called back to Nicholas. Judging by their hushed gasps, everyone in the room had recognised the venom with which she had said the words, and knew that she meant it as a veiled curse.

‘Fuck you!’ Nicholas had bellowed after her, with far less subtlety. So childish he had looked as he had glared and pouted, brandishing his empty glass as if he wished to throw it after her. Sofia had finally been unable to hold back her laughter, and it poured from her in a mad yelp.

‘Good night, everyone,’ her husband had drily bid their guests as he took Sofia out of the room with him.

The two of them had swept through the corridors, with Sofia following closely behind her husband. She quickly had begun to sober – not because the wine had faded, but because of her dread; the possible ramifications of the scene she had just made alongside her stepson had begun to sink in.

With unhappy obedience, she had made her way into their bedroom when Lord Wilmot opened the door for her. Immediately after he closed it behind him, Sofia turned around, ready to defend herself.

‘Anthony, I didn’t –’

‘Don’t.’

Reluctantly, she tried an apology, instead: ‘Then, I’m... sorry.’ She could not help but speak the last word as if it had a bad taste.

‘Of all days to ruin, you two had to pick Christmas? Good God! Could you not have shown restraint?’

‘It’s not easy for me to be polite when your son treats me like I am worthless – calls me nothing – in front of an entire room of people. You’ll have to forgive me,’ she had told her husband through gritted teeth, ‘if I can’t find words that he won’t be offended by.’

‘Then don’t speak at all!’ Lord Wilmot had said, gesturing angrily with one hand as he began to undress with his other. He had never been a man who enjoyed wearing clothes any fancier than those which he wore on typical days, and his eagerness to remove the finery he had donned that night meant he had wasted no time in freeing himself of it as soon as he had the chance. ‘Simply let him have the last word! You’ve embarrassed me, Sofia.’

‘And he humiliates me at every opportunity!’

‘He needs more time to accept you,’ he had said dismissively.

‘I’ll never –’ It had been close, but she had caught herself just short of saying something regrettable. Instead, she had said, ‘We’ve been married three years, Anthony.’

It had been nearly exactly three, as they had married in late-December.

At some point during their hurried walk to their room upstairs, tears had begun to form in her eyes. In the gentle lighting of the bedroom, her damp cheeks had burned with humiliation and rage.

‘My relationship with him is never going to change,’ she had told him. ‘I’ll never find it in me to love him. It’s impossible.’

Anthony had not known it, but when she had said those words, she had not only been speaking of Nicholas. Under the cover of speaking about his son, she had finally said aloud what she knew even before she married him – and he had no idea, even if he no doubt had become aware, at some point, of her lack of love for him.

When she had finally looked at him, she had seen only mild pity on his middle-aged face.

‘That’s very disappointing to hear, Sofia,’ he had said unsympathetically. ‘Don’t share these thoughts with anyone, including my son.’

‘He already knows,’ she had said with a thick, miserable laugh. ‘He doesn’t care.’

‘He’ll grow up eventually, and maybe then, you two will have a better relationship. You must remember how young he is.’

‘He’s less than three years younger than me.’ In that moment, she had finally refused to disguise the disgust in her voice.

‘Women mature faster,’ he said with a wave of his hand. ‘He’s still unmarried. You were less mature, too, when we first married.’

She had waited for a moment, wanting to see what other terrible excuses for his son’s behaviour he would rattle off next. But he had merely stared at her, looking at her face more closely than he normally did; she had wondered exactly what he saw in it.

‘Do you regret marrying me?’ she had then asked, keeping her tone neutral. 

He had appraised her with an unfathomable expression. He had finally stripped down to just his shirt; the sight of the chest hairs peeking out from the top of it made her feel ill.

‘No.’

She had felt the muscles in her cheek twitch at his short answer.

‘You can say it if you do.’

‘I do not,’ he said emotionlessly.

He had looked old and tired as he had sat down upon the bed. Without his wig, his growing number of grey hairs were visible; the sight of them had made her grimace. But even if he had been young, she still would not have wanted him; no matter his age, she still would have regretted marrying him. Not that he had asked; not that he had even thought about her feelings enough to turn the question back upon her.

‘Sofia, get ready for bed,’ he had instructed, like she was a child.

‘I’d prefer to sleep in another room tonight,’ she had said as she turned towards the door.

‘No,’ he said in a tone that had made her stop. ‘There are no vacant rooms. Every last one is filled with people whom you’ve embarrassed me in front of tonight.’

She had known for a fact that there were still one or two available rooms in the large, usually-empty manor, but she had not wanted to keep arguing.

‘Then I’ll find some other room with a chair or sofa.’

‘No. You’re staying here. This conversation is over.’

She had felt the rage build inside her as she glared at the back of his head with undisguised hatred. Standing there, clenching and unclenching her fists, she had looked at him and wished more than ever that she was not shackled to him, that she did not have to suffer the life to which she had been sentenced – one as his wife. Despite his claim otherwise, she had been certain he hated their marriage, too.

Then she had finally realised just how angry he was at her and her rage was replaced with sorrow.

‘Am I still to see my family in two days?’ When at first he did not answer, a sob had come. She stepped towards him, begging, ‘Please, Anthony, I can’t bear it... I only want to see them.’

She had held her hand over her mouth, trying to stifle the sound of crying – to stifle the urge to scream in grief and revulsion over what her life had become. The time in which he withheld his response felt immeasurable and cruel.

‘Yes.’

Her exhale had come with such desperation, one would have thought his hands had been around her throat.

As was the case for so many men, he needed only to say one word – just one, and the world would move for him; all of her happiness was held within the space of a single breath of his.

Sofia would have given anything to have that kind of power.

Just as had been the case that night – and what felt like almost every night of her marriage – Sofia now found herself again sharing a room with someone she did not wish to be anywhere near. At least Jackson wasn’t near enough to touch her; at least they were not sharing a bed. Especially considering where the woman had accidentally touched Sofia earlier, upon her breast. Sofia still wasn’t wholly sure why she hadn’t slapped her hand away immediately, besides that it had stunned her.

She rolled her eyes when she heard Jackson groan softly in her sleep. Her combing slowed, then stopped, so she could listen more intently. She wondered if she’d hear the name Billy again. Thomas was prone to thrashing during his frequent nightmares, or otherwise sniggering in his more pleasant sleep, but he never said anything interesting.

In sleep, Nell Jackson did nothing more than breathe – and the simple fact that she was alive, was able to draw breath, had once been a source of Sofia’s resentment. Even now, she did not take great pleasure in it as she watched her chest rise and fall – watched it rise and fall again and again – even if Jackson was helping them.

But Sofia was tired and sore, and it was the first time in months she had a bed to sleep in. Even if it was small and threadbare, it was more comfortable than she remembered a bed could be. The last thing she thought about before falling asleep, however, was the absurdity of sharing a bedroom with her enemy, and how foolish it was that she still preferred it to the idea of ever again being married.

Chapter Text

A warm blanket. An absence of wind. Only the faintest notes of birdsong.

Sofia was indoors.

She had slept in her shift, nothing else. No stays were digging awkwardly into her torso; no skirts were there to trip her when she would eventually get up.

There was a dull ache that ran all throughout her body; it had been there for almost two months, but it had been easier to ignore when she did not have the comfort of a bed with which to contrast it.

In spite of her awareness of where she was not – a forest, a barn, a shed, an overturned rowboat, or any of the other pitiful shelters they had used, when available – she struggled to remember where she was and how she got there.

It took a shameful amount of time for her to even will herself to open her eyes. There was a small part of her that couldn’t help but worry that if she did, she would see the green and gold floral-patterned canopy that hung above the bed she shared with her husband.

She opened her eyes and saw only a plain wooden ceiling above her. Better yet, the bed she had slept in was not built for a second person. It was very narrow, the mattress was nowhere near as soft as any bed she had slept in before her exile, the sheets were rather coarse – but it was entirely hers.

The room itself, however, was not.

There was an unpleasant scraping sound coming from nearby. Just to be sure she wasn’t having yet another hideous nightmare, she lifted her head to look towards the source of the noise.

Nell Jackson was looking directly at her, and she had the handle of a spoon sticking out of her mouth. Her eyebrows raised as her gaze drifted up from the blankets covering Sofia to her eyes. Jackson turned away quickly when she was caught looking at her.

‘Mm-mmm-mm,’ came Jackson’s garbled greeting. Even when she swallowed and took the utensil from her mouth to gather up another spoonful of some thick liquid food, she didn’t bother translating what she had said.

Memories were trickling in slowly, but she could only work through them in reverse. Her bad dreams of her marriage – some of which inaccurately included Nell Jackson – she discarded swiftly as unworthy of further inspection. Charles Devereux’s eyes glittering with the fireplace’s sparks; Thomas’s unusual babbling; the bottle with L and M. The exiting of the shared room –

She drew the blankets up to her chin, trying to ignore the sounds of the other woman eating. The memories of the previous day continued to play out behind her eyelids, which still felt unbearably heavy.

Then she caught the scent of the food Jackson was eating and – despite her stomach being nowhere near as empty as it had been for over a month – she perked up.

‘I thought you said the man caring for my brother wasn’t providing us with food.’

This time, Jackson bothered to swallow before speaking.

‘No, I never said that.’ Her smug laugh annoyed Sofia. ‘No, what I said was that he didn’t have children for you to eat.’

Sofia rolled her eyes, sinking back into the pillow. Her lip and cheek ached as if to remind her again of her fight and the events which followed it the day before – as if to remind her not to let her guard down.

She did not want to get up, but she did not want to fall back asleep either and risk having more bad dreams of being married. In her time on the run, she had rarely even thought about that point in her life, and she could only blame herself now for the dreams; she should not have spent so much time brooding over such things before falling asleep. She tried to will herself to get out of bed, because she doubted Jackson would allow –

‘You can stay in bed for as long as you want.’

‘Oh.’

She was surprised, but sceptical.

‘Thank you...’

Sofia waited for the jab she knew Jackson would be unable to resist adding.

‘You’re easier to put up with when you’re asleep.’

‘Ah.’

Jackson scraped again at the bowl. It was hard to judge whether she was intentionally being loud or if she was simply not very self-aware. Sofia suspected both things were true.

‘Is Thomas awake?’

‘No, whatever he’s been given is keeping him asleep.’

Sofia lifted her head again to look at her. Her eyebrows drew together in concern.

‘But his condition is stable?’

Jackson shrugged. ‘So far as I know. Oh, and we’re calling him Robert. Charles came up with it.’

Sofia rolled her eyes. ‘And have I too been given a new name?’

Sofia watched Jackson lick her spoon clean. The woman’s eyes were narrowed thoughtfully – which made her worry that she was trying to come up with an alias for Sofia on the spot.

‘If you haven’t already told them a name, then let me choose –’

‘Margaret. There ya go. No, wait!’ She laughed and pointed at her with the spoon. ‘Maggie. That’s it. It’s perfect.’

Maggie was certainly not the name she would have chosen for herself. But it could have been worse, she thought, as she frowned at the ceiling.

‘Has Thomas slept this whole time?’

‘Do you mean Robert?’ Jackson pointedly asked. ‘Didn’t ask.’

Considering it was his health which made their two hunters agree to help them, she would have thought she would show marginally more interest in his well-being than was evidently the case.

‘Will I be allowed to see him?’

‘So long as you can keep quiet and not draw attention.’

‘My speciality,’ she muttered.

Despite Jackson’s invitation to stay in bed, Sofia finally sat up. The lopsided feeling of her head reminded her of how little progress she had made in taming her hair the night before. It was with reluctance that she took the comb from the bedside table and braced herself for another round of pain.

The comb snagged immediately when she put it to her hair.

‘Look...’

‘What?’ Sofia grunted in pain. She had no interest in whatever it was that Jackson was about to say, but she was trying not to antagonise her.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jackson set the bowl down and get up from her own bed.

‘The way you’re going about it, that’ll take you all day.’

‘I have the time,’ Sofia pointed out, but she was ignored.

‘Come on, get up,’ Jackson said as she drew nearer. ‘Up, up, up. Off the bed.’

Sofia complied with a roll of her eyes.

‘Now... turn around,’ she instructed.

‘No,’ Sofia immediately said; she was not even thinking about why the instruction was given, she simply hated the idea of Jackson being behind her.

Jackson scoffed and plucked the comb from Sofia’s fingers. Even when Sofia realised that Jackson only meant to help, she still panicked and tried to move away.

‘I don’t want to be touched by you.’

‘Sure you don’t, but I’ll be needing my comb back eventually, so we might as well get it over with.’

Jackson blew out a breath and tried to find the ends of her hair.

‘Did you really not try to keep it in a plait? It’s common sense.’

Sofia had put her hair up to try to protect it, but only after she and Thomas had put a safe distance between them and the home Jackson had forced them to leave. The fight against Poynton, the horse-ride – it had made her hair hopelessly untidy, and tying it back did little, as she would later realise. It had not been her intention to allow it to go to rack and ruin, but she had no options.

‘My comb was –’ She stopped herself short of saying it was stolen. ‘I lost it. By the time I had a chance to stop and try to fix my hair, it was too late. Pins, too, are easy to lose when you’re running for –’

‘Oh?’ Jackson asked, sounding almost cheerful. ‘Running for what, exactly?’

Sofia refused to answer.

The truth was that the expensive comb had been taken with the rest of Sofia’s belongings – along with the documents, books, jewellery, and everything else she had rushed to take on her way out of her ancestral home, after Jackson had put her on the run.

‘I had nothing but my fingers to use for almost two months. As it turns out, they aren’t very good for the job.’

The sound Jackson made was almost sympathetic, but not quite.

Sofia had not realised that she had already started combing, because the expected level of pain never came. Carefully, she turned her head just enough to see Jackson’s hands, and that’s when she felt it – the painful pulling of hair behind her ear, but also near the top of her scalp and all the way at the back – so bad was the matting, it was connected seemingly everywhere.

‘Keep your head straight,’ Jackson instructed. ‘Pretend I’m not here.’

‘God, if only you – ah!’

‘Accident!’ she teased in singsong.

Sofia decided to ignore her presence. Her body still ached, but she did her best to keep rigid; she kept her back as straight as if she was still wearing her stays.

After several minutes, Jackson spoke.

‘Well, now we’re getting somewhere. By somewhere, I mean closer to the root, so there ain’t much I can do to keep it from hurting.’

‘Says the person who greeted me yesterday by punching me in the face.’

Jackson used her little finger to lightly poke at the bruise on Sofia’s cheek. It would have smarted even if she had gently stroked it. Sofia clenched her jaw, trying not to show pain.

‘Yeah, well, I could have done worse,’ she told Sofia. She prodded it again, and this time Sofia flinched.

‘Why didn’t you?’ she asked, batting her hand away. ‘I’ve seen you fight like a demon.’

It took her a while to respond. In the silence, Sofia could hear the comb’s teeth sliding through her hair.

Finally, Jackson said, ‘Since you wasn’t throwing fire or making the trees attack, I saw no reason for it.’

Sofia had not considered using the trees as weapons. As useful as it would have been, it was not something she could have done without a proper ritual, anyway.

‘Well,’ she began, turning her mind away from a tempting vision of having a whole forest of deadly trees at her command, ‘it sounds like you practised more restraint with me than with anyone else who has ever fought you, my brother included.’

‘He’s an arse,’ Jackson scoffed. Sofia didn’t disagree, but she waited to see if she’d elaborate. ‘And then you... Well, you are a lady.’

Sofia wasn’t sure she ever truly felt like one, but it was especially unconvincing when she looked as she did: knotted hair, a shift that barely fit her, and somehow still filthy enough to be mistaken for a pirate, despite her great efforts last night to clean herself with a rag. She was a disgrace in every sense of the word.

‘And you aren’t a lady?’ she asked with an unhappy laugh.

‘Me? No.’ She laughed. ‘I mean – I’m not a lady, y’know?’

‘No, I don’t know. I had assumed the Queen elevated you in some way as a reward.’

‘Right, but even if she did, I still – No, I’m –’ She huffed and seemed to think about how she would have liked to define it, but ultimately only said, ‘It don’t matter what I am. But you’re a lady, so...’

‘That didn’t stop you from punching or kicking me.’ Sofia turned her head – regretted it immediately – and gestured to her split lip. Jackson hastily leant back to put distance between their faces, but her hands were still tangled in Sofia’s hair.

‘Yeah,’ she said with a frown. ‘But I didn’t fling you around or nothing.’ Jackson studied Sofia’s face for a moment, as if with suspicion or else cunning. ‘I could have slung you all the way to Slough, if I’d wanted. Glad I didn’t?’

‘I’d have preferred that to being kneed in –’

‘Look.’

To both interrupt Sofia and to show off her progress, Jackson drew a lock of smooth black hair towards the front of Sofia’s face. When Sofia lifted a hand to reach for it, Jackson let her take it. Sofia ran it through her fingers, handling it like a once-loved doll she hadn’t seen in years.

Her annoyance melted away.

If it wasn’t Nell Jackson, she would have thanked her – repeatedly, even. But it was Jackson, and thus it felt wrong.

‘You’re welcome.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, after gathering herself.

‘Such manners.’

‘You’re lucky I even –’ Sofia hissed when her hair was yanked far too hard to be accidental.

The two of them went back and forth like that for half an hour. For all her complaints and unsubtle threats about cutting the rest of her hair off if Sofia didn’t watch her sarcasm, Jackson dutifully kept at the task Sofia herself had given up on the night before.

She had noticed, at one point, that Sofia was having trouble standing for such a great length, and pushed at her shoulder to force her to sit down on the bed. As Sofia pulled at the neck of her shift, uncomfortable with how the ill-fitting thing had slid at the woman’s touch, Jackson looked over at her from where she had been plucking hairs from the teeth of the comb.

‘Turn yourself so I can get to the back without having to get on the bed with you.’

Sofia obliged, spurred into action by the uncomfortable thought of Jackson kneeling behind her on the mattress.

‘Thank you,’ she murmured without thinking, like she would have with a maid.

She felt the bed sink as Jackson took a seat beside her. Sofia held herself around the middle, feeling unsafe with her back to the woman; one of her hands was up at the neck of her ill-fitting borrowed shift, holding it shut in case the other woman looked over her shoulder. She felt the woman’s bored sigh stir the half of her hair that was no longer knotted.

‘If it gets like this again, I won’t help you with it,’ she scolded her.

‘Don’t ever speak to me like I’m a child,’ Sofia said through gritted teeth.

Jackson responded only by turning Sofia’s head to reach the far side. Every so often, her hand would bump against her skin and Sofia would recoil from it like her touch burnt.

Eventually, Sofia reached up carefully – slowly, so she wouldn’t spook her – and touched her hair, checking her progress. When her hand got in the way, Jackson would swat it aside, and Sofia would wait a few seconds before going back to touching it again.

‘Right, so... Your brother,’ Jackson said after a few minutes of silence. Sofia could hear her cleaning the comb, then felt its teeth sink back into her hair.

‘What of him?’

‘If he recovers...’

Sofia swallowed.

‘I don’t see how you two are going to keep living for much longer, what with how bad you are at robbing people.’

Sofia sighed in relief, despite the grimness of the topic. After all, had Thomas not been injured, she could have kept them alive.

Except they were starving even before he was hurt. By her instruction, they had exercised perhaps too much caution; they had avoided roads that would be too busy, only ambushed small carriages with minimal guards. The gains had been meager – nowhere near enough for the survival of two people. Thomas had never had the chance to fully recover his strength after Poynton’s magic had nearly killed him.

No matter how much she had blamed it on Nell Jackson, Sofia had known a large part of it to be her own fault. And now, with that very woman’s hands tending her hair – albeit not with the most patience – she had a hard time laying all that anger upon her.

‘How did you do it alone?’ Sofia asked, careful to keep any admiration out of her tone. ‘How were you – without assistance – able to hold up carriages? Did you tell them who you were so they would comply out of fear?’

Sofia couldn’t tell if she was trying to think of a response, or if she had no intention of answering the question. 

‘Listen,’ Jackson said almost patiently, ‘I don’t want the two of yous causing more trouble. So, no more hurting people, or stealing from anyone, or scaring –’

‘The only alternative, then, is to die.’ Sofia turned her head, interrupting the combing, so she could look into Jackson’s eyes when she said, ‘Is that what you want?’

The two of them locked eyes for several seconds, each unwilling to be the one to look away first.

‘Fuck,’ Jackson sighed, turning back to her task. ‘You must have people that won’t care what you’ve done. Friends?’ She laughed at her own suggestion. ‘No, probably not those. But family, maybe.’

Sofia thought of their uncle in London, their cousin and his family in Northumberland.

‘Has Broadwater Hall been occupied?’ she asked.

‘You really think I’m letting you go back –’

‘I meant, has my cousin moved in yet? I’m not asking to go home – I know I don’t have one anymore.’ The unspoken ending of the sentence was, ‘Thanks to you.’

‘Ooh, I can’t imagine how that would feel!’ she said obnoxiously.

‘Would you answer my question?’ Sofia asked with forced politeness.

‘Yeah, there’s a new Lord Blancheford.’ Her flippant shrug insulted Sofia. ‘Your dad’s nephew, I suppose?’

Sofia pulled a face.

‘Not on good terms?’ she asked, not sounding very interested.

‘I barely know him.’

‘Well, if he’s part of your family, then he’s probably rotten, anyway.’

‘You make a lot of assumptions about people you don’t actually know.’

For whatever reason, Jackson was smiling when Sofia went to glare at her again.

‘To be fair, you’ve given me a lot to assume, what with your arse of a brother and your witchery-pokery –’

‘Witchery-pokery?’

‘Yeah?’

Sofia laughed, in spite of herself. She opened her mouth again with the intention of saying something else, but instead could only repeat, ‘Witchery-pokery?’

There was something so funny to Sofia about describing the rituals she had experienced in such a ridiculous way; and it was even funnier to her because Jackson didn’t seem like she was trying for comedy.

Ignoring Sofia’s laughter, Jackson continued, ‘After how you used Moggerhangar, it’s no surprise she’s let the papers have free rein with your image and what-for.’

‘I haven’t seen any drawings of myself in over a month.’

‘Well, you’re hideous,’ came her cheery reply. Out of the corner of her eye, Sofia saw Jackson’s lips twitch. Now she was trying to be funny. ‘They’ve made you look very witchy.’

‘Witchery-pokery?’ Sofia asked.

‘No, no – That’s not how you use those words.’

‘Oh, how foolish of me.’ Sofia’s dry tone was met with a tut.

‘Anyhow... The papers have been doing you a favour, without meaning to, by making the two of yous so bloody ugly.’

‘And the reward for our capture? What is it up to now? I assume it is the reason you have sought us out.’

When Jackson didn’t reply, Sofia turned her head as far as she could, in spite of the pain, to try to read her expression.

‘For all I know, you could have sent word to London. There could be –’ Sofia grunted. It was hard to tell if that pull was intentional or not. ‘– guardsmen on the way right now.’

‘Well, there ain’t,’ Jackson said simply.

‘Are you not, then, intending to turn us in?’ she asked disbelievingly.

Jackson gave her a sly sort of look, which Sofia did not like.

‘If you do,’ she continued, ‘you’ve wasted this man’s medicine. You know that Thomas and I will be hanged. Any trial we get will just be for the benefit of the newspapers.’

Jackson still refused to meet her eyes.

‘Don’t you want me dead, Nell Jackson?’ she asked quietly.

‘You know, not everyone’s interested in killing people, even if they hate ‘em, Sofia.’

She rolled her eyes.

‘As for the papers... I can’t say I’m pleased with the way they’ve already gone right back to spreading lies.’ Once again, Jackson passed a finished segment of hair for Sofia to observe. ‘Assuming, of course, that you haven’t been poisoning wells and sacrificing people’s goats.’

‘Not to my recollection, no, but it has been a long two months.’

Sofia caught a short exhale – a disguised laugh – and felt a flicker of pride. Growing up, she had rarely felt appreciated for her humour, by most people, so it pleased her now to have earned the amusement of a woman who hated her. 

‘Listen, if I wanted to kill you, why would I be putting myself through this right now?’ she asked, giving Sofia’s hair a little tug for emphasis. ‘Ah, what I’d give for a pair of scissors.’

It was an exhausting task, to be certain, and Sofia still wasn’t sure what had compelled the woman to do it; she found it difficult to imagine that it was solely out of a desire to have her comb back sooner. Her fingers moved gently enough that it seemed that she was taking care not to cause unnecessary damage or pain – besides when she was punishing Sofia for ‘taking the piss’, as she had put it.

It went on and on for so long that both had fallen silent, after a while. Sofia took to complying wordlessly at Jackson’s touch, turning her head or angling her shoulders to give her access just based upon where her hands landed.

Finally, only one small tangle remained; it was near to her temple, close to the root. She was surprised the woman didn’t just rip it out of her head, as even Sofia herself might have been tempted to; but instead, she worked with the little string of hairs, unwrapping them from one another; Sofia squinted the eye closest to it, which had begun watering from the pain.

She drew in a shaky breath of relief when Jackson’s hands pulled away. The woman got up from the bed, leaving Sofia’s back colder.

‘Look-it, I’ve a present for you.’

It was a large bundle of black hair, rolled loosely.

She reached up for it, but before she could take it, Jackson tried to fling it at her; Sofia caught it upon the tips of her fingers before it could hit her, to the woman’s visible disappointment. Seeing the size of it, she was relieved to have plenty of hair left on her head.

As if reading her mind, she said, ‘You’ve still got more hair on your head than half this town combined.’

‘Then, you’ve finished?’ Sofia was running her fingers through her freely-flowing locks to inspect it herself, rather than waiting for an answer.

‘Lord, I hope so. Anything still there, you’ll have to figure out yourself.’

She looked up at Nell Jackson, who stood with her hands on her hips, looking down at the ball of hair Sofia had cupped in her hands.

‘Here, give it to me. I’ll dispose of it outside. Maybe there’s a family of birds that’ll find good use for it.’

When she turned away, brushing her hands together to get rid of any hairs that clung, Sofia murmured one last thank-you.

Even after two nights together without Sofia trying to kill her in her sleep, it was still hard for Nell to get used to waking up and finding an enemy in the same room as her. It was even stranger, for some reason, to look over and see her sleeping peacefully, looking harmless as a lamb.

In reality, there was nothing harmless about Sofia, and judging by the open glares she gave her during all her waking hours, she didn’t want Nell to forget that.

But she was asleep, just then; all limp and devoid of her usual palpable malice. Nell curiously got a little closer to her, quietly as she could; although she didn’t know why she even wanted to risk waking her and drawing her ire – or why she even wanted to look at her more closely.

So, she convinced herself that it was because she couldn’t see her breathing.

What a nightmare it would be for Sofia to die – having to explain being found next to a dead body again. Rather than reaching out to shake her or check for a pulse, Nell drew near enough that she could see her face clearly, besides the parts that were covered by her now-smooth hair.

She wasn’t hideous or nothing. Her features were sort of sharp, and probably good for striking fear in any of her enemies – other than Nell, of course. Even there, with her mouth slightly open – enough to drool on her pillow, if her lips didn’t look dry just then – and with her expression making her look dotty, Sofia was pretty.

Remembering why she had come over, Nell looked from her face to her neck – but that wasn’t moving, either, so she reluctantly looked down further. After several seconds of staring at her chest, she was able to confirm that it was moving – she was breathing.

Nell herself breathed, too, in relief.

Then, to her horror, Sofia’s eyes opened; they locked onto Nell, wide with fear. She pulled the blanket up to hide her body, even though it wasn’t like Nell was even looking at her like that and –

‘It’s not like that – I’m not – Don’t be –’ Nell jabbered, before Sofia could even say a word.

The fear in her eyes faded into confusion, then outrage.

‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ Her voice was rough with sleep and shook with rage. ‘Why are you near me?’

‘You wasn’t breathing.’ Nell rolled her eyes, more at herself than Sofia. She shakily explained, ‘That is, I couldn’t tell if you was or not.’

‘What?’

‘You wasn’t breathing!’ Nell repeated more loudly, as if the woman was half-dumb upon waking. ‘That is to say, I couldn’t –’

‘Get away from me!’

‘I just thought that maybe you was dead, is all!’ Nell calmly said as she held her hands up and backed away.

Sofia muttered something under her breath – probably threatening, if Nell had to guess.

‘All right, not dead. Breathing. All them good things.’

How many nights more Nell would survive, she wasn’t certain.

There was something strange about seeing an unfamiliar woman in just her shift. It was usual enough at night – albeit still peculiar, because of who it was – but in the daylight, it felt at least slightly indecent, and both of them knew it.

The shift didn’t fit Sofia very well, either. The woman who it belonged to was very tall – taller than Roxy, maybe even taller than Moggerhangar – and wider about the shoulders than Sofia. Sometimes the neck of the dress would slide, showing too much of her shoulder, which made it even more uncomfortable for them both.

For once in her life, Nell wished she had packed a dress. She almost wanted to tell Sofia to put back on her ruined dress, for decency’s sake, but the thing did not look like it would survive a wash. Sofia’s own stained shift was in too poor condition to even rip up for rags.

And so, Nell just had to ignore her as best she could; she tried not to look at her, at least nowhere besides her face. Funny, really, that the face of the woman who had tried to kill her was easier to look at than her body.

Strangely enough, Charles did not seem all that bothered by her state of partial undress. The day following their arrival, sometime after Nell had spent an hour unravelling Sofia’s hair, they had gone down for her to see Thomas, and the sight of Sofia – so different-looking with her hair made tidy – had made Charles laugh; and his laughter in turn made Sofia look as if she wanted to slap him across the face; Nell had even stepped between them, in case she had decided to act upon her humiliated anger. After all, if anyone was going to slap Charles, Nell thought, it sure wasn’t going to be Sofia.

They were downstairs again. It was supper time, and the healer had been kind enough to feed them, in part because Nell was slipping him extra money. In truth, she had never returned much of the lolly which she had stolen, and she didn’t feel so bad about it because most of them had been toffs who had more than they knew what to do with – at least, that’s what she told herself, and she hadn’t seen any reason to re-examine that belief.

It was a little sickening to watch Sofia spoon-feed her brother, not in least because he never did get his shirt put back on. He wasn’t hairy, at least, but Nell still would have preferred not to look at him. Every so often, Sofia would miss his mouth and have to wipe the hot food off his skin while he winced.

‘Sorry, Thomas,’ Sofia murmured to him, dipping a rag into a bowl of cool water and cleaning a few drops of the mashed food off his collarbone.

‘Robert,’ Nell corrected her.

Through the back of her head, she could almost see Sofia’s eyes rolling.

‘Maggie,’ Thomas said with an unpleasant little snigger. At least one of them liked the name she had come up with for Sofia.

Sofia leant back and set his food aside. Yet again, she reached up to tug at the shoulder of the borrowed shift. Suddenly, Nell remembered the other night; the moment when she had grabbed Sofia’s sleeve to harass her. She began to fear that – had the room not been as dark as it was – she might have seen –

‘Nelly?’

‘What?’ she said to Charles, perhaps a little snappish. At his feigned look of offence, she tried again: ‘Sorry. What is it? And I ain’t Nelly.’

‘Oh, do you want a new name, too?’ he whispered, getting a little too close to her ear. ‘Let’s see...’

She rolled her eyes, leaning away from him.

‘Need something, Dev?

‘Do you know what I was thinking when I woke up this morning?’

She angled her face up so he could see her disinterested frown.

‘I ain’t swapping with ya. You wouldn’t last one night with her.’

‘No-no-no – Oh, please! Yes, I would! I’m very charming.’ He scoffed at Nell’s expression of doubt. ‘But what I was going to say was that you’ve never actually met any of my friends in London.’

‘What about those idiots you used to steal with?’

He waved away her question. ‘No, I mean my real friends. Bosom-friends.’

Charles’ hand-waving caught Sofia’s eye and she looked upon them with open suspicion.

‘Do speak up,’ she said, ‘so that we all might be able to hear whatever it is you’re planning.’

‘We ain’t planning anything.’ Then, lowering her voice so only Charles could hear, Nell said, ‘Look, right now I’ve got enough to worry about with them two.’

‘And afterwards? ’

‘They’ve got to be my focus right now, at least until I’ve decided what to do with them.’

He gave a dramatic sigh, which once again earned them both a glare from Sofia.

‘At least recognise the sacrifices I’ve had to make by sleeping here with him, uncomfortable and stuck hearing him mutter in his sleep. I could have sworn he hissed at me, once, like he was possessed.’

‘If he were, that’d explain some things.’

Charles laughed and sent Sofia his best smile; she looked at him like he was a puddle of mud.

It wasn’t like Nell was enjoying their company, or the responsibility of keeping them safe. But even once Thomas was back to full health, letting them go would be like releasing an animal in a place it had no hope of surviving in. They’d just go back to thieving, to hurting people and eventually she’d find out they killed someone, and then it would be her fault for letting them go.

No. As much as she hated them both, and as much as she wished she could wash her hands of them, she had to figure out a better plan.

Besides, she wanted Billy. Sometimes when she looked into Thomas’s cold eyes she fancied she could see her little friend trapped behind them; it wasn’t too hard to imagine that the awful man was only behaving himself because Billy Blind was doing everything in his power to hold him back.

She couldn’t – wouldn’t – abandon Billy.

To Sofia’s relief, Thomas’s fever had broken on the third day. Although his arm and abdomen still ached, he had impatiently thrown aside the blankets he’d been buried under, grumbling to Sofia about the stuffy little room. The medicine whose bottle she had struggled to read was called laudanum; it made him drunk, but too drowsy to be obnoxious.

On the fourth day, his pain had lessened enough that, with her assistance, he was able to get out of bed. She helped him reach a window to sit beside – one which faced only an open field, so he would not be seen by anyone. Jackson and Devereux occasionally went outdoors to speak privately, and once or twice they had – seemingly unknowingly – stood within their view.

‘I saw him steal a bottle,’ Thomas murmured. ‘Just last night. He said he doesn’t know what the drug does, he just thought the bottle was pretty.’

‘What a waste of a knighthood.’ Sofia leant forward so she could see Jackson better through the glass. ‘They’re a pair of thugs, nothing more.’

‘He claims his father was noble, but that he has inherited nearly nothing because of his father’s foolishness.’

She transferred her glare from Jackson to her brother. He had a faint smile on his face.

‘Maybe, before his father could squander it all, he should have –’

‘Stop.’

‘Then we’d have even more in common.’

She leant towards him and said in a whisper, ‘Just because the truth got out doesn’t mean I want to be reminded of it.’

His empty eyes appraised her; she knew he was trying to decide whether or not to push his luck.

‘You’d shoot our own father,’ she hissed, ‘but not the man the other day whose food we needed?’

‘Evidently, you aren’t as convincing as Poynton was.’

She stood up, looking down upon him.

‘You’ll find your own way back to your bed, I’m sure. You are, after all, looking so much better.’

Before leaving, she threw one last bitter look at the woman in the field, upon whom she wished she could still lay all the blame.

At the end of the fifth day, Sofia overheard something which necessitated a prompt change in plans.

Jackson, ever the restless one, had gone with Charles into the town – to do what exactly, Sofia did not know. This left Sofia and Thomas alone in the house with the married couple whose hospitality they were benefiting from – and, she suspected, they were paying well.

Thomas had spent most of the day out of bed. Though he stumbled and his speech was no better than when he was drunk, he had made his way outside to breathe in the fresh air he hadn’t had in days; he tired of it quickly, however, and told Sofia that he’d had plenty of it over the last two months.

Sofia too had grown weary of her surroundings. The house was small, and the space which they were allowed to roam within it was even smaller. At one point, Charles had tossed a book at her, telling her that her boredom was obvious and painful to watch. Then he had winked at her, and she almost wanted to throw the book back at him. She was growing tired of being handed objects via them being lobbed at her, even if that mostly came from Jackson.

After Thomas had become drowsy from his medicine, she left him for the evening. Quietly she took the stairs, trying to be considerate as to not disturb the married couple, whose bedroom was not far; it was easy for her to hear them when they were speaking, so she knew that they would be able to hear every creak of the stairs.

‘Are we even sure she’s Nell Jackson?’

She stopped, just a few steps from the top of the staircase.

‘How many women prance about in men’s clothes?’ came the voice of the woman whose shift she wore.

‘But why would Nell Jackson help the Blanchefords?’

‘She’s bewitched, I tell you.’

‘I’d be able to tell, surely,’ the husband said. ‘There would be some medical signs, I’m positive.’

‘Magic has nothing to do with medicine!’

For a moment, silence fell. Then, the man said, ‘Do you really want to do this? I’ve spent almost a week tending to that man – all for him to be hanged?’

‘It’s ninety pounds, Henry. Even just one of them – even just the girl –’ Sofia held her breath. ‘– with her thirty-five pounds would mean never worrying about money again.’

‘I know. I know. I...’

Sofia had heard enough, and would not risk being caught by them by staying there on the stairs; she silently went into her room and awaited Jackson’s return.

‘We need to leave.’

‘Fuck! What have I said about waiting by the door?’

‘Sorry,’ Sofia said, not trying to sound sincere.

‘Leave?’ Jackson asked suspiciously. ‘What did you do, Sofia?’

‘I did nothing – Nothing except overhear a very concerning conversation.’

Jackson gestured for her to continue.

‘They know who we are. They are making plans to hand us over – I do not know how soon.’ Sofia had taken to pacing. ‘Oh, and they believe I have bewitched you.’

‘As if you could bewitch me!’ Jackson said, looking Sofia up and down. ‘You ain’t –’

‘Are you ever going to tell me what your plans for us are?’ Sofia interrupted.

‘You mean, beyond having done you a massive favour by getting your useless brother help?’

Sofia’s jaw clenched. She thought about saying thank you but couldn’t bring herself to do it, even sarcastically.

‘And after he’s in good health?’

‘I have a plan,’ Jackson said so defensively that Sofia was sure it was a lie.

‘Will it lead to us two being hanged?’

Jackson leant against the wall, facing Sofia but not looking at her.

‘You don’t actually have a plan, do you?’

‘No, I do have one – did have one – but now I’m realising that it won’t work.’

‘You should have used the one I gave you months ago.’

‘Oh, the one you started ordering me to do after killing Poynton?’ she asked, finally looking up at Sofia.

‘It was a good plan. Nobody would have had to suffer, if you could have put aside vengeance for one moment.’

‘You’re something special, Sofia,’ Jackson said in a low, dangerous voice. ‘You come up with lies that easily all the time? Schemes and plots and shit?’

‘Yes,’ Sofia said emotionlessly. ‘I do, in fact.’

‘You sound proud.’

Sofia frowned up at Jackson. Her mind was like a book with infinite pages, and she flipped through it for all the things she could say to her: words that could hurt her, words that could anger her, words that could perhaps earn Sofia sympathy; small truths, small lies, bits of both that were so well-blended that Sofia herself could barely separate them; lies that she needed to force herself to believe to have the courage – and the depravity – to go on.

It was a family album. Her mind hit something painful – something that bore a resemblance to her father – and the book was slammed shut. She sat upon her bed.

‘I am what I am because I needed to be,’ was ultimately all she was willing to confess to.

Sofia expected more scorn, but instead Jackson averted her eyes. It gave her the privacy to openly stare at her.

‘Should I not take pride in my good intellect?’

‘Good intellect isn’t worth a pig’s shit if you haven’t any common sense.’ Nell’s disgust for her showed on her face as she looked around the room. ‘If I were you, Sofia, I wouldn’t talk up my intellect in front of someone who knows you – knows what you’ve done, who you’ve done it with, who you’ve done it to...’

‘You don’t know nearly as much as you think you do.’

‘Right, because I’m stupid – because I’m poor.’

‘No,’ Sofia said, forcing patience upon herself. ‘Because there are things that I haven’t told you.’

‘Oh, God.’ Jackson rolled her eyes.

Except, patience wasn’t Sofia’s strong point.

‘But you are stupid, yes.’ Sarcastically, she said, ‘I completely agree.’

That got Jackson to look at her.

‘If you turn me in, you’ll be putting countless lives in danger. There will be a war.’

Jackson pushed herself off the wall and walked closer to Sofia.

‘You’re that important, are you?’

‘No, not at all.’ Sofia took pleasure in the flicker of confusion that passed over Jackson’s face, knowing she subverted her expectations. ‘But when you so kindly cast us out of our home, I –’

Jackson cut her off. ‘Wait, is this about where all your stuff went?’

Sofia paused, knowing that as soon as she said more, Jackson would laugh at their misfortune.

‘We were robbed by highwaymen,’ she muttered.

Sure enough, Jackson threw her head back and laughed.

‘Ah, shame,’ she said, grinning.

‘They took everything.’

‘Well, yeah. That’s the proper way to do it.’

‘They took more than our clothes and money, Nell.’ Saying her given name alone was too strange, so she quickly added, ‘Jackson.’

‘Yeah, yeah – all your valuables and keepsakes, I’m certain.’

At some point, Jackson had begun to pace restlessly around the room.

‘There were incriminating letters, documents and other items which Poynton had brought with him to Broadwater Hall.’

Jackson stopped, looking over at Sofia. She took a step backwards to better see her face, but kept her expression neutral.

‘Amongst them are contingency plans, in case some meddlesome person showed up to ruin everything.’

Jackson raised her eyebrows and gave Sofia a cocksure grin, recognising herself in the statement.

Sofia shrugged and said in a nonchalant tone, ‘I’d like them back, obviously, but even if you don’t think I should have them, I’m sure you realise the danger they pose to the nation if they are left out there.’

‘Oh, Sofia.’ She laughed and took just a step closer to her. ‘You think I care about this?’

The smile on Sofia’s face fell.

‘Well, you should care,’ she argued. ‘I care about this country –’ She had to wait for Jackson to finish sniggering. ‘– no matter who is the monarch.’

‘Right,’ she laughed.

‘Believe it or not,’ she said with the expectation that Nell wouldn’t believe, ‘I have no strong opinions on Queen Anne.’

‘Keep that to yourself. I swear to God, Charles is arse over tit in love with her.’

Sofia blinked, then decided to ignore her.

‘If I have the documents, maybe I can use them to bargain for my life.’

‘You mean with the Queen?’ Nell gave her a knowing look. ‘Or are you hoping to get back in all nice and cosy with the Jacobites?’

‘I’ll take whoever will have me,’ she reluctantly admitted.

‘Toffs are toffs, I suppose.’

‘And you’re a coward.’

‘I beg your fucking pardon.’

‘So much for the Queen’s heroine.’

‘Hero!’ Nell whispered fiercely as she took another step towards her, clearly trying to look menacing. She glared down at Sofia – who stood up to try to get closer to eye-height.

‘Coward.’

Sofia was not sure what she expected to gain from provoking her, but she really should not have been so surprised when she found herself suddenly shoved back onto her bed. She lay there for a second, stunned and waiting – but for what, she did not know.

Jackson only stood there, glaring down at her. Sofia thought of magic; she thought of using something to push her back, without even having to get up.

Then Jackson stepped further away from the bed, her expression one of discomfort. Sofia quickly checked her shift, but it was still covering her fully. When she looked back up at Jackson, she saw her turning and walking towards the door.

‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’

All she said was, ‘Charles.’

Sofia was stunned for several minutes more before anger took hold.

Desperately needing to get away from Sofia, Nell took the stairs so fast that she tripped on the third step from the bottom, tumbling spectacularly.

‘Ooh, that looked painful,’ came Charles’ voice, unfortunately. He stepped towards her to offer her a hand, but she was too quick for him to get to her in time.

‘No – it was fun – you should try it,’ she fired back in a rush; before he could reply, she continued, ‘I need to talk to you.’ She looked up from where she was rubbing her aching elbow and told him seriously, ‘Privately.’

‘I’m all yours.’

‘I’m sorry, you pushed her?’

‘That part doesn’t matter,’ Nell said dismissively. ‘What matters is that –’

‘Then what happened?’ Charles asked in unabashed delight. ‘What did she say? What did you do?’

Nell looked at him as if he was an idiot, but to him, she was absolutely the stupid one.

‘She ain’t hurt. I’m sure she’s offended, but that’s all.’

‘Too funny,’ Charles mused.

She shook her head, looking unhappy. They were outside, plotting in the dark like a pair of villains in a play – not that Nell was anything but heroic.

‘I don’t trust her. I only helped her at all because of...’

‘Pity. Obviously.’

He smiled when Nell nodded.

‘Like a good hero,’ he added.

She stopped pacing and turned to look at him almost sternly. He didn’t see why she would react that harshly to the little joke.

‘Fuck,’ she sighed. She ran a hand through her hair, but it only served to make it untidier. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘Why, we’re going after the stolen items, of course.’

He knew that for all her debating, she wouldn’t be able to resist. She knew it, too.

‘But what do we do with those idiots?’ she asked, throwing a hand in the direction of the house.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, pushing his sarcastic tone to the point where he almost sounded silly, even to himself. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t discard the only people who know both what exactly we’re looking for and the looks of the highwaymen who took those things?’

‘Are we really going to put up with them for that long?’

‘Well, he and I get along well enough.’

It was true. Once the man’s delirium had faded, he’d been open to chatting. Charles had soon found in Thomas the unsurprising arrogance which set most countryside nobles apart even from their city-living counterparts – an added layer of poshness cultivated by the rare need to interact with anyone who isn’t a household servant.

To Charles’ great interest, Thomas seemed to be just as much a scoundrel as he was a haughty noble. It seemed that the time he did spend in London, he had spent in many of the more lowly, disreputable establishments with which Charles was more familiar.

It felt at times when talking to him that Charles was looking at a distorted reflection of himself. Thus, Thomas Blancheford’s company was far from the worst he had suffered.

But Nell’s look reminded him that these were thoughts he should never share with her.

Charles regretted his flippant reply immediately. ‘By which I mean –’

‘Huh, Charles? You want to tell me more about how the piece of filth who killed my dad really ain’t all that bad?’

He held up his hands and took a step back for good measure.

‘Apologies. I’d forgotten, since I wasn’t there.’

She held her glare for another moment before turning away.

‘Would your father have liked me?’

‘No,’ she said without any hesitation whatsoever. ‘Definitely not.’

‘Oh, but women’s parents usually like me!’

‘Yeah, because you lie from beginning to end.’

‘No, no. At the end, I’m too busy stealing to lie.’ 

‘Yeah, my pa would’ve fucking loved you.’

‘You’d be surprised by how far my charm can go,’ he smoothly said as he took a step towards her.

‘I’d love to see how far it can go – away from me.’ She didn’t even try to sound like she was flirting for the first part of the sentence, like he would have.

And that was why he liked Nell Jackson. She always had a reply for him, at least in the form of a groan or a roll of her pretty hazel eyes. 

‘Wouldn’t you miss me, though?’ He said it like a joke, but he wondered, nevertheless.

‘Eh,’ was her reply, paired perfectly with a disinterested shrug. She delivered it as a joke, but he wondered...

‘You know their shit won’t be that valuable, don’t ya?’

‘Oh, you mean treasonous letters full of secret instructions to an unknown number of people involved in a conspiracy to –’

‘Look, I know, but I just don’t...’

‘– want to be stuck with these two?’

In truth, he couldn’t understand why it mattered to her so much. If they were too unbearable, surely they could bind and gag them somehow, only letting them speak when they needed information. Maybe the woman – Sofia – would be dangerous, but he had not actually seen so much as a glimmer of the magic she supposedly possessed.

Nor had he seen Nell do anything that any other strong woman could have done, ever since meeting her again. He’d been tempted to provoke her to the point where she’d throw him, just so he could have evidence that she still had it in her.

‘It’s not that.’ She unfolded her arms and put her hands on her hips instead.

‘Does she smell? Is that it? If it’s because she smells, we can find more soap.’

‘No, she smells nice now.’

He tilted his head at her, watching her frown at her feet.

‘Do you really want to go home, Nell?’

The look she gave him made it clear that she was trying to hide her guilt with anger.

‘Well...’ He puffed out a heavy sigh. ‘I suppose that if you’re going home, it will just be me and the Blanchefords.’

‘Huh?’

‘They are two dangerous individuals. We can only hope I’ll be able to keep myself safe, should they prove to be as treacherous as they were before.’

‘Now, hang on...’

‘And I’m sure that even in the best of situations, we shall be pitted against some very dangerous Jacobites who won’t take kindly to –’

‘All right!’ she interrupted. ‘Stop taking the piss.’

‘Do you want me to beg?’

‘What? No.’

‘Because I’ll do it!’

He clasped his hands together and walked towards her, causing her to step back to get away.

‘On my knees?’ he said as he looked down at the ground, trying to judge if it was worth getting his breeches dirty just to be more annoying.

‘Why would I want that?’ she asked, sounding disgusted.

He committed to it, plunging to his knees in front of her.

‘Will you please come with me on this exciting adventure?’

He shuffled towards her, dirtying his knees further.

‘So that you can protect me from those terrifying Blancheford siblings and all the nasty Jacobites we’ll surely encounter along the way?’

He knew he had her when she muttered a ladylike stream of curses and tiredly rubbed at her face. He got close enough to take her hand, to draw it towards his –

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ she asked, pulling her hand away. He made a mwah noise as it went.

In a couple seconds, he was back on his feet with a smile.

‘So, we’re leaving tomorrow?’

‘Maybe even tonight. Don’t want to give them the chance to peach on us.’ She shut her eyes and sighed. ‘He’s good enough to ride a horse?’

‘I should say so, but if you want me to go back and purchase that cart from that woman for an absurd amount of lolly, I’ll do it – if you’re paying.’

‘If it’s as dangerous as we think,’ Nell said, and he could swear he saw a hint of a smile on her face, ‘then let’s keep just the horses.’

And just like that, they were back where they belonged: planning their next adventure. As they discussed it in hushed tones, Charles rubbed his hands together for warmth; Nell seemed unbothered by the cold – or at least unwilling to show weakness in front of him, even after everything.

‘We should head in.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you’re eager to apologise to that nice lady you left up there on the bed.’

Her eyes widened and he could tell he caught her off her guard because of her very visible struggle for words. He wanted to probe, but instead let her have her chance to respond.

‘I’m not sure you could possibly have gotten more things wrong in just a single sentence, Dev.’

He sceptically tilted his head at her, trying to give her the impression that he knew more than he did.

‘Fuck off. Make sure you’re ready to leave in a few hours,’ she said as she scanned the outside of the house. ‘We won’t give ‘em any chance to catch us by surprise in the morning with a little army of people hoping for a piece of the bounty.’

‘As if you wouldn’t relish a chance to single-handedly fight off such an army.’

She looked at him again and gave a humble sort of shrug.

‘I’ll go make sure the idiots are ready,’ she said with a decisive nod.

He smiled wistfully as he watched her disappear through the door.

That was their relationship, at the end of the day: relentless teasing, pretending they weren’t friends. He couldn’t imagine even a Nell who returned his affections to openly show it. But still, he had to try, didn’t he?

Chapter Text

‘Before you go, I would like to express my gratitude,’ Sofia said, sounding so sincere. ‘Were it not for you, Robert’s life would have been taken by the infection, and mine too would no doubt be – I think – hanging in the balance.’

Nell watched the woman to whom Sofia was speaking; she smiled tensely and averted her eyes, not giving Sofia any real response. Sofia herself seemed to keep her eyes straight on the woman’s face, as if unaware of the evident guilt.

‘Good night, Mrs Bosby, and thank you for your ongoing mercy.’

The door shut and her soft-eyed expression immediately fell away to reveal her true emotion: resentment. Nell bit her lip to keep from laughing at the stark change.

The healer’s wife’s footsteps grew faint, and Nell waited for the sound of a door opening and closing before saying to Sofia, ‘Laying it on a bit thick, weren’t you?’

‘She won’t realise it until after we’ve already left.’

They sprang into action.

There was something a little sad about seeing Sofia put back on her tattered black dress. Nell helped her with her stays – hurrying, so she did not have to touch her for very long – and then stood back to let her do as much of the rest herself as possible. The ill-fitting shift’s tendency to fall off her shoulders did not matter much, as the dress itself was designed to leave the shoulders uncovered. Nell hadn’t seen a dress like it worn by anyone of Sofia's age; she wondered if it was true, about women in the countryside often being a decade or two behind those who lived in the city. She never cared enough before to pay it much attention, and decided to keep her observations to herself as she watched Sofia pull her weathered cloak over her, covering up everything but her hands and face.

It baffled Nell when Sofia told her that she was taking her stained shift; and then it disturbed her when, upon pressing her for a reason why she would need it, Sofia’s reasoning had been that she did not want to leave it where someone might use her blood in a ritual. Nell had decided she didn’t want to know any more, but it made her wonder who Sofia was expecting to use magic, besides herself.

Charles had rounded up medicine bottles and tinctures which they had seen being used on Thomas. At the very last moment, Nell had crept into the room in which Thomas had been treated and left money on his pillow as payment for the stolen goods. It was no ninety pounds, but it was something – and even if the married couple were ready to betray them, they still had saved his wretched life.

It was sometime around midnight when they stepped out under the stars.

‘Thomas and I can share a horse,’ Sofia told Nell in a hushed tone. For reasons Nell couldn’t imagine, she still somehow believed herself to be in charge.

‘No, you won’t,’ Nell said with a scoff, ‘‘cause then you’ll just steal the horse and ride off.’

Sofia ignored her and went towards the horse Charles hadn’t already mounted, but Nell got to it first and hurried to get on before Sofia.

She glared up at Nell and whispered, ‘You know that’s not true.’

‘Not gonna risk it,’ Nell said as she unscrewed the cap of her flask. ‘Come on, hop up.’

Still, Sofia only stood there. Nell took a long swig of water, giving her time to grow some sense, but she really was a stubborn woman, all right.

‘Look, either you ride with me or you ride with Charles.’ She stowed her flask back in a pocket, then looked back at her.

Sofia came to her, casting a look at Charles that made it plain to see that as much as she disliked Nell, the idea of sharing a horse with him was even worse. Charles himself missed the interaction, as he was busy whispering with Thomas while they finished loading the bags on the other horse.

‘Do you need a hand or not?’ Nell asked, leaning to the side and dropping a hand down for her to take – which Sofia ignored, preferring to struggle on her own rather than accept help.

Nell looked back over her shoulder, getting a face-full of Sofia’s grimace. Nell rolled her eyes and turned to face forward; then she looked back, just one more time, as if Sofia might be replaced by someone – anyone – more tolerable; she groaned as she faced forwards on the saddle and determined not to look back at her again until they reached their destination.

The warmth and presence of the woman behind her made it impossible for her to relax. She wanted the distraction of riding; she felt that once she felt wind upon her face maybe she would be able to forget about the trouble she had already gotten herself into again.

‘Ready?’ called Charles softly once he and Thomas were mounted.

‘I’ve been ready to get outta here for a week,’ she replied.

‘We haven’t even been here a week,’ whispered Sofia a little too near to Nell’s ear.

‘Feels like a month with this company,’ she said under her breath. ‘Now hold onto me unless you want to fall off and probably die.’

‘Give me a moment to consider my options.’

‘You’re so funny,’ she drily said.

Nell clicked her tongue and urged the horse onwards, not giving Sofia any choice but to hold onto her.

It had taken the four of them the better part of two days to reach the right location: the area close to a village called Marcham, west of Abingdon. They had not slept at all that night when they had left the healer’s home, and it wasn’t until the next evening that they found shelter to rest in, which had taken the form of a barn that had seemingly been abandoned; despite its absence of animals, it smelt almost as bad as if they were surrounded by livestock, and the roof looked as if it would fall upon them if anyone so much as leant against one of its walls.

That was the morning they had made it to Marcham. On their horses, they circled the village like a pair of wolves, searching for the road the Blanchefords had lost everything on; one which Sofia was certain she would recognise immediately.

From the moment they had both woken up, Sofia had felt Jackson’s presence like a fly noisily buzzing about, constantly too near. Being on a horse together, with Sofia having no choice but to hold onto her, was nearly intolerable; she tried to do it in such a way that would require as little contact as possible, but every so often the horse would jolt and she would find her face nearly pressed to her back.

‘Stop doing that,’ Jackson muttered when Sofia was once more subjected to the smell of her hair. ‘It’s giving me the creeps.’

‘Believe me, nobody wishes to touch you less than I.’

Sofia gripped harder at the woman’s coat as she focused on a row of bushes near the side of the road; they parted almost neatly in the centre, forming a sort of natural fence.

‘I ain’t so sure of that, what with –’

‘Wait! Stop the horse!’

Jackson made a show of loudly sighing as she coaxed the horse to slow.

‘Do you see those bushes?’

‘I do. But you don’t have to whisper in my ear like that, thanks,’ Jackson said as she bucked her shoulder back to shoo her away, nearly hitting Sofia in the chin.

She ignored it, this time, so she could focus on the area around her.

‘The bend of the road there – I could see it from the clearing where we – Over there.’

‘Well, that’s something. And even if this ain’t it, I need a rest – from you.’

‘I too would like a little time away from the person behind me,’ Charles said, gesturing unhappily to Thomas, who was slumped against the other man’s back.

Jackson grunted and swung her leg over the horse so she could dismount. Sofia pushed her skirts down where they had bunched up between the two of them during the ride. She was so busy taking in her surroundings – feeling hope rising within her – that she did not notice Jackson offering her hand to help her down, at first; it was brought to her attention when Jackson started impatiently patting her leg.

‘Don’t touch me,’ Sofia said for what felt like the hundredth time since they met.

‘Get off my horse. He needs a rest.’

Reluctantly, Sofia accepted her assistance, sliding off the horse and immediately adjusting her dress.

‘Thomas,’ she called as she walked towards the other horse. ‘Wake up.’

At the edge of her vision, she could see that Jackson was already sauntering through the gap in the bushes. Sofia smiled at the thought of her being whipped into the air, foot-first, by a hidden snare someone left.

‘There’s a field here, all right,’ Jackson unnecessarily declared.

Thomas finally stirred.

‘No – I don’t want you –’ Thomas’s voice shook. His eyes fluttered open and he clapped a hand to his face.

‘What the fuck is he on about?’ Charles asked, looking uncomfortable.

Sofia watched her brother warily. He proceeded to dig his fingernails into the skin of his face, dragging them downwards and leaving red, claw-like marks. He stared down at her, looking miserable and pale.

‘Thomas?’

‘All right,’ Charles said, clapping his hands. ‘Time to stretch your legs, Tommy.’

‘Don’t call me that.’

‘The alternative is, “lazy bastard”, if that’s what you’d prefer,’ Charles amiably told him as he began to dismount from the horse, leaving Thomas atop all alone.

‘Don’t call him that, either,’ Sofia warned.

‘Oi! When yous lot are finished tiddling about back there, why not come and help me?’

Charles laughed almost affectionately, as if Jackson had just said something endearing, rather than impatient and rude. He offered a hand for Thomas to take.

‘Ladies first.’

Her brother stared down at him through sleepy, shadowed eyes.

‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you are a bastard.’ Thomas groaned as he let himself off the horse; like Sofia, he was reluctant to accept the helping hand. ‘I assume your parents met at a nanny-house.’

‘Let’s save the friendly chatter for later,’ Charles told him with a smile. ‘But I’d love to hear all about whatever long line of aristocracy the two of you have brought shame to.’

To Sofia’s annoyance, Thomas laughed – a bitter laugh, but still more than the man deserved. Her brother swayed slightly as he walked, so she went to his side to assist him.

‘He’s a bastard,’ he muttered to her.

Sofia turned back to look at Charles, who was leading the horses to the grass by the road.

‘Here I thought you two were getting along.’

He sighed, leaning heavily upon her. The gap in the dense bushes was narrow enough that they could not pass through it side-by-side, so she went first, walking backwards so she could watch her brother.

Instead of his pained grimace, to which she had become accustomed, he looked empty; beyond his half-lidded eyes and still-hollow cheeks, there was a detachment behind his features which reminded her of when he wore Poynton’s pendant.

She stopped, reaching up to push back against his chest when he nearly walked into her. It took several seconds for her touch to register.

‘Are you in pain?’

He stared gormlessly down at her, and before he could say anything, Sofia heard a voice coming from behind her.

‘What’s the hold-up? Where’s Dev?’ She turned to see Jackson trying to see them over the bushes. ‘Am I the only one who wants to solve this before winter starts?’

Sofia let the matter drop with Thomas and redirected her attention to the familiar clearing.

The patches of scattered grass which were green when she had last stood there were now as flat and brown as the dirt which surrounded them. There was the smooth, flat rock which had the highwaymen's unfinished game of playing cards scattered across it last time they were there.

Nell Jackson looked small standing there in the centre of the clearing. Her head was tilted back so she could look at the clouds, and she had a hand upon her hat to keep it from falling off.

‘How’s this look?’ Nell called to her.

For a second, Sofia thought the woman meant herself, rather than the clearing – and she had nearly instinctively answered, ‘Stupid.’

The rustling sound of the bushes signalled that the two men had caught up.

‘I hope you aren’t thinking about building a house here, Nell. Lordy, no! Location is everything, after all, and this –’

‘It’s the correct place,’ Sofia interrupted Charles. ‘We were standing over there when they began to go through our belongings.’

‘How many of them were there?’ Nell turned on the spot, looking at her surroundings. ‘And why didn’t you use magic, anyway? Surely you could have –’

Jackson stopped once she saw Sofia had closed the distance between them.

‘There were four, and they were all well-armed. I wasn’t going to risk our lives by seeing whether I could cast a spell faster than one of them could pull a trigger.’

‘Probably wise.’

‘Not all of us have been granted your ability to catch bullets in our bare hands.’

Jackson’s only response was a noncommittal grunt. She had her face pointed towards the ground and was running her knuckles over her lips. Sofia would have assumed she was deep in thought, had she thought Nell Jackson was so inclined. She could see that the woman’s eyes were aimed towards her, barely visible through her lashes.

She was paying more attention than she seemed.

‘Did you hear any names?’ Charles asked, his voice coming from closer than she expected; she had only been paying attention to Jackson.

‘Carlisle. I believe that was how the leader of their group was addressed.’ She looked fruitlessly to her brother for confirmation, but he was still useless with inebriation.

‘Carlisle?’ Charles playfully gasped. ‘Isn’t that an earl? A Jacobite earl, perhaps?’

‘Are you trying to say that Charles Howard, Earl of Carlisle, personally robbed my brother and me?’ she asked incredulously. ‘Here, on this road near this insignificant village? Under the guise of a bandit?’

Charles said slowly, ‘Maybe?’

Sofia stared at him as if he was an idiot – something she hadn't even come close to ruling out.

‘Right, because all of us know the same toff shit as you, Sofia.’

Sofia turned for a moment to look disdainfully at Jackson.

‘Well, is he a Jacobite?’ Charles asked. ‘Because if he is, wouldn’t it be rather convenient for him to –’ He waved a hand. ‘– seize anything incriminating?’

‘Whether the Earl of Carlisle is a Jacobite or not, it does not matter, because the thief looked nothing like him.’

‘What, you’ve met this earl before?’

‘Thomas has.’

Her brother nodded in confirmation after a few seconds.

‘It is not the same man, that much is certain. Besides, a man on the Privy Council would not be so foolish as to use a name which could be traced back to him – nor instruct any man working on his behalf to use it.’ She looked again at Charles as she said, ‘That would be incredibly stupid.’

‘Point taken.’

She gave him an unfriendly smile, then continued: ‘Carlisle must simply be this thieving piece of filth’s name.’

Jackson’s eyebrows raised; she looked as if she was insulted. Sofia shook her head questioningly at her.

‘What?’

‘Oh, nothing. Not hypocritical at all.’

Sofia rolled her eyes.

‘Did you mouth off much in front of them?’ Jackson asked.

‘Tell me what you mean by that.’

‘Oh, you know – “piece of filth”, “thieving louse”, “you’ll pay for this” – that sort of sweet talk everyone likes to hear. The kind you’re so good at.’

‘No. I reserve that for you,’ Sofia said in a monotone.

Jackson stared down at her for a moment as if deciding whether or not to fight. Eventually, she put on a forced smile and took a step back from Sofia.

‘So, a man named Carlisle – who isn’t to be confused with the Earl of Carlisle –’ She shook her head and pointed at nothing in particular. ‘– ‘cause that ain’t confusing at all ... This Not-Carlisle robbed you.’

‘Wonderful,’ Sofia said drily. ‘You’re keeping up better than expected.’

‘Oh, go fuck yourself,’ Jackson said quickly before she continued: ‘So this group – four of them – they was just sat here –’ She motioned imprecisely in the direction of the dirt road. ‘– waiting for someone to ride past.’

Sofia curtly nodded.

‘That there road? See, if I was them –’ Jackson paused, perhaps realising that she more or less was them, when she was robbing people. ‘– I’d be on the other side of Abingdon, catching people coming from London. Now, what did Not-Carlisle look like?’

‘Rather unwashed – ungroomed.’ She tried to think of a better description, but could only say, ‘He looked like any other man, at least to me. As forgettable as any other, I should say.’

Charles might have scoffed, but she was focused on Jackson.

‘Fucking useful,’ Jackson said, looking bored. ‘Well, how ‘bout them other fellas?’

‘I only remember one other name,’ she said dully, feeling her hope rapidly dwindling. ‘A short man, I believe his name was something to the effect of Algernon.’

‘Hold on!’ In his excitement, Charles came even closer to them, unfortunately. ‘Algernon, you said?’

‘Not a common name,’ she remarked, trying to keep her hopes from rising again.

‘No, sir! Not common at all!’ He looked expectantly at Jackson. ‘Nelly. Algernon.’

She stared blankly up at him. ‘What?’

‘My Algernon!’

She tilted her head in confusion. ‘Your what?’

‘Oh, you know! The academician!’

‘Uh-uh,’ she said, shaking her head.

‘Now you’re just being obtuse.’

Sofia doubted Jackson was feigning this particular stupidity.

‘You talk far too much for me to remember even half of what you say.’

‘Hurtful,’ he said with a tut. ‘But Algernon! You know him! He was with me both times I... well... robbed you.’

‘Tried,’ she corrected, ‘and failed, twice.’

‘Third time’s the charm.’

Jackson shook her head, looking both unimpressed and arrogant.

‘If it’s the same Algernon, I could find him.’ He looked upwards, as if in thought. ‘Well, possibly. But I could find someone who could find him.’

‘Your confidence is reassuring, Charles,’ Sofia said.

‘Not to defend him,’ Jackson said with a suppressed smile, ‘but this is still more than you’d’ve had if he weren’t here.’

‘I am aware.’

Jackson stared at her, as if waiting...

‘Thank you,’ Sofia forced herself to say, going so far as to look at Charles as she said it.

‘That’s it, then,’ Jackson said, marching decisively back to the bushes they had come through. ‘I’ll go and poke around in that village nearby – keep my head down, avoid kicking up a rumpus. I’ll see if I can nab anything good, maybe news-sheets for Dev to read to us –’

‘I can also read,’ Sofia pointed out, but the other woman only waved dismissively.

‘You keep your brother from fucking anything up,’ she called back at them as she waded through the bushes. ‘Yous all stay hidden.’

Sofia followed after her, trying not to let her out of her sight.

There was silence as Jackson frowned thoughtfully, appearing as though she had lost her train of thought. It was something which happened frequently, Sofia had noticed.

Then the woman shrugged, smiled, and mounted her horse.

Sofia found it insulting to believe that the woman who seemed to wander so aimlessly through situations had managed to not only catch her a week prior – with only a cart and a canvas to cover her, no less – but to also foil the plans Poynton and other brilliant minds had crafted and prepared for years.

‘Oh, and...’ Jackson called down to Sofia. ‘Try not to get robbed again, would ya?’

Sofia gritted her teeth as she watched Nell Jackson tip her hat at her and ride off down the road, leaving her with the two men.

During their flight from Broadwater Hall two months earlier, Sofia had planned to take the carriage that had been scheduled to take the Queen north to Scotland, only to find that the driver had left – whether it was before the sky went black or after, she did not know. Sofia supposed that the amount of money he had been paid fell short of risking his life to the infernal magic that had besieged the manor.

At first, it seemed logical to head north, even without the carriage. They could try to make their way quickly, with only their horses and their belongings, and...

But that was exactly what they would be expected to do.

Horses needed time to rest each day, no matter how well-bred and hale they were; and they needed food, which Sofia and Thomas did not have the time to secure on their way out. The royal forces would have the numbers to fan outwards and flush them out of hiding. Unlike the two of them, they'd have the means to swap out their horses as needed; and their uniforms were the only excuse they would need to take whatever supplies they required from those they encountered.

Sofia had seen it all play out within her mind’s eye: she saw her deathly-ill brother, already struggling to steer his horse and hang on to it, being captured; she saw herself being executed on the spot while trying to fight back with whatever magic she could summon.

And so, she had turned her eyes away from her brother and towards the setting sun, and she assumed that by following it, they would have a greater chance to live. She knew the area to the west of London better than the north; better than she would have liked to have known it, in fact – for it was where she lived when she was married.

By going west, they could avoid the first volley of guardsmen and bounty hunters that followed the logical route. They could even head for the far coast and find passage to Ireland, where there were other men who held the same sentiments towards the Queen as Poynton had.

Once they had put a safe distance between themselves and Tottenham, Sofia had intended to stop and search through Poynton’s books; she had some memory of a ritual that would allow her to cast a magical decoy in their image to lead whatever forces were in pursuit of them further astray.

She never had the chance, however. For when they next stopped, it was unwillingly – and what followed was their ruin. However, Sofia’s natural inclination to hold a grudge meant that such humiliation – the details, the location of it, the men involved – would not be soon forgotten.

The siblings had made it to Abingdon by the fourth day of their exile; they skirted around its southern side, keeping their distance from any other travellers.

Once, when they had the horses at a steady gallop and were seemingly making good time, Thomas had suddenly – and with no warning to her – pulled hard upon his reins, causing his horse to rear up on hind legs in its haste to stop. Sofia had only realised he was not still with her when she heard the hoofbeats fade behind her and sensed her sudden aloneness, and she had turned her horse around in the middle of the road to see what had become of her brother.

She had found Thomas to be staring at nothing, his eyes wide and wild. His horse trotted uneasily from side to side as it waited for instruction, but the beast otherwise seemed calm – in stark contrast to its master, who was visibly shaken.

‘What’s wrong?’ The two of them were completely alone, so she felt it safe to say his name: ‘Thomas, what are you doing?’

‘I just wanted to stop,’ she thought she heard him say.

‘This isn’t a good time to stop, Thomas!’

‘No, I want it to stop!’ he cried as he buried his face in his hands. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘Thomas –’

She stopped short when he clumsily dismounted from his horse.

But he only continued to look about him, searching for something that was not there.

‘Go away!’ he shouted. ‘Take it back!’

At his outburst, a flock of birds came bursting from a nearby tree, and he flinched at the sight of them, as if expecting them to attack.

‘Thomas, stop,’ she firmly said.

Feeling as if she had no choice, she carefully got off her horse and joined him on the ground. He did not look at her; he was still searching for whatever it was that had him so frightened.

He barely reacted even when Sofia grabbed him by his shoulders.

‘What is happening?’ she demanded. ‘Why are you like this?”

‘Father – He –’

Her heart went cold as she waited for him to say more.

‘I can’t get rid of him,’ he said through tears. ‘I’ll never be free.’

She softened the grip on his shoulders.

‘Father is dead,’ she told him as she put a hand to his cheek, ‘and unless we keep moving, so too shall be our fate.’

‘You didn’t listen to me.’

‘About?’ she asked, trying not to let her irritation show.

She waited for him to say the name – to throw in her face her misplaced trust of the earl. Instead, he shuddered and leant into her, resting his face atop her head.

‘We need to keep moving, Thomas.’

‘He’ll follow me.’

‘He’s dead. You need to let him go,’ she said, stroking his hair. When he did not respond, she told him, ‘I have.’

‘You aren’t the one who killed him, Sofia.’

She felt uneasy and frustrated by his continued need to speak about it in the middle of a road in broad daylight. Too long he stayed crying into her messy hair, and although she did not wish to be so insensitive as to push him away, she felt the seconds passing in the quick beating of her heart – which she very much wished to keep beating.

‘We’ll talk about this later,’ she said as she detached herself from him. ‘Once we’ve found somewhere safe to stop.’

But they did not speak of it later. Instead, his mood had become sullen by the time night had fallen and they found a quiet place to stay the night. The next day, he still did not bring it up.

And it was the day after that when everything fell apart.

Mid-afternoon sunlight lit their path along the edge of a wooded area. Autumn had only just begun to make itself known in the form of cool air and shortening days, and they had wanted to make the most out of the daylight hours. As far as they could tell, they were outpacing any search parties that had been sent westwards, and Sofia wished to keep it that way.

Her brother hadn’t stopped them again with panic over unseen horrors, but they were evident in the way he tossed and turned in the night. When she had asked if he was dreaming of Poynton, he had only looked at her peculiarly.

Neither of them had slept properly in days. It was too difficult, due to the fear of being caught, the discomfort of sleeping unsheltered and – worst of all – the nightmares from which they had both suffered those first nights. Sofia’s were about the events which led to their flight, Thomas would not answer when she asked what his were about.

Though he was still lethargic from the spell which had nearly killed him, it was Thomas’s mind which seemed to be particularly strained, and even the way he handled his horse caused her to worry. She thought maybe it was hunger which was agitating him, so she was ready to suggest they take shelter in the woods for an hour or so, where they could eat some of the apples they had taken with them – but the sight of a man on a horse in the centre of the road ahead of them put an end to that thought.

They slowed their horses so that there would be no collision – their first mistake.

‘Ho there!’ the lone man called out. ‘Sir! Miss!’

Sofia shared with Thomas a quick look of wariness, for neither of them wanted to take their eyes off the stranger for very long. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Thomas’s hand hovering near his pistol. The one she had taken for herself was not nearly as accessible to her.

‘What is it?’ Sofia called back to the man. ‘We’re in a hurry.’

‘No bother, I was just hoping you could tell me –’ The man stopped for a moment, turning away from them as if he had heard something coming from behind him.

She tried to sit up straighter on her horse to look past him. Her unease grew, but they were near enough to him now on the narrow road that the horses would need to be steered carefully around him to pass.

‘Sofia, we need to –’

She knew. Even if the man was merely a traveller who had taken the wrong turn at some point and wished only for guidance, their lives were at stake.

‘We don’t have time for you, I’m sorry,’ she said quickly, in too great a hurry to feign pity for whatever comparatively trivial situation he had found himself in.

‘Oh, miss, but I only wanted to ask you –’

She waited, glaring at the man.

There was an explosive sound that came from behind her and Thomas – a firearm discharging straight upwards. Their horses shied away from the unexpected noise; Sofia’s grip tightened on the reins.

‘I wanted to ask you what is in your bags!’ he said, his last several words done in singsong.

His smile was broad. He was clearly pleased both with his pathetic joke and the chuckles coming from the group of three men on foot who had spread out across the road behind them when they had been focused on the horseman. All three had firearms out and at the ready.

‘Well, if you won’t answer, I don’t mind taking a look myself,’ he said jovially as he dismounted.

Sofia’s blood was boiling. They should have just ridden past him without a word. They should have pretended not to hear him call out to them.

Instead, they were ushered down from their horses under the threat of four firearms – three pistols aimed at Thomas and the rifle at Sofia. The man who had stopped them had the nerve to walk towards her, a hand stretched out in an offering of help, the other still pointing his pistol at her. She hastened to dismount before he could get too close.

‘One of them independent women, I see,’ he laughed. ‘Very well. Not screaming or crying, either – a welcome change.’

Sofia stared down at the muzzle of his pistol, which – were she to speak her mind – would be in perfect position to discharge a bullet straight into her chest.

She was exhausted, emotionally raw; and no matter her natural talent for magic, she was no Nell Jackson. She could not risk fighting off four men with firearms, even with magic. Yet in the frigid, hungry nights ahead of her, she would question again and again whether it would have been better or not if she had attempted to fight back.

‘Oh, but let’s all take this somewhere a little more private, why don’t we?’ He whistled at them like they were dogs, jerking his head in the direction of the edge of the road. ‘Wouldn’t want to hold up any busy travellers, would we?’

They were led a short way down the road to where there was a gap in the bushes, past which there was a clearing. Sofia’s dress made it difficult for her to pass through the overgrown foliage, and at one point, her skirt had become tangled on the low-lying branches. Thinking fast, she took the opportunity to duck down and – under the guise of setting herself free, under the cover of both leaves and her own petticoats – she was able to remove the small pistol she had in a pocket. But rather than stand and take aim like a fool, she stayed crouched and tried to plan her next move.

‘Just – give me a moment, please, to free my skirt,’ she said through gritted teeth. She was concentrating, making her motions as subtle as possible while still rustling the bushes enough that they would assume she was still working to free herself.

One of the men had already pulled one of their bags from their horses, and he very nearly kicked her in the head as he passed right over her.

‘You fucking buffoon,’ Thomas spat at him. ‘Touch her and I’ll gut you, pig.’

‘She ain’t my type,’ grunted the man disinterestedly. He knocked into Thomas’s shoulder intentionally as he passed. Her brother, still weak from all that they had been through, stumbled backwards a couple steps, to the amusement of the thieves.

It was the distraction she needed, and by the time she stood back up, her pistol was nestled near her knee, tied precariously with the ribbon holding up her stocking.

She walked stiffly into the clearing and stood there numbly as she took in the makeshift camp in front of her. There was a horse left untied that was grazing, and a smooth flat rock low to the ground which had playing cards spread out upon it.

‘Let’s hope you two are worth the fuss,’ the first man said, yawning, completely indifferent to the fact he was taking from them their only possessions, their only hope for survival.

‘I’ll be taking this,’ said one of the men to Thomas, ‘since you clearly don’t know how to use it.’

Thomas tried in vain to wrestle the pistol back from him, but threw his hands up in surrender when another pistol was pressed solidly against his cheek. Her heart sank at the sight. It was unlikely that these men would be as foolish as Nell Jackson had been; she had no doubt that their guns were loaded.

‘Not that it would do much damage.’ The man laughed. ‘Look how small it is, Carlisle!’

The man who had stopped them – Carlisle – looked at the firearm with a sort of pity.

It was the pistol that had ruined her family.

‘Carlisle, you should see this!’ called a different man. ‘They’ve some jewellery here, too. Lord! Lots of it, in fact.’

‘Books and papers here. Not nearly as exciting.’

‘Ah, toffs’ll go mad for them, anyway.’

‘Look at this mantua! It’s even prettier than the one she’s wearing.’

‘I’m giving that to my wife!’

‘You don’t have a wife, idiot.’

‘Fuck you, I will soon.’

Their banter all ran together as she watched them take apart their supplies. The man with the rifle stayed by them, watching the others, but ready to react if either of them tried to stop them.

‘Would you look at these books!’ Carlisle let out a low, appreciative whistle as he opened one and flipped through it. ‘All sorts of pictures in this one.’

‘Can you even read?’ Sofia asked through gritted teeth.

He looked up at her sharply.

‘Don’t need to, really, to know that this’ll fetch a high price – even just for the leather.’ He turned another page with his dirty fingers. ‘I’m sure someone can tear all these creepy drawings out, replace them with something cheerier.’

It horrified Sofia to imagine the destruction of the irreplaceable books; and even more so, the idea of their pages being replaced by something mundane.

‘Certainly ain’t the Good Book, what with all these skulls and shite.’ His expression was becoming more perturbed by the second. ‘What kind of person needs a book like this? The Devil?’

‘Then give it back, if it bothers you so,’ she told him. ‘Clearly, you have no use for it.’

The book snapped shut.

‘Oh, but someone will, and I’m sure they’ll give good lolly for it,’ he said with that false smile. ‘Nice try, though, sweetheart.’

‘Oi, Carlisle,’ said the man who had been throwing the books onto the ground, not even bothering to stack them. ‘We’ve got some fancy papers, too.’

The document had already been wrinkled by its hasty stowing within the bag, and now it was being handled by hands which were unfit to even touch the playing cards left upon the flat stone.

‘Give that to me,’ said Carlisle as he plucked it roughly from the other man’s grasp. The way he squinted in concentration, how his gaze roamed across the paper but seemed to fix on spots for several seconds – it altogether made Sofia realise that he could read, at least a little. He raised his gaze back up to Sofia, looking at her even more closely than before.

‘What’s your name, sweetheart?’ He jerked his head in her brother’s direction. ‘What’s his?’

‘I won’t tell you that,’ she told him steadily.

‘Is he an earl?’ Even as he asked, he looked at Thomas doubtfully. ‘He’s clearly someone important.’

However improper given the situation, she felt resentment sink in at his implicit disregard of her own worth.

‘We kidnapping them?’ asked one of the men far too eagerly.

‘Lord, no!’ Carlisle laughed. ‘You idiots are hard enough to keep fed! Especially you, Algernon, you bloody runt.’

Two of the other men laughed; only the shortest of the men did not, suggesting it was he who had been insulted; he busied himself with the jewellery Sofia had taken to potentially sell, trying to slip a ring on his finger despite how clear it was that it would not fit.

‘Pretty stamp on this one,’ said the man on the ground, waving another precious document like it was a flag. ‘I’d bet you this one’s important.’

‘They very well might all be,’ Carlisle said softly, still trying to pick out familiar words from the first document. ‘They’re certainly interesting.’

‘So that’s it? You’ll take everything we have, and then what?’

‘And then what?’ he mocked as he walked to her and lifted her wrist. ‘Easy now. I wouldn’t be thinking about punching anyone, were I you – what with Barnaby and that rifle of his.’

Sofia felt the muzzle of the rifle press into the back of her stays, pushing her towards Carlisle.

‘We ain’t even so much as bruised you, sweetheart. You wouldn’t want that to change, would you? Now, relax your hand. Alls I wants is your rings.’

It took all her will to force herself to unball her hand. As he delicately pulled her mourning ring off her finger – the ring which she had received at her father’s funeral – she finally began to cry; his farce of chivalry upset her far more than if he’d roughly prised the ring from her finger. It was Sofia herself who reached up to take her wedding band off, and she held it out for him to take.

‘Oh, my love, I accept!’ He gasped playfully and snatched it from her fingers. ‘I’m so glad you feel the same, milady.’

 The muzzle at her back jabbed at her again in warning, but she was already angry beyond words and wanted only for it to be over and done with.

‘And you know what, my dear?’

Carlisle looked her up and down, then her brother.

‘You may otherwise keep your clothes, pretty though they are. See? I’m plenty generous – and so have you been, giving us such a haul – being so compliant and –’ Carlisle raised his eyebrows at Sofia in a way that disgusted her further. ‘– so lovely.’

She tried to tap into her energy to draw a spell – any spell – that could distract or harm them, but all it did was make her knees weak; and she feared that if she stumbled, the pistol would come loose and clatter to the ground.

Over the course of the next ten minutes, the last belongings of the Blanchefords – save for their clothes and the hidden weapon – were taken and loaded onto the men’s own horses; they did it with a practised efficiency, yet she still felt that they did not handle the books and papers with enough reverence. The highwaymen took even the pair of horses they had ridden out of Tottenham, once they were deemed worthy of the cost of feeding them.

To further insult her, two of the men waved cheerfully at her as they rode away; Carlisle himself blew her a kiss.

Sofia looked down at her fists, forcing herself to uncurl them.

In the end, Sofia and her dazed brother were left alone in the clearing, with nothing but numbing despair.

‘“By the Queen, wanted. Sofia Wilmot. Reward of Thirty-Five pounds is offered to the Apprehender of this dangerous Jacobite, attempted Queen-Killer and known Practiser of Witchcraft and Diabolical Magic.”’

Charles’ voice echoed across the clearing, where they had decided to stay for the night. Nell had expected Sofia and Thomas to argue when she suggested they camp there; Sofia might have, Nell thought, if Thomas hadn’t looked so peaky. But aside from the bad memories they had of the place, it was safer than the nearby town – where Nell had earlier pinched the stack of papers Charles was reading from.

‘Looks like they’ve let the lady title drop,’ Nell said to Sofia with a tight smile.

Sofia didn’t respond, only stared at the little fire they were huddled around. Charles had his back to it, using its light to read by.

‘Shh, Nell, you’ll like this part!’ Charles said, throwing a grin at her over his shoulder. ‘“Wrongful Accuser of Nell Jackson, Heroine of England.”’

‘I liked it – up until the end.’

Before Charles could say anything, Sofia snatched the sheet out of his hand. She gave her own ugly portrait a murderous look, one which was then raised to Nell – whose only response was to hold eye contact, eyebrows raised to show how unimpressed she was, while she took a drink from her flask.

Sofia had been moody all day – worse than her usual.

When Nell had come back from the village with a stack of wanted papers in hand, Sofia had still been right where she had left her: in the middle of the road, looking like a ruffled little raven, and with a most hateful scowl on her face. Had it been nighttime, and had Nell not already been expecting such a show of gloom from her, she might have thought she had run into some dreadful spirit that haunted the road. In a way, Sofia was more dangerous than any spirit, even if she didn’t look nearly as menacing now, huddled near the fire with the news-sheet in her hands.

It had been Sofia who had started the fire – all she did was stare at the twigs Nell had piled up, and she had barely given Nell time to pull her hands away before setting it alight. She had ignored Nell’s pointed glare, settling down across from her and holding her hands out to warm them as the fire grew faster than what seemed natural.

She’d been looking at Nell all night, far too intensely for comfort; and because of it, Nell had taken to watching her with suspicion. If she and her brother were to try to flee, Nell wouldn’t have any choice but to stop them, even if just to prevent them from getting themselves killed.

The woman handed the paper back to Charles and took up a different one to read for herself.

‘How are people stupid enough to believe that any of this other stuff is real?’ Sofia asked. ‘Is attempted regicide not exciting enough for them?’

‘It’s what gets people talking,’ Charles told Sofia. ‘Besides, the more grotesque you’ve become to people of all standings – the less sympathy you get – the more likely you are to get caught.’

‘Yes, I’m aware. I just don’t appreciate how many rumours there are of me eating newborn calves.’

‘They just don’t learn, do they? Them papers,’ Nell said. She scowled right back at the portrait of Thomas she was holding, then turned that scowl upon Charles. ‘How much was Mogs paying to keep them from spreading such lies about you, Dev?’

‘Nelly, I think you’re missing something important here.’

‘Go on, then.’

‘I liked the rumours. Besides, it isn’t as if she knew for certain that I was Tulley.’

‘Didn’t you say you told her when you was drunk once?’

He waved dismissively and said, ‘Unimportant.’

‘Why’d you do such a thing? Can’t hold your liquor?’

She gave him a doubtful smile when he said, ‘Of course I can. Again, unimportant.’

He leant forward in his seat upon the ground, as if he and Nell were the only two there.

‘I wasn’t Isambard Tulley. How many babes he ate, how many warts he spread –’ Sofia looked up from her paper, face twisted in disgust. ‘I was Charles Devereux. Hmm? You see?’

Nell sighed loudly. ‘I knew who you was the moment I met you in London, so you really wasn’t as good a sneak as you think.’

‘But you still would have to go through the courts to prove it. Even with all those witnesses – all those people I robbed and terrified –’ He stopped when he saw Nell’s expression. ‘Well, even then, I almost got away with it. I would have, had that bitch not tried to slander me as a Jacobite.’

He looked at the Blanchefords.

‘And that is precisely why these poor souls are now Robert – ah – Brokehill and Maggie... Let’s see...’ He trailed off as he tried to think of a surname. ‘Maggie Markeley.’

For some reason, he winked at Nell before saying, ‘I’ve a friend with that name. I’ll introduce you when we go to London, after we drop these two off somewhere.’

‘Would you stop talking like we aren’t here?’ Sofia muttered.

‘He might as well not be here, in his condition.’ Nell nodded at Thomas, who had his elbows resting atop his knees and his face resting upon his crossed arms.

The man’s sister reached over to touch his arm, to try to wake him, but he only groaned and stayed put.

‘Thomas?’

He still did not lift his head, so she shook him harder.

‘I was sleeping, Sofia,’ he whined.

‘Because of your medicine,’ she said as she picked up the bottle that he had set beside him on the ground just after taking a swig from it.

He finally lifted his head, as if sensing she was going to take it away from him. He snatched the bottle out of her hand, cradling it against his chest and ducking his head once more to rest upon his arm. She looked as if she was about to try to take it again, but he stopped her.

‘Do you want me to get better or not?’

She didn’t answer him. Instead, she set down the paper in her hand and got up off the ground, dusting off her skirts. She walked carefully around the fire and came to stand by Nell.

‘Walk with me.’

Nell looked up at her with a frown. Sofia stared down at her, expecting for her to comply.

‘Nah, I think I’m comfortable here,’ she said, tapping her foot against the dirt.

‘I need to speak to you.’ When met with only Nell’s stubborn silence, Sofia added, ‘Alone.’

Making a show out of rolling her eyes, Nell hopped up off the ground. She scooped up the last apple from the sack which she had bought earlier in town and followed Sofia away from the fire.

‘What, you didn’t get enough alone time with me back at the house?’ Nell called out to her, not bothering to keep up.

‘I got more than I would ever want, actually.’

‘Yet here we are!’

‘Yes,’ Sofia curtly said. ‘Here we are – in the place where I had everything taken from me.’

She didn’t want Sofia to get the idea that she was giving her undivided attention to her, so she tossed the apple high up into the air and caught it.

‘Not the worst place for it. It’s shaping up to be a nice enough place to sleep. Warm night, too, so that’s –’

‘You’re going to London,’ Sofia said, pointing out the obvious.

Nell shrugged and nodded, her eyes following the apple’s trajectory as she tossed it even higher.

‘Well, I will stay with you for a little longer, at least. Even if it does look like your highwaymen have gone underground. Then I’ll drop yous two off somewhere safer, and then Charles and me –’

‘Take me with you.’

‘Hmm?’ Nell caught the apple. She stared at it for a couple seconds, then turned to Sofia and laughed. ‘Oh. No.’

‘You will,’ Sofia told her very confidently, moving closer to her. ‘You can do so very easily, in fact, because the drawings in the news are completely devoid of any resemblance to us, so Thomas and I can –’

‘Can what? Go and get caught immediately?’ Nell scoffed and rubbed the apple against her shirt to get any dirt off.

‘We have an uncle there.’ Sofia looked at Nell almost expectantly when she added, ‘James Ogilvy.’

‘What, you think I know him or something?’

Sofia ignored her question, saying instead, ‘I could send him a letter, tell him to keep it a secret –’

‘You really want to see how far common blood will get you with him, do ya?’

‘He cared for Thomas, once.’

‘Did he, now? I’m sure that went well for him.’

The dark-haired woman gave her another moody look, then she went right back to thinking so hard that Nell could practically see her brain at work.

Nell recognised that Sofia Wilmot was a smart lady – underneath all the failed plots, poor judgement, and terrible company she kept. She gave the impression that she was always thinking – always cooking up some plan or another. It was tiring just to watch her sometimes.

Nell bit into the apple. It was pretty good.

‘I’ll wear a veil,’ Sofia said, nodding at her own words. ‘And Thomas can continue to grow out his beard.’

She chewed, watching through unfocused eyes as Sofia paced back and forth in her tattered dress, looking like some strange forest ghost – but one which held little terror for Nell.

Then, because Sofia just couldn’t help but speak as if she was in control: ‘You’ll find us suitable clothes, of course.’

‘Oh, of course!’ Nell played along, though much of her attention was on getting the last edible bits of apple close to the core. She looked up, her expression bored, and asked, ‘And then what, Maggie? Someone still recognises you and you start throwing fire at innocent people?’

Nell found it rather telling that Sofia did not deny the sarcastic suggestion.

‘With Uncle James’s financial assistance, Thomas and I could leave the country.’

‘Go where?’ Nell stopped to spit out a seed. ‘France?’

‘God, no,’ Sofia said in such a way that Nell almost laughed. ‘We shall go to Scotland.’

‘Right, I’m sure that’s just what the Scots want –’ Nell put on her best Edinburgh accent: ‘Just a couple high and mighty English nobles – and these two on the run from Queen Anne, at that. What’s a couple more of yous? Sure, they’ll be pleased to have you as guests.’

She took Sofia’s initial silence as her being impressed.

‘Gifting us a spare castle is optional.’

She nearly laughed at the glimmer of self-awareness, but caught herself just in time, and hoped the darkness would hide any remnant of it in her expression.

‘Where am I supposed to find you a dress pretty enough to go oppress the Scots with, huh?’

Nell heard her laugh, however faintly, and she smiled as she tried to push a shred of apple skin out from where it had become lodged between her teeth.

‘Why, from your uncle, of course.’

Nell’s smile faded.

‘By which, I mean one of his daughters. You said he has many, including one close to your sister’s age, so surely –’

‘Oh, of course! Stupid of me not to think of that.’

‘Then you’ll do it?’ Sofia asked with a delicate, hesitant smile, and with eyes full of cautious hope.

‘No.’

In the low light, so too did Sofia’s smile fade; first into a look of confusion, then into her more common anger.

‘No?’ Sofia asked in a clipped tone, the sort which suggested she would not accept that answer.

Nell nonchalantly tossed the apple core into the darkness; Sofia’s head turned to follow it as it disappeared.

‘We ain’t going to my uncle’s. I ain’t bringing the two of yous near any family of mine, after what you did.’

‘What we did under very different circumstances.’

‘Didn’t you hear me? I fucking said no, Sofia.’

The glowering face turned away from Nell and a heavy silence fell, allowing the choir of the night to fill the space. After a long moment, she saw Sofia’s hand come up to rub tiredly at her brow; she could hear the hiss of a sharply-drawn breath cut through the crickets’ chirps.

Sofia let her hands fall in front of her, clasping them demurely before turning once more to face Nell. Sofia shut her eyes for a second, as if willing herself to take the step she took towards Nell, then dropped her head apologetically.

‘Please.’

‘Oh, Lord,’ Nell muttered.

‘I have seen the error of my –’ She paused for a second to think, yet still had the audacity to say, ‘– my choices, which proved to be harmful.’

Nell gaped at her for her apparent inability to truly admit fault.

‘Right, because clearly you had to see it all play out to realise that trying to murder me –’ Nell had begun to shout. ‘– was a bad choice of yours!’

‘Keep your voice down,’ Sofia scolded.

‘You’re either mad or you’re taking the piss!’ Nell said just as loudly. The way the woman was acting now, all superficially submissive, had her quite certain it was the first one: that Sofia Wilmot was as mad as a March hare.

‘Shh,’ Sofia said, keeping her voice quiet and her movement towards Nell slow. ‘If you would please keep your voice down...’

‘You don’t regret a thing, do ya?’ Nell asked, moving away – but Sofia doggedly pursued her. ‘Other than getting caught – other than Poynton turning on you last moment.’

‘No, he did not turn against me,’ Sofia said patiently. ‘It was I who turned against him.’

Nell pretended to think for a second – pretended to care.

‘Oh, well that makes a difference, surely!’ she said with a big, false smile. ‘Oh, wait... No it don’t! You fucked everything up before that! Your disloyalty to him near the end? It don’t mean shit.’

She gestured to Sofia’s breast as she said, ‘You didn’t do it because you grew a heart – you’ve nothing but a snake curled up there in your chest.’

The woman’s expression of open hatred was once again stifled, and then it slipped away to make room for something else – something Nell didn’t recognise, and certainly didn’t like.

‘You saved Thomas: my only brother, and the only person I have left in this world.’ Sofia spoke softly, smoothly, and came even closer. ‘You’ve tried to help me find what was stolen, despite how little you seek to gain from doing so.’

She was far too close for comfort, and she sounded far too grateful for Nell to believe a word she was saying, despite the objective truth in her words.

‘I... know that you owe me nothing. I know that I am terribly...’ Her façade seemed especially strained, as if she had to will herself to finish. ‘– unworthy of your further assistance.’

Nell wanted to laugh at how her unhappy expression which had slipped through in that moment did not fit well at all with her supposed gratitude nor the polished tone she was using to try to make herself sound sincere.

‘But I still need you, nonetheless.’ Her tone was steady, not nearly as desperate as her words demanded; it was a little too smooth, too low and artificial; it was the voice of someone trying to get their way by charm or sweet talk.

The fact that it was coming from Sofia – an unrecognisable Sofia, with sad, softened eyes – was disorientingly strange to Nell.

‘Right, you’re very bonny,’ she said, trying to look unimpressed, ‘so I’m sure that trick works on all the fellas, but –’

‘What trick?’ Sofia's strained pleading look slipped away and was replaced with disgust. ‘And don’t call me that.’

Nell walked to a tree and leant against it. The other woman followed as if she had been invited, standing within touching distance. Nell frowned and looked her up and down.

‘You put me through hell, Wilmot. I’m only doing this because I don’t want another bloody war.’

‘I starved in the forest for two months,’ she growled, ‘and had to watch on helplessly as my brother nearly died.’

‘My sister nearly died! My baby sister! She’s only eight – practically an infant – and she’s already worth a dozen of your brother.’

‘Thomas is...’ She frowned thoughtfully, then looked at Nell imploringly. ‘He’s different now. He has changed. He would never –’

Nell’s stomach turned as she thought of Billy trapped within him, stuck trying to make the wretched man worth the air he breathed.

‘Why’s he different? Eh? Is it because he has no more dads to kill?’

To her surprise, Sofia moved towards Nell, quickly and like she was about to attack. She could see Sofia shaking with rage.

Nell took it as her cue to continue: ‘If it had been you who was injured, how do you know he wouldn’t have just let you die? It don’t seem like he cares much about family.’

It was a cruel thing to say; Nell would have felt bad if she had said it to anyone else. But Sofia had her blood pumping and wouldn’t back away, neither literally nor figuratively. Nell leant towards her; it was her turn to intrude upon Sofia’s personal space. The woman didn’t flinch, even when Nell’s face was less than a foot away from hers.

‘Be honest, Sofia, for once – at least to yourself,’ she whispered. ‘Your brother’s a murderer who don’t care ‘bout nobody but himse –’

Out of the corner of her eye, only a second before impact, Nell saw a pale little fist come up from the shadows; she felt its sharp blow upon her jaw.

She stumbled sideways, away from the tree, and caught sight of Sofia shaking her hand, then clasping it protectively in the other. Nell was pleased to see that the punch had hurt her, too.

‘Oh, not as easy to do with your own hands?’

Sofia’s eyes glittered malevolently in the low light.

‘Wish you had another person to use to fight me? Or maybe another press to crush my head with?’ Nell laughed bitterly. ‘God, that was dirty of you. Would’ve left a real mess – but that’s for someone else to clean up, yeah? Never someone like you.’

Nell appraised her as she began to circle around her, looking for a weak point. Every word she said made her jaw hurt more, but she couldn’t stop herself: ‘No wonder you couldn’t even keep yourself clean – you’ve never had to do any hard work in your life, have ya?’

The batty woman rushed at her and grabbed her by the shoulders. They danced violently together for a frantic moment as Nell tried to keep her balance, but the other woman pressed viciously at Nell until she inevitably fell backwards – but she took Sofia with her as she crashed to the ground.

Except that only meant that she was the one who broke Sofia’s fall.

‘Fuck!’

Opportunistically, Sofia raised a fist to punch her in the face. Nell barely caught it in time.

‘You ruined my life!’

‘After you tried to end mine how many times?’ Nell grunted as she tried to shove her off, but Sofia had a tight grip on the collar of her shirt. She didn’t like her fingers being that close to her neck. ‘Fucking get off me!’

This time, Sofia’s punch slipped past her hand and slammed into her brow.

‘Make me,’ Sofia said, like a bully. Nell caught the flash of white teeth – either a grimace or else a cruel smile. Sofia breathed heavily around the words, ‘God, I should have –’

Sofia’s words were cut short by her groan, for Nell had given her a good slap across the face. The force of it dislodged Sofia’s grip on her shirt and Nell took the opportunity to push her off her; she wasted no time in rolling atop Sofia, reversing their positions.

‘Should have what? Should have fucking what, Sofia?’

The damned little witch’s face lit up with outrage when Nell put her arms up over her head, pinning her to the ground by her wrists. Quickly realising that this was no time for gallantry, Nell lowered herself onto Sofia further, putting weight on her legs to keep her from trying to knee her. Altogether, it put Nell in a position that neither of them wanted, but she felt she didn’t have much choice.

‘Should’ve what?’ Nell panted, her teeth bared in a defiant grin. ‘Killed me? Then who would have saved you and your brother from Poynton? From the woods? Eh? From your own stupidity?’

There was a sharp buzzing of sorts in Nell’s ears as she shouted down at her, dampening the sound of her own voice. Sofia’s lips had begun to move, but she couldn’t hear her even when she herself went silent; the only sounds were their heavy breathing and the pounding of blood inside her head. Try as she might, she couldn’t make out whatever threats Sofia was making.

Then an orange glow caught her eye: embers were forming in Sofia’s hand.

‘What is wrong with you?’ she demanded. She almost laughed as she said, ‘You’re really gonna try to kill me? Ain’t one for learning from past mistakes, are ya?’

The sparks had grown into a swirling ball of fire nearly the size of the apple she had been eating just minutes before.

‘Fuck! Billy,’ Nell said through gritted teeth: a desperate prayer. ‘C’mon, Billy.’

‘“Plea?” I’ll never plead,’ Sofia spat back, evidently having misheard her.

Nell could feel a scalding heat against her knuckles. She slid her hand down Sofia’s arm to get away from the fire, all while trying to keep a firm grip on her.

‘Where are your powers, Nell Jackson?’ Sofia sounded more winded than scary, if only because Nell was crushing her. ‘Why are you holding back?’

Nell glared down at her, hating her all the more for having noticed her helplessness, which she had tried so hard to hide. She tightened her grip on her forearms to the point she knew that it must be hurting her, but Sofia showed no pain.

‘I could burn you alive.’

Sofia smiled up at Nell, her eyes rolling upwards in the direction of her flaming hand. The tremor of Sofia’s arm gave Nell the impression that she was struggling to keep the growing magic leashed.

She whispered, sounding more menacing, ‘Look.’

Realising nobody was coming to help her, Nell felt she had only one option: so she smacked her forehead against Sofia’s.

The witch’s shout in her ears hurt almost as much as the impact.

‘Fuck, you really are hard-headed,’ Nell grunted, feeling her own head going light.

The flames had disappeared, just as surely as if they’d been blown out, and Sofia’s head lolled to the side; her pained groan, however, let Nell know that she hadn’t been knocked out.

Meanwhile, Nell had hurt her neck when she jerked it back and then forward; and for a moment, the pain was bad enough that she couldn’t hold her head up, forcing her to rest her brow against Sofia’s cheek, like it was some kind of terrifying pillow.

Her head was still swimming when Sofia shoved her, and all she could do was roll onto the ground, limply staring up at the sky.

‘Not again –’ she grunted when she felt Sofia climb atop her once more.

Her mad laugh of victory rang in Nell’s ears as she weakly tried to swat at her hands to prevent her from getting a solid grip on her; then, when they did find purchase on Nell’s shirt yet again, all she could do was try to push at Sofia’s torso while she wriggled beneath her to try to throw her off.

All of a sudden Nell’s pushing seemed suddenly to come easily, and for a second she thought Billy had finally –

But no, it was only Charles who had come to help her.

He dragged Sofia off Nell. She looked like a cat being picked up by the scruff; she hung onto Nell’s clothes for as long as she could, pulling Nell halfway up into a sitting position in the process.

‘Good Lord ! Five minutes!’ Charles laughed. ‘I can’t leave you two alone for five minutes!’

‘Let go of me!’ Sofia snapped.

‘I will, I will!’ Charles laughed, giving her an almost-playful shake. ‘But only once I know you’re not going to burn her pretty face off.’

Sofia stopped struggling and tiredly sagged against him. Nell could feel her eyes on her as she got up off the ground.

‘Are you all right, Nelly?’

‘It’s “Nell”,’ she corrected him through gritted teeth. ‘I’m fine, she didn’t even draw blood this time. Wait, fuck, never mind – my lip’s split again. It’s never going to heal fully, if this keeps happening.’

Sofia’s laugh sounded far too pleased with herself.

‘I think it suits you,’ Charles said, but Nell ignored him.

‘Right, well...’ she sighed.

She really didn’t want Sofia to feel like she won, or that she was getting her way. But with her face all freshly-bruised, Nell only wanted to sleep off the pain.

She felt she had no choice but to say, ‘We’re all going to London. I’m going to have a word with the papers. Yous two can see if your uncle will take you.’

Sofia looked on in astonishment, rather than the gloating Nell had expected.

‘Speaking of uncles, there’s somewhere I need to stop first.’

Then Sofia just looked exasperated.

‘How kind of you to reconsider,’ she said insincerely to Nell. ‘I’m so grateful.’

‘Terribly unworthy and all that, yeah?’

Sofia sprang away from Charles as soon as he let her go. She looked him up and down with distaste, sent Nell one last dirty look, and then left them.

‘Fuck her,’ Nell muttered.

Her face really did hurt. Just under a week’s worth of proper meals had given Sofia just enough strength to do some damage. As Nell prodded at the tender spots on her face, she felt a familiar stickiness. She wasn’t sure where the blood was coming from, but it was minor enough that she wasn’t too concerned.

‘Since when do you need my help?’ Charles asked. He held up a finger and clarified: ‘In a fight, I mean. You’re a disaster without me in every other way, and we both know it.’

‘No,’ she weakly argued. ‘I just didn’t want to hurt her, now that I know what pitiful shape she’s been in.’

He came closer, making a noise that was something between sympathetic and amused.

‘Here, allow me...’

Because she had still been looking in the direction Sofia had gone in, she didn’t expect it when he lifted a handkerchief to her face; it caught her by surprise when she was suddenly blinded and there was an unwelcome sting at the brow Sofia’s fist had collided with before.

So tired and distracted was she from the fight, it took her a moment to react to him.

‘Oh. Thanks,’ she said, reaching up to press the handkerchief against her bleeding brow, but finding it difficult to find a place where their fingers would not overlap.

‘I’m happy to help,’ he said with a little smile. ‘At least she didn’t manage to light you on –’

‘Thanks for the handkerchief. I’m all –’

‘Nell, you know I’d do anythi –’

‘Uh-huh,’ she said quickly as she reached up to tug his hand out from under hers. ‘And to you. Much obliged.’

She felt the hand she had freed herself from brush against her cheek for barely a second before he took a step back.

Nell, too, stepped back from him. She blinked hard – so hard it made her brow hurt more – and looked in the direction Sofia had gone.

‘Blimey, she’s the worst,’ was all she could say.

He did that laugh: the same one she had recognised in London. The one that was a little rude, perhaps, but real. His laugh was familiar and comfortable, unlike the look he had been giving her.

She smiled, relieved by the sound of it, and hoped he’d let it drop, whatever he’d been about to say.

‘So...’ Charles said, following her gaze towards where the fire burnt. ‘Are we still helping them or not?’

‘Huh?’

‘Did she not just try to kill you?’

‘Fuck, I suppose, but...’ Nell sighed. ‘I’m fine. She’s fine. Really, this changes nothing.’

It had changed something, though.

In the morning, when it was time for them to leave for Abingdon, Sofia had climbed onto the horse behind Nell without complaint, and her arms had looped around Nell’s waist as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Nell didn’t even feel like the woman’s eyes were boring holes into the back of her skull. She leant forward to subtly peer down past her own chest at the hand that had cradled deadly fire in it last night, and saw that it was relaxed, holding her coat securely, but not even clutching the wool as if wishing to strangle.

‘Ready?’ Nell asked everyone.

Charles made a sound of confirmation. Thomas said nothing. The arms tightened painlessly around her from behind, a wordless confirmation from Sofia of her readiness.

Nell urged their horse into a trot.