The Shadow in the Glass by JJA Harwood (any book recommendations txt) 📕

‘He keeps making me do all the syringes for him. I hate them! I keep thinking he’ll go for me with one of them and I – I think he’s thinking that too. The way he looks at me … sometimes he’ll …’

Aoife put a hand to her mouth, tears pouring down her cheeks. Eleanor put an arm around her shoulders.

‘I’ve not had it as bad as Leah,’ Aoife whimpered, ‘but it’s not because he doesn’t have it in him. It’s just because he doesn’t want to yet.’

A cold, creeping fear rippled through Eleanor. Aoife was weeping into her shoulder, clinging to Eleanor’s clothes like a child. The top of her head barely came up to Eleanor’s chin. How could anyone stand to make Aoife cry like this?

‘I won’t let anything happen to you,’ Eleanor muttered. ‘I’ll find a way to—’

Aoife pulled away from her, snatching the parcel back as she did so. ‘How?’ she wailed. ‘You aren’t here!’

Eleanor slammed her front door, still shaking with anger. She’d tried to find Leah and she’d tried to help Aoife but nothing had come of it. Weeks of searching, all that simpering at Mrs Cleary and she had nothing to show for it. Aoife was still in danger, Leah was – God knew where she was! Eleanor had tried and tried and it had all come to nothing. Nothing!

Eleanor kicked the umbrella stand, sending a patched umbrella rolling across the floor. It wasn’t enough. She wanted to break something.

Bessie was out. She was always out. Sooner or later she’d be out for good, because she liked being a servant about as much as she liked her mistress. And then where would that leave Eleanor? Scrubbing an empty house, yet again.

The children next door were playing as their father tried to shepherd them to bed. Eleanor’s house echoed with the sounds of running feet and screaming. The last few dairymaids and coffee-sellers called out, dust-carts rattled down the street, and train whistles shrieked in the distance. Life pressed against her door, hot and sharp, but no matter how she tried, nothing she did could touch it. She might have been a doll trapped inside its box.

She needed money to make a difference. As a rich woman she could buy Aoife’s way out of Granborough House, or employ a proper detective to find Leah. If Eleanor had been rich, when her mother had taken ill her father could have paid for a doctor or a nurse, instead of leaving his daughter to tend a dying woman when she was too small to lift a coal scuttle. What could she do without money? Last month’s allowance was two weeks late, Mrs Cleary had cut her off and getting a job would never provide the kind of funds she needed. Seamstresses and washerwomen were paid in shillings, Eleanor needed guineas. She was sick of watching her bank account waste away and knowing she could do nothing about it.

Unless she made a wish.

The sun had started to set, staining the sky a dirty orange. Next door’s children had stopped playing. The carts and costermongers moved further down the street. Eleanor was left in a bubble of quiet, and inside it, something was waiting.

No. She couldn’t. Someone would die if she did. It wasn’t like before; she wasn’t making a wish that would work only on her. If she made the wish, someone else would die. Someone who was more than a nudge in her abdomen – a person, a real person, with hopes and dreams and a family.

Eleanor looked around. Her curtains needed mending. The chairs would need replacing. More coal would need to be ordered, more polish would need to be bought, more rags would need to be scrubbed out and re-used. How could she find Leah and rescue Aoife when the shabby house ate everything she had?

If she made a wish, someone else would die. But if she did not make a wish, Aoife would be assaulted, Leah would die in a damp and stinking gutter, and Eleanor would wear herself down to the bone trying to keep the threads of her life from fraying.

It would take her one step closer to losing her soul. But perhaps her soul was already gone – perhaps she’d never even had one in the first place. Losing her virtue had not made her feel any less virtuous; perhaps losing her soul only mattered because someone had once told her it should. If it was even there, if the woman was even real, if she wasn’t going mad. How could she put her faith in wishes, when she didn’t even know if she’d dreamed them up?

Eleanor took a deep breath and wrestled her doubts back into place. Fretting over whether the black-eyed woman was real or not was not going to help Eleanor save Aoife or find Leah. She had to put her faith in something; it might as well be herself.

She would need to be careful. Whether souls were real or not, Eleanor did not want to risk making the final wish. Every instinct in her body screamed that it would be a bad idea.

A golden realization dawned.

Perhaps there was a way to solve both her problems with one wish.

The first problem: she needed money. However, she was still under the age of twenty-one: until then, all her money would be controlled by her legal guardian, Mr Pembroke. The second problem: Mr Pembroke was going to assault Aoife and throw her on the streets once he’d had enough.

If she wished for money, Mr Pembroke would have to die for her to get it.

Even though she hated him, the thought chilled her. It would not be like all the times she’d made a wish before. She would know exactly who was going to die when she spoke the death into being. She may as well slit his throat herself.

Could she do it?

Eleanor sank into a chair, her mind reeling. She tried to imagine