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

expressive lips, but so different a smile from Richard’s: understanding and kind instead of knowing and devilish. A pale shadow of the man I had lost, but he was doing me a good turn—an extraordinarily good turn—and I owed him a debt of gratitude for that.
    All the more chafing that I hated to be in anyone’s debt.
    The ceremony itself proceeded with a kind of hazy unreality, as if I were watching it through a fogged-over windowpane. The vows I spoke sounded muffled in my own ears, and with my thoughts full of Miss Ingram’s portents, I half expected Atticus to say “With this curse I thee wed.” Even the ring my new husband placed on my finger—an heirloom of rose gold set with opals—did not make the event any more real to me.
    This would not do. Once we were settled in the railway carriage and hurtling away from London, I asked, “What is our story?”
    Atticus, fortunately, did not need me to explain the question. That was pleasant to see: he was more intelligent than I had expected, given my impressions of him from our younger days.
    “I think it would be convenient for us to have met through a mutual acquaintance of your late husband’s,” he suggested. “An American businessman, let’s say, interested in expanding his reach to our shores.” He seemed thoroughly at ease now with the wedding behind us, his arms crossed over his chest, the ankle of his good leg propped on the opposite knee. I, in contrast, was sitting primly straight in the seat across from him, not yet accustomed to the rattling, shaking rhythm of our passage; it had been months since I had last been on a train.
    “And you met him how?”
    “Through a… charitable institution that I’m developing. A genuine one,” he added, seeing the question in my eyes. “That work will occasionally take me away from Gravesend, I should mention.”
    “Oh?” Uncertain though I was at how enjoyable married life would be with my new husband, the prospect of being left alone at Gravesend was perhaps even less appealing. “Will you be gone for long periods?”
    “Not at first, no. And I won’t be traveling to France as often as I used to, certainly. Now that you and I are married, my ward can come to live with us.”
    “Your ward,” I repeated blankly. This was the first time he had mentioned such a person.
    In his enthusiasm he seemed handsomer somehow, younger; closer to my memory of Richard. “Her name is Genevieve Rowe. She’s of English parentage but has lived in France since before she learned to speak, and she’s far more French than English now. Sometimes I almost forget that she isn’t French by birth.”
    I myself had perhaps a dozen words of French, no more. “How old is she?” I asked, picturing a child of nine or ten years. If she was no older than that, we might get on well enough.
    “A month or so shy of eighteen,” he said cheerfully. “I want her to debut this Season, so it will be important for her to become acclimated to England before then. You’ll adore her, Clara. And she can learn so much from you.”
    “From me? If you mean to restrict her education to sewing and housekeeping, perhaps.” The words emerged tartly; I’d spoken the truth when I had told Atlas that I disliked surprises. The domestic arrangement I had begun to come to grips with in my mind was now being unsettled by a stranger—an unknown quantity. How would she affect the fragile accord that Atlas and I were building?
    Seeing my discomfiture, he moved the conversation back to a less controversial channel.
    “We can discuss the matter further at a later time. Just now we have our own history to decide upon. I suspect that my circle of acquaintance won’t be conversant with American lineage, so let’s say that you are descended from sturdy American stock on one side—moneyed, I think—and hearty British yeomanry on the other, but of sufficiently modest name that you prefer not to discuss it. You and your late husband shared a fascination