Splinters of Scarlet Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Acknowledgments

  Sample Chapter from THE DISAPPEARANCES

  Buy the Book

  More Books from HMH Teen

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH on Social Media

  Copyright © 2020 by Emily Bain Murphy

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Cover art © 2020 by Maricor/Maricar

  Cover design by Celeste Knudsen

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Murphy, Emily Bain, author.

  Title: Splinters of scarlet / Emily Bain Murphy.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2020] | Audience: Ages 12 and up. | Audience: Grades 7–9. | Summary: “In nineteenth-century Copenhagen, an orphaned seamstress goes to work for a retired ballerina and uses her magic to investigate her father’s mysterious death while working for the same family years ago.”—Provided by publisher

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019029210 (print) | LCCN 2019029211 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358142737 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358157366 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Magic—Fiction. | Household employees—Fiction. | Love—Fiction. | Orphans—Fiction. | Mystery and detective stories. | Copenhagen (Denmark)—History—19th century—Fiction. | Denmark—History—Christian IX, 1863–1906—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.M872 Sp 2020 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.M872 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029210

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029211

  v1.0620

  To anyone who is still searching for home.

  And for Pete—a plum.

  Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask?

  Søren Kierkegaard

  You can turn everything you look at into a story, and everything, even, that you touch.

  Hans Christian Andersen

  Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

  William Shakespeare

  Chapter One

  Marit Olsen

  November 7, 1866

  Karlslunde, Denmark

  There is blood on Eve’s lace.

  I turn my palm as a fresh, incriminating bead blooms red on my fingertip. A new streak of crimson drips down the lace and onto the layers of tulle I just spent a week frothing to be as light as meringue.

  With a yelp I drop my sewing needle and a hearty string of curses.

  The most important performance of Eve’s life is tomorrow, and I’m bleeding across her costume like a stuck pig. I suck on the tip of my finger, tasting rust, and throw a furtive glance around Thorsen’s tailor shop. I am alone for once, tucked in the back behind reams of muted wools and intricate lace, silk scarves bursting with birds, a pincushion studded with needles and pearled buttons.

  I could take more, I think. Thorsen keeps an unsorted stash of deliveries on the third floor. He might not notice the missing fabrics before I put aside my earnings from next week. I rise, remembering how I promised Eve I’d make her stand out tomorrow. I envisioned her in a costume dripping in glass beads so she’d reflect light like an icicle in the sun—not one that looks as though she practices arabesques for Nilas the butcher.

  Tomorrow, a couple named Freja and Tomas Madsen are coming to the Mill orphanage, looking for a child to adopt. The thought of it makes my heart twist. I’ve poked around, wringing the barest answers out of tightlipped Ness, the orphanage director, and gleaning snatches from servants picking up their masters’ tailoring at the shop. From what I can tell, the Madsens live two towns away—still within a morning’s journey by carriage ride—and they might be Eve’s best chance of getting picked.

  If I hurry, I can grab what I need for Eve’s costume before my roommate, Agnes, returns. Otherwise she’ll snitch on me before I even make it back downstairs.

  But just as I reach the first step, the bell over the door tinkles, and Agnes herself bursts in with a swirl of leaves. I freeze with my hand on the banister.

  “What are you doing?” she asks, unlooping her scarf. We work side by side in Thorsen’s shop and have boarded together in the cramped room upstairs since I aged out of the Mill myself three months ago. For someone who’s barely older than I am, Agnes is as nosy and crotchety as a spinster. But worse, actually, because she has more zest for snooping.

  “I just . . .” I say, but she isn’t even listening.

  “Did you hear?” She cocks her head and smoothes her hair from the wind. My heart falters. She looks positively gleeful. The only time she ever looks that way is when she’s about to deliver bad news.

  “What?” I whisper.

  “The Mill’s in a panic. That prospective couple, the Madsens—they aren’t coming tomorrow anymore.” Agnes squints at me, her lips curling up into a miserable smile. “They’re coming today.”

  My mouth goes dry. The deliciously selfish part of me whispers, Maybe now they won’t pick Eve. I kick at that thought like it’s a dog that won’t stop nipping at my ankles.

  Agnes watches my reaction with growing pleasure, and when I turn, she follows. I stomp up to the second floor, trying to drive her away. “You know, I think I saw a mouse up here,” I call over my shoulder. She squeals and hesitates for half a moment until she sees me bypass our bedroom and continue on.

  “Where are you going, Marit?” she yells, charging up the wooden stairs behind me. No one ever wanted either of us, but I hope I hide it better than she does. She aged out of the Mill a year before I did, and the bitterness has settled into her like rot—the kind that repels people with one whiff, the kind that doesn’t want anyone to have what she doesn’t. Don’t be Agnes, I tell myself. You want Eve to have a family. Even if it means they take her away—​the last person I have left in the world.

  Maybe this time my mind will finally stitch these lies well enough to hold.

  “I don’t know why you care so much,” Agnes says behind me. “The Madsens have plenty of girls to choose from. Eve has almost no chance of getting picked.”

  “Stop talking, Agnes.” I round the landing to the third floor. Agnes is wrong. Nes
s must believe that Eve has a very good chance, in fact. Because Ness is having the girls dance. And Eve is the best dancer of them all.

  “Unless, of course,” Agnes says, “Eve does something to . . . improve her odds.”

  I pause on the final step. It gives a shrill creak under my weight.

  “What do you mean?” I ask coldly.

  “Nothing, really. Just that there have been rumors.” Agnes tuts her tongue. “Of magic.”

  My blood warms and beats faster. I take the final stair and stop in front of the fabric closet.

  “She’s always been good at dancing,” Agnes continues. “Unusually good. Perhaps unnatural.”

  “Eve doesn’t have magic,” I say.

  Magic. To excel in a single area since birth, like a savant, and do things others can do only in their dreams. Magic—the gift that comes with a hefty price. I shudder and think of my sister, Ingrid, of the blue frost that laced itself beneath the delicate skin of her wrists.

  Agnes shrugs. “Using magic might get her picked,” she says in a singsong voice, “until the Firn turns her blood to ice.”

  I kneel to sort through the boxes, gritting my teeth. Agnes is such a shrew.

  “Eve doesn’t have magic,” I repeat. “If anyone would know, it’s me.”

  I grab a handful of fabric and a spool of gold thread before Agnes suddenly seems to notice what I’m doing. “Hey! You didn’t pay for that!” she cries.

  I straighten. All I can think about is Eve, waiting for me at the Mill, her heart in her throat, her fingers tapping. How much I want the Madsens to pick her today; how much I don’t.

  “I’ll tell Thorsen.” Agnes crosses her arms and steps in front of me, challenge swimming in her cold blue eyes. “He’ll kick you out, and I’ll have our room all to myself again.”

  “In that case . . .” I shove past her and grab the small bottle of glass beads I’ve been dreaming about. “Might as well take these, too.”

  Her scandalized gasp is faintly satisfying and I whirl around to close the distance between us, so that for once I am the threatening one.

  “Strike a deal with me, Agnes,” I say. “What do you want?”

  She narrows her eyes and thinks, smoothing the front of her apron. “Cover my lunch hours every day for a month,” she says. “Starting . . .” Below us, the grandfather clock bongs out twelve noon. “Now.”

  I reach out my hand to shake and she purses her lips. But then she takes it and the agreement is made.

  “Don’t choke on your lunch!” I call, waving my contraband at her. She leaves me at the top of the stairs without acknowledgment.

  Good, I think, trying to forget what she said. About magic and what it leaves behind, a Firn that frosts your veins until, eventually, it freezes you from the inside out.

  My hands tighten around the beads.

  Agnes has to be gone for what I’m about to do anyway.

  Chapter Two

  I lock the door behind Agnes and set the borrowed material on my work desk, pulling my chair closer to the glowing ink-black coal stove in the corner. The cobblestone street beyond the window is gray and wet with leaves, and the blunt edges of the windmill blades turn slowly beyond the roofs of the half-timbered houses. The people of Karlslunde hurry by the shop, heads ducked into the wind, pockets patched with stitches so ghastly they make my fingers itch.

  I examine Eve’s ruined costume, seeking out the lace not marred with red. My hands shake as I sort through the fabric. When I was young, there was a horrible rhyme that was whispered in the streets and sung by little girls spinning in circles at the market: Magic flows like water; magic freezes like ice. Use too much and it costs a pretty price.

  I glance out the window now, waiting until the street is clear. Orphans who have magic are equal parts valuable and vulnerable. If we fall into the wrong hands, we’ll be forced to use up our magic and burn out like a brief, bright flare.

  I shudder even now, picturing Thorsen finding out what I can do.

  The street clears, and still, I hesitate. I haven’t used magic in almost two years. Emergencies only, I promised myself, and tucked away my magic like a weapon in a box, highly volatile and unstable. Well, this is an emergency, I tell myself. For Eve. I take a sharp breath as if I am preparing to dive into dark, cold water. Using magic is almost frighteningly easy—as simple as telling my lungs to fill themselves with a deep breath of air. It takes little more than a command, a slight concentration.

  I close my eyes. It’s all right, I urge myself, my hands clenching. Such a tiny, inconsequential bit of magic won’t matter.

  I uncurl my fists and immediately my fingers prickle and sing with long-dormant magic. I trace around each unstained piece of lace, faintly tapping each knot, and feel a thrill as something courses out of me and into the threads. I try not to think of the magic as something precious pouring out of me—or as a fuse being lit. The truth is, I forgot how quick and easy it is. How dizzyingly good magic feels. At my slightest touch, the knots untangle themselves and loosen.

  The patch of lace falls into my hand, as delicate as spun glass, as intricate as a snowflake.

  Without Agnes hovering over me, it takes all of seven minutes to reconstruct the tulle, a stiff, intricate honeycomb that would have cost me hours to do by hand. I work swiftly, heart thrumming, and transfer the old layers of lace onto the bodice like patches of stained glass.

  I glance at the clock. Maybe the Madsens will pick someone else, I think. I uncork the gold and white beads I took and touch them to the fabric. The thread instantly winds itself tight to hold them in place, as easily as if I were pushing a plump berry into a frosted cake. Maybe I can save enough money to adopt Eve myself someday.

  It’s a thought I’ve never let myself look at too hard or too long, and my heart suddenly tightens along with the final knot. Today, I tell myself fiercely—today the best thing for Eve is to be picked by the Madsens. So I will give her the best chance I can—this tutu laced with magic.

  And then I’ll let the chips fall as they may.

  I hastily throw the costume over my arm, lock the door behind me, and half run up the sloping street to the orphanage. I’m taking an enormous risk. If Thorsen finds the shop empty, Agnes and I will both be thrown out on the street. I run past the butcher shop that reeks of iron, the soot-soaked windows of the blacksmith, the tannery with its sagging roof. Waves of cholera and Denmark’s two Schleswig Wars created plenty of drudges like me—orphans who run these places and spend our wages to board above them, half-starved and always in debt, our entire lives reduced to the span of one block. I quicken my pace as the warped roof of the Mill comes into sight. Ten years ago, my father was working in an underground network of limestone mines when the earth gave out over him and twelve others in the worst mining accident Denmark has ever seen. The Firn took my sister less than a month later, and suddenly, like a candle being snuffed out, I had no more family left in this world.

  I don’t want that for Eve. At eleven, she still has the slimmest chance of being picked. But today could be her last one.

  I slip into the orphanage through the kitchen door, past the crooked back of Silas the cook, and dart up the side stairs. It smells like cloves and cardamom, which means he’s making kanelstænger—cinnamon twists. In the drafty dormitory room on the second floor, Eve and another orphan, Gitte, are crowding in front of the mirror, slicking their hair up into high buns.

  I exhale in relief. I’m not too late.

  The tips of my fingers still tingle like frost.

  Gitte finishes her hair first and nudges Eve. “You coming?”

  Eve catches my eye in the mirror’s reflection. “In a minute.” She pulls at the dull pink costume that Ness scrounged up from somewhere. It hangs lumpily in some places and stretches too tightly in others.

  Gitte nods to me on her way out. “Ness says the Madsens will be here any moment.”

  I remember the day Eve arrived at the Mill. Most of the young ones either mewed like pit
iful kittens their first few days or cooed with lowered lashes. Eve was silent: dark haired, brown skinned, her deep brown eyes flashing. She barely said a word for half a year. Until her Wubbins caught on a spring one morning and ripped right down the middle. Wubbins, a horrible rag supposedly in the shape of a rabbit, missing an eye and with stuffing that never quite lies right. Eve came to me, holding him out, her eyes brimming. “Can you mend him?” she asked. I was the first—the only—person she ever asked anything of.

  Now, petite at eleven, she is exactly eye-line with my heart.

  “Marit!” she says, turning toward me. When our eyes meet, her face blooms into the loveliest grin. “How’d you even know to come?”

  “Agnes was finally good for something,” I say, holding out the tutu. “Unintentionally, of course. Here.”

  Eve leaps for her costume. “Look at this!” she crows, her finger­tips admiring the fabric. “Are you trying to get me sent away?”

  My stomach clenches and I turn my back. “Hurry.”

  She changes as I look at a small square of gray sky. The first week I aged out of the Mill, I snuck out of Thorsen’s and walked here every night to gaze up at the dormitory room, surprised by my homesickness for Ness, for Eve, for my own bed. On the fourth night, I caught Eve through the window, practicing pirouettes in the mottled light from the street lamp when everyone else was asleep. I watched her for an hour, and by the time I returned to Thorsen’s, hope had somehow brightened like coals within me.

  I wonder, my heart closing up like a night flower, exactly how many minutes of separation it takes to turn someone you love into a stranger.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. “Do you need help with the buttons?”

  Eve gives a small squeal of delight in response. “Do I look like Helene Vestergaard?” she asks, twirling at her reflection. Helene Vestergaard, the Mill orphan who grew up to become one of Denmark’s most celebrated ballerinas. When the other young orphans wanted to hear Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and the older ones wanted scary lore about the nightmare demon Mare the Vette, Eve always, always wanted stories about Helene Vestergaard.