Chapter 2

Nico stabbed his shovel into the dirt, which thankfully wasn’t yet frozen. Burying bodies was a miserable task under any circumstance; burying them in snow and ice was an altogether different breed of torture. He tossed a pile of dirt onto the rotting arm of a corpse, little more than a skeleton at this point, unlike its more freshly deceased neighbor.

His late father, a butcher who had turned the head of a nobleman’s daughter—much to her father’s chagrin—had reminded Nico often that he was made of softer stuff than his two older brothers. At least Nico had inherited Jeremiah’s strong stomach. It came in handy for grave digging.

In all other ways Nico took after his mother, tall and lean with a perpetually furrowed brow. He’d always been Lucinda’s favorite, a role he had cherished until she died of the mori roja in his arms. He hefted the shovel and drove it into the dirt harder than necessary, just to prove to himself that he wasn’t as soft as he’d once been. His father and brothers would hardly recognize him now. Why, they’d be—

The shovel’s head slammed into a rock, sending shock waves through Nico’s arm. He shook it out, scowling at the sky. Someone up there had a shit sense of humor.

“That’s the last of them,” Colin said, coming to stand next to Nico. Colin Chambers had been a chimney sweep before the plague, and now Nico, a gentleman—by birth if not manners—was working side by side with him. Death truly was the great equalizer.

Nico nodded. “Only three bodies this week. That’s three less than last week.”

Colin swiped his forearm over his brow, revealing branching red streaks on the light brown skin of his inner wrist that matched the marks on Nico’s own. Built like a chimney, Colin was uniquely suited to life as a sweep, work he’d detested but which, in the end, had spared him witnessing the worst of the plague. Just before it hit, he’d been sent to the seaside for a few weeks by his employer, who had taken pity on him after listening to him cough all winter long. The plague hit while Colin was at the shore, and his employer’s family had let him stay on there to look after the house while they sailed for even safer lands.

The plague had eventually spread throughout Goslind and beyond its borders to the surrounding kingdoms, but when it reached the shore, Colin found that, like Nico, he was one of the lucky few with blood immunity. He had come back eventually to check on his family, but they were all “dead or fled,” as the saying went.

Nico’s family never had the chance to flee. He’d been the one to care for them during their final three bloody days. His brothers may have been sturdy and strong like their father, but they’d died the same way his mother had: with blood spilling from their pores, their eyes, their ears, their noses, and every other orifice imaginable. He’d never know if his father had been immune. He’d died shortly before the plague hit.

“Most of these bodies have been out here for a good while, months and months. The plague is over,” Colin said, then promptly knocked on Nico’s head. “Touch wood.”

“Ow.” Nico rubbed at his brown hair, which had grown long enough to tie into a ponytail at the nape of his neck. The barber who’d once kept his hair fashionably styled was dead, along with his tailor, his cobbler, the butcher, the baker, and the bloody candlestick maker.

“We should get back to the house. It’s nearly nightfall.” Colin picked the empty wheelbarrow up by the handles and turned it around toward the stately stone manor on the hill. The place they now called home.

It was strange to be a servant after so many years of having them, but not a day went by that Nico didn’t thank his lucky stars for his savior, Lord Crane. Nico had gone to his neighbors in the days immediately following the plague, hoping to be of some use with his medical knowledge, but they had all been too afraid to open their doors to anyone. And considering no one had ever come to him seeking aid or refuge, he had to assume a huge portion of the population had died.

For a while he had contemplated going to Esmoor, the capital city and the epicenter of the plague. Even if no one had need of him, perhaps he could learn more about the mori roja and how it spread. He wasn’t brilliant enough to find a cure, but there was still a chance he could help someone. A chance that he wouldn’t fail them the way he’d failed his mother.

Finally, after Nico had consumed everything edible at home—and some things that were decidedly not—he had set out on his own to look for other survivors. Sadly, he had found nothing but corpses, sometimes still lying in the middle of the road where they had collapsed. There weren’t even enough people left to bury them.

Lord Crane had found Nico in the forest, half-starved and delirious, nearly twenty miles from Crane Manor. Crane was also immune to the plague, and after most of his servants and the farmers on his lands had died, he started making trips out into the countryside.

So far he’d taken in more than a dozen survivors, all living and working together at Crane Manor. If he’d been braver, Nico liked to think he would have done the same. But even if he wasn’t saving lives, he helped the rest of the household with his medical knowledge, and that gave him the sense of purpose he’d been lacking since his family died.

Nico wasn’t paid money for his work, but he was given everything he needed to live a perfectly decent life. Someday maybe he’d go back to his ancestral home, if looters or animals hadn’t taken over. But for now it was nice not to be alone. He’d always considered himself a solitary, independent sort, until he’d been truly alone for the first time. He quickly realized that the company he’d kept in his prior life wasn’t nearly as witty or charming as he’d thought.

They knocked the mud off their boots and went to the servants’ area downstairs, following the aroma of cooking meat.

“Hurry and wash up for supper,” Mrs. Horner, the cook, said as she bustled around the kitchen. “The master has a guest tonight, and he wants a formal dinner at eight.”

They all wore multiple hats in the manor; Nico served as footman, valet, undertaker, and nurse, depending on what was needed that day. Tonight he’d be a server in the dining room.

“Who’s the guest?” Colin asked, munching on a scraggly carrot plucked from the cutting board when Mrs. Horner’s broad back was turned.

“A girl,” said Abby, a young woman whom Colin himself had found over two years ago. She was short and plump with an angelic face, and Colin had fallen in love with her the moment he saw her. But Abby had aimed her sights higher, on the only other young aristocrat at the manor, Clifford Branson.

Not that any of it mattered. Lord Crane didn’t tolerate tomfoolery amongst the staff. It was one of his requirements for living at the manor, one that had little effect on Nico. Romance was the furthest thing from his mind these days.

“An immaculate?” Colin asked.

Abby nodded. Immaculates and immunes were not the same. Immunes had been exposed to the plague and gone unaffected but for red marks that appeared along the veins of their inner wrists, whereas immaculates had somehow managed to escape exposure altogether. They were rare, especially now and especially in these parts, where the plague had hit hard. Sometimes they turned up—returning to look for survivors, or just now venturing out after locking themselves away for years in a manor. No one who caught the Bloody Three survived it, as far as Nico could tell. By his estimation, at least three quarters of the population of Goslind had been wiped out in the past three and a half years.

“She came upon the manor just as Lord Crane was heading out for a hunt,” Abby explained. “She’s headed home, she said. She was abroad when the plague hit, but she believes it’s over. She doesn’t know who survived.”

Nico lowered his gaze in sympathy. He could imagine she must be very frightened, a young lady all on her own, not knowing what she’d encounter when she returned home. In the beginning Nico was certain that even without a cure, there were preventative measures they could take to slow the spread of the mori roja. Quarantines had saved villages from other plagues in the past. The Jews, for example, who were forced to remain in their walled quarters, often succumbed last. Of course, that led to their being accused of starting the plagues in the first place, so it was not the blessing it might have been. Between the Bloody Three or a pogrom, Nico thought it better to be betrayed by nature than slaughtered by your own neighbors.

But Nico still didn’t know how the plague spread—whether it was airborne or passed through bodily fluids. Either way he had known it would eventually run out of hosts, as all plagues do. But a small part of him worried it could still be out there, biding its time, waiting for the population to recover enough for it to take root once again.

“She must be finding Goslind very much changed,” Colin said. “She’s fortunate to have come upon Lord Crane’s lands.”

Abby nodded. “She’ll stay a few days and then be on her way. I’m to prepare the guest room.”

“As if she’ll need it,” Branson said behind her. He had a nasty habit of appearing out of nowhere, with his oily black hair and leer of a smile. Abby tittered behind her hand, hiding the crooked tooth she was self-conscious of around Branson.

“Get to work, all of you,” Mrs. Horner said, swatting Branson with a spoon. But even she was under his spell; she giggled like a schoolgirl when he untied her apron strings with one deft tug.

Colin and Nico rolled their eyes at each other as they went upstairs to wash and change for dinner. Nico had taken some of his brothers’ clothes with him when he left home, and they were almost too small for him now, proof that he’d grown. Colin liked to tease that if he had “the body of a god and the soul of a poet,” he’d have married Abby by now, titles be damned. But he said it mostly to make Nico blush, which wasn’t difficult; Nico blushed whenever anyone complimented him, teased him, or looked at him too long.

They left the room together, Colin off to the kitchen and Nico to the dining room. He was making his way through the many corridors of Crane Manor when he nearly ran into someone he’d missed in the dimly lit hallway.

“Oof,” Nico said, rather poetically.

“Who’s there?” a small voice asked.

Nico looked down to find a petite young woman standing before him. This must be Crane’s guest. “I beg your pardon, miss. Can I be of service?”

“That would be most welcome,” she said, spinning in a circle. “This house is like a labyrinth.”

“Please, allow me.” It had been a while since Nico had been in the presence of a lady, and it took him a moment to shake off his new, more rustic persona. It didn’t help that the lady in question was young and beautiful, and Nico was blushing like mad. He was suddenly grateful they didn’t have enough tallow for candles to light all the halls of the manor.

“Are you a relation of Lord Crane?” the girl asked. She had wide-set brown eyes, giving her the look of a startled fawn.

“No, Miss...”

She smiled up at him. “Elisabeth Talbot.”

“No, Miss Talbot. I am one of the many people Lord Crane has taken in after the plague. I came from Mayville.”

She blinked at him with her doe eyes, clearly unfamiliar with the small hamlet.

“My mother’s family was from Esmoor,” he added. “Lucinda Templeton.”

“Oh,” she said, brightening. The Templetons were well known in Goslind. Several had served as kings’ advisers, and Nico’s uncle was a judge who had presided over the murder trial of a famous opera singer. “And what shall I call you?”

“You don’t need to call me anything, Miss Talbot. I’m just a servant here.”

Before they reached the end of the corridor, she stopped him with a delicate gloved hand on his arm. “The plague changed all of us, sir. But that doesn’t mean we must completely abandon who we were beforehand.”

He smiled and inclined his head. “Well said. My name is Nicodemus Mott.”

“Well, then, Mr. Mott. Will you please escort me to dinner?” She crooked her elbow expectantly.

He bowed, a fancy trick for hiding the world’s longest-sustained man-blush. “It would be my honor.”

***

Crane Manor hadn’t seen a guest in over six months, and something about Elisabeth’s presence raised the spirits of the entire household. It wasn’t just that she was charming and beautiful; it was knowing that there were survivors out there, immaculates who had made it through the plague without immunity. The world was changed, but not entirely. And with that came the hope that one day things could go back to how they had once been.

Nico helped Miss Talbot into her chair, noting that Crane had asked for the good china and silverware to be used tonight.

“Tell me, Mr. Mott,” Elisabeth said, glancing up at him. In the candlelight, she was even more beautiful, her olive complexion glowing with health and vitality. “What would you be doing with your life if it hadn’t been for the mori roja?”

Nico had been sixteen when the plague hit. As the youngest of three sons, he would have been lucky to inherit anything, but there had been no expectations placed on him, either. “I would have liked to study medicine,” he said. His father had ridiculed the idea, but he could dream about those things now. There was no one left to tell him not to.

“Mott is one of the brightest young men I’ve ever met,” Crane said, striding into the room. “He tends to all our injuries around the manor, human and animal alike. He would have made a fine physician.”

“He will,” Elisabeth said, smiling at Nico. “The world still needs physicians, surely.”

Nico was about to say something brilliant, like “thank you,” when Crane took his seat at the table, signaling that it was time for Nico to serve.

Nico’s stomach hollowed in embarrassment, and he bowed before heading to the kitchen. He’d told himself for years that there was no place for romance in his life, and he was right. He had nothing to offer someone like Miss Talbot. Not even a witty retort.

When he returned with the carrot soup, Nico was surprised to see Elisabeth and Crane sitting in awkward silence. Crane could be stern with the servants, but never without reason, and he was generally affable with guests. Perhaps he was rusty from not having entertained in so long.

Nico set the soup down and was turning to fade into the background like a proper servant when Elisabeth placed a hand on his forearm.

“Tell me more about your family,” she said. “I’m curious how someone with noble blood came to work here at the manor.”

Nico could feel Crane’s eyes on him, and he licked his lips against the sudden dryness of his mouth.

Fortunately, he was saved by a heavy knock on the front door.

“Who the hell is that?” Crane asked, sounding profoundly unhappy about being interrupted.

“I’ll go,” Nico said, grateful for the excuse to leave the room. No one ever came to their door, and Nico had half a mind to grab one of the hunting rifles. But the pounding of a fist continued, and Nico found himself answering the door simply to spare Crane the noise.

A stranger stood on the threshold. He looked to be in his twenties, with sable hair to his shoulders and the fine clothing of a gentleman.

“Can I help you, sir?” Nico asked.

“I certainly hope so,” the man replied. “I’m looking for my wife, you see. I lost her in the forest.”

Nico suppressed a shiver as he glanced back into the manor. The stranger couldn’t possibly mean Elisabeth.

“My name is Adrien Arnaud,” the man said, drawing Nico’s attention. “I live just a few miles from here. I don’t suppose I could come in? It’s awfully cold this evening.”

“Do not invite that man inside, Mott.”

He turned to see Crane standing behind him. He hadn’t heard his master approach, but then, he hadn’t been able to hear much over the pounding of blood in his ears.

“This gentleman says he’s looking for his wife,” Nico explained. Crane was several inches taller than Arnaud, but the stranger had the lean look of someone who spent plenty of time engaged in physical pursuits. Nico wouldn’t want to face either of them in a fight.

“You’re not welcome here,” Crane said to the man. They stood nearly toe to toe, one on either side of the threshold.

“Come now. Surely we can be civil about this.”

Crane was about to respond when they all heard a small cough behind them. Elisabeth stood watching, her hands folded daintily before her. “Dinner is getting cold.”

There was no flicker of recognition in her eyes when she glanced at Arnaud. Not her husband, then. Who was this man, and why did Nico get the sense that he and Crane knew each other somehow?

“Leave now, before I have you driven off my land,” Crane growled, slamming the door so hard it was a wonder he didn’t break Arnaud’s nose. Straightening his jacket, he turned to Elisabeth and took her arm.

“Nico,” he called over his shoulder. “Watch from the window and be sure he leaves. Whatever you do, don’t open the door for him again.”

Nico nodded, unable to find his voice after witnessing the bizarre encounter.

But Lord Crane was already leading Elisabeth back to the dining room, speaking to her in a low, reassuring voice. “Come, my dear. Your hands are like ice. Nothing like a warm meal to get the blood pumping.”

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