Chapter 1
Hannah wished the child would cry, add his thin wails to the keening lament of the wind lashing against them. There was something terrible in his silence. Something frightening in the stillness of the tiny hand she held in her own as he trudged along beside her.
Pip had to be exhausted. Her own feet dragged through the sucking mud as if the soles of her shoes were millstones. The sodden layers of her skirts and meager cloak bowed her shoulders and weighted her chest, holding the chill against her skin. The portmanteau she carried in one hand felt as if it was stuffed with iron bars instead of what few clothes she'd managed to fling together for Pip and herself.
At least the rain had finally stopped.
Night bruised the edge of the horizon, devouring what little light managed to pierce the last wisps of storm clouds.
It seemed as if she and Pip had been wandering forever, braving the Irish Sea in a dilapidated fishing boat, battering themselves in countless jolting mail coaches carrying them to no destination in particular, only farther and farther away, deeper into the English countryside.
Worse still, they'd been on foot for two weeks now, ever since the store of coins she'd carried away from the pawnbroker's shop in far-off Ireland had dwindled away.
This was a journey that would never be finished, not until Pip had grown into a man. A man who could fight back, rather than a little boy at the mercy of someone who could batter with fists and words.
Her one hope was that she'd managed to buy them enough precious time to vanish into the mist -- but at what price? She'd betrayed those who trusted her, failed those who had depended on her, lied and deceived them in quiet desperation until they would never forgive her.
Her stomach growled and she pressed her hand against it, fighting back waves of sick hunger. It was three days since she had eaten, a handful of green apples that had left her retching in a ditch.
She'd fed the little boy the last crushed bit of pie that she'd snatched from a wooden bowl of chicken feed set out on the doorstep of a cottage a village ago. But his stomach must be devouring itself by now, torn by the talons of hunger.
He was far too small for his five years. Cheeks that should have been rosy and plump were pale hollows; hands that should have been dimpled and busy with mischief were thin and uncertain. His narrow shoulders braced against the wind with the stoic resignation of someone who had weathered far more devastating storms than the one that had pummeled them from the west.
He hadn't murmured a word of complaint, but she knew he couldn't go on much longer. The cough that had plagued him these past weeks was growing worse and worse, hammering at his narrow chest. A raw knot of despair lodged in her throat. Had they traveled so far only to die on some unfamiliar road? Starving? Cold? Alone?
No, she'd promised she would take care of him. She'd guard him with her life, But she was tired. So tired. And grief pressed like a boulder against her battered heart.
"Just a little farther, Pip," she encouraged, more for herself than the boy.
He turned his face up to hers, huge gray-green eyes conveying words he'd never say: I'm frightened. I'm hungry. Please don't let him hurt me.
Helplessness and desperation gnawed at Hannah's courage. God in heaven, they needed somewhere to rest, just for a little while. Long enough to get a decent night's sleep. Long enough to untangle the aches from their knotted muscles and dry their clothes beside a heavenly warm fire.
Long enough to mourn...
No, she couldn't think about that now. Didn't dare. She had to find some way to go on. She sought strength the way she had throughout their trek.
Though her own arms were throbbing, Hannah shifted the handle of the bag into her left hand, then bent down and scooped Pip up, pressing his small body so close she could feel the beat of his heart. After a moment the boy melted against her, burrowing his face into the hollow of her neck. It was a gesture of trust, all the more precious because it was so hard-won.
It was dangerous to love anyone so much. That was a lesson Hannah had learned with brutal clarity over the past few months. Her heart, ever wary, seldom risked, was in danger of being broken yet again. But she couldn't help it, couldn't stop it. Each time she looked at him, she saw another gentle face with eyes the gray-green of a mist-shrouded glen.
Don't let him suffer as I have done. The plea would haunt her for eternity.
A cough racked Pip's small frame. He stifled it against her shoulder, then glanced up at her with guilt-ridden eyes. How many times in years past had he been made to feel ashamed, thinking he'd committed some dire transgression by succumbing to that cough?
She battled rage and pressed a fierce kiss to his damp temple. "There now, my little man. It's all right," she soothed. "Just cough it out."
But a splinter of alarm twisted deeper into Hannah's frayed nerves. A hale, hearty child's strength would be challenged by the brutal trek the two of them had made these past two months. Pip's lungs were already weakened.
He'd terrified her three times already, stricken by spasms in his breathing that turned his lips blue, his eyes wide with panic. A panic that had magnified itself a hundredfold in Hannah's own breast because she was helpless against the malady that racked him.
She had to find some kind of shelter before it was too late. Find a temporary job where she could earn enough coin to fill Pip's stomach, and to rent the small cottage she'd promised him, hidden like a fairy-tale bower so deep in the Yorkshire moors that no one would ever find them.
But when she'd stopped in the tiny hamlet of Nodding Cross that morning, pleading for some employment, the cluster of villagers lounging near the smithy's had admitted that there was only one place she might hope to find a situation.
Her gaze swept up to the crest of a hill. There out of a wreath of mist rose a shadowy structure, smears of candlelight setting the windows aglow.
It didn't look like the house of an ogre, but the villagers had painted it in tales dark as legend, wrapped in some evil enchantress's spell. Within its confines supposedly dwelt a most capricious dragon.
One so vain he'd swept aside his tenants' cottages so his view of a nearby lake would be unobstructed. A taskmaster so ruthless he'd gobbled up a dozen assistants in the past eight months and spat them out, broken and babbling.
The men had stumbled into the village after they'd escaped, with tales so grim they chilled the bone. Tales of their master rousing them in the middle of the night, keeping them at their desk for days at a time, forcing them to choke down whatever food they could manage as they labored.
And his fits of temper when they failed the Herculean tasks he set them rivaled those of any tyrant who'd ever lived.
"You'd be better off to let the wee lad perish in the hedgerow in peace," a stingy goodwife had advised, busily tucking a clean cloth over a basket of bread.
Hannah glanced down at the wet guinea gold curls plastered against Pip's head, her jaw tightening with determination. She'd bargain with the devil himself to get the boy into shelter tonight.
"Is that the mad bastard of Raving-scar's house?" Pip quavered.
"Master of Ravenscar, sweeting. Master." Hannah corrected him, but from all accounts the man was exactly what Pip had labeled him. "And yes, sweeting. It is his house."
His little arms clasped tighter about her neck. "The lady with the bread said the bastard is mad."
Hannah understood all too well the vibrating terror in Pip's faint voice.
"I hope he is in one of his notorious temper fits," she said, tossing a stray strand of auburn hair away from steady gra
