Maria snorted. A curse, that.

The girlish pleasure she had once felt for having uncommon beauty died the day her stepfather leered and said, “You shall fetch me a fortune, my pet.”

It was only one of many deaths in her short life.

The first was her beloved father. She remembered him as unrestrained and vital, a dashing man who laughed often and adored her Spanish mother. Then he fell ill and wasted away. Later, Maria would become intimately familiar with the signs of poison. At the time, however, she knew only fear and confusion, which worsened when her mother introduced her to a dark-haired, beautiful man who was to replace her father.

“Maria, child,” her mother had said in her softly accented voice. “This is Viscount Welton. He and I plan to wed.”

She had heard the name before. Her father’s closest friend. Why her mother wished to remarry was beyond her immature comprehension. Had her father meant so little?

“He wishes to send you to the best academies,” was the explanation. “You will have the future your father wished for you.”

Sent away. That was all she heard.

The wedding took place and Lord Welton took over, whisking them to the moors to a house that resembled a medieval castle. Maria hated it. It was cold, drafty, and scary, so very far removed from the golden-bricked home they had lived in before.

Welton begat a daughter on his new wife and then promptly left them. Maria went to school, and he went to Town where he drank, whored, and gambled her father’s money to his heart’s content. Her mother grew paler, thinner; her hair began to fall out. The illness was hidden from Maria until the last possible moment.

She was sent for only when the end was near and assured. Returning to her stepfather’s home, she found the Viscountess Welton a ghost of the woman she had been only months before, her vibrancy depleting along with their coffers.