I

The bellows of the famine had been blowing for three years, and the Ashworth estate at Blackmoor stood like a rotting tooth in a blackened mouth. Lady Eleanor Ashworth, twenty-two and pale as the wax candles that lined the corridors, stood before the cracked mirror in her chamber and counted the buttons on her wedding gown. Sixteen. Each one a promise she had not made.

The match had been arranged in Dublin, behind mahogany doors that smelled of pipe smoke and betrayal. Captain James Blackwood of the Royal Irish Fusiliers was thirty-four, decorated for service in the Punjab, and possessed of a smile that showed too many teeth. He had offered to protect the Ashworth lands from the creditors who prowled the county like wolves. In exchange, he would have Eleanor. It was not a marriage; it was a transaction written in the language of blood and soil.

She touched her abdomen. The sickness had begun three weeks ago, a morning nausea she had blamed on the damp air of the house. But the sickness did not leave, and her belly had begun to swell with a certainty that terrified her more than any creditor, any captain, any matchmaker.

Thomas, the stable boy who had brought her wildflowers from the hedgerows on Tuesdays when no one was watching, had been gone for a fortnight. Banished by her father's orders, shipped to America with a pouch of coins and a one-way ticket. She had not cried when he left. She had stood at the window of the carriage and watched the road swallow him, and she had felt something inside her crack like ice on a February pond.

Now the child grew, and with it grew a terror that had no name.

II

The first to die was Father Thomas, the parish priest who had examined her in secret. He had come to the estate on a rain-soaked evening, his cassock dripping, his hands shaking as he placed them upon her belly. He had wept before he spoke.

"God forgive me, my child," he had whispered. "You are with child. By another man."

Eleanor had said nothing. She had only stared at the fire in the hearth, watching the flames consume the peat logs with a terrible and beautiful hunger.

Father Thomas had left at dawn. By noon, his body was found in the priest house, face upturned to the ceiling, eyes open and unseeing. The coroner declared it a sudden heart failure. The villagers whispered of a curse, of the old witch of Carrickmore who had prophesied doom upon the Ashworth line. Eleanor heard the whispers through the thin walls of her chamber. She said nothing.

The second to die was Mrs. O'Connell, the housekeeper who had raised Eleanor since her mother's death. Mrs. O'Connell had been the one to discover the swelling belly, the one who had brought Eleanor ginger tea and whispered prayers. She had also been the one to lock herself in the pantry on the third night of the fever, screaming that something was moving inside Eleanor's body, something that was not a child.

When they broke down the pantry door, Mrs. O'Connell was dead, her hands pressed against her mouth as though she had tried to swallow her own screams.

III

The doctor who came next was Dr. Maeve O'Connor, a woman of thirty with sharp eyes and hands that moved with the certainty of someone who had already decided what she would do. She arrived in a carriage that did not belong to the estate, wearing a coat of dark wool and a scarf the colour of dried blood.

She examined Eleanor in the drawing room, while the storm raged outside and the house groaned like a living thing. Her fingers were warm against Eleanor's skin. She pressed, she listened, she withdrew.

"You are with child," Dr. O'Connor said. Not a question. A verdict.

"How long?" Eleanor asked.

"Four months, perhaps five. The father is not Captain Blackwood."

Eleanor closed her eyes. She had known this would be the question, and she had no answer that would not condemn them both.

Dr. O'Connor sat in the chair by the window and watched the rain. "There is a flower," she said quietly. "It grows in the hills behind my father's house. They call it the red jasmine. It looks like an ordinary white jasmine, but the petals are stained crimson at the edges. My family has used it for generations."

"What does it do?"

"It can remove a curse," Dr. O'Connor said. "Or a child. The effect depends on the dose."

Eleanor stared at her. "You are offering to help me."

"I am offering you a choice," Dr. O'Connor said. "My father died three years ago. He came to examine you, and he died the next day. They said it was a heart failure. I know better. Your father's men came to my father's house and told him what would happen if he spoke of what he had found. He died of fright, or of poison, or of the weight of a secret he could not carry. I have spent three years looking for a way to make your family pay."

She stood and walked to the window. "But I have also spent three years thinking about you. A girl who did nothing wrong, who was sold like a cow at the market. Your father's men will kill me if they find out what I am doing. Your father's men will kill you whether I help you or not. The question is not whether you will die, Lady Eleanor. The question is whether you will die for something, or for nothing."

IV

Dr. O'Connor planted the red jasmine in a large earthenware pot and placed it in Eleanor's chamber. She told the servants that the flower's perfume would ease Eleanor's nerves. She told Captain Blackwood that the scent would strengthen Eleanor's constitution before the wedding. She told no one the truth.

The jasmine bloomed within a week, its crimson petals unfurling like wounds in the moonlight. Eleanor sat by the window each evening and breathed in the scent, and slowly, imperceptibly, something inside her began to change.

She did not know whether the flower was destroying the child or preserving her. She did not want to know. The uncertainty was a kind of mercy.

Captain Blackwood came to the estate every other day, bringing gifts of silk and jewellery, speaking in a voice that was all honey and no venom. He kissed her hand and called her his future wife, and she let him, because resistance would only accelerate the end.

On the seventh night, she woke from a dream in which she was standing in a field of white jasmine, and every flower had a red centre, and each one was a drop of blood falling from the sky. She woke with tears on her cheeks and the scent of the jasmine thick in the air.

Dr. O'Connor was sitting in the chair by the window, as she had done every night, watching.

"It is done," the doctor said quietly.

Eleanor did not ask what was done. She only nodded, and the doctor nodded back, and the red jasmine bloomed on between them like a silent witness.

The wedding was postponed. The villagers whispered less. Captain Blackwood grew impatient, and then angry, and then he left for Dublin and did not return for a month.

When he did return, Eleanor was thinner, paler, and something had changed in her eyes. She looked at him the way one looks at a stranger in a railway carriage, someone whose name you will never know and whose story will never touch yours.

He did not notice. He was too busy planning the ceremony, counting the guests, arranging the flowers. White jasmine, he said. White jasmine for a pure bride.

He did not know that the jasmine in the house was red.