Ashes Beneath the Lilies
Marie Higgins
Love can bloom even in the shadow of the grave.
Once, Isobel Fairfax’s life was gilded with wealth and promise, until the night fire consumed her home and left her for dead. Five years later, she tends the graves at Highgate Cemetery under another name, living quietly among the dead to escape the man who stole her future.
Captain Elias Blackwood is determined to bring her back into the light, but doing so will pit them against a cunning enemy with deep pockets and darker secrets.
In the silent graveyard, where lilies bloom over cold stone, Elias and Isobel must confront the past that burned them both, and risk igniting a love neither thought they’d feel again.
Chapter One
October 1845
Highgate Cemetery, London
The dead hadnever bothered Captain Elias Blackwood. It was the living that haunted him.
He stood beneath the spire of ivy-covered angels, as the chill of October seeped through the wool of his greatcoat. The cemetery was nearly empty, save for the silent rows of tombs and the rustle of leaves whispering secrets through the trees.
Highgate had always carried a weight—a hush, a reverence—but now it felt different. Heavier. As though it held its breath the moment he passed through the iron gates.
Elias shifted the bouquet of dried heather and laurel in his hand, the only offering he could think to bring. They weren’t for family. He had none left. These were for Lieutenant Hartley, a boy barely twenty who had once stood between Elias and a bullet, then died three days later of fever. Although the Crimean War took many, Hartley had no family, no one to mourn him.
“Rest easy, lad,” Elias murmured as he knelt before the modest stone.
The wind rose without warning, rattling the bare branches and tugging sharply at his coat, sending the hem of his trousers snapping against his boots. Elias stilled, sweeping his gaze along the hedgerows and leaning statuary behind him. Years of warhad honed his instincts into something almost primal, and now every nerve was on alert.
Someone was watching him. The certainty slid down his spine, cold and undeniable. The hairs at his nape prickled.
At first, he saw nothing, only the shifting shadows cast by the moon over moss-streaked angels and stone crosses. Then a ripple of black caught his eye. A length of silk, quick as a breath, vanished behind the bowed head of a weeping cherub.
He stepped forward, boots crunching over gravel. “Is someone there?”
Silence. Only the toll of a distant bell broke the night. Eleven sonorous chimes, each one hollow, as though striking from deep underground.
Then she appeared again. The woman in mourning stepped from behind the cherub, her black veil stirring in the wind like smoke from an unseen fire. Although she wore black, her white hair was more prominent, making him wonder about her age.
She moved with an unnatural elegance, her steps almost soundless over the gravel paths. Her height, her bearing, the slight tilt of her chin as she glanced over her shoulder—every detail struck him with a pang of familiarity that stopped his breath.
Elias’s pulse thundered in his ears.It can’t be.
He followed, heedless of how mad he must look, the damp leaves whispering beneath his stride. “Miss Fairfax?”
The name clung to the air between the headstones, absorbed into the fog. She did not answer. Instead, she turned the corner of a tall, weather-streaked monument, disappearing from sight.
Elias quickened his pace, but when he reached the monument, she was gone. Only the soft perfume of lilies lingered. A handful of white petals lay scattered on the ground, already browning at the edges, as though abandoned days ago.
Isobel Fairfax had been declared dead five years earlier. Yet Elias would have wagered his soul that it was her who had just stood among the graves, staring back at him through the veil.
He turned in place, slow and deliberate, straining for the faintest sound—a breath, a rustle, the whisper of skirts. But there was nothing.
The path behind him lay empty, the fog swallowing all trace of her. She had melted into the cemetery night as though she had never been there at all.
He walked the long road back to the city in silence, trying not to believe what he’d seen. Ghosts were for superstitious fools and drunken soldiers. He had buried that part of himself long ago—hope, faith, longing. All of it.
But Isobel… He remembered her laugh like the lilt of a harp. The delicate way she had held a teacup, as though it might shatter if gripped too firmly. He’d only known her a short time, but it had been enough to carve her name deep into the quiet places of his memory. She had been engaged to Lord Norton, a man with a face like cold marble and a heart to match. Ugly whispers that she’d tried to break off the engagement had passed through the air. Then came the fire. No body was ever found.
