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‘The Larkspur’ is set in the same world as my novel The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy and the subsequent books in that series; however, Sterling’s story takes place in a different time and location within the Tanrian Marshals universe.

Many readers will notice a hint of Emmuska Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel in these pages, but more than anything, this tale is a loose reimagining of one of my favorite comfort reads , The Blue Castle by L.

M. Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables.

S terling Valancy sat across from his wife at the kitchen table, both of them staring at the scarred wood between them.

“You didn’t die,” Bernadette said at last.

“I didn’t die,” Sterling agreed numbly.

“Again.”

It was a reasonable observation. Votary Trent had assured Sterling that any accident might befall him before the year was out, yet here he was ten months later, alive and, quite frankly, well. For someone on the verge of death, he had demonstrated a remarkable propensity for survival.

This time, he had been buying Bernadette a bag of honey-roasted almonds – her favorite – when a pianoforte nearly crushed him in the street, the beast of an instrument having come loose of its harness during a botched third-floor delivery.

He could still hear the cacophony of wood and keys and strings as it slammed onto the cobblestones not three feet from where he stood.

The evidence was difficult to ignore, and the niggling suspicion that he might live out the year – and possibly many, many years to come – loomed over Sterling like a specter.

What if the oracle had made a mistake? What if his brilliant, vivacious wife – who had only married him out of pity – was now stuck with him?

Without another word, Bernadette got up and closed herself in her study, never to emerge.

Sterling could hear her pacing incessantly through the thin wall while he busied himself with the homey rituals he had come to cherish – the washing of their dishes, the dusting of their shelves, the tidying up of Bernadette’s chaos.

Eventually, he took himself to bed, feeling completely adrift as he lay alone, longing for his wife.

She was only in the next room, and yet she might as well have been on the moon.

If I am not going to die, I shall have to return to Uncle Stickles’ house , he thought, a prospect that knotted his guts.

He had lived under the thumb of his uncle’s charity from infancy, he and his mother having moved in when Sterling’s father died two months after his birth.

Uncle Stickles, who seemed like a veritable immortal, clung to life – and his money – with a skeletal death grip, so Mama had fussed over Sterling throughout his twenty-six years, worried that he would die before inheriting his uncle’s modest fortune.

You must not go out of doors, Lambie! You know how susceptible you are to colds and fevers.

You must not exert yourself, Lambie! You know how weak your constitution is.

But how Sterling had wanted to exert himself, to play like other children and run and climb trees.

Get down at once, Lambie! You know you are liable to break your neck!

And so, earlier that year, when Sterling had found out that his life was about to end before it had ever begun, he left Mama and Uncle Stickles to apprentice himself to Abel Roring, the blacksmith.

For the past ten months, he had relished the work of his body – the pumping of the bellows, the pounding of a hammer, the hefting of iron.

And the people who came in and out of the smithy each day!

Abel was friends with everyone within a mile’s radius, and they loved to drop in, if only to say hello, each one with a life as colorful as Sterling’s old existence had been drab.

There was Chauvelin, for example, the Golois wool merchant, who had defected to Stenland years ago and always seemed to have a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread on him.

And of course, there was Bernadette Snaith, the peddler, who cussed like a sailor and cared not one jot what anyone thought about her.

Sterling had walked out of his old life, and Bernadette had stepped into his new one like a miracle.

But if the oracle was wrong, he would have to return to the dreary townhouse in Benchley Square, where the ancestral altar groaned under the weight of the gods knew how many dusty birth keys; where his mother’s scraggly fern soldiered on in the anemic light of the entry hall, shedding yellowed leaves like half-hearted flags of surrender; where the hoar, cast-iron stand beside the front door hosted two outmoded umbrellas; where the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs ran two minutes late by mid-afternoon, its pendulum swinging ponderously in its mahogany case.

How that clock had driven him nearly to madness some days with its insistent ticking away of his time, as if to say, “Here is another second of your life wasted, Sterling, and another, and another.”

He would once again have to sit in the drawing room every afternoon, reading a novel hidden behind some dry ecclesiastic text to the grating rhythm of his mother’s knitting and the wheezing coughs of Uncle Stickles, who read political newspapers that made Sterling want to pull out his own hair.

And all the while, the porcelain lamb figurine, which his mother had purchased out of drippy sentimentality because it reminded her of ‘her Lambie,’ would sit on the side table and stare at him reproachfully, as if to say, How pathetic you are .

As memories of his woebegone existence under his uncle’s roof flooded his mind, he drifted into a fitful slumber.

When he awoke early the next morning, he instinctively knew that Bernadette was not at home.

There was a stillness to their ramshackle cottage when she was not in it.

Sterling felt much the same. He had been a hollowed-out shell of a man before Bernadette had come along to fill him to the brim with life and living.

He had only mustered the bravery to ask for her key in marriage because he’d had nothing to lose – or so he had thought – and she had only accepted him out of pity, knowing full well she would not be shackled to her husband for long.

Unless the oracle had made a mistake.

Sterling rather hoped a bolt of lightning might strike him to prove his suspicions incorrect as he hailed a hackney to take him to Three Mothers Temple.

***

“So…I am not out of luck?” he asked in miserable disbelief as he slumped in the pew.

The oracle’s votary, a middle-aged woman with golden demigod eyes, regarded him from across the altar in the Bride of Fortune’s oracular as if he were a boy in short pants, covered in mud, clutching a frog in his grubby hands and begging, Please may I keep him?

“Why would you think that you were out of luck?”

“Because you told me that I was out of luck!”

“I…I am afraid that I have not the pleasure of understanding you.”

Obviously, Sterling had met Votary Trent before, but he still found her eyes unsettling as she blinked at him. When he was eight years old, he had asked his uncle how one could tell if a person was a demigod.

Eyes and size, boy , the old man had answered with a dry laugh, and while that assessment rang somewhat offensive to Sterling’s adult ears, it was not entirely inaccurate. In addition to having yellow irises, Votary Trent was indeed quite tall.

Sterling slid the letter, dated ten months earlier, across the altar to her. It read:

Mr Valancey, I apologize for the late arrival of this missive. I was unexpectedly called away from my work on a personal matter of an upsetting nature. It will be some time before I am able to return to temple, but your situation is such that I feel I must write to you at once.

I have consulted the oracle on your behalf, and, with a heavy pen and a heavier heart, I write to inform you that the Bride of Fortune has intervened in your present circumstances as much as she is able to.

The sad truth is that what little luck you may have had in this life is about to run out.

I regret to inform you that you have, at most, a year to live.

It is my professional opinion that you should avoid perilous situations at all costs.

Leave your house but sparingly and safely secure all sharp objects.

Do not walk under open windows. Bodies of water should be avoided at all costs.

Etc. And I advise you to put your affairs in order at your earliest convenience.

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, Mr Valancey, but it is with the utmost sincerity that I wish you all the best for the life you have left to you.

Sincerely,

Sarah Trent, Votary of the Bride’s Oracle.

The votary blanched as she held the letter in her slim hands.

“Oh dear. I’m afraid there has been a misunderstanding.

As I recall, I was called away quite suddenly during your visit.

My niece was gravely injured in a sea polo match, you see, and in my disturbed state, I must have mixed up the envelopes.

This letter was intended for a Mr Sherwood Valancey of Hellebore Corners.

He came to the oracle the same day as you and was felled by an infected paper cut not two weeks later.

But see here? He spelled Valancey with an e . Didn’t you notice?”

“I assumed you simply misspelled my name,” Sterling said faintly as his marriage and, therefore, his joy, slipped away from him like water trickling between his fingers.

Bernadette , he wailed in the privacy of his mind, his heart already a bruise and careening toward a decimated pulp. He would beg her for forgiveness. He would grovel – gods, would he grovel – but even if she forgave him, she would not want him. She never had.

Perhaps sensing Sterling’s inner turmoil, Votary Trent came to sit on the edge of the altar, her goldenrod eyes gentling.