Shadow among Sheaves

by Naomi Stephens

  Charlie and William were listening more attentively now. Though William was filling two glasses with the port, his smile had vanished. His gaze inched over toward Barric, who at last took his uncle’s cue and strode out of the room. As he’d done the night of the party, he brought his uncle to his mother’s old sitting room. He didn’t turn to face his uncle until he heard the door close behind them.

  “This better be good,” he warned.

  “I wouldn’t have poked a sleeping dragon if it wasn’t,” his uncle responded warily. “Could you please forget I’m a scoundrel long enough for me to say this?”

  Barric supposed it would be a bit churlish not to at least hear his uncle out. He leaned against the armrest of a chair, folded his arms, and nodded his acceptance. His uncle lowered himself to the settee and hesitantly began. “I’ve been doing some research on Mrs. Hawley’s husband’s estate, and I’ve received word from my solicitor in London that her husband’s fortune was supposed to pass to a cousin in Australia, but apparently it hasn’t passed to anyone.”

  “What are you talking about?” Barric challenged.

  “There’s something wrong with the will,” his uncle explained. “It seems some loose ends have been left rather…loose these past few months.”

  As he listened to his uncle, Barric’s temper began to work inside of him, as if it just needed more room to move, to stretch its neck, but was trapped and beginning to claw. “You’ve gone digging into the will?”

  “Just think, all that money, that beautiful property—it’s floating around unattached.” Uncle George gestured toward the ceiling, as if it were all there, hidden in Barric’s rafters all along.

  For some moments, Barric was too stunned to speak, muted by his rising fury. There was a growing list of details and questions he knew he ought to consider, but he was still stuck on the first. “You have contacts in London…looking into her?”

  “Not her,” his uncle corrected quickly, “the estate.”

  “I told you to leave it alone.”

  His uncle’s expression opened with eagerness. “Where is your sense of enterprise?” he challenged with a bit more gusto. “Aren’t you the least bit interested? If the women can’t inherit it, perhaps we could—”

  “No.”

  “Barric.”

  “They have nothing,” Barric said, his voice as sharp a grate as boots on gravel. “They are destitute, and you want me to ally with you to rip the property right out from under them.”

  His uncle spoke more carefully. “I understand you’re protective of the girl,” he said. “But whether or not I buy the property does not change their situation if the will is ironclad set against them anyway. Has she said anything about it?”

  “I would never ask.”

  “Well, you should know other people very well might ask her. There’s nothing more romantic to small-town gossip than a missing will.”

  “What is your sudden interest in this property anyway?”

  “There’s nothing sudden about it,” he said dismissively. “I’ve always admired Hawthorn Glen. I think it would suit me rather well.”

  At first Barric didn’t like the image of Uncle George living in Edric’s old house. He knew it would destroy Nell to have her home snatched away, and he suspected it would affect Rena in subtler ways that hurt just as much. He wondered if Rena had been to Hawthorn Glen since arriving in England or if she had stayed away out of grief.

  If his uncle bought the property, he would open the windows, air out the gloom. He would turn the dead man’s bedroom into a guest room, a spare room. He would tear down the wallpaper for something more fashionable, raze the weed-strewn gardens, and fill the library with pipe smoke. He would erase Rena’s husband, chase away his ghost.

  His uncle spoke again, in a lower voice. “Your father and I used to go riding together in the evenings,” he confessed. “We’d ride up past the glen, rest at the top of the hill, and look down at the Hawley manor. I always liked the sight and said that if I could have an estate of my own, it might look something like that. Your father used to tease me—if anyone could find a way to pirate a house for himself, he said, it would be me.”

  Barric knew his father had probably been right, but it still didn’t set well with him, this image of his uncle walking through the halls of the home that might have been Rena’s had death not barred her from entering it.

  Rena knew she was dreaming, but there was nothing she could do about it. Legs weighted, she stood at the counter of the Gilded Crown, pleading. Nell was slumped at a table behind her, her limbs hanging limply from starvation, her eyes delirious with hunger.

  “Pay,” Mrs. Bagley ordered, and Rena searched and searched but could not find any coins. It was only a dream, she reasoned with herself, half-frantic, and yet she could not remember how to climb out.

  “Pay,” Mrs. Bagley insisted and shoved Rena through a door. It was not the produce closet, as she expected, but a dusty room with a disheveled bed, standard fare for a below-average inn.

  Before Rena was able to turn, to tell Mrs. Bagley she could not pay for such a room, Thomas stepped through the door, his teeth impossibly white as he leered down at her.

  “Pay,” he repeated, holding out his hand to her. His skin was smooth, his hair soft and black, but his eyes were unthinkably hard. Cruel.

  Rena’s mind sloshed from side to side. “No,” she said, but she already knew it wouldn’t work. Her words were often made empty in her dreams, and this time was no different.

  Thomas grabbed her by both wrists. His lips found her face. “Something different,” he called her, his teeth scratching against her skin.

  Rena tried to fight him back. She tried to scream.

  She searched frantically for his name—for Barric—but the only word she could clench in her panic was “No, no, no…”

  The word still meant nothing. Sounded like nothing. She screamed the word, tasted the blood beneath it until at last she bolted up in bed, startled to find herself in her usual cottage, in her usual bed, with Nell slumbering at her side.

  “Rena?” Nell whispered sleepily, turning over on her side. “What’s the matter?”

  Rena sank back against the pillows and pleaded with her heart to find a steadier rhythm. “Just a dream,” she murmured, unclenching her hands, but she still needed convincing herself.

  Too many days had passed since Lord Barric’s party, and she still felt its strain. If Barric barred her from his fields, as she had begged him to do, or if William turned her out of his cottage, where would she and Nell go?

  The next morning, she set out for Misthold after breakfast, pulling her shawl snug around her shoulders as she considered what she ought to say to Lord Barric when she finally faced him. In the aftermath of Christmas, she had been avoided by nearly everyone she had come to depend on—Barric, Alice, even William. All nodded politely to her on the road, but none of them stopped or uttered more than the standard greeting.

  She had not felt so alone since she had first alighted in Abbotsville.

  She couldn’t very well tell Lord Barric about her dream, of course, especially the part Thomas had played in it, but she could tell him she was still afraid and needed, more than anything, to depend on him. She approached the front door of Misthold as William was leaving and nearly bumped into him.

  “Mrs. Hawley,” he greeted with a drawn smile. With his free arm, he reached to open the door for her but seemed to reconsider at the last moment, his fingers dropping from the handle. “What are you about this morning?”

  “I am here to speak with Lord Barric.”

  With an uneasy look, William pulled the door closed behind him and straightened. “Give me your message,” he instructed quietly, “and I will pass it on to Lord Barric.”

  Unsettled by William’s grim expression, Rena gaped up at him. “Is Lord Barric not at home?”

  Nothing in William’s expression moved. “He’s home.”

  Panic struck as she considered her last me
eting with Lord Barric. Was this proof, then, he wanted nothing more to do with her? The fright of her dream nipped at her again. She could never pay her own way, not as things stood.

  “Let me in,” she ordered, half considering pushing past him. “I need to see him.”

  William looked at her sadly. “No, Mrs. Hawley. You need to stay away from him.”

  She reeled back a step, her gaze lifting to the windows above them, wondering if Barric was watching from one of the high casements. Was he glad to see her cast away from his door like a vagrant? Was he laughing at her in his high and lofty tower?

  Yet again, William had personal reasons of his own for barring her from Misthold. Perhaps he was not speaking on Barric’s behalf at all. Her thoughts turned back to the Christmas party, and her stomach clenched. “Is this about what Alice said?”

  William sighed heavily, his tone tightening. “What Alice said to you was unpardonably cruel. This is not about that.”

  “She thinks I’ve tried to seduce Lord Barric.”

  “No. She doesn’t.”

  “She thinks I am beneath her.”

  William leaned subtly closer, lowering his voice. “My sister has been in love with Lord Barric for as long as she has known him,” he confided, shaking his head in brotherly frustration.

  Surprised to hear William speak so plainly, Rena studied his clenched jaw and perfect suit and saw a man who worked himself tired every day, who cared a great deal about how he appeared and what he accomplished.

  “She is not angry with you,” William went on. “She is angry only with herself. She has wasted many years on Barric and is only now beginning to realize it.”

  “She has not spoken to me since Christmas.” Rena’s voice could not endure the pain of this admission. Her words pinched off at the end.

  William reached out and touched her arm. “She also spent a smallish fortune to get you that book of Indian art, had it delivered all the way from London.” He smiled faintly. “She cares for you a great deal. Give her time.”

  Rena couldn’t keep the accusation out of her voice as she prodded. “And you, Mr. Wilmot? You have not spoken to me either.”

  He stiffened, but his eyes still looked weary and spent. Perhaps Rena wasn’t the only one not sleeping well those days. “I do believe I have said ‘good day’ from time to time,” he disagreed. “In truth, I thought some space was best.”

  “Best for whom?”

  He leaned his shoulder against the doorpost as he considered how to answer. “I’ve known Lord Barric—truly known him—longer than anyone else in this town. I remember when he used to get in fist fights over Charlie. I remember when he used to insult me just because he thought he had to, and I remember the way he got cross-eyed drunk after our fathers had died. In many ways, I know him better than his own family.”

  Rena felt uncomfortable by William’s open expression. His confidence in her felt heavy in her already fumbling hands. “Why are you telling me all of this?”

  “If there is one thing I know best about Lord Barric, it’s that he has always been an immovable man. He does what needs to be done, and he doesn’t lose sleep over it, however taxing it may be. But you move him, Mrs. Hawley. You make him act out of character. You make him go against his better judgment, and that cannot end well. Not for either of you.”

  “You think Nell and I should leave Abbotsville,” she guessed weakly, her thoughts spiraling faster than a spinning top. Perhaps Nell’s cousins would take Nell in, she thought, if she went to them without Rena. Then Rena could find another way to support herself alone. But what if the only way was to return to the Gilded Crown? She could not bear to live out her nightmare, allowing men to touch her just to stave off starvation.

  William held up his hand as if he sensed her tumbling thoughts. “I didn’t say that. Things will continue as they have. You’ll live with us, and you’ll take from Barric’s fields, but you must stay away from him.”

  She knew what he said was well advised. It made sense. It was safe. But it hurt all the same. There was something about the closed door to Misthold which frightened her.

  William frowned as she stared blankly at the door, and his voice gentled. “I don’t mean to hurt you, Rena.”

  “You are looking after your lord,” she said. “I understand.”

  “It’s not just him I’m looking out for,” William disagreed, sounding slightly defensive. “He could hurt you too if you let him.”

  Rena slid back a whole step and nodded. “I understand,” she said again, but her voice paled and drifted, betraying her. Despite it all, she’d grown used to Lord Barric, fond of the way he sometimes looked at her. Even with his quick temper, even with his stern pride, she knew him to be a decent man.

  “Your message,” William said, and touched her arm in gentle reminder. “What did you wish for me to tell him?”

  Rena felt as if every stone of Misthold had been stacked upon her chest as she turned at last toward home. “Nothing,” she said to William. “Tell him nothing.”

  The rest of winter turned gray and slushy. Snow came intermittently, never heavy enough to cover the gray or chase away the gloom. It was on a particularly soggy morning that Rena at last received word from her parents. She carried the letter down to the creek and perched on a rock, her eyes racing over her father’s thin, elegant script. She did not have to read for long.

  They loved her, the letter said. They missed her. They were glad she was safe, tended to, and cared for by her new family. She hated those words—new family—but still accepted them as the truth and read on.

  “You have made your choices,” the letter said. “And though we will remember you in our prayers, we must live in the separate worlds we have each created. Farewell, Daughter.”

  Rena flipped the letter over, knowing she had come to its end but praying other words had been tucked away, perhaps waiting for her on the paper’s other side. She felt her own emptiness mirrored in the letter’s large white margins, in the empty space that stretched down after her father’s stately signature. Though she knew her father could write with vibrancy, letters rich in detail and affection, he had written her only two short paragraphs. The letter had been kind but bland. He had included no news of India, of her family, or how they fared. There were no questions about Nell or Rena’s place in England, no show of concern for her day-to-day struggles. He had written with an even hand, focused and controlled.

  Rena’s fingers pinched the corners of the page. When she’d first come to England, she had felt a hundred doors slam shut on her desperate pleas for food, for work. Staring at her father’s letter now was like staring at the slammed-shut door to his study. He had forgiven her for marrying Edric, offered to bring her back home and find her another husband with time, but she had left, and however hard she struggled now she could not wrench open his door. He said they loved her, but he also cast her off.

  She was to live her life. They were to live theirs. There was no room to intersect.

  As snow began to fall, to nibble at the letter’s edge, Rena returned home, the letter still clenched in her fist. She entered the cottage, surprised to find Nell sitting at the table with a middle-aged man who wore a slightly faded frock coat and wide necktie.

  “Ah!” remarked the stranger with a pleasant nod. “Here she is.”

  Rena hovered in the doorway, confused by his presence, until Nell stood and beckoned her closer. “We’ve been waiting for you,” she said, pulling out the empty chair beside her own. “This is Mr. Finley. He is a solicitor. He’s come a rather long way to see us.”

  As Rena took her seat at the table, she realized she still held fast to her father’s letter. She smoothed its paper between her hands under the table as she waited for either Nell or Mr. Finley to speak.

  Mr. Finley slid on a pair of thin-wired spectacles. “Now that you are both here, I may begin.” He rifled through a few layers of paperwork as he spoke. “It seems there has been some confusion about your husband’s wil
l, Lady Hawley.”

  He passed Nell a piece of paper. “This is the will that was found when he died.”

  Nell’s mouth tightened into a frown as she gazed down at her dead husband’s handwriting. She placed two fingers, softly, to the paper’s edge. “Yes,” she said wearily, pushing it slightly away from herself. “I have read it. Everything passes to Sir Alistair’s cousin.”

  “Yes,” the man agreed. “According to this will, that would be the case.”

  Nell’s eyes shot up from the paper, narrowing on Mr. Finley. “This will?”

  He slipped another sheet of paper from his folder and placed it gently in front of her. “This was found after you and your daughter-in-law left India. It has taken some time for us to authenticate it.”

  Nell stared vacantly at the paper, her eyes straining as she again traced the dips and swells of her husband’s handwriting. Her eyes moved frantically from the will to Mr. Finley and back again. “Is it…real?”

  The man nodded. “Quite real. We tracked down the witness, and it seems to have been written in the same hand as the one previously drafted.”

  Nell sat back in her chair, her cheeks suddenly flushed, and settled a hand against her temple as if warding off a headache. Stricken by Nell’s sudden anguish, Rena grasped the woman’s shoulder. “Are you all right?” she whispered. “Do you need him to leave?”

  “What does it say?” Nell asked the solicitor in a hoarse voice. “Tell me.”

  “Your husband’s second will is rather…unorthodox,” he explained slowly. “It seems he and your son joined together to break the previous entailment to the Hawley cousin. The second part was written, rather hastily, after your son had died. It seems the fortune can pass to you, Lady Hawley—but only in the event that your daughter-in-law remarries.”

  Rena felt the blood drain from her face. “Excuse me?”

  “There’s more.” Mr. Finley swallowed deeply. “Mrs. Hawley, you must marry one of Sir Alistair’s relatives—one who is, specifically, in the Fairfax line.”