Page 1 of A Single Thread of Moonlight

PROLOGUE

Once upon a time there was a girl whose life was a dream, spun from golden thread.

She lived in a vast and rambling house in the countryside. It was a house that had been in her father’s family for generations, and she loved it. She loved the jumble of hallways and rooms knotted strangely together, the huge Georgian windows, and the old Tudor beams.

It was a big house, and her father was a big man. Nobody could ride like him or shoot like him or throw her up into the air like him. She had no memory of her first time on a horse; it was as if she was born knowing how to gallop across open fields. Her father would take her around his estate, telling her thrilling stories of daring adventures.

The girl’s mother was a haze of honey-coloured hair and blue eyes. She was a gentle voice and soft arms. “Delicate” – that’s what the girl’s father called her – which meant no loud voices, no running, no tumbling about. Her mother’s rooms were as quiet and sleepy as any belonging to a fairy-tale princess under a spell.

The girl knew all about fairy tales, because her mother read them to her while she combed her blonde curls with her fingers. Her mother also taught her how to sew, how to create beautiful things out of nothing but cloth and thread, and this seemed like another kind of magic to the little girl.

All was well, and the days fell like neat stitches in a beautiful tapestry.

Then, when she was nine, the golden life began to unravel.

Her mother died – one day she was there, and the next she simply slipped away, like a candle that had been burning lower and lower as the months and weeks passed, finally extinguished.

But the girl still had her father, and she held him closer than ever. He was her whole world, and she was his shadow, following him wherever he went.

Then, less than a year after her mother died, the girl’s father remarried.

At first she was excited about gaining a stepmother and two new stepsisters, but her new family were cold and cruel. Her father started to disappear, staying away from home from morning to night. He did not take his shadow with him.

It was only a year after the marriage that the unthinkable happened. The girl’s father – the greatest horseman in seven counties – had a riding accident on his way home. A rabbit hole, they told her. He fell from his horse and was killed instantly.

It was impossible. Her father rode the same path through the woods every day – there was not a chance that he could be thrown from his horse so easily. The little girl knew a convenient lie when she heard one. She saw the satisfied smile behind her stepmother’s black veil, and deep in her heart she knew the truth: that she was living with a cold-hearted killer.

But she had no proof, no one to confide in.

And she had an ominous feeling that she might be next.

So the girl did what any self-respecting young heroine would do.

She vowed that one day she would have her revenge.

And then she ran away.

Part One

London

October, 1899

CHAPTER ONE

Not a lot of people knew when they were going to die, but I did, right down to the minute. At the stroke of midnight, on the twenty-fifth of November 1899, Iris Penelope Scott-Holland would die. The letter in my hand told me so.

I sighed, closing my eyes and crumpling the sheet of paper between my fingers.

I hadn’t been Iris Scott-Holland for a long time now. It had been almost seven years since I had run away from home, and – according to the investigator that I had scrimped and saved to hire – seven years was all the time that you needed to be missing before you could be declared legally dead.

It was no surprise to learn that my stepmother had been counting the days.

The final sentences of the letter danced behind my eyelids like sunspots.

I regret to inform you, Miss Grey, that time is not on your side. If you wish to act, it must be soon.

Seven years since I had been home. Seven years since Father had died. Seven years of questions left unanswered. Perhaps it was time for that to change.