Chapter 1                   

 

Blackthorn Heath, The New Forest, 1935

 

Lydia gripped the iron bedpost with white knuckles, gouging the paint, eyes glistening with unshed tears. Her breath came ragged, each gasp rasping through her throat. Damp strands of hair clung to her face. Even after the pain, a heavy, aching void remained where the sharp agony used to be, a dull thrumming emptiness. Sweat glued her nightgown to her skin. She stared toward the foot of the bed, where the midwife, Nurse Braithwaite, held the newborn up into the flickering light. But the baby was still. Utterly still.

            No writhing limbs, no high-pitched squall to mark the shock of her entrance. The air seemed to pause, as if the world had taken a breath and forgotten how to let it go. Only the sound of leaves scratching against the window, and the faint rhythmic creak of the floorboards beneath the midwife’s feet.

 Frigid stone walls leached the autumn chill from the forest outside. The candlelight trembled in the draft, throwing long shadows up the walls and casting strange shapes across the beams above.

            The baby’s skin was grey in the light. Dark fine hair clung to her scalp, and her mouth was closed in a tiny, solemn line.

But it was her eyes that froze the midwife’s hands in mid-air.

They were already open.

 Already watching.

            Wide, dark eyes, too steady, too knowing. They did not flit or flutter like a newborn should. They just stared.

            “Dear God.” She gasped.

Nurse Braithwaite’s breath caught sharply. A chill, unnatural, not from the frigid air, crept up her spine, coiling at her neck like fingers made of ice. She felt her hands trembling, though she was not prone to fear. She’d delivered scores of children from Dorset to Hampshire, in fields and parlours, in rooms more cursed than this. But this child was wrong; something was bad, but she didn’t know what.