Ivor looked up in surprise, his face cloudy but panicked.
“What are you doing in here?” I demanded, and felt Cassius at my back, peering in.
Ivor slowly shut the drawer. One of my silk stockings caught in the latch. “Looking for the twins.”
“In Annaleigh’s dresser?” Cassius’s voice was dark with warning. “And they’re triplets.”
He shrugged. “Thought with everyone busy, I might search for clues.”
“Clues?”
“About the shoes.”
“My sisters are missing and you’re worried about our shoes?” I flew at him, grabbing his arm and pushing him toward the door with all the strength I could muster. It was like trying to move a mountain. “This is my private room. Get out of here!”
Ivor ducked out of my grasp. “I was just trying to help.”
“Help yourself, more like it.”
“The lady has asked you to leave her room,” Cassius reminded him, stretching out his frame.
Ivor glanced back and forth between us, one eyebrow raised. “And just what exactly are you doing in the lady’s room?”
Cassius’s eyes narrowed. He stared him down, silent and unmoving, until Ivor shuffled off. “There’s a trinket in your pocket I’m certain belongs to Miss Thaumas,” he called after him. “Leave it.”
Without looking back, Ivor dropped one of my hair ribbons to the ground, trampling it as he left. Cassius followed after him to make sure he didn’t wander into any of the other rooms.
As I picked up the ribbon, a memory stirred deep within me.
Hair.
I’d pulled a twig from Lenore’s hair this morning. A berry twig. I knew where those bushes were. They grew in a thicket in the forest not far from Highmoor. Lenore must have been there. And the triplets never did anything by themselves….
“I think I know where they might be,” I said as Cassius returned.
“Where?”
I raced down the stairwell, throwing a scarf around my neck. “Follow me.”
I took the quickest route through the gardens, but we were still half frozen by the time we entered the forest’s edge. Along the way, I kept an eye out for any signs my sisters had come this direction, but the howling winds obscured any traces they might have left. I tried to ignore the growing fears in the pit of my stomach as they twisted my hopes with grim pragmatism.
It was too cold.
They’d been gone too long.
There was no way we’d find them alive.
No!
I pictured Rosalie and Ligeia huddled in the thicket, cold and disoriented, but we’d cover them in our cloaks and bring them home. They’d warm up in front of the fire, cheered with cups of hot cider and a good meal, and we would all laugh about this one day.
We raced through the woods as fast as the snow would allow. In some parts, there was hardly a dusting, but our ankles snagged on frozen roots and vines. In others, the drifts came up over my knees. Within the protection of the trees, the wind wasn’t as sharp, and our visibility increased tenfold.
Cassius caught himself before tripping on a fox hole. “What would they be doing out here?”
I pushed aside a low-hanging limb, but it swung back, catching my face. My cheeks were too numb to feel the sting. My feet ached, frozen and tingling, as they trudged through the heavy snow.
Up ahead was a flash of red, the first true color we’d seen since stumbling into the tree line. The berry bushes!
They clustered together, forming a thick, circular hedge. There was a break farther along the bushes, opening on a small clearing in the center. In the summer months, we often packed picnics and spent whole afternoons hidden in the verdant thicket.
I spotted footprints in the untouched snow.
My heart soared, so full of hope I thought it might burst. They’d been here! “Rosalie! Ligeia!”
Cassius was ahead of me now, following the prints around the hedge. I wanted to push him out of the way and run faster, but snowbanks pulled at my skirts, keeping me several feet behind.
I counted three sets of tracks. “Look! Do you see? They might still be here!”
He halted abruptly at the opening of the thicket, blocking me. Cassius grabbed at me as I ducked around him. His fingers briefly slipped over mine, but it wasn’t enough to stop me.
“Annaleigh, don’t!”
I stopped in my tracks. Everything in the world froze except the beating of my heart. It pounded harder and harder, faster and faster, until I felt its tempo in the hollow of my throat, cutting off my breath.
I think I screamed but I heard nothing, just the sharp whine of a silence grown too strong.
I wanted to go to them, but the only way I could move was down as my knees collapsed from under me and I fell into the snow.
I don’t remember how I reached them—I must have crawled—but suddenly I was there, with my sisters, my hands feeling for a pulse in their frozen throats, their pale blue wrists. I pushed my ear to silent chests, desperate to hear a heartbeat, but there was none.
“Rosalie?” My voice constricted into a sob as I cupped her cheek. Tears streamed down my face. She was cold. She was so cold. They’d been out here far too long. “Ligeia? Ligeia, Rosalie, please wake up,” I begged the cold shells of my sisters before throwing my arms around them and howling.
They lay in the center of the thicket on their backs, their frozen eyes looking up at the sky. If you could see past the icicles on their lashes, the frost beneath their nostrils, and the blue of their lips, they could have been watching clouds go by, pointing out funny shapes they saw.
Cassius was at my back, trying to pull me off the bodies. No. Not bodies. Rosalie. Ligeia. My beautiful, carefree sisters. They weren’t bodies. They couldn’t be dead. They couldn’t be….
I allowed his arms to enfold me as he tried to absorb my grief. Sobs ripped from my chest as if they would splinter my sternum in two, but he held me tight, pressing kisses in my hair, stroking my back, keeping me together and whole.
When I turned back to my sisters, I noticed their hands were clasped together, and I recalled the story Mama loved to tell about the day the triplets were born. Having spent so many months crammed and squished tightly together, none of them could bear to venture out into the great unknown world on their own, so they formed a chain, holding on to each other’s hands, their bond broken only as the midwife pulled them free. First Rosalie, then Ligeia, then Lenore.
Ligeia had reached her free arm out into the snow, searching for the hand of her sister, looking for Lenore, desperate to leave the world as they had entered it. Together.
Tears filled my eyes, blinding me, and I knew no more.
“We, the People of the Salt, commit these bodies back to the sea.”
The High Mariner’s voice held a trace of sadness I had not detected in my other sisters’ burials. He nodded to Sterland, Regnard, Fisher, and Cassius.
Our makeshift pallbearers.
The storm still raged outside, cutting off access to the mainland and any relatives willing to brave this further confirmation of the Thaumas curse. Most of the guests had wanted to leave Highmoor after my sisters were found. All but Papa’s oldest friends and Cassius had left for Astrea, intending to wait out the storm as far from our grief as they could get.
The men slid the coffin into the tomb, trying not to grunt with their efforts.
Coffin. Singular.
The crypt was only big enough to hold one box at a time. Prior Thaumases apparently never died in pairs. I didn’t want to know what had been done to make both Rosalie and Ligeia fit into one coffin, but it did make me feel better somehow that they were in there together.
“We are born of the Salt, we live by the Salt, and to the Salt we return,” the High Mariner continued.
“To the Salt,”
we repeated listlessly.
He poured the goblet of salt water onto the box, doused the candles, and it was over.
There was no speech from Papa this time. No wake. This was not a time to celebrate their lives. Mourning settled back upon us like a second skin.
It took three carriages to return everyone to Highmoor. Papa, Sterland, Regnard, and the High Mariner were in the lead. I sat in one with Verity, Mercy, and Fisher. Camille, Honor, and Cassius followed behind. Morella had stayed at home, unable to be out in such cold, and Lenore…
Lenore.
She’d taken to her bed since Cassius and I returned to Highmoor with the sad news. I couldn’t remember much of the trip back. I’d never swooned before. It was nothing like what I’d read in those ridiculous romance novels the triplets swapped back and forth.
Had swapped.
When Lenore heard the news, she nodded once, our words affirming what she already knew, and left the room with an eerie grace. Hanna hurried after her, certain she would harm herself.
But there was no violence. There were no tears, no screams or moans or wailing. It was as if the spark of life animating Lenore followed after her sisters, leaving behind an empty shell. She woke and slept and ate and bathed, but she wasn’t really there. Even when I curled up next to her at night—I couldn’t stand leaving her alone, knowing the pain I suffered was magnified ten thousand times for her—she said nothing. I almost wished for the frantic, wild state she’d been in before. This detached, silent grief was too terrible to bear witness to.
“You saw them, didn’t you?” Verity asked, bringing me back to the jostling carriage ride. Even with the windows closed and covered, our breath steamed in the air, and we all huddled together under thick blankets and furs.
I nodded.
“What killed them? Papa won’t say. Roland told me it was a bear.”
“There are no bears on the island,” Fisher reminded her.
“It wasn’t a bear,” I said. My voice felt rusty, corroded from tears.
“Then what was it? He said they were ripped to shreds. There was blood everywhere.”
“Roland is going to find himself without a job. He should never have said such things to you. They’re not even true. When we…found them…they were just in the thicket, on their backs.”
“Did someone poison them?” Mercy asked.
“Of course not!”
“Then how?”
I shrugged. “It looked like they wandered out into the storm and just got too cold. It was very peaceful. And they were together. I don’t think they were scared or sad.”
“Then why didn’t they come back?”
I wondered the same thing myself. Lenore had made it through the storm. When I pressed her for details, trying to find out what had happened that night, she turned to me with her strange and empty stare and simply walked away.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “There’re lots of things I just don’t know.”
“The curse,” Verity said, her voice soft and small.
“There is no curse. Just bad luck.”
“Couldn’t bad luck be a curse?” Mercy asked.
“No. It’s just coincidence.”
“The curse could make itself look like coincidence.”
“There is no curse!” I shouted, much louder than I meant to. The girls jumped in surprise. It wasn’t nice to have startled them, but the carriage was blissfully silent for the rest of the ride.
When we reached Highmoor, Mercy and Verity hopped out of the carriage, anxious to get away from me, but Fisher remained behind, his eyebrows furrowed into one straight line.
“What?” I prompted when it was clear he had something on the tip of his tongue. He shook his head, reaching for the door. I grabbed his hand, stopping him. “Fisher, what is it?”
“Cassius was with you when you found Rosalie and Ligeia?”
“He was.”
His brown eyes flickered over mine for a moment before returning to the window.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s obviously something.”
His breath billowed around him in the cold air. “It’s just…I went through those woods myself. During the search…I know my memory of that day is a blur, but I feel like I’d have seen the girls when I went past the berry bushes.”
“What are you getting at?”
He rubbed his forehead as if his fingers could erase the dark thoughts piling up. When his eyes met mine, they were as sharp as tacks. “I’m saying they weren’t there. I’m saying someone put them there later on.”
“Put them there?” I repeated. A bit of cold sparked in my heart, running through my veins like icy water, freezing me in place. “What do you mean? You think…you think they were murdered?”
“Don’t you? You told me someone killed Eulalie. You shouted at me and all of Astrea that Edgar was pushed. Don’t you suspect foul play here?”
I frowned, horrified. “No…Eulalie…that was someone else. Someone who was jealous of Edgar and…But Rosalie and Ligeia…they’d gone dancing. They were just caught in the storm….”
“Were they?” Fisher asked, his voice brusque but not unkind. “You said you saw three sets of tracks in the snow….”
“That was Lenore,” I said readily before realizing how feeble it sounded.
“Why would only Lenore make it back?” Fisher leaned in close. “You know she wouldn’t have left them.”
“But the berry branch in her hair—”
“Could have been planted later.”
I imagined a great, hulking shadow stealing into my sister’s room as she slept, leaving behind a single twig, and shuddered.
“You think the third set of footprints were from the killer? Eulalie’s killer?”
He nodded.
My mind spun, trying to remember all the reasons I’d thought Eulalie’s murderer had been an unrequited love. If it hadn’t, if my theory had been wrong…
“If Rosalie and Ligeia really were murdered…that means none of us are safe,” I whispered.
Glancing out the window, I saw Verity and Mercy patiently listening to Papa talk with the High Mariner, and my stomach plummeted. Someone could be after them. Someone who…
The final carriage pulled into the courtyard. Cassius stepped down, offering his hand to assist Camille and Honor. He gave our coach a lingering look before escorting them inside.
“How much do we really even know about him?” Fisher asked unhappily. “I mean, your father didn’t even know Corum had a son until he showed up. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
My head hurt, a sudden migraine brought on by the icy chill and the accusations swirling in the air. “It’s a little suspicious, I admit. But it doesn’t mean he’s a killer.”
“True, but…”
I held up my hand, stopping him. “I have to ask this, Fisher…. You’re not saying any of this because…because I chose him over you?”
His mouth dropped open. “Of course not! How can you even think I would…” He put his hand on the door of the carriage, ready to throw it open and leave me.
“Wait! I’m just saying…” I blew out a long breath, shaking my head. “I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m sorry. I haven’t been sleeping well, and I…I’ll think it over, all right?”
Fisher’s eyes burned into mine.
“What? Right now?”
He shrugged. “Do you have something else more pressing?”
Sighing, I tried to remember that day. “You and Sterland were in the maze with Regnard and Ethan, weren’t you?”
“For most of the morning.”
I counted them off on my fingers. Ivor had been upstairs, searching for clues about our worn-out slippers. Another tick.
“Jules was in the stables with Cassius, I think,” I said
. Even as I said it, my mind flashed to Cassius coming in alone. His cheeks had been bright red, as though he’d been out in the cold for quite some time.
Why?
The stables weren’t a far walk from the house, and they were heated with banks of coals for the horses.
“You’re certain you went by the berry bushes?”
The hollow of my throat tightened. I felt as though I was standing on the edge of a cliff, with pebbles and gravel shifting under my feet. I knew I was about to fall, but I couldn’t stop and save myself.
Fisher nodded. “The thicket was empty. No one was there.”
I stared out the window but couldn’t see anything except Cassius’s red cheeks.
The glass panes fogged over with condensation from our breath as Fisher waited in silence, letting me process his words.
“Come on, let’s get you inside,” he said finally, pushing open the door and helping me out.
I stood in the courtyard in a dazed fog. I didn’t even flinch as the driver cracked his whip, startling the horses into action. Though I ran my hands up and down my arms for warmth, it didn’t help. I couldn’t feel anything. I’d gone completely numb.
“Someone on this island killed my sisters.”
Fisher’s face was lined with sadness as he took my elbow, guiding me inside.
Just before ducking beneath the portico, I looked up and caught sight of a figure, perfectly framed within one of the Blue Room’s windows. Cassius stood looking down at us, lines of worry across his brow.
The room was hot.
I lay next to Lenore, unable to sleep. Sheets stuck to my legs, twisting and pulling. I tried to flatten them with my foot, but it only tangled them more.
How much do we really even know about him?
Fisher’s voice welled up, repeating the question over and over again until each word ceased to have meaning, leaving only a jumbled echo of consonants ringing in my mind.
It didn’t make any sense.
It couldn’t.
But his cheeks had been so red….
I bunched the pillow up beneath me, trying to get more comfortable, but it only served to further agitate me. I slammed my fist into the downy softness, wishing I could pummel my thoughts into such submission.
House of Salt and Sorrows Page 22