Page 37 of As Many Souls as Stars
‘Sheiscursed,’ her uncle said. ‘Our father told us the stories—what happened the last time there was a First Daughter. Shadows followed her, and suffering came in their wake.’
‘Nonsense,’ Reginald Harding said again. He had always been stubborn, carving his opinions upon himself like words carved into stone—he had neither the twitching paranoia of his younger brother nor, perhaps, his foresight.
Esther didn’t tellherbrother, Isaac, about the curse, not even once he grew old enough to understand it. Her father had given him a room near the servants’ quarters for shame of his bastardry, and yet—despite this—Isaac seemed to approach the world with great vigour and optimism; it was often commented that his personality was the opposite of his curt, callous sister’s. When Esther walked down a hall, he would spring from behind doors and leap to grasp her skirts; hewould babble and laugh with all the joy of a piping flute; he was sweet and kind and gullible, craning his neck when Esther told him she saw a pig flying through the sky, gasping in delight when she somehow removed her thumb from its socket.
Eventually, though, as the shadows grew more familiar, their darkness more insistent, Esther learnt to keep the pigs upon the ground, her thumb attached. She did not want to ruin him. She did not want to love him overmuch, or else the curse might take him, also. Instead, she made herself alone.
And so, Esther Harding grew from girl to woman. She ignored her doddering father and her earnest brother, who always tried so hard to get her attention, and whom she pushed away. They stayed in the London townhouse all year, regardless of season, as the family estate belonged to her uncle’s line; and although that was terribly out of fashion, Esther didn’t mind it. To her, London was not only the Ton, with its pastel dreams and white-marble houses, its gilded carriages and manicured lawns. It was all the filth, too: the horse dung on the cobbles, the thin film of soot that coated everything, the stench of the summer and the bitter cold of the winter. It was oily puddles and coal smoke, street vendors shouting, butchers lugging sweating cuts of meat. It was the constant rain, the darkness of the clouds, the way that thunder sometimes shook the chandeliers in their red-papered dining room and made the crystals clatter. On occasion, Esther would dream of other places—faraway houses, with empty halls and shadowy hills—and it was always with relief that she awakened, remembering she was in London still. London was sohuman, soreal. It kept her grounded.
The town offered opportunity, too. There were bookshops in the town, those run by secret societies, full of shelves of esoterica and occult scribblings. Esther would sneak out at night and explore dark alleyways with closed doors that only opened to the correct pattern of knocks; she would seek ancient manuscripts in labyrinthine libraries that claimed to hold the secrets of the universe.
At seventeen, the night before Esther’s first day out in the marriage market, she went to one such library and held a book in her hands that was bound with human skin. Bringing it home, she followed theritual inside to the letter, sourcing each ingredient, muttering each incantation with solemn precision: but nothing seemed to happen. Nothingeverseemed to happen, no matter how many attempts she made.
Esther groaned and tipped her head back, rolling her neck. It was late, very late, the only illumination in the room the candles she’d lit for the ritual circle. She remained in the gown she’d worn to tea that afternoon, a pale-blue capped-sleeve dress with bluebells stitched on its hem. Its incongruity with the pentagrams inked on the back of her hands was almost amusing.
Something tapped on the window. Esther turned to look at it, and she smiled, going to open the sash. The crow on the sill cawed in approval, outstretching its wings as if to imply an embrace. Something glinted in its claws.
‘You brought me something?’ she asked it, and in reply it thrust a curled talon towards her. It dropped something small and red and bloody onto the windowsill: a tiny sparrow’s heart, dead and unbeating, a vivid stain on the white-painted wood.
‘Oh.’ Esther reached forward to take the heart in her hands. A droplet of blood welled between her clasped palms, trailing down her wrist. It tumbled down to the hem of her skirts, where it bloomed red against the cerulean petals of an embroidered bluebell.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and the crow bowed its head.
The crow had been visiting Esther at the townhouse for as long as she could remember. Perhaps, as a young girl, she had given it something to eat, and so ensured its loyalty; she couldn’t remember. If so, Esther declined to question how the crow had lived so long, or why it continued to visit with little reward. As with all things in her life, it was largely inexplicable.
She went to her dressing table, laid out an old silk kerchief, and placed the heart upon it. She knew she would have to throw it away soon, but she wanted to appreciate the gift while it lasted. She stared down at the tiny, fingernail-size organ, noting its silence and stillness, and she cocked her head.
The darkness had been whispering to her for years. It was only natural that, sometimes, she had listened.
Their interactions had started as tiny trades: she would ask for something small of it, like setting the logs alight when the fire failed. In exchange, Esther would feel a brief moment of burning within her, like searing a finger upon a candle flame, and a brief moment of emptiness. It had become second nature to her, now, to make these miniature deals. The wonders they created were always worth the pain.
Slowly, gently, she held her hands out to the shadows, welcoming them to her. They knew her well enough to understand she wanted an exchange. Immediately, she felt a heat prickle in her chest, and—being careful not to let the pain overwhelm her—she reached forward, placing a trembling finger on the sparrow heart.
Make it beat, she thought. And with that thought, the shadows stretched forward like fingers, curling themselves around the organ. The heart quivered, inflated, and slowly, steadily, began to pulse in time with her own.
Esther’s shoulders slumped as the pain faded. She had this, at least. Her power had made her isolated, but perhaps, someday, it would bear the key to her freedom. She simply had to find the correct ritual, the correct set of spells, and it wouldn’t matter anymore that the other women in the Ton found her off-putting, or that her dreams were full of fire; it wouldn’t matter that sometimes—in the most silent moments of dark between sleeping and waking, when the mind is half present, half dreaming—she heard someone saying a name that was her own, but not her own. An oracle’s name, just as Esther was, and one that seemed as familiar to her as Esther did.
The crow on the windowsill cawed. Esther felt the sparrow’s heartbeat for a moment longer, then lifted her finger.Thank you, she told the shadows.
The organ fluttered, shuddered, and was still.
Esther’s father died when she was twenty-two.
It had happened while he was sleeping. No one knew why. ‘His spirit left him,’ the doctor said, as if spirits were prone to spontaneous flight; but either way—he was gone.
Esther felt grief, but very little of it. He had been an absent father, not cruel, but not kind; sometimes it seemed he almost had an aversion to her, that he avoided her gaze and her conversation. She had never grown to love him.
At the funeral, as they laid their father to rest, there was much commentary on the tragedy of the Harding bloodline. They were a scandalous family, after all—seventeen-year-old Isaac was illegitimate; Esther had been out in the marriage market for several Seasons but had yet to make a match; and this was the third Harding death in as many years. The first had been her uncle, of distemper; the second her cousin’s poor little wife, Lily, upon the childbed—and now Reginald had followed them. Left without a guardian, Esther and Isaac had nowhere to go but to their cousin’s household. The three of them were the only Hardings left in London, the other branches of the family huddled away in country estates, resolutely pretending their scandalous town relatives didn’t exist.
Esther met the curious stares of the funeralgoers with open defiance, while Isaac simply ignored them. No doubt they were ill-matched, the two of them, standing beside the casket in their mourners’ clothes: Esther pale and flame-haired, face impassive, swaddled in her black pelisse, while her brother—brown-skinned, brunet, expressive to a fault—grimaced and winced at the belaboured droning of the vicar. Their eyes caught; Isaac’s lips twitched. Esther did not quite allow herself a smile.
Afterwards, walking out of the church, with the stares of dozens beating on their backs, he said, ‘A bloody relief it’s over.’
Esther wasn’t certain whether he was speaking of the funeral or their father’s life. She had considered, many times, that she might have been Reginald’s killer; but that was his fault, she supposed. Their uncle had tried to warn him several times about her curse, and he’d never listened.
‘We could go see a play,’ Isaac continued, hopefully. ‘We have time to catch the matinee.’
‘We ought to return home and pack our things,’ she said.
