The Poison Duchess: Reborn to Ruin Them All

Grace had stopped marking the days after the guards took the nail she’d been scratching them into the wall with. Eleven, she thought. Maybe twelve.

“She’s not crying,” said the guard outside the door. He sounded almost hurt about it. He was the one who used to sneak her extra bread.

“Some of them don’t.”

She wasn’t crying because she’d already done all of it, days ago, until there wasn’t any left. What was left was Rosalind’s face, showing up whether she wanted it to or not, always right after saying something devastating with a small, concerned frown. You look tired, sister. Have you been sleeping? And Julian’s face, though there was less of it to remember, because he hadn’t looked at her once the day he broke off the betrothal. She’d counted.

Celeste’s face stayed away. Grace had tried, these last few days, to remember a single kind thing that woman had ever done for her, and come up empty, and stopped trying somewhere around day nine.

The footsteps in the hallway were unhurried. That was the part that stayed with her more than anything else. Nobody had bothered to make the walk to her execution sound any different from someone fetching a tray.

“Time.”

Grace stood. Her knees had been on the stone so long they made a sound.

Nineteen, when she’d started believing it. Twenty-two, now. Three years to learn that being good enough was never the measure anyone was using.

She closed her eyes. The dark behind them went white, and then it wasn’t dark or white or anything she had a word for, and for one very long moment there was nothing in the world at all.

Canvas. Creaking. A man’s voice, unhurried in a completely different way.

“Mind the trunk. Her mother’s books are in that one.”

Grace opened her eyes, and something that was not entirely Grace opened them with her.

Canvas roof. A carriage, patched in one corner with the wrong kind of leather. She lifted a hand to block the light and it was the wrong hand. Clean nails, trimmed short. Calluses in places a lady’s hand had no business having calluses, unless that lady had spent a decade grinding herbs and holding a scalpel steady, which, as it turned out, someone had.

I’m not dead.

That thought belonged to somebody else. It came up dry and startled from a place the girl on the cell floor had no map of. I was dead. Properly dead. And now I appear to have a carriage.

Two sets of memories arrived at once, shoving past each other like two people trying to use the same revolving door. One belonged to a girl named Grace Ashford, three months from her nineteenth birthday and riding home to a betrothal that had been arranged since she was in diapers. The other belonged to a doctor who had spent ten years with her hands inside other people’s chests and had, until a few breaths ago, been fairly sure her career in medicine had ended the way most careers eventually do. Badly. With paperwork, filed wrong.

She sat up too fast. The carriage rocked. Her skull rocked along with it and took its time settling.

“Easy,” said the coachman, facing the road. “Another hour yet.”

Her hand went to her collar on its own and found a cord there, and on the cord a small iron key, warm from her skin. The girl’s hand knew exactly what it was for. The doctor let it keep the secret for now.

Grace pressed her other hand flat to the wall and breathed the way you breathe when your body has just been swapped out from under you, in through the nose, out through the mouth. The convent had taught her that. So had a hospital, in another life. Both sets of hands had learned it, and both sets of hands were hers now, and of everything in the last hour, that was what made her sit very still. The dying she could file. The dying had paperwork.

She had ten years of a stranger’s childhood to get through, so she got through it, fast, the way you skim a chart. A mother who sang badly on purpose because it made a small child laugh. A house that smelled of beeswax and horse. Then the part that happens to children all at once. A black ribbon on the door. A new mother. A half-sister with the new mother’s eyes. A cart, and a convent, before Grace had finished being eight.

Sent away for her health, was the official version. Sent away so nobody had to look at her, was closer to true, and nobody said that part where an eight-year-old could hear it, though eight-year-olds hear everything. It’s the great design flaw of eight-year-olds.

The convent came in pieces after that, and she let most of them go by. Sister Agatha’s ruined hands, holding a stem of something up to the window. Widow Pell tapping Grace’s chin with one finger until the smile came out right. And the last morning. Grace on her knees on the dormitory floor, tying her mother’s books into two bundles with the waxed thread Agatha used for hanging herbs, and Agatha watching from the doorway, letting the crooked knot go.

Ten years of being nobody’s daughter and everybody’s little project. And now she was going home to be somebody’s daughter again. Lucky her.

Three months.

The number came up out of the doctor’s memory, unprompted, the way facts do when you badly need one. Because the doctor had read this. All of it. Years ago, on a dorm room bed, cold tea going colder, a paperback with someone else’s name inside the cover because she’d borrowed it and kept it. Rose and Crown. A book where the heroine was golden-haired and beloved by everyone she met, and the heroine’s older half-sister, trueborn, inconvenient, occasionally still breathing, spent four hundred pages being quietly dismantled before getting executed in a chapter the author had probably finished before lunch.

Grace remembered crying over that chapter. She’d been nineteen. She’d cried for a made-up woman named Grace Ashford, whose entire narrative function was to make someone else’s happy ending taste better by comparison.

She had not expected to personally become the sad backstory.

“Miss.” The coachman again, gentler. “House is just up the rise.”

Grace leaned toward the window. There it was. Ashford Hall, shrunk down by ten years of half-remembered childhood, and wrong in a dozen places at once. Bigger. The east wing had new glass in it, glinting in a spot she was fairly sure used to be plain wall.

Someone spent a great deal of money on that wing.

I already know whose rooms those are.

She did know, too, before she’d finished asking herself the question. That was the useful part of what she was carrying now. A weather forecast, more than a memory. Rain expected. Possible treason. Bring an umbrella. She knew the large shapes of what was coming. The exact hour of any of it she’d have to find out the old way, and books lied about small details constantly. It was the big things she had to trust, on account of the big things being the only things she had.

Three months until the betrothal. Three months for Celeste and Rosalind to make sure it never happens.

Last time, the only other time this had happened, as of roughly an hour ago, Grace had spent those three months being grateful. Grateful to be brought home at all. Grateful for a stepmother’s cool hand on her shoulder. Grateful for a sister who called her sister with such warmth that it took three more years, and a cell, and a length of rope, to work out who the warmth had been for. The room. Always the room.

She would be skipping that part. Gratitude, as a strategy, had never once worked.

The carriage stopped with the specific finality of wheels meeting a drive that had been swept for the occasion. Through the window, a man was already waiting. Steward’s coat. Hands folded. The particular stillness of someone who has rehearsed looking pleased to see you.

“My lady.” He had the door open before the wheels had properly stopped. “Hollis, my lady. Welcome home. A long journey, I trust?”

Ten years. You could call it long.

“Very,” Grace said, and let her voice do what it needed to do. Thin it. Soften it. Let a small tremor in at the edges. It cost her nothing. She’d spent a decade learning to sound smaller than she was, and it turned out that particular skill traveled well between one body and the next. “I’m afraid I hardly remember the house.”

“That’s to be expected, my lady. It has been some time.” A pause, the length good manners required, and then on. “Her Ladyship and Miss Rosalind are waiting in the drawing room.”

Her Ladyship. A title sanded smooth of every warmer word that used to fit her, like your mother, or the mistress of the house, handed to Grace as though the house had already forgotten who it used to belong to.

Grace filed that away too, and stepped down from the carriage into air that smelled like nothing in particular. Cut grass. Horse. The faint mineral edge of a house too large to ever properly air out.

Behind her, two footmen took the trunk down between them, and Hollis watched it all the way to the door.

She followed him up the front steps. Her legs remembered the height of them before the rest of her did, which told her something about how deep this girl’s memory ran, buried under a decade of convent stone.

At the top of the steps, just before the doors, Grace’s shoulders came down from around her ears. She’d have sworn they were already down.

Like setting down a bag she’d forgotten she was carrying. Ten years of expecting nothing. Ten years of shrinking to fit whatever room she’d been put in. Underneath all that, once she set it down, was something colder and considerably more entertaining.

She had read the ending. She knew how this went, down to the smell of the cell and the fact that nobody, not once, ever changed their walking pace on the way to fetch her.

She was, as far as she currently understood the situation, the only person about to walk into that house who knew that.

Small comfort. She’d take it.

The doors opened. Warmth, candlelight, a room arranging itself to be looked at. Grace lowered her eyes exactly as far as a frightened, grateful, thoroughly harmless girl would lower them, and let herself be seen.

Rosalind got up first.

She crossed the carpet with both hands already out, gold hair pinned high, one curl left loose at the temple where it would catch the candlelight. “Oh, look at you. You must be exhausted. Was the road very bad?”

Her hands were warm and a little damp. She squeezed once and let go.

Last time, Grace had cried right here. She could remember it from both sides now, the girl who had done it and the woman who had read about it with cold tea going colder, and neither of them came out of it well.

“It was long,” Grace said.

Rosalind waited for the rest. The rest stayed where it was.

Celeste kept her chair by the fire. She was stirring her tea, round and round, and the sugar bowl on the tray still had its lid on. She was smaller than the woman in Grace’s eight-year-old memory and dressed in a grey so dark it passed for black by candlelight, which was either mourning or taste, and Grace would have bet on taste.

“Grace.” The spoon went down on the saucer. “You’ve grown.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Rosalind’s head came round at that. Celeste only picked the spoon back up.

“Sit. Rosalind, ring for fresh tea.”

Rosalind sat instead, arranging her skirts, and took her time over Grace’s dress. Convent grey. Heavy wool. The hem had been let down twice, and each old fold still showed near the bottom, a paler stripe, then another.

“Is that what they all wear?” Rosalind said. “Every day?”

“On weekdays.”

“And Sundays?”

“The same. Cleaner.”

Rosalind laughed. It got out of her before she could arrange it, a short honest bark, and afterward she looked cross with herself and touched the loose curl.

“Do they let you have mirrors there, or is that one of the vows?”

A bee had got into the room somewhere. It was walking up the inside of the far window, legs working at the glass, very slowly. At the top of the pane it lost its grip and dropped to the sill. After a while it started again from the bottom. Grace watched it make the whole climb twice. The window was shut. The candles hissed a little in their holders, and somewhere behind the panelling a servant laughed at something and was told off.

“The road was dry most of the way,” Grace said. “Thank you for asking.”

Rosalind opened her mouth. Shut it. Started again. “I asked that ages ago.”

“I know. I was thinking about it.”

“Your father is at court until Thursday,” Celeste said, to nobody in particular. “He sends his regards.”

Grace tried to picture her father sending anyone his regards and got as far as his back, going out through a door.

Her eyes went, at last, where they had wanted to go since the doors opened. Above the fireplace hung a painting of a grey horse standing in a field. A good horse. The frame was gilt and deep and too big for it on every side.

“Where’s my mother?” Grace said.

Celeste’s cup stopped on its way up. Then it went back down to the saucer without a sound.

Rosalind looked at her mother.

“Cleaning,” Celeste said. Nobody filled the gap that followed. “Some years ago. Hollis will know where it’s got to.”

Kept the frame, though.

Celeste took up a knife and buttered a scone for her, generously, right out to the edges, and held it across on a plate. “Her Majesty asked after you last week. Whether the convent had agreed with you. Whether you took after your mother.” She waited, plate out. “I told her I couldn’t possibly say.”

Grace took the plate. “Thank you.”

“Your trunks have gone up. The books I’ve sent to the east attic for now. They were three days in a damp carriage, they’ll want airing.”

“Which room is mine?”

“The yellow room. Second floor.”

“Thank you,” Grace said again, and ate the scone, all of it, while Rosalind told a story about Lady Somebody’s hat at the spring assembly that had no purpose Grace could find except to go on for a while.

She set the plate down, and stood, and got as far as the door before she turned round.

“My lady.” Thinner now. She let the tremor in. “The books. They’re all I have of hers. I’d sleep better with them in the room.”

“It’s a box of old books, Grace,” Rosalind said. “Not a dog.”

Celeste stirred her tea. Round and round. “Tonight, then,” she said. “Once Hollis has seen to the lock. Those old ones stick.”

Grace curtsied low, the one Widow Pell had taught her for people who had just done you a favour and would expect to be paid for it later.

That lock has never stuck.

The key’s been round my neck for ten years.

A maid took her up. Bess, sixteen or so, freckled to the elbows. She counted the stairs under her breath as she climbed, lips moving, lost the count at the landing and started again from one.

“Yellow room’s lovely, miss. Gets all the afternoon. Her ladyship had new curtains made for it in the spring, only they came back from the draper’s short, so they’ve been let down, you can see the line if you look. Nobody minds it.”

“I’m sure it’s lovely.”

“Eleven,” Bess told the stairs. “Twelve.”

The yellow room was yellow. The curtains had a line.

Dinner came and went. Grace said thank you nine times. She knew because she counted, and she only caught herself counting at seven.

The trunk was at the foot of her bed when she came up.

She locked the door. Drew the curtains, line and all. Got the cord out from under her collar, and the key on it was warm from her skin.

The lock turned the way it had always turned. A small catch halfway, then give.

Nine books, in two bundles, under the herb thread from that last morning on the dormitory floor. Her own knots. Agatha’s knot, really. Two turns through, pulled down flat, a knot that would sooner break the thread than slip. The other half of her memory had a name for it. Surgeon’s knot. Agatha had called it the only knot worth the trouble.

Grace pulled at the thread on the first bundle. It came undone in her hand.

Both bundles had been tied with a bow.

A neat bow. Even loops. Better than hers.

Grace sat back on her heels.

She went looking in the other memory, the one with the dorm bed and the borrowed paperback, and turned it out like a pocket. Rose and Crown had given Evelyn Ashford one paragraph, early on. Beautiful. Disgraced. Dead within the year. The author had wanted her out of the way so the real story could start, and had written her out the way you’d clear a table.

The paragraph said nothing about books.

Ten years Grace had carried them from one shelf to another. She had read two.

Somebody in this house had got further than that in an afternoon.