Providentially, as she had continued her survey, the sun had become obscured by a cloud, instantly casting the house into such a gloom that the windows darkened and the grey stone deepened in sheen, and she began to feel quite satisfied, fancying that if there were very many cloudy days, the house should do very well. Fortified in this belief, she had entered the portals of her new home in high spirits, and a full fortnight had passed before she was made to realize that she had never been so taken in.
Not only were there not very many cloudy days to be had that summer, but there was not a locked door nor an unexplained cupboard in the whole of the house. And search as she might, she could find no evidence of hollows behind the paneling, or of any flooring that could reasonably have been placed to hide an oubliette. She had even tried quite faithfully not to watch for ghostly figures vanishing from the corners of her vision, and had been justly rewarded—there were none. She was forced to the depressing conclusion that Wrenthorpe Grange, despite her persistent hopes and Sir Joshua’s assurances, was everything that was proper and comfortable.
Her fingers had been pulling at a clump of moss, and it came away in her hand. Bemused, she stared at it for some moments, her thoughts catching up with her. “What can I have been thinking? What act of heroism could I be called upon to do here, in a respectable mansion without even an oubliette, and an army of servants without a humped back among them, and neighbors without even the slightest imagination?”
As there was no answer aside from the gently creaking tree limbs above her, she threw the clump of moss away from her, crying, “I am doomed to languish in the smooth seas of gentility!”
Then she descended into a brown study, her arms crossed tightly across her chest and her forehead creased, but soon a vision seemed to work upon her mood. The brooding cloud upon her brow gradually eased, and after some time she pushed herself to her feet, vaguely brushing off her dress, a far-away look in her eyes.
“I am cast adrift in unknown waters, friendless, penniless, and without a shore to call my own.” She began to walk, slowly and thoughtfully, deeper into the wood as she mused and gesticulated. “After untold hardships, my boat runs upon a desolate beach, where breakers crash so violently that the craft is broken asunder, and I am dashed onto the rocks.” She struck the flat of her hand against a tree trunk, absorbing the blow with stoic dignity, then moved onward, winding around trees and stepping over rocks and creepers as she continued, speaking aloud as if the wood were her bosom friend.
“I awaken in the hovel of a kindly hermit, who nurses me to health, before bestowing upon me a humble gift—” Here she paused to look about herself for a token suitable to her story and, spying a burled stick poking up from the underbrush, she pulled it out, wiping the dirt and grass from it with a corner of her cloak. Satisfied, she held it reverently before her and continued, “He bestows upon me a humble gift, with the admonition to use it only in time of great need, which circumstance will reveal its magic powers.”
Tucking the stick into the pocket of her cloak, Lenora strode more purposefully into the wood, fully absorbed in her tale. “Though I wish to repay his kindness, he accepts only a lock of my hair, and directs me into the forest, where he prophesies my destiny awaits. The forest is dark and ancient, full of mysteries and secrets, but my courage shines forth like a beacon, and the spirit of the wood guides me on my path.”
She ran a hand along the low-slung branch of a tree, which was held out to her like the arm of a faerie creature, and walked on, gazing wonderingly about her as if in a dream. “The faerie folk peek out from their hiding places to watch me with mingled hope and awe. Suddenly, a clearing opens up, and in the center, on a greensward like scattered emeralds, stands a prince, whose countenance gleams like chestnuts, and whose green eyes pierce me to the very heart.”
She advanced into the clearing, which was real enough, and stood in the center, her hand outstretched to the invisible prince. “’Your Highness,’ I say, and extend my hand in peaceful greeting, but he falls to one knee before me, bowing over my hand like a petitioner. ‘My Queen,’ he cries, ‘I have long awaited thee, and bless the good fortune that has brought you at last to my side.’”
Raising her hand, and with it the gallant—if imaginary—prince, Lenora said, “My lord, I have traveled through untold terrors to find you, and will grant you the boon you seek.”
But the prince uttered a groan. “You have already suffered much, my Queen! How dare I ask you to risk more?”
“My prince, not all the sacrifice in the world could—”
The prince moaned again, more loudly, and uttered a most unprincely string of curses.
In utmost astonishment, Lenora jerked from her daydream, her eyes darting right and left. The clearing was, indeed, empty, and the gloom of the trees had thickened the shadows beneath them, so that she could not discern anything within the shapeless darkness. Her skin prickled as the notion that the woods were haunted came deliciously to mind, and another moan, accompanied by the thrash and scrape of movement, caused her to start again and step backward. But a light breeze, shivering through the gold-tinged leaves overhead, allowed a sprinkling of sunlight to penetrate the gloom, and Lenora was able to see the distinct outline of a man—a solid and substantial man—in the underbrush beyond the clearing.
She blinked at the figure, unsure whether it would be more prudent to investigate—for he was surely in distress, as the groans attested—or to run away. No sooner had the latter thought obtruded than she scorned it and, moving cautiously, made her way to the man’s side, discovering him to be laid on his face in the dirt, at the base of a small rise. His frieze coat and breeches were stained and covered with dead leaves and other debris, as if he had rolled down the hill and into the brush, and a battered cap clung to his head.
“Sir?” she asked, her voice quivering with uncertainty. There was no answer, and Lenora, disgusted with her cowardice, cleared her throat and said in the strong, brave voice worthy of a queen, “Sir, are you alright?”
Another moan issued from the fallen man, and he tried to lift himself, but after an abortive effort, he again lay still.
“May I be of assistance, sir?” she asked, tentatively taking one of his arms and pulling on it— which was utterly ineffectual, as he was larger than she, and dead weight into the bargain. Still, she tugged insistently at the arm. “Sir, if we both try at once, you may be able to rise—”
He suddenly swiped his arm in an arc, ripping it from her grasp, and at the same time flung himself into a sitting position, facing her.
“Don’t need any assistance, you,” he bellowed, with an unmistakable slur to his Scots accent, and fumes of strong drink billowing on his breath and into Lenora’s horrified face.
“Good heaven!” she cried, stumbling backward. “You’re drunk!”
Her ejaculation gave him pause, and he squinted hard at her, evidently making a discovery. “Ladies present!” he said, as his hand went to the kerchief knotted around his neck, and patted down his coat in a cursory self-inspection. “Pleasure, ma’am, sorry to contradict, but only slightly foxed,” he said almost incoherently, touching his cap. “Word of a gentleman.”
“Gentleman!” exclaimed his outraged companion, who had just been able to make out that last word. “No self-respecting gentleman looks—or smells—as you do, sir!”
He blinked down at his attire, then surged to his feet, achieving a bow that nearly toppled him over once again, but by dint of windmilling his arms in rather a haphazard fashion, he miraculously remained standing. “Right. Not a gentleman. Soldier,” he said, nodding in a conciliatory way to this angry, but percipient, young lady.
“Well,” huffed Lenora, her arms crossed sternly as she surveyed the disreputable personage before her, from his unkempt hair and overgrown beard to his mud bespattered boots. “Any man claiming to be in His Majesty’s service ought to be ashamed to be seen in such a state!�
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“Fallen on hard times,” he mumbled sullenly, swiping at his nose with his sleeve. “Old Boney drew in his horns. Gave us marching orders home.” He wheeled around and stumbled toward the path. “No money for the likes of us.”
Lenora had heard of the sad lot of noncommissioned soldiers, who were turned out of the army with no pension, and often with no home to return to, after the long years of the Peninsular war. Discomfited, she watched him go, wavering between disgust and compassion for this poor soul who had so reprehensibly sought refuge from his troubles in drink. Then his toe hit a root and he tumbled to his hands and knees, and compassion won the day.
“Sir, take care,” she said, hurrying forward to help him to his feet, and holding tight to his arm as he swayed alarmingly.
He swatted at her hand, as if it were a fly. “Can take care of myself.”
“I’ve no doubt you can, sir, under normal circumstances,” she persisted, keeping step with him as he once more started down the path. “but you are not yourself, and I feel I should see you safely home.”
He seemed to become resigned to her company, for he ceased pushing at her. “Suit yourself,” he said, doggedly plunging onward.
Lenora stumbled alongside him as he wove from side to side, nearly toppling into the brush herself several times in her effort to keep him upright. The gloom of the wood deepened, and she glanced up through the burnished leaves at a cloudy sky.
“How far is your home, sir?” she asked anxiously, fully aware that her mother and Sir Joshua would have remarked her absence by this time, and would be wondering where she had gone.
But her inebriated companion merely waved a hand in a vague forward direction and trudged on, obliging her to walk on with him. After some minutes more had passed, Lenora had repented her hasty decision to accompany a stranger—and a drunkard at that—into the forest, and was forming the determination to leave him to his fate and seek her own home, when the trees opened onto the most fantastic sight she had ever seen.
An undulating field of unmown grass, interspersed with patches of thistle, autumn gentian, and Queen Anne’s lace, fell away from the wood, down a slight decline, and across a wide expanse, where it ended at the sloping and bedraggled walls of a hedge-maze. This was surrounded by a riotous garden of sweet pea and rambling rose, with spikes of hollyhock and delphinium, all tangled in russet-leaved bramble and ivy, with clumps of ragged lavender and geranium clinging to the edges.
But the sight that held Lenora dumbstruck was a fine old stone mansion that rose up beyond the gardens, its rain-blackened walls splotched with lichen and overgrown with vines, and its pocked roofline stretching the broken teeth of chimneys into the darkening sky. The gaping eyes of several broken windows silently regarded her, as her annoyance melted away into spellbound amazement.
As her drunken companion trundled forward into the high grass, Lenora commanded herself enough to ask, “Do you live here?”
Shaking his head ponderously, he swerved abruptly away from the mansion, seeming unwilling even to look at it, onto an unseen path. “Not the Big House,” he mumbled. “Only ghosts there.”
Lenora's feet moved mechanically, and she followed him in a daze through the grass, around the mansion, and over a weed-strewn gravel sweep, while she gaped in wonder at the gothic perfection of the house and the grounds. How was it possible that such a place existed at all, and within miles of Sir Joshua’s home? How had he not told her of it?
Her companion turned down the overgrown drive, away from the lichen-mottled hulk, and it was with exceeding reluctance that she turned with him, picking her way down the pocked lane to a small cottage, which she took to be the gatehouse.
“Is this where you live, then?” she asked her companion, far less impressed.
“Groundskeeper,” he grunted, without a pause in his step.
He lifted the latch and shuffled into the house, and as she paused to critically measure the romantic merits of this dwelling—which was also in tantalizing disrepair, but which had a homey touch of smoke drifting from the chimney—he turned and closed the door in her face.
“Wait—” began Lenora, but the bolt slammed home.
She stood in shocked indignation for several moments, the fantasy of having at last discovered the house of her dreams crumbling into the realization that her connection to said house was on the other side of a solidly locked door, very likely flung unconscious upon the bed. And when he did awaken—after enduring a splitting head for some hours, she hoped—it should be wonderful if he remembered his meeting with her at all, much less that he owed an obligation to her.
The injustice of the very idea struck her forcibly, and she squared her shoulders, knocking at the door and calling imperatively, “Sir! Come back!” There was no response from inside the cottage, and she knocked again, raising her voice. “Sir! You must open the door at once! You cannot lock me out!”
This assertion fell lamely even upon her lacerated sensibilities, for none could dispute the man’s right to close and lock his door whenever—and upon whomever—he chose, and most especially in the excessively improper state in which he found himself to be. But Lenora easily cast this consideration aside, for she felt that her need was the greater, and she knocked and shouted and pled until her knuckles were sore and her voice raspy. But it was to no avail. The door remained shut, and the rooms behind it were as silent as the grave.
At last, she saw nothing for it but to surrender, and to make her way back around the manor to the path through the wood. This took nearly a quarter of an hour, as her feet meandered longingly past the enticing decrepitude of the mansion, and into the romantically overgrown gardens, her heart tugging with the insistence that her destiny was somehow intertwined with this place. But though she wished she could linger here all the day long, her stomach reminded her that nuncheon would be waiting at the Grange—and with it, her parents, who must not be made to worry—and that even she could not live upon vain hopes.
Sighing gustily, she turned away from the ruined mansion and, looking back only twice or three times, reentered the wood.
Judith Hale Everett was born in the mountains, and hopes never to leave them, except to travel to more amazing places. When not writing romance or fantasy, she is a mom, a gardener, an apiarist, a food preserver, a chicken herder, a dog and cat tolerator, a clothing designer and repairer, and a lover of walking barefoot on the grass.
Find JudithHaleEverett on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, or at judithhaleeverett.com.
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