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Actia had completed another portrait of the siblings while Elly was away. This one was in oils and she had gotten all of their faces just right.
With Elly returned home, the sisters cloistered themselves in the playroom. They didn’t emerge for two days and when they did, they were haggard and even more frail than they had been before, but they were smiling. Actia’s cough was gone. They had a new plan. It was time to let new brother die.
The country doctor who had been called to tend new brother despaired, throwing his hands up to god and declaring the young man beyond cure. The fabricated body smelled of stale gin and mouldering straw, of unknown substances but mostly of decay, some organic, some of questionable origin but nothing that hadn’t been seen before in the lower depths of the London lost. The young man’s chest cavity was concave. He looked terrible. The sisters nodded solemnly at Bran’s bedside for a second time in their lives and accepted the news with stoic faces and murmured prayers.
Lottie could see her sisters’ mouths twitching at the corners.
The disguise was buried next to the stone marker that bore Bran’s name, near their other sisters and Mother in the family plot. Actia painted him out of her portrait, because she