by A. W. Exley
“Did either of you marry?” Dawn’s head was lathered with lavender-smelling shampoo.
The smile dropped away and Marjory turned to stare at the fire. “No. We have many stolen kisses over the years, but not all love stories end in happily ever after.”
Dawn thought of her parents. While they had never been openly affectionate with each other, there had always been an air of quiet companionship about them, and they seemed content in their marriage. She wondered what obstacle kept Marjory and Hector apart if they had some regard for one another. “I am sorry for you both, that you did not marry.”
“Don’t be. I will always have affection for Hector, and we both chose the paths we walk. Lady Letitia’s condition has meant I need to be her constant companion, and I sleep in her room. If I had married, I couldn’t have tended her as she needed.” She picked up the dipper and rinsed the last of the shampoo from Dawn’s hair.
Dawn dropped beneath the water and then emerged again with a new question. “What of Lord Seton, does he have a beautiful fiancée somewhere waiting for the day she becomes lady of the house?” Did it make her a terrible person that she hoped not?
Marjory placed the dipper on the floor by the bath. “Not that one. He’s not found the woman to give his heart to yet.”
Elation ran through her breast that he was unattached, tempered by sadness that he was indeed alone to carry his burden. His sombre moods might be a reflection of his loneliness. “It must be difficult, living in such a remote location. Perhaps he needs to take a season in London to find a charming debutante?”
“Oh, there are ways to find prospective candidates. Like advertisements in newspapers.” The smile was back on the nurse’s face, but this time it seemed mysterious and unreadable, as though she knew something Dawn didn’t.
How odd that the earl would advertise for a life’s partner. She thought that was something only cowboys did in the wild west of America, where brides were acquired through the mail.
After her bath, Nurse Hatton helped Dawn change into the clean dress.
“That’s a nasty cut you have there.” Marjory took Dawn’s arm and peered at her wrist. “You want to keep an eye out that it doesn’t become infected. You don’t want to end up losing the hand.”
“It’s only a scratch.” Dawn glanced at the cut, which looked much cleaner for a bath, but one end did seem to have a tiny black smudge, like the marks a pencil made on her fingertips when drawing.
Marjory frowned. “Give it a good salt wash to clean it out. But promise me that if it doesn’t improve, you will show it to Dr Day the next time he visits Lady Letitia.”
“I promise,” Dawn said. It would make a change to have a doctor examine an actual wound suffered in the course of being adventurous.
Then Marjory said her goodnights, as she had to return to her charge. Dawn headed back down the stairs alone and found Lord Seton sitting with Mouse in the entrance hall. The earl looked up as she descended the stairs.
“Feeling better?” He rose from his seat by the fire.
“Much, thank you.” She stopped at the last step, unsure what to do. She was an employee. Why was he treating her with such attention? Not being able to discern his motives left her in a constant state of anxiety.
Lord Seton held out his hand. “It is just the two of us for dinner this evening. Elijah is keeping Lettie company as neither wanted to call a halt to their game of chess. It also gives Nurse Hatton a rare evening to herself.”
Once again Dawn laid her hand on his sleeve, and again the little vine appeared and sniffed at their hands. As it snaked along skin, it progressed a little further past their wrists and drew them a little tighter.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Dawn closed her eyes tight and then opened them again, willing the plant to disappear.
“Yes, just a little tired after such a long day. We have made excellent progress in the walled garden.” Given the long and eventful day, followed by a hot bath, Dawn should have been lulled to sleep. Yet contact with the earl seemed to revitalise her as though she bathed in a cool stream on a hot day. She found herself anticipating dinner, like a birthday celebration with presents to be unwrapped.
They walked to the dining room, and as they separated to take their seats, the phantom vine dissolved into a burst of dust motes that danced and spun before vanishing. Unable to grasp any other topic, Dawn told the earl of how all the vegetable beds had been reclaimed and tended, and described her plans for winter seedlings. He may as well add frightfully boring to her list of faults alongside unladylike and unprofessional.
It was while Dawn paused as the main course was served that she realised she had monopolised the conversation. She stared at her cutlery. “I do apologise. Apparently I can talk non-stop about flora and compost once I start. I must be terribly boring.”
He made that grunt in his throat and took a sip of his wine. “On the contrary, I admire how passionate you are about restoring the grounds. It’s hard to find someone who cares so deeply.”
The estate made her feel practically maternal, as though it were a child she needed to nurse back to health from an illness. “I’m sure the previous gardener felt the same way.”
His face remained impassive. “Ravenswing Manor hasn’t had a gardener for forty years now. If it weren’t for Hector’s valiant efforts, even the house would have been reclaimed by the landscape.”
Forty years. Conversation kept turning back to whatever happened back then. In 1840, Victoria was a young and vibrant queen who was just learning how to rule. Dawn clasped her knife tighter in her fingers. She would never know what events unfolded here if she didn’t find the courage to ask.
“If it is not too impertinent, would you tell me about Master Elijah’s parents?”
Lord Seton laid down his cutlery and picked up the wine glass. He stared deep in the ruby liquid but didn’t drink. When he spoke, it seemed he addressed something he saw within the crystal. “Julian and I encountered Ava on the road to the mill. She was travelling from Scotland down to family in Cheshire, but her horse had become lame not far from our estate. Julian was obsessed from the moment he laid eyes on her and was determined to possess her.”
“Obsessed?” The word resonated in Dawn’s head. It was the same description used in the diary about an ill-fated pair forty years before, who must surely have been Julian’s parents. Did the son follow the same path as his father?
He swirled the glass, and the liquid within made patterns on the side. “It was as though she cast an enchantment over Julian from the moment they saw each other. Ava moved into the manor the same day. Over a period of weeks, their obsession turned into something darker. Something poisonous.”
Did Ava poison the ground or Julian’s mind? A shiver worked down her spine, and Dawn was glad the high neck of the dress concealed the prickle of goosebumps. The story the earl narrated echoed the older one in the diary. Perhaps all earls were cursed to follow the same doomed course of women unsuited to tending a large estate. “Were you not friendly with Ava for the sake of your brother?”
He didn’t look at Dawn, but through her toward some answer on the wall behind her. “I was pleased at first that Julian found someone he loved so deeply. But there was an air around her that smelt wrong, a taint that bothered me.”
“She smelt wrong?” What an odd thing to say. Maybe she ate lots of garlic that clung to her tongue.
His gaze slid sideways, back to Dawn. “Poor choice of words. I meant she behaved in a manner toward Lettie and the staff that bothered me.”
“What happened to them?” Dawn’s question was a mere whisper. She wanted him to continue but didn’t want to break his reverie in case he discarded the tale.
“They planned to marry, especially once she became with child. But her power over Julian began to diminish, and one night he saw through her facade to the rotten core underneath. He intended to seek my help to extricate us all from her clutches.”
“But then he
died,” Dawn whispered, already knowing the tragic end to the story.
“But then he died.” Lord Seton lifted his glass, drained the wine, and placed the empty glass on the table.
13
Silence fell over the room and the rest of the meal passed quietly, with both Dawn and Lord Seton lost in their own thoughts. She wondered that she had stumbled into a fairytale in the pages of a book that some evil force had taken hold of the family and estate. What role did young Elijah play – doomed princeling, perhaps?
After dinner, the earl once again walked her across a silent lawn. The moon washed everything in pale silver light, and Mouse looked as though he had turned to burnished metal. The raven was missing from his accustomed perch on the brick wall, but Dawn assumed even her silent watcher eventually went home to roost. The book on local fauna said they nested in the Ravensblood tree, and she wondered if she ever made the middle of the maze, how many of the large black birds would she find?
At the cottage door, the earl took her hand in his and placed a kiss on her knuckles. Her skin tingled and wriggled as the imaginary seedling writhed inside her. Did he do this to all his employees? She imagined all the staff, including the rough stable hands, lined up for a goodnight kiss from the earl and she bit her lip to stop from laughing.
“Would you kiss all your gardeners goodnight?” she asked.
He stared at her, but at least he didn’t frown. “Only those that intrigued me. Good night, Miss Uxbridge.”
“Good night, Lord Seton,” she said and stepped into the cottage. He had denounced her for being a woman when she first arrived at the estate, but now she intrigued him.
A shaft of moonlight swept through the window and illuminated her hand. Dawn held it up as the vine appeared and looped its way around her wrist and across her forearm. A single leaf burst from its stem before it puffed out of existence.
Dawn rubbed her hand down her arm and over her knuckles. “I’m going mad.”
Impossible ideas swirled in Dawn’s head as she undressed for bed and hung up her gown. The story of Julian and Ava seemed achingly like the diary entry dated 1840. The earl obsessed with a woman who poisoned family and estate. Everything circled back to this particular piece of land. Thinking of land, Dawn needed to investigate if the soil was affected. Certainly something allowed the suffocating black vine to thrive.
The history of the estate was unfolding like one of her mother’s fanciful tales. Was it possible that the family was cursed, with the current members of the family doomed to re-enact the same ill-fated choices as their parents?
She brushed out her hair while she waited for Mouse to return from his toilet stop. Then he settled on the rug and Dawn climbed into bed. She eased the tiny diary out from its spot between two larger books and then crawled under the blankets. A lantern on the shelf behind her head cast a faint light over her shoulder as she flicked through the brittle pages, looking for passages similar to what she heard that evening.
At last she found the paragraph that gnawed at her mind… Today I worked with Lettie in the garden. It is rewarding to see things flourish under her care.
The first read through, she assumed she misread the handwriting and the narrator meant they worked with lettuce. Now she studied the diary in detail for clues about what occurred to start the estate on the path of neglect.
The problem with old accounts referring to noble families is that the earl was simply the earl. No first names were ever given, for that would be terribly inappropriate. Even the more formal Lord Seton didn’t tell the reader which one the author meant. Did he mean Julian, his father, or grandfather? Could the Lettie from forty years ago be a relative of Jasper’s? Letitia didn’t seem a terribly common name, but it could be one passed down through the family.
Dawn’s forays around the estate uncovered decades of neglect, not just a few years. Forty years unattended was possible, if Elijah’s father had died four decades ago. However, his son appeared to be in his late teens, not early forties. That left her with only two options. Either history had repeated itself and two tragedies occurred at the estate, one in 1840 and the other just prior to Elijah’s birth. Or secondly, members of the Seton family were far older than they appeared.
Here was a puzzle for her to solve. Was there more to this family and estate than met the eye? And what happened to Ava, Elijah’s mother? No one had said she also died, so could she be the presence Dawn had sensed in the hermitage?
She needed to determine if the people now on the estate saw the beginning of the garden’s deterioration forty years ago, or if it were mere coincidence. As a first step, she was going to ask Elijah’s actual age, as opposed to the age he appeared. She was also curious as to Lord Seton’s age. Was he in his twenties, as he appeared, or was there also a discrepancy between his chronological age and appearance? Finding Julian’s gravestone inscribed with his date of death would be convenient, but there was no family cemetery on the map of the estate.
Trying to figure out a solution reminded her of an experience a few years before. She had a period of feeling particularly healthy, almost like a normal child, and her parents took her to an outing at a gallery. They had an exhibition of optical illusions, and her parents thought staring at the paintings wouldn’t be too taxing on her constitution.
Dawn found that if one stared directly at an optical illusion, then it resisted all attempts to reveal its secret. One had to glance to the side and pretend you weren’t looking at the middle of the picture at all. Only then, did the image appear. This mystery was the same; she needed to worry at the edges, not confront it face on. And she knew exactly where to begin.
Hector.
The night time screaming only briefly interrupted Dawn’s sleep. She roused enough to acknowledge the eerie sound, then rolled over and ignored it. Yet she woke with fatigue sinking into her bones.
“It must be the extra exercise, that is all,” she told herself as she took a mouthful of tonic to revive her tired constitution. After breakfast, she found her workforce waiting in the courtyard and gave them jobs to complete in the walled garden.
Dawn watched them head off and then struck out on a different course. She walked the length of the herbaceous border as she considered her course of action, both in tackling the mystery of the family and in restoring the grounds to their former glory. Mouse was a constant presence at her side.
The border was a double length of weeds, patches of bare earth, and scraggly hedges that would have given the original gardener nightmares. The black vine snaked through the hedge, spreading fingers that caused the yew to grow at odd angles as it tried to escape the grasp holding it tight. Large patches were dead where the vine suffocated a branch.
“What did you do, Ava?” Dawn wondered aloud.
The vine rustled and slithered, much like a snake through undergrowth. No, it must just be the wind, blowing the yew and making the vine appear to move. Dawn lifted the hem of her skirt and stepped over the weeds and grass to stand closer to the vine where it laced through the hedge.
Mouse whimpered and sat at the edge of the bed, but didn’t venture any closer. His ears were pricked and his large eyes tracked Dawn’s movement.
“Ava,” she whispered.
Mouse leapt to his feet and yapped as the vine slid along the hedge. Did it move, or did it grow on hearing that word? Or it might be a pure coincidence as the hedge bent and bowed under the vine’s weight.
“Brussel sprouts,” she said, to no reaction at all. Not even a splutter of horror from either plant or wolfhound.
Silly. I just imagined it. She found a path back across the debris-riddled bed to the lawn. Dawn glared at the vine.
“Ava.” She still kept her voice low in case someone overheard. Once again, the vine twisted and tightened its hold on the hedge a fraction more. A branch broke with a snap under the attack, and a piece of yew slumped, defeated. Mouse nudged her side and whined nervously as though asking her to stop it.
“All right, boy.” She
patted his head and ruffled his ears.
Having challenged the vine with Ava’s name, Dawn headed for the maze. As she approached, a raven took flight and soared over her head, straight toward the middle. Dawn watched the bird with envy. Since she couldn’t fly, they would need to formulate a plan of attack to find their way inside.
She stopped next to Hector and examined the vine. Mouse padded to a shady spot and threw himself to the ground. Now was Dawn’s opportunity to ask the old retainer a few questions while it was just the two of them. “Do you remember when Nurse Hatton came to work for the family?”
“Oh yes.” He took the boater off his head and stared at it in his hands for a moment. “I thought a fairy had come to live among us. She was such a delicate, wee thing, with fiery red hair and vivid blue eyes. I thought she had drifted down from a sunflower.”
The look on his face made Dawn wonder what obstacle kept the two apart. They should have had a life together. She supposed they had in a way, just not as man and wife. “She said you cut quite the impressive figure, and girls used to swoon as you walked by.”
“Well, did she now?” The boater went back on his head and the toothless grin lit his face. “Quite true, too. Terribly inconvenient having to step over all them fainted women littering my way.”
He winked and Dawn burst into laughter. She could well imagine him as a handsome rogue beguiling the local women. Later she might ask if there were old photographs, but for now she needed to steer the conversation to a more delicate topic.
“Was Lady Letitia so terribly broken when Nurse Hatton came to care for her?” She almost held her breath, waiting for his reply. She glanced at the leaves on the grass, trying to spot another leaf from the mythical Ravensblood tree.
His shoulders slumped as a silent sigh deflated his chest. “Poor mite. She took it terribly seeing her brother die.”