Chapter 1

I don't have a heartbeat. Oh, yes, I have a pulse. The confused doctors made sure of that at my birth. The only thing they could tell my mother was that I was alive, but she knew that already-I was crying, wasn't I? Dripping blood and slime, and crying, of course my mother knew I was alive. Doctors diagnose the strangest things. At my birth, they diagnosed me as "alive." Wrote it, right on the chart.

I didn't question the terminology until much later. Eleven years old, I asked, "how can being alive be a disease?"

And my mother said coolly, guardedly, "It's not, of course."

"You wouldn't diagnose someone healthy, would you?" I persisted.

"Well, not usually," Mother answered. "I'm busy right now, Clara."

She didn't like to talk about my "condition," which is how she referred to it whenever she had to speak of it to my father. Father was more open. He swept me into his arms after a long day at the bank, lifted me up and pressed his ear against my chest. "What?" he gasped. "Heartless girl, aren't you glad to see your papa?"

Mother stood frowning in the elegant, glass-and-mahogany foyer, waiting for her own kiss. "Peter . . ." she cautioned.

Father went to her and tugged a loose, silky black curl. "I'm only teasing her, Missy."

Mother's thin, red lips tightened and she pinned the loose curl up, a bobby pin appearing in her mouth as if from nowhere as she positioned the curl behind her head. Even with her lips tightened in displeasure, Mother didn't refuse Father's soft kiss.

These exchanges fascinated me. Mr. and Mrs. Van der Moer, their small child, Clara-we were a family. I couldn't understand exactly what that meant, and so I watched. My parents loved one another, I could see that easily. When Father had let go of Mother's curl, the back of his hand trailed across her jaw. She turned and brushed her lips against his fingers.

"Any man could love your mother," my first nanny told me, shortly before she was dismissed. "Look at her."

And I did, and often. Formerly Missy Tremont (of the Tremonts of New Havoc), Mother was beautiful, with dark eyes to match her black curly hair, which Father so loved to touch, to smell, to kiss. Countless times I watched him lift a lock of her hair to his lips and kiss it in a way that filled me with strange yearning. His eyes became hot when he watched her. She moved gracefully from room to room, her long dresses swishing around her ankles, the long sleeves and high collars enticingly suggestive of what lay concealed beneath. Her stern jaw and nose were disguised, though not hidden, by her thick, long, innocent lashes. When she spoke cuttingly to a lady with whom she no longer wanted to associate, her voice was so muted and melodic the other woman would think she was being complimented until all was said and done. Missy Tremont could charm the scales off a snake, Grandma Van der Moer assured me. Father told me not to believe everything that Grandma Van der Moer told me about Mother, but a second nanny glowered ominously and said, "Ol' Missus is more spot-on than your pa wants to believe."

Grandma Van der Moer was known as Ol' Missus among the servants in our household. I spent so much time with the servants that I called her that, too-only never, ever to her face. She lived with us for as long as I could remember, though she dies long before this story runs out.

She always said the best thing about my mother was her looks, and it was a pity that Missy Tremont's daughter had turned out so homely. I couldn't like Ol' Missus much, but I couldn't stay away from her, either. She smelled like moth-eaten clothes and foreign citrus fruits and dust, and she made me sit at her feet as she spoke to me. Occasionally she'd stroke my lank brown hair, pushing the fringe away from my eyes. "My Peter's eyes," Ol' Missus croaked with pleasure. She was right, I do have Father's eyes, large and dark green like the woods in neighboring New Darden, a still-wild country that had yet to be settled at this point in the story. Now, much of the woodland of New Darden has been razed to make way for the King's settlements, and who do you think he put in charge of the colonization? My own father. Ol' Missus was proud as punch when Father told us the news, but luckily she died not long after ("from pure greedy pleasure," a seventh nanny informed me tartly), so Father never had to tell her that he only got the position because of Mother's money and her family's influence. The Tremonts had been in charge of settling New Havoc, but the Tremonts had been cursed (blessed, my fourth nanny corrected firmly) with having mostly daughters, so they were forced to extend more than dowries toward their daughters' husbands. If they wanted good Tremont blood, if not the name, to reach every corner of the country, they'd have to extend their influence as well.

Ol' Missus thought the favor had been granted because the Van der Moers were one of the oldest families in the kingdom, though their money had been squandered to nothing generations ago, from a fondness of luxuriant living and brash behavior. Van der Moer males had an ancient reputation of being hotheaded and wild, like young, unbridled stallions. They liked to gamble and they never backed down from a bet. They'd put money on anything, just to show they had it.

But shhh, right now I know none of this. Ol' Missus won't tell me these stories for several years. Right now I'm eleven years old and I'm only just realizing what it might mean that I don't have a heartbeat. Listen to my chest-rap on it-it is hollow. I have no heartbeat. But think-why?

Because I have no heart.

A/N: Welcome to a brand new story! Influenced by Rushdie, no doubt, and I'm not seeing very far ahead into the future right now. Any ideas for plot (what do YOU want to know?) as well as general and detailed critiques welcome! Hope you like!