Page 3 of Rules for Ruin

Nell’s expression sobered as she stopped in front of them. “I won’t go in. Miss Corvus insists on speaking with you alone.”

“Does she, indeed?” Effie lifted Franc from his carpetbag and set him down on the stone floor. He gave a perfunctory shake before springing into motion. Effie caught hold of his lead before he could gallop off. Franc was a loyal companion, but he was also a rogue. He couldn’t resist wandering.

She handed the lead to Nell. “If you would be so good as to take him for an airing? And pray don’t let him loose. He’s swift as a greyhound when he chooses to be. You’d never catch him.”

Nell didn’t ask any questions. She knew all about Franc’s little foibles from Effie’s letters. “I shall take him to visit the hedgerow,” she said. “Look for me when you’re done.”

Effie waited until Nell had gone before rapping twice on the door. There was a taut moment of silence before Miss Corvus answered from within.

“Come,” she said.

The clipped, frost-edged voice had its usual effect on Effie. It was a reaction borne from a memory too distant to recall as anything more than primitive emotion. It made Effie long to shrink back into herself. To make herself invisible. Maybe then Miss Corvus wouldn’t see her. Wouldn’t take her away.

But Effie had never excelled at being invisible.

Stiffening her spine, she opened the door.

• • •

Effie was met by the unsettling prospect of a darkened sitting room. The curtains had been drawn shut, and no candles had been lit. There remained only enough light to see the heavy mahogany furnishings, the vases filled with crumbling bouquets of dried flowers, and the shrouds of black fabric that covered the pictures on the walls and the mirror hanging over the fireplace.

For all Miss Corvus’s progressive views, for all her insistence on looking to the future, this was a chamber firmly enshrouded in the past. A veiled room, all stale darkness and decay.

Miss Corvus had been similarly veiled the first time Effie had seen her that fateful day eighteen years ago in the London slum of St. Giles.

But Miss Corvus wasn’t veiled now.

She sat in a green damask–upholstered armchair by the window, her uncovered face as white as wax. She was clad in stark black, just as Effie was—a plain, but impeccably tailored, silk dress worn over an abundance of petticoats and a formidable wire crinoline. A jet brooch gleamed at her throat, and an embroidered lace handkerchief was clutched in her pale hand.

There was a low inlaid malachite table beside her chair. A tray sat upon it, holding a pitcher of water, a single glass, and a small, stoppered brown bottle with a label pasted on it. Some sort of medicinal tonic, Effie suspected.

Shutting the door behind her, she crossed the room to join her former teacher.

Miss Corvus watched her come with a raptor-like intensity. In appearance, she was all but unchanged from the enigmatic lady who had entered her life when Effie was a child. Only the threads of silver in her hair, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, and the grooves bracketing her perpetually disapproving mouth betrayed the truth of Miss Corvus’s age. She was approaching fifty. A great age for a woman, especially an unmarried one whom the years had made peculiar.

Effie stopped in front of her. She dropped a graceful curtsy, honed to a perfect degree of fashionable elegance in the drawing rooms of Paris. “Miss Corvus.”

“Miss Flite,” Miss Corvus replied in the same icy tones. “I see my money has not been wholly wasted.” She motioned for Effie to step back. “Let me look at you.”

Effie remained standing, back straight and chin lifted, silently submitting to Miss Corvus’s cold perusal. She examined Effie from top to bottom. The thick ebony hair worn back in a stylish plaited roll. The catlike blue eyes so dark they might be mistaken for violet. The solemn face, with its black arching brows, high cheekbones, and wide, voluptuous mouth. And the figure—lithe and athletic, but not lacking in curves.

Taken along with Effie’s striking complexion (a clear rich hue that lingered somewhere between dark ivory and olive), the whole of her appearance made her less a traditionally pretty girl and more a compellingly seductive mystery. People couldn’t help but stare. Couldn’t help but wonder. Who was she? they whispered. Where did she come from?

The very questions Effie had begun to ask herself. The ones that had resulted in her being sent away five years ago.

“I rarely get things wrong,” Miss Corvus said when she’d finished taking Effie’s measure. “But I readily own my mistakes.” She signaled for Effie to sit with an impatient flick of her hand.

Effie gave Miss Corvus a sardonic bow of acknowledgment before taking the seat across from her. She was confident enough in her own attributes to recognize the hidden compliment in her former schoolmistress’s words.

“You were a pretty child, but had no promise of great beauty,” Miss Corvus went on. “Not like Miss Trewlove. It was she who was meant to grow into my Aphrodite incarnate.”

“Hence her name,” Effie said.

“While you…You were meant to soar.”

“Hence mine.” Effie’s voice held no humor. This wasn’t the first time Miss Corvus had expressed such sentiments. She’d had fixed intentions for both Effie and Nell when she’d taken them. She was a woman who was rarely without a plan. One for whom an orphan girl was a tool rather than an object of Christian charity.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Miss Corvus mused. “To think, I reared up a falcon who is afraid of heights.”