House of Salt and Sorrows

by Erin A. Craig

  I planned to drop off the purchases in my bedroom before searching for Papa, but as I walked down the hall, I spotted steamy air billowing from the bathroom. It smelled of lavender and honeysuckle, such a distinct scent I paused as memories of Elizabeth flooded my mind. She had a special blend of soap made in Astrea just for her. I hadn’t smelled it since the day her body was discovered. One of the Graces must have come across a bottle and decided to try it for themselves.

  Sure enough, wet footprints led down the hallway toward their rooms, staining the carpet runner.

  With a sigh, I followed them. They led past Honor’s and Mercy’s rooms and came to a stop outside Verity’s. She lay on the floor, sprawled out with her sketchbook and surrounded by colored pastels.

  “You’re lucky I caught you and not Papa.”

  Verity sat up, dropping a blue pastel. “What do you mean?”

  “You didn’t towel off properly and left a watery mess in the hall. You know how much he loves that carpet.”

  He and Mama had bought it on their honeymoon at a bazaar. Papa said he’d turned his back for a moment and a merchant had pounced, showing off his hand-knotted wares. Mama had wanted to buy a small one for her sitting room, but her Arpegian was so bad that when the rug arrived at Highmoor, it was fifty feet long. She’d loved to describe the look on Papa’s face as the runner rolled out longer and longer.

  “I take baths at night. I’ve been in my room all afternoon. See?” Verity raised her hands, dry and smeared with colors.

  “Who was it, then? Mercy or Honor? It’s still steaming.”

  She shrugged. “They’re in the garden, tying ribbons on the flower bushes.”

  I glanced back into the hallway. The footprints were still there, just barely. On closer inspection, they were too big to be Verity’s. “Were the triplets up here?”

  “No.”

  “Well, someone left wet footprints behind, and they lead straight to your room.”

  Verity closed her sketchbook. “Not my room.” She gestured out toward the hallway, at the door directly across from hers.

  Elizabeth’s.

  “I know you pilfered her soap. The bathroom smelled like honeysuckle.”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “Then who?”

  Again, she looked meaningfully at Elizabeth’s room.

  “No one is in there.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  I sank down onto the floor next to her. “What do you mean? Who would be in Elizabeth’s room?”

  Verity studied me for a long moment. I could see her thoughts grinding. Finally, she opened the sketchbook back up and flipped the pages till she found the right picture.

  It was a portrait of Elizabeth. I noticed the date scrawled in a shadowed corner. Verity had drawn this recently.

  “Are you having nightmares again? Have you been dreaming of Elizabeth?”

  Verity often suffered from horrible night terrors. She’d scream so loudly, even Papa would rush up from his study in the East Wing. When pressed, she could never remember what they were about.

  “This isn’t a dream,” she whispered.

  I brushed aside the chill that had settled over me. “No one is in there. Come and see.”

  Verity shook her head, her chestnut curls springing like snakes.

  I pushed up off the floor with a frustrated swish of skirts. “I’ll go, then.”

  The footprints were almost gone, fading out of the carpet. If I’d come upstairs only a minute later, I never would have seen them. My fingers closed around the door handle—a burnished seahorse poking out from the dark walnut—and there was a rustle behind me. Verity paused on her threshold, eyes wide and pleading.

  “Don’t go in.”

  Something about the way her tiny hand dug into the jamb sent a streak of cold racing through my chest. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled, rising in defense against an unseen horror. It was ridiculous, but I couldn’t shake the look of fear in Verity’s eyes.

  I pushed open the door with resolve but did not step inside.

  The air felt thin and dusty. After Elizabeth’s funeral, maids stripped the bedding and covered the furniture with thin, gauzy cloths. They never returned to clean it.

  After a cursory sweep of the room, I turned to Verity. “There’s no one in here.”

  Her dark green eyes drifted up to the ceiling. “Sometimes she visits Octavia.”

  Octavia’s room, another shrouded, untouched shrine, was on the fourth floor between Papa’s suite and Morella’s sitting room.

  An involuntary shiver snapped me from the eerie trance Verity wove. “Who does, Verity? I want you to say it and see how absurd it sounds.”

  She pressed her eyebrows together, wounded. “Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth is dead. Octavia is dead. They can’t visit each other, because they’re dead and the dead don’t visit.”

  “You’re wrong!” She raced into her room, snatched up the sketchbook, and held it out, unwilling to enter the hallway.

  I flipped the pages, searching for whatever proof she thought these drawings would offer.

  “What am I meant to be looking at?”

  She flipped to a scene in black and gray pastels. In it, Verity cowered into her pillows as a shadowy Eulalie ripped the bedsheets from her. Her head was snapped back unnaturally far. I couldn’t tell whether she was supposed to be laughing manically or the odd angle was the result of her fall from the cliffs.

  I drew a sharp breath, horrified. “You drew this?”

  She nodded.

  I studied my little sister. “When the fishermen brought Eulalie back, did you see her?”

  “No.” She flipped the page. A chalk-white Elizabeth floated in a red slash of ink, surprising a robed Verity, ready for her nightly bath.

  She turned another page. Octavia curled up in a library chair, seemingly unaware that half her face was smashed in and her arm was too broken to hold a book straight. Verity was there too, peeking around the door, a small, scared silhouette.

  Another page flipped.

  I took the book from her, staring at Ava. We had only one portrait of her hanging in Highmoor. She’d been little—nine years old with short curls and freckles. This…this looked nothing like that.

  “You’re not old enough to remember Ava,” I murmured, unable to look away from the festering buboes or black patches of infected skin at her neck. Most disturbing was her smile. It was soft and full, exactly as it had been before the plague. Verity had been only two when Ava got sick. She couldn’t know what Ava ever looked like.

  I turned the page and saw a drawing of all four of them, watching Verity as she slept, hanging from nooses. In disgust, I dropped the book, and sheets of loose paper—dozens of sketches of my sisters—escaped. They exploded across the hall like macabre confetti. In the pictures, they were doing things, ordinary things, things I’d seen them do all my life, but in every drawing they were unmistakably and horribly dead.

  “When did you do these?”

  Verity shrugged. “Whenever I saw them.”

  “Why?” I dared a glance back into the seemingly empty room. “Is Elizabeth here now?”

  Verity scanned the room before looking back at me. “Do you see her?”

  The hairs on my arms rose. “I’ve never seen any of them.”

  She took the book and retreated into her bedroom. “Well…now you’ll know to look.”

  “It was Ava, I’d swear on Pontus’s trident.”

  Hanna heaved a basket of violet ranunculus up onto a side table. Her full cheeks were as flushed as rosy apples. Even she had been enlisted as an extra set of hands today. “You’re telling me Verity sees ghosts? Of your sisters?”

  I’d been trailing Hanna around the dining room, telling her the horrors I’d found in Ver
ity’s book. The day of the triplets’ ball had dawned gray and overcast. A thick, soupy fog blanketed the island. Even though it was well after noon, the gaslights burned brightly, illuminating the army of workers bustling about with final tasks before the guests arrived.

  “Yes.” I didn’t want to believe it was possible, but the detail with which Verity drew Ava shook me to my core.

  “These are to be added into the foyer’s bower,” Hanna instructed two men on a ladder.

  They were adding drops of purple cut glass to the chandelier as footmen worked around them, putting the last touches on place settings. Alongside the silver-trimmed plates, dozens of mercury glass candelabras covered the banquet table; as the dinner wore on, their trick tapers would drip purple wax over the glass, delighting the guests. I dropped my basket of the ghoulish candles onto a chair where Roland indicated they should go.

  “Ghosts don’t exist. Your sisters are in their eternal rest, deep in the Salt. They wouldn’t be here. Verity’s imagination runs wild. You know that.”

  My heart sank. Camille had had a similar reaction when I told her about the pictures last night. She’d then kicked me out of her room, saying she needed a good rest before the party. She’d shut the door without even offering me a candle, forcing me to race down the darkened hallway, certain Elizabeth was going to come out of her room and grab me.

  Hanna headed to the solarium at the back of the house. “The girls said they want at least a hundred votives in here,” she instructed the servants hidden beneath towering palms and exotic orchids. “Be sure to space them out evenly, and for Pontus’s sake, don’t set them too close to the plants! The last thing we need tonight is a fire.” She turned back into the hallway, running into me. “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” she asked, exasperated.

  “I know you’re busy, but listen, please. Verity didn’t know what Ava looked like. She was so little when she died.”

  Hanna grabbed my shoulders, drawing me in, face to face. “You all look alike, love. A painting of any of your sisters in black and white could be mistaken for you. I think you’re seeing what you want to.”

  My mouth fell open, hurt. “Why would I want to see that? They looked so horrible.” A shudder of revulsion swept over me as I remembered the awful angles of their bodies. “And she didn’t know Eulalie broke her neck.”

  “The girl fell a hundred feet from the cliff walk. What else would her neck have done?”

  A crash sounded in the kitchens, and Hanna used the moment to push me aside. “Annaleigh, child, you’re about to drive me batty. I can’t remember whether I’m supposed to be polishing the bedclothes or folding the silver. And Fisher is due any moment. You have plenty of preparations for yourself upstairs. We’ll talk about Verity later, I promise. Just please get out from underfoot.”

  My mind, swirling with gruesome sketches and ghosts, stilled at her words. “Fisher is coming?” I broke into my first smile of the day.

  She nodded, her face lighting up. “Your father invited him to the ball. Wants to introduce him to the captains and lords. He’s so proud.” She swatted at me. “Now scoot! I’ll be along soon to start on your hair.”

  I took the back stairs, narrow and as tightly coiled as a nautilus shell, to avoid the foyer’s frenzy. Approaching the second floor, I could hear the triplets squabbling over the best mirrors and who stole whose lip color. As Rosalie shouted for a maid to help search for a pair of wayward hair combs, I hurried away.

  Once in my room, I opened my bureau, intending to lay out my undergarments. A worn envelope pressed against the back of the drawer caught my eye.

  It was a letter from Fisher, written years ago, after he’d begun his apprenticeship on Hesperus. I ran my fingertips over the familiar handwriting.

  I really shouldn’t even be writing to you, since you made such a stink when Lord Thaumas chose me as the next Keeper of the Light, but Mother says I ought to take the high road. It’s pretty stupid, if you ask me. There aren’t any roads on Salten and certainly not on Hesperus.

  It’s quiet here, and Silas wakes me up at all hours of the night to scrub Old Maude’s windows. I hate it. That should cheer you, at least. And if it doesn’t, no matter. I wrote you, as Mother said I should. So there.

  But write me back, Minnow. I miss home more than I thought I would. You especially.

  Sincerely,

  The Terrible Traitor Formerly Known as Fisher

  “Are you taking a bath or not?” Camille barged into my room, surprising me. I shoved the letter under a pair of wool tights. “I’ve been waiting all afternoon.”

  Snatching up a pair of stockings, I ran my hand over the silk, as if checking for runs. “Go on, then.”

  “Have you bathed?”

  I tossed the stockings aside. “No. I’m not even sure I’m going to.”

  She pulled a face. “Is this about Verity’s drawings? Elizabeth isn’t going to drown you in the tub, but I might if you make me late. Get in there before I dump you in myself.”

  “Just take the bath, Camille.”

  “I won’t have you looking anything less than your best tonight. We’re both finding suitors.” She grabbed my robe from a hook and threw it at me.

  “I thought you said I just needed to be myself,” I muttered peevishly, trudging down the hall. Camille followed after me, presumably to make sure I actually went in.

  “Your best, bathed self,” she clarified.

  I shut the door in her face with a bit of satisfaction and quickly locked it before she could force her way in, issuing more orders. I faced the bathtub with trepidation. This was silly. I’d bathed here many times since Elizabeth died.

  As I turned the brass handles, waiting for the water, the pipes creaked and rattled, like echoes of Eulalie’s screams when she discovered Elizabeth’s body.

  After adding a sprinkle of soap, I stepped out of my day dress and studied myself in the full mirror. Dark spots edged along the beveled lines, clouding the reflection. Had drops of Elizabeth’s blood seeped into the glass, staining it forever?

  I tried to let the hot water relax my tense muscles, but it was no use. My imagination was working overtime. Noises in the house became my departed sisters creeping in, ready for me to join them. When a bar of soap bumped my thigh, I nearly screamed.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” I chided myself before scrubbing my hair. The soap smelled of hyacinths, and as I breathed it in, I felt my body relax, releasing its worries.

  Fisher was coming.

  I hadn’t seen him in years, not since Ava’s funeral. We weren’t allowed to leave the estate while mourning, and Silas kept him too busy for frequent visits. But he’d been a constant fixture of my childhood, eager to play elaborate rounds of hide-and-seek or go fishing in the little skiff Papa let us use if the weather was good.

  He was twenty-one now. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine him as a grown man. Fisher had been such a lanky beanpole, with a mop of sandy brown hair and twinkling eyes, always ready for mischief. I couldn’t wait to see him again.

  “Are you still in there? Hurry up!”

  “I just need to rinse my hair!” I shouted at Camille.

  She groaned and stomped away.

  Plunging under the water, my head cracked against the back of the tub. It knocked the wind out of me. I came up crying in pain, and as the stars cleared from my vision, I let out a shriek.

  The water had turned dark purple, nearly black. Murky brine burned in my nostrils, sharp and bitter. I struggled to push myself out of the tub. The bottom was slick with a silky viscosity. I tried to stand, but my feet slipped from under me, and I fell with a spectacular thud, splashing black water over the floor. I rubbed at my hip, already feeling a bruise.

  I tried to scream for Camille but was suddenly yanked under by an unseen force. The dark water raced into my mouth, filli
ng it with a brackish bite as I sputtered out a cry for help. I pushed upward, gagging on the fishy tang.

  It was a surprisingly familiar taste. One of Cook’s favorite dishes to make in the summer months was a black risotto, full of clams, shallots, and spot prawns. The rice was an exotic obsidian, dyed with squid ink.

  Ink! The tub was impossibly full of ink.

  Without warning, a tentacle shot from the water, snaking around my torso and constricting tightly. It was mottled red and purple, with lines of orange suckers latching on to me. Another arm attacked my leg, winding up it with a fierce possession. I flailed and kicked, but nothing could pry the beast from me.

  The bulbous head of an octopus broke the surface, intelligent amber eyes surveying me through slit pupils. With my free foot, I lashed out at them, praying it would release me.

  The creature reared back, and I could see its muscular underside. Dozens of suckers pointed directly to its wickedly sharp black mouth. It opened once, twice, as if pondering which part of me to attack first.

  It launched at me, and just before I felt the beak sink into my thigh, I woke up. My heart pounded, echoing its racing rhythms up through my chest and into my throat as I gasped for air.

  I’d fallen asleep.

  It was a dream.

  An awful, awful dream.

  Lowering back into the cooling waters, I let out a sigh of relief but immediately jerked up as pounding sounded against the door.

  “Annaleigh, I swear, if you make me late, I’m going to murder you!”

  “Coming!”

  I pushed myself out of the water, wondering how long I’d dozed. Looking at the white porcelain as I toweled off, I couldn’t remember why I’d been so scared in the first place. It was just a bathtub. Elizabeth dying there didn’t change that.

  Standing in front of the mirror, I twisted my wet hair up and spotted something on my back. A set of red marks raked down my spine, almost as if I’d been scratched.

  “Camille?” I unlocked the door.