A Single Thread of Moonlight Read online

  Praise for

  LAURA WOOD

  “I Capture the Castle meets Gatsby. It’s absolutely delicious!”

  Laini Taylor on A Sky Painted Gold

  “Heady, sun-drenched and achingly romantic”

  Guardian on Under a Dancing Star

  “Irresistible… gorgeous escapism”

  Guardian on A Snowfall of Silver

  “Pure escapism… a wildly romantic, delicious indulgence”

  Observer on A Sky Painted Gold

  “The perfect comfort read, the kind of lovely, absorbing novel that is not published any more. I loved it”

  Ella Risbridger on A Sky Painted Gold

  “A brilliant, beautiful book. I loved it”

  Louise O’Neill on A Sky Painted Gold

  “Think Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, set in Italy and revolving around a summer romance, and you’ll understand the joy of Laura Wood’s Under a Dancing Star”

  Stylist

  Also by

  LAURA WOOD

  To AJ, one of my very own fairy godmothers.

  “On what slender threads do life and fortune hang…!”

  – Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for Laura Wood

  Also by Laura Wood

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One: London

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two: Kent

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Part Three: Kent

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Once upon a time there was a girl whose life was a dream, spun from golden thread.

  She lived in a vast and rambling house in the countryside. It was a house that had been in her father’s family for generations, and she loved it. She loved the jumble of hallways and rooms knotted strangely together, the huge Georgian windows, and the old Tudor beams.

  It was a big house, and her father was a big man. Nobody could ride like him or shoot like him or throw her up into the air like him. She had no memory of her first time on a horse; it was as if she was born knowing how to gallop across open fields. Her father would take her around his estate, telling her thrilling stories of daring adventures.

  The girl’s mother was a haze of honey-coloured hair and blue eyes. She was a gentle voice and soft arms. “Delicate” – that’s what the girl’s father called her – which meant no loud voices, no running, no tumbling about. Her mother’s rooms were as quiet and sleepy as any belonging to a fairy-tale princess under a spell.

  The girl knew all about fairy tales, because her mother read them to her while she combed her blonde curls with her fingers. Her mother also taught her how to sew, how to create beautiful things out of nothing but cloth and thread, and this seemed like another kind of magic to the little girl.

  All was well, and the days fell like neat stitches in a beautiful tapestry.

  Then, when she was nine, the golden life began to unravel.

  Her mother died – one day she was there, and the next she simply slipped away, like a candle that had been burning lower and lower as the months and weeks passed, finally extinguished.

  But the girl still had her father, and she held him closer than ever. He was her whole world, and she was his shadow, following him wherever he went.

  Then, less than a year after her mother died, the girl’s father remarried.

  At first she was excited about gaining a stepmother and two new stepsisters, but her new family were cold and cruel. Her father started to disappear, staying away from home from morning to night. He did not take his shadow with him.

  It was only a year after the marriage that the unthinkable happened. The girl’s father – the greatest horseman in seven counties – had a riding accident on his way home. A rabbit hole, they told her. He fell from his horse and was killed instantly.

  It was impossible. Her father rode the same path through the woods every day – there was not a chance that he could be thrown from his horse so easily. The little girl knew a convenient lie when she heard one. She saw the satisfied smile behind her stepmother’s black veil, and deep in her heart she knew the truth: that she was living with a cold-hearted killer.

  But she had no proof, no one to confide in.

  And she had an ominous feeling that she might be next.

  So the girl did what any self-respecting young heroine would do.

  She vowed that one day she would have her revenge.

  And then she ran away.

  Part One

  London

  October, 1899

  CHAPTER ONE

  Not a lot of people knew when they were going to die, but I did, right down to the minute. At the stroke of midnight, on the twenty-fifth of November 1899, Iris Penelope Scott-Holland would die. The letter in my hand told me so.

  I sighed, closing my eyes and crumpling the sheet of paper between my fingers.

  I hadn’t been Iris Scott-Holland for a long time now. It had been almost seven years since I had run away from home, and – according to the investigator that I had scrimped and saved to hire – seven years was all the time that you needed to be missing before you could be declared legally dead.

  It was no surprise to learn that my stepmother had been counting the days.

  The final sentences of the letter danced behind my eyelids like sunspots.

  I regret to inform you, Miss Grey, that time is not on your side. If you wish to act, it must be soon.

  Seven years since I had been home. Seven years since Father had died. Seven years of questions left unanswered. Perhaps it was time for that to change.

  “There’s no time for moping over love letters.” Annie bustled in. “Madame wants that embroidery for Lady Flintlock’s gown finished today.”

  Annie was not exactly how one might picture a guardian angel. She was short and seemed permanently angry, with grizzled grey hair and a frighteningly hard stare. She was not warm, she had never expressed one word of affection towards me, and yet, when I was eleven years old, she had saved my life.

  I had arrived in London alone, a pretty, spoiled child, with no idea of the real world. Fortunately for me, Annie took me in – temporarily, she said – and when she found out that I could stitch like a dream she got me a job at Madame Solange’s, the ‘dressmakers’ where she w
orked.

  I had an instinct for colour, an interest in the latest fashions, and clever fingers. After Annie showed her some of my embroidery, Madame Solange took me on as an assistant dressmaker, and when my new employer asked for my name, I gave her my mother’s maiden name instead of my own. So, Iris Scott-Holland became Iris Grey, and I shed my old name and my old life gladly, like a winter coat on the first sunny day of the year.

  Seven years later, Madame Solange’s designs were in great demand. The dresses that I created were beginning to change hands for a lot of money – not that I saw much of that. My job was to be grateful for the opportunity. And I was, really.

  Every day I sewed in the small workroom, surrounded by bolts of fabric in all the colours of the rainbow. It was work that I enjoyed, and it was the perfect work for someone who wished to remain a shadow – no one wanted to think about the fingers that stitched their dress, and that was exactly how I liked it.

  “I’ve almost finished,” I told Annie, folding the letter briskly into quarters, and sliding it under a length of rich red silk. “It will be done in time for her fitting tomorrow.”

  “Is that Lady Flintlock again?” Claire, the shop’s model, drifted in. “I can’t stand showing the clothes for her – she’s a nasty old thing. Last time she came, she said that lovely blue dress would probably look well enough on someone built less like a work horse.” Claire’s eyes widened in distress. “A work horse.”

  Claire was seventeen and sweet, with enormous doe-like brown eyes and masses of dark, curling hair. She hadn’t been at the shop for long, and she was still trying to be my friend. I was as discouraging as possible.

  Fugitives didn’t have friends.

  Which is why, instead of commiserating with Claire over Lady Flintlock, I schooled my voice to be cold when I replied, “Lady Flintlock is one of our biggest customers, Claire.” And a mean old bat, I added to myself.

  Claire flushed and mumbled an apology.

  I turned back to the piece of embroidery that I had laid across my desk. It was for a morning gown of pale lemon silk, and I was embroidering hundreds of tiny yellow butterflies across it. It was a bit fussy for my taste, but Lady Flintlock had never met a flower, a feather, or a ruffle that she didn’t like. Butter upon bacon, was her philosophy.

  At her last viewing she had demanded the addition of hundreds of crystal beads. Madame Solange had praised her keen eye for fashion, added several guineas to the price, and then told me to get to work.

  Claire moved closer, her fingers hovering above the embroidery, not quite touching the fine material.

  “So beautiful,” she murmured. “I couldn’t understand at first – why Madame kept you hidden away in the back room, with your looks. It’s because you can do this. How did you learn?”

  “My mother taught me,” I replied, my eyes on the stitches.

  That, at least, was a small truth in a sea of lies.

  Mother had taught me to sew as soon as I was old enough to hold a needle. She was an artist when it came to embroidery, and I had spent my whole life trying to capture some of the magic she had in her fingers. In another world – one where women’s work was taken seriously – my mother’s art would have hung in galleries. I thought with a pang of the beautiful wall hangings that had adorned my bedroom. Images from fairy tales brought to life: Rapunzel with her golden hair tumbling from the tower window; Red Riding Hood followed by a shadowy wolf – a shiver of silver fur and gleaming amber eyes.

  I wondered what had happened to them after I ran away. Helena had probably burned them.

  I gave myself a shake, forcing my focus back to the piece of silk in front of me. Thankfully, Claire had taken the hint and gathered her things, heading home for the night.

  “She’s right, you know,” Annie said from the corner of the room where she too was getting ready to leave. “It is a waste, you being stuck back here. Think of the fuss you and Claire would cause together, her so dark and you so fair. People would buy anything you put in front of them. We’d sell hundreds of gowns.”

  “And who would make them?” I asked tartly.

  Annie only made a huffing sound and pulled on her coat. She knew I was right, and that was a good thing. If it hadn’t been for my usefulness back here, I have no doubt Madame would have wanted me parading about out front, and that was a risk I could not take.

  If things had turned out differently, perhaps I’d be a smartly turned-out customer, looking for a wardrobe to suit my social calendar – the daughter of a wealthy marquess probably had need of a great number of gowns. But I had left that life behind on the night I ran away from home and caught the night coach to London.

  I had spent my first night in the city huddled in the doorway of Madame Solange’s shop – drawn by the words painted in neat golden letters: DRESSMAKERS OF QUALITY, THE FINEST STITCHING IN ALL OF LONDON. I sat there for hours in the dark, increasingly afraid of the noises around me. The country had noises too, but they were different: the sharp bark of a fox, the insistent tap of a tree branch against the windowpane. Here, there was a constant, cresting wave of voices, and crashes, and horses, and footsteps. By the time the sun rose I was half-dead with fright.

  That was when the door opened, and I fell flat at Annie’s feet.

  For almost seven years after that, I had hidden away in London, saving what little money I could to hire investigators. I had hired three so far to look into Helena’s background, her life before marrying my father, her first husband (Samuel Weston, a mere baron) and his death – anything that could help me uncover a truth that I was certain of in my heart: that she’d played a part in my father’s death. All three had come up empty-handed.

  I tried not to think about home too much, or the large inheritance that was owed to me, but this latest letter was clear: in just a few weeks’ time I would be declared dead, and the woman who had killed my father would have won.

  I rubbed my temples. It was late now, the lights low as I set my final stitches in place. The moon shone through the window; it was time to go home.

  I packed up and let myself out of the shop, carefully locking the door behind me. It was a cold night, and the blanket of London fog tucked itself snugly around everything in sight. A nearby streetlamp struggled valiantly, managing to cast a dim silver halo of light that diffused into the darkness like perfume from a glass bottle.

  “Hello, darlin’,” a voice slurred from over my shoulder. “Aren’t you a pretty piece?”

  I turned. A man was weaving his way towards me – older, dressed in a worn suit, and clearly the worse for drink.

  “Anyone ever tell you you’ve got the face of an angel?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “It’s not an imaginative compliment. Now, excuse me, please.”

  His brow furrowed. “I’m only trying to be friendly.”

  He reached out and put his hand on my arm.

  That was his mistake.

  In a flash I had the thin silver blade of my pen knife against his neck.

  “Let. Go.”

  His hand leaped from my arm like I was a burning-hot coal.

  “Now, now,” he said, his voice coming out in a thin whine. “There’s no need for that, just being friendly, just being friendly.”

  “I’m not looking for a friend.” I stepped back and the man exhaled. I kept the knife pointed towards him, moonlight flashing wickedly across the blade.

  “I thought you was a nice girl,” he grumbled, backing further away, his hands held up in front of him.

  “I suppose you were wrong.”

  With a shake of his head, as though I had let him down, he finally turned and walked away.

  A nice girl. More fool him. My mother always told me that appearances could be deceiving. Well, I was living proof of that. I had learned a lot during my years in London.

  You see, people always assume that I’m the pretty little piece of embroidery.

  But I’m not.

  I am the needle.

  CHAPTER TWO


  Three days later, I was no closer to a decision about what to do.

  I couldn’t just go home and reveal that I was very much alive. At best, Helena hated me and at worst, Helena was a ruthless murderer. Who was to say what lengths she would go to conceal the truth?

  The city was hardly safe, yet the thought of living with Helena felt riskier still. If my father had been unable to survive her, then I wasn’t sure I liked my own chances.

  But I was no longer a naive child. I was a force to be reckoned with. And I would not abandon my father’s memory without a fight. Helena couldn’t win.

  It wasn’t simply justice that I wanted. It was revenge. I wanted her to suffer as I had suffered. To lose.

  These thoughts chased each other round and round in my head.

  Then, as so often happens in stories like this, fate stepped in and everything changed.

  ***

  Madame Solange’s shop was a smart building in the West End of London. These premises had been acquired two years ago, when the success of our dressmaking made moving to more luxurious surroundings a possibility. Now the words in Madame’s window were no idle boast: we really did produce the finest stitching in London.

  Madame was a whip-smart businesswoman, and over the last two years the shop had become increasingly popular with the aristocratic set – the kind for whom money was no object. The kind who enjoyed the plush red velvet seats, the shining walnut and brass fittings, and the tea from fine china served with lemon shortbread from Fortnum and Mason. They enjoyed the heady, Turkish-delight scent of the rich roses that spilled out of dozens of vases, the exclusivity.

  You had to make an appointment with Madame, and then she lavished you with her full attention. The clients liked her creations, the ones made to their exact requirements. No request was too difficult or extravagant, no demand too outrageous.

  The back room where I worked was cramped and much less smart, but it was clean and neat, and when I bought Madame’s roses I always spent a farthing or two on something small and cheerful, like a bunch of daisies to sit in a jam jar on the side. It had two large windows – artists needed good light, Madame said.