by Lydia Joyce
They reached the far wall of the kitchen, where four doors lined up beside a staircase that led to the upper reaches of the keep.
“A pantry?” Fern asked.
“I don’t know,” Colin said.
The first door opened onto a narrow flight of stone stairs that led downward into darkness. A breath of cool, dank air slivered up the steps to caress his face.
“The cellars,” Fern said. “Let’s not go there.”
Colin simply grunted, frowning, and opened the second door. The light from the high windows around the kitchen penetrated the gloom. It was a tiny, cell-like chamber, just large enough to contain an ancient bed box that was still filled with moldering straw.
“Third time’s a charm?” Colin suggested. He opened the next door, and Fern screamed.
Chapter Ten
The chamber was like the room they had just seen, only a version reflected through a horrible, twisted mirror. Spidery writing scrawled from the walls and ceiling down onto the bed box and across the floor, covering everything in tangled layers of words, the dark crimson of old blood twining with black and angry orange. Some words were written out in huge brushstrokes two feet high; others were written so small that the letters blurred into incomprehensibility. The one thing that united them all was their hate.
… they shall be brot to accompt’ … and the WRATH of the Lord … mine anger as the seas … day of judgement … evildoers … evildoers … EVILDOERS
Colin shut the door so hard that the air shook in the vaults. Fern clung to him, making strangled, half-sobbing sounds.
“What was that?” she said, the words almost a plea. “It was nothing to be frightened of.” His heart was beating hard and fast against his chest in defiance of his own assurances. “It was old—very old. No one has written like that in two centuries.”
“It was horrible,” she said. “I don’t care how old it is—I could feel the hatred. This whole place is infected with it.” The last was said in a wild rush, and Colin drew Fern closer to him, hoping that she would sense a steadiness that he did not have.
“We won’t go in that room again,” Colin promised, as much to himself as to her. He began to move toward the fourth and final door, and Fern stumbled along beside him. When he reached for the handle, though, she cried out.
“Surely you don’t mean to open another door!”
“It was only words,” Colin said. “They can’t hurt us.” Still, he braced himself as he swung open the door.
He was confronted with a pantry. An ordinary pantry, filled with mundane pantry things, thick with dust and corroded by age, but completely and thoroughly unexceptional.
Beside him, Fern gave a short laugh that had a hysterical edge. He reached onto one of the shelves and took out a jar of lamp oil.
“I am ashamed to say that I do not even know what a beater looks like,” he said in the most normal tone he could manufacture.
Fern took a shuddering breath and loosened her grip enough to reach past him with her free hand and grasp a long-handled tool with a curled wire head on one end. “This is it.”
“Good,” Colin said. “Let us go.” The words carried more force than he’d intended, and Fern nodded fervently beside him, gripping the beater like a weapon. It should have been funny, but Colin found himself incapable of amusement. All he wanted was to set this manor to rights and to leave it behind him forever. He had never been given to superstitions or irrational fears, but he wanted as little to do with this place as possible.
He guided Fern back into the Tudor wing, and when she had to release his arm in order to precede him up the stairs, she did so with a reluctance that he could feel. When they reached the first-floor bedrooms, her shoulders seemed to unwind a little.
“Half an hour ago, I would not have believed you if you’d told me I would be grateful to see these rooms again.” She squinted up at the ceiling, where water infiltration had made wide stains in the plaster. She went to the bedroom where they had laid the mattress out onto the floor. Outside, the rain had increased from a drizzle to a steady wash that whispered against the half-timbered walls. “Who do you think wrote all that?” she asked abruptly.
Colin didn’t have to ask what she meant. “I don’t know. A crazed person, no doubt, but I assume you already came to that conclusion yourself.”
Fern shuddered. “Could it have been a prisoner?”
“A prisoner?” Colin frowned. “Not here. That was a servant’s room, though why anyone would keep a mad servant on …” He shook his head. “It is also likely one of the only bedrooms without a window, so if one of the family members became ill …” He trailed off. “But there are no family stories of mad relatives—not that I know of, anyhow.”
Fern was silent for a long moment, her expression hooded. Finally, she spoke with an air of decision. “I don’t want to think about that anymore. Let’s get this mattress clean.” She hefted the beater, then paused. “Did you realize that these last two days are the only times since we have known each other that you have actually spoken with me?”
Colin raised a skeptical brow, allowing the change of subject. “I can’t imagine how I managed to gain your consent to wed me if I had never spoken to you.”
She shook her head earnestly. “That is not what I meant. I meant spoken with me, truly talked about something together. We have had dozens of meaningless exchanges of pleasantries, but it doesn’t count when the topic is idle speculation about what dress your sister-in-law will wear to the soirée or when the swallows will come back this year. Those aren’t real conversations. They’re a charade—noises that people make to hide the fact that they are not talking to one another.”
“And what would the purpose of such a charade be?”
“For me, its purpose was to hide how much you frightened me and to conceal the fact that I had no idea of what to say to you,” Fern answered, her gaze dropping despite the evenness of her voice. “What its purpose was for you, I cannot say.”
Colin took her shoulders, forcing her to look at him so that he could read the truth in her eyes. “I scared you—really scared you—that much?” He was not sure whether the idea appalled or intrigued him.
She closed her eyes, swaying slightly in his grasp. He could feel the trembling attraction in her body, and it roused a response in his own. “You still scare me. But now I am just as scared of myself, so it seems pointless to hide from you when I cannot hide from me.” She opened her eyes and smiled thinly. “And I am even more scared of this place. I think.”
The allusion to what they shared sent a twist of desire lancing from his groin outward. He pulled her against him, sliding his arm about her waist so she could not back away. “We have only just begun, mon ange,” he whispered into her hair. “If we are such frightening creatures now, imagine what we will become in the fullness of time.”
Fern shivered, leaning into him as the beater slid from her fingers. “Terrifying,” she whispered back. She lifted her hands to the back of his neck, digging her fingernails into the base of his skull as she pulled his head down to meet her upturned lips. He took the offering as greedily as he reveled in the fire across his neck, crushing her skirts against him. When he pulled away again, she smiled at him—breathlessly, tremulously, but a genuine smile of happiness, the first he’d seen from her since their marriage.
He did not know what else his future held in store for them, but that they would have something worth keeping, he was certain, and was glad of it. Gladness. The emotion fizzed like champagne in his brain, strange but welcome.
Time would tell, people said, and it certainly would. But for the first time since that ringing slap had woken him from his dream of a life, he considered that the result might just be better than what he had begun with.
*
Fern watched Colin flail at the featherbed through the inch-wide door opening, holding her handkerchief tightly over her mouth. She had made her best effort at beating the mattress as she had remembered seeing the maids
do, but it made her eyes and nose stream, and her hands quickly grew raw even through her gloves. She hadn’t dared complain—she did not want Colin to think her as soft and useless as she was half-afraid that she was—but she had been more than happy to give the task over to him when he offered.
She watched the fabric of his coat move across his broad back with every swing of the beater as he balanced on his wide-set legs. He should be made ridiculous, reduced by doing such a menial and feminine task, and yet to see his hard body in motion was an experience to savor. A new, fat puff of dust rose up at each stroke, hazing the air and drifting with sullen reluctance out of the open window and into the steady rain. Finally, the mattress had been hit to the point where it was impossible to tell whether there was more dust entering the air or if the new swirls of dust were just eddies in the clouds that already filled the room.
Colin paused and wiped his coat sleeve across his forehead. Then he grasped two corners of the mattress and pulled, sliding it toward the doorway.
Fern quickly opened the door, and together, they wrestled it through the doorway. She shut the door again, closing the dust inside, and looked up at Colin. He was frosted with dust, from the his grayed hair to his dulled shoes.
“You look as if you were carved of marble,” Fern said. “All except your eyelashes. No artist has ever been able to work stone so finely.”
“I do not know whether the correct response would be to thank you for the compliment or apologize for the insult of appearing before a lady in such a state,” Colin said.
“You cleaned the mattress for us both, so there is no reason to apologize,” Fern said. “Besides, I doubt that I am better.”
Colin heaved, sliding the mattress to the door of the bedroom that Fern had chosen for them. She got caught up in the doorway, battling her crinoline as she tried to fold the mattress so it could fit through. Suddenly, her skirts and feet were tangled, and with a yelp, she toppled onto the mattress, her hoops flying up and sending a cloud of dust into the air that made her sneeze.
Colin blinked at her for a moment, then gave a short bark of laughter. The sound thrilled up Fern’s spine even as she wiped her streaming eyes.
“I suppose I don’t make such a good chambermaid,” he said.
Fern tried to get up, got twisted in her skirts, and fell over again. This time, though, she was close enough to grab hold of Colin—which she did, and, possessed by a sudden impishness, pulled as she toppled backward.
Taken by surprise, Colin overbalanced and sprawled atop her, sending her hoops into new chaos. Fern looked into his astonished face and began to laugh herself, the sheer release of it feeling so good that she gave herself up to it, peal after peal ringing from her until she slumped, breathless, pinned beneath Colin’s weight.
“You think that is funny, do you?” Colin asked, a note of challenge in his voice.
“At this point, I am desperate to find anything funny,” Fern retorted. “Besides, you were the one who began laughing first.”
“Ah, but now you have made yourself helpless.” His eyes glittered in a way that made her pulse speed up.
“I am never helpless,” Fern shot back, and to her amazement, there was some grain of truth under the bravura. She was not just a passive receptacle, and though her ignorance—unsuspected only days ago—was still a source of constant frustration and limitation, she had found the ability within herself to act, even with regards to the astonishing and frightening being that was her husband.
He kissed her then, and it was a long time before they resumed the process of getting the mattress back onto the bed. Once it was in place, Fern picked up the linens she had found in the press at the bed’s foot and frowned.
“I’ve never made a bed before,” she confessed.
Colin raised an eyebrow. “Give the sheets to me.”
Fern blinked at him, and he took them from her unresisting arms. “How …?”
“Eton, mon ange,” he said, setting the stack aside as he unfolded the topmost sheet with a snap. “Come. Take this side, and I will show you how.”
Fern took direction with bemusement, and when they finished, Colin sprawled upon the bed, loose-limbed in repose as he stared at the dust-grayed hangings above his head. Fern took up some rags that she had found and, with the windows open to the increasingly heavy rain, pushed around the dust that coated the jumbled furniture within reach. Soon the air was full of motes, the rag leaving shiny tracks on the wood that dulled as the dust settled immediately upon it again. She sneezed.
“Put it away, Fern,” Colin said, his gaze still upon the hangings. “You aren’t doing any good.”
Trying to sniff in a ladylike way as she wiped her streaming eyes, Fern could do nothing but nod.
“It’s getting dark,” he added.
“I’m getting hungry,” Fern admitted.
Colin took out his pocket watch. “No wonder. The hamper’s in the corridor. If you fill the lamps, I’ll get it, as well as wood, water, and a kettle to wash with. It shall be a light dinner, but it must hold us until I go to the village in the morning.”
Fern nodded again. Colin pushed upright in an easy motion and tossed a packet of matches on the bed as he strode through the doorway.
As soon as the door closed, she regretted agreeing to letting him leave her, even if following had meant a return to the kitchen. She shifted, trying to shake the feeling of foreboding that overtook her. From the window, the rocky tor sloped down to the village, moor and bog interwoven into a treacherous tapestry of heather, sedge, and mosses. The wash of rain was constant, not the ominous roll and crack of a storm but a steady, drowning, suffocating shower that oppressed everything under it, leaching the color from the world and draining it down into the deep peat.
She dusted and filled one of the lamps, waiting for the ancient wick to darken with the new oil before carefully striking a match and setting the leaping orange flame to the end of it. The wick caught, and though it gave off the low glow of sperm oil rather than the strong white paraffin light, she was grateful for the cheerful ruddiness of it, driving out the gray of dust and rain. But the rosy globe of light attenuated swiftly, leaving the crowded corners of the room in gloom and making the hulking furnishings strange in the flickering shadows. Not threatening, exactly; it was more lonely than anything. That thought was so ludicrous that Fern made herself laugh aloud in a stiff “Ha ha!” But it didn’t feel funny. It was a sense that wore on her nerves, dissipating when logic was brought to bear upon it but coalescing again in the corners of her mind whenever she thought of anything else.
Fern determinedly sought to occupy herself. She found towels in the linen press, clean though musty, and laid out their nightclothes. Going through Colin’s trunk felt wrong: The scent of his clothes was now familiar to her, a combination of laundry soap, sandalwood, and cedar, but she still felt like an invader for pawing through something so fundamentally private as his unworn clothing.
With no productive tasks left, she occupied herself shoving around more dust with the rag, trying to keep her hands busy and mind away from the dark, silent kitchen cell and the words written there …
The noise of the door opening again made Fern jump and spin around, her crinoline swaying against her legs.
“Startled you, did I?” said Colin mildly. There was a spark of humor in his eyes that made Fern’s heart beat fast. It was so real, so alive—it was part of the new Colin that stirred and frightened her and made her want to seize on to him and never let go.
He carried a bucket, a kettle, and a hamper over one arm and a big block of peat under the other. He set down everything but the hamper on the hearth, carrying it to the bed to unpack the leftovers from their lunch.
“I found a door in back of the kitchens that led to a well yard,” he said. “There was an internal cistern, but it was dry.”
“In all this rain?” Fern asked, watching him bring out the remains of the roast chicken and potatoes.
“Broken, I suppose.”
He paused, surveying the food. “There isn’t much left over, I fear.”
“It shall have to do. Now I am glad we didn’t stop for luncheon,” Fern said. When they had been on the road, she had resented Colin’s hurry.
Colin split the food evenly onto the two plain, heavy earthenware dishes that were still marked with the remains of their luncheon. Fern’s stomach growled in a very unladylike way, and Colin gave her an amused glance that made her belly do a flip-flop for a very different reason.
She took her plate hurriedly and began to gnaw on a wing. Her sister Faith would have said that since he was a man, he should have the lion’s share of the food, and it would only be ladylike to pretend to be full after a few bites and offer him the rest. But Fern wasn’t Faith, and she was also ravenous.
She ate as neatly as she could in such rough conditions. Colin consumed his share more slowly, as if to make the food seem to stretch further. He watched her with half-lidded eyes, and she kept her own gaze fixed to her plate as much as she could. She still wasn’t comfortable with him, not the new Colin and not the old, either, despite the moments when she forgot her awkwardness and simply felt like herself with him.
He sighed when he finished the last bite. “I wish we had twice as much,” he said.
“I saw a sack of flour in the pantry, but I dare not speculate upon its age,” Fern said.
The edge of his mouth quirked. “What would you do with a sack of flour?”
“Find someone to cook something with it,” she retorted.
“That’s my Fern,” he said, the jocular words tempered by an ironic twist of his lips. She must have betrayed some reaction in her face, for he added, “What is it?”
“You said my name again. You have said it several times today, but almost never before. You always just said mon ange.”
The handsome lines of his face drew into a faintly puzzled expression. “I suppose you are right. I had never thought of that.”