Her Dark Artifice [t.r]

Prologue

Prologue

LONDON, IN ALL ITS DARK SPLENDOUR, was enveloped in the hands of autumn. The seasonal change was quick yet subtle, akin to the gentle caresses of two intertwined lovers beneath faint starlight and black satin, for the tall trees once a swathe of verdant foliage teeming with songbirds now stood dressed in a fire ablaze with red and gold.

An earthy fragrance permeated the crisp air, but it was rendered a mere undertone, for firesmoke and soot stained London's streets, the stench of buildings aflame and shrapnel from incendiaries as pungent as it had ever been in the war-ridden city since the start of World War II.

'Servir la patrie est une moitié du devoir, servir l'humanité est l'autre moitié.'

The latter was a foreign scent never before smelled by the cityfolk, and with a multitude of men fighting away at a gruesome war, their hapless children evacuated to the silent sanctuary of the countryside, and women taking on traditionally 'masculine' professions to aid in the ongoing war effort, the city felt as empty as a vacuum; a macrocosm rendered an inconsequential microcosm – if even that.

London was the beating heart of the country, and with the heart punctured, bleeding, everything else was in disarray - a body fractured, in desperate need of regeneration.

There was little raucous bustle of black automobiles and red buses on the roads. An eerie wind filtered through the terrace-lined streets. Children couldn't be seen playing their ball-games out in the soft drizzles of late-summer rain; reluctant school children didn't don uniforms in preparation to return to school in September; no mothers shouted admonitions and reprimands for their children to return home for a warm supper before nightfall. Florists or bakers or jubilant booksellers didn't stand outside their stores beneath the shelter of an umbrella, eager to garner potential customers.

Lilies, geraniums, and violets were lost to glass shards and tattered, forgotten paperbacks on cracked, crumbling pavements.

It was as if the city sat empty -- a delicate heart trapped in a gilt jar of amber -- frozen in time until the war was over. However, it was still relatively early in the conflict, and no one could tell what power was winning, exactly. It wasn't too strenuous to make an objective guess however, seeing as a majority of London had been bombed during the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, its skies a fortress for enemy aircraft. Buildings were decimated to rubble and ash, and citizens - lost souls - left behind had no choice but to seek shelter in underground train stations. Shattered glass littered the pavements, and an array of war advertisements - successful propaganda, depending on how one looked at it - drifted in the perennial flurry of biting wind.

The War Needs You, they all read. Words that had led unassuming men to war and soldiers to an unmarked grave. Fight For Your Country.

For everyone, the summer of 1942 was by far the most dismal, three years since the Second World War had begun. Government broadcasts estimated that over a million London homes had been bombed so far, and so civilians endured the summer with a permanent pit of worry in their stomachs for what even more deadly things could transpire on top of what had already occurred.