With This Curse: A Novel of Victorian Romantic Suspense by Amanda DeWees

seems I’m not truly leaving the theater after all, Miss Ingram, for I must become an actress.”
    That brought a smile that softened the shrewd gaze. “Determination is half of it, and you seem to be well equipped with that. But you must work without a script, and that can be nerve wracking. I shall give you a piece of advice: make your lies as brief as they can reasonably be. If you must concoct a story, make it a simple one; it is when you go into too-elaborate detail that a story becomes implausible.” She rose to depart and twitched her canary-yellow overskirt into place over the cerise skirt. “I shall miss you, Clara. Write to me if you wish.” She embraced me lightly, and added with her lips close to my ear: “No matter how foolish you may think me for saying so, do try to influence your husband to leave Gravesend. Take the old baron with you if need be, but don’t stay a moment more than you must.” Drawing back, she looked into my face and gave a troubled shake of her head. “Obstinate girl. Trust an experienced trouper, my dear, and believe me when I tell you that my intuition is not wrong on this. Gravesend will place you in danger.”

    Atticus and I were married on a bleak morning in late January. When he came to fetch me, he gave my ensemble a look of approbation. “I see I was right to trust your eye for fashion,” he said, after greeting me with a kiss on the hand that I did not even feel, so distracted was I.
    “You approve, then?” I asked. I was far more nervous than I had expected to be. In his morning suit and high silk hat my soon-to-be husband looked both familiar and alarmingly alien. His likeness to Richard was a constant distraction rather than a reassurance; each time I saw him my heart would lift for one delighted instant before being cast down again as memory took hold. I was full of dread that I would say “I take thee, Richard” instead of “I take thee, Atticus.” Or even “Atlas.” I was still finding it difficult to stop thinking of him by that old nickname.
    Unaware of my turmoil, or else tactful enough to ignore it, he said, “The dress is lovely, but it merely underscores what I already knew, which is that my bride is a most handsome woman.”
    I did not know what to say to that. “I hope dove gray is appropriate,” I finally replied. “It may be a trifle young, and goodness knows with this weather we hardly need more gray. I look like a cloudbank settling over the Thames.”
    “Clara,” he said gently, and waited until I stopped fussing with my gloves and gave him my attention. He was watching me gravely. His voice was very quiet when he said, “If you wish to change your mind, now is the time to say so.”
    Yes, I’ve changed my mind. Part of me wanted to say this—wanted it desperately. But what would happen then? I had seen what life in the factory—and out of it—had done to Martha. I could never become like her and the others like her, women who had grown old in that life, turning to laudanum or gin to make their existence bearable, sometimes to the extent that their habit had to be funded by gentleman “admirers.” Anything rather than that.
    Yet when I met that icily pale blue gaze, with its mysteriously pensive quality, I was not certain I could take this course either. At Gravesend I would have no allies save this man, and I did not even know to what extent I could trust him. I would be cut off from the world, surrounded by strangers, and living in the constant fear that someone would reveal my true identity.
    Mother would not have run, I thought suddenly. She had taken that position at Gravesend to support us, believing all the while in the curse. Trying to keep me on my guard against it. Had she lived in dread? Or had she, having lost my father, felt that the curse had nothing more to use against her—except me?
    “I haven’t changed my mind,” I said through dry lips.
    His taut, listening posture relaxed, and he smiled. The same mobile,