Autumn

by Lisa Ann Brown

  228

  The Corvids, Book One: Autumn

  The Corvids

  Book One: Autumn

  by

  Lisa Ann Brown

  NOTICE TO THE READER

  THE CORVIDS, BOOK ONE: AUTUMN

  Copyright © by Lisa Ann Brown

  The Corvids, Book One: Autumn

  Cover design by Lisa Ann Brown

  Cover artwork by Tina Nicole Hibbs

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  Dedication Page

  for all the witchy girls

  Contents

  The Unseen 6

  The Neighbourhood, Proper 7

  The Orphaned Girl 9

  Strangers at the Inn 13

  The Dreaming 16

  A Cracked Reflection 20

  The Speculation & The Bird 27

  Man on the Run/Man Overboard! 34

  An Echo Within 41

  Raising the Dead 48

  The Bog of St. Martin 54

  A Penance Party for Naughty Girls 60

  The Ancients and The Ondines 69

  A Greater Evil Rises Upon Us 75

  A Kind of Innocence 81

  A Becoming Lie/Afraid of the Dark 91

  Beware the Kings & Queens of Old; Their Fortunes Are To Die For 100

  The Dark of Nowhere 103

  The Dead Girl’s Plea 111

  Tools of the Trade 117

  What’s Old Is New Again 124

  A Night To Remember 133

  The Last If Ever 139

  An Understanding of Sorts 145

  Conflicting Stories/Alternate Points Of View 150

  A Closer View, Upon Re-Inspection 157

  Sifting, Threshing and Plucking 164

  Deep In The Dark Harsh Belly Of The Beast 166

  A Guitar & A Fiddle 171

  Everything You Said Was A Lie 173

  Feathered Friends 178

  Faithful To His Memory 180

  At the Center, A Pit 184

  A Serious Thing, Indeed 187

  Into The Ground, Cold With Snow 197

  A Return Visit 202

  A Dance And A Distraction 211

  The Unseen

  Arabel Spade was not like the other girls. She knew this for certain after old Mr. Hapkins’ funeral. Everyone turned out for the dismal ceremony, standing together in the spitting rain, hiding solemn faces under wide brimmed black hats and downturned glances. All eyes were upon the plain black coffin being lowered into the wet, dark soil; all eyes stood witness to the deceased man’s final journey into the cold belly of the earth.

  Except for Arabel. She was too busy staring at the spectre of old Mr. Hapkins as he frantically tried to leverage the coffin open with grey stiff fingers, his skittish eyes darting back and forth in confusion as he did not understand the futility of his actions. His mouth worked wildly, as if he wanted to speak, to scream, to understand why he was not in his body and why said body was being lowered into the ground as the bagpipes played mournfully overtop the curtain of rain.

  Arabel surveyed him sadly. She had seen his kind before. She also knew they never managed to reclaim their discarded bodies. They always tried, but none succeeded. Once the spirit left the mortal coil, it no longer belonged within the earthly realm. Of course Arabel was not exactly certain where they belonged, but it was obvious, it was no longer here at The Corvids. Arabel very much sympathized with their plight – she did not know if she belonged in The Corvids either.

  Arabel Spade was not like the other girls.

  The Neighbourhood, Proper

  The Corvids was the affectionate name bestowed upon the four townships bordering one another: Ravenswood Glen, Magpie Moor, Crow’s Nest Pass and Blue Jay Hollow. It was easiest to refer to the towns collectively as The Corvids, and most folk did.

  The Priory stood in the epicentre of The Corvids. It stacked itself as high in the sky as it could go and cut the watery sunlight in half with its bulk. Bordering the Four, the Priory had long been a meeting place, a bustling, festive market guaranteed to serve up a crowd delighted to purchase wares and an industrious cottage nation willing to supply them.

  Arabel often wandered the Priory with Shelaine Murphy, a stout redheaded lass who made Arabel laugh and didn’t remark when Arabel disappeared from the conversation mid-stream now and again. Shelaine came from a long line of horse breeders and very much wanted Arabel to come see the new foal. He promised to be a real beauty as both his sire and his dam were of championship lines.

  “Your way with horses,” Shelaine was saying, “it’s simply marvellous. I don’t know anyone else who seems of such a rapport with the beasts!”

  It was true. Arabel was keenly insightful into the behaviour and thoughts of most animals and they came to her unbidden, as if drawn to her by an invisible chord. The crows loved her most particularly and she heartily returned their admiration. Down by Ravenswood Glen, in the autumn and winter seasons, a roost of more than twenty thousand crows gathered nightly and hosted themselves a fairly raucous party of naughty chatter and flying feathers. Arabel loved to watch and listen to the gaiety. Their chatter was often loud, comical, and yet strangely cold, in that otherworldly sort of manner.

  Arabel had just come from the crow gathering that fateful day, the day of the Lost Souls celebration, to join the rest of the townsfolk at the Priory for the annual lighting of the ceremonial Great Torch. Hundreds of people gathered in the early twilight of the softly foggy night. Arabel searched for Shelaine, or for anyone she might want to stand with to watch. Arabel moved quickly throughout the crowd, searching, sensing the excitement, the general mood of revelry; she felt the barely disguised tension underneath the happy façade.

  There was a grey and swirling energy present; Arabel could see it, feel it, almost taste it – like chalk. Arabel’s mouth felt gritty and she was suddenly incredibly thirsty. The magnificent flame approached the base of the Great Torch and Arabel felt the collective sigh as the greedy licks of fire consumed the wood. And then the screams began.

  Propped against the base of the Great Torch, the light shone to reveal that a small, female, mostly naked corpse had been draped there. The thin white arms and legs of the corpse looked garish under the red firelight and the mist could not hide the horror of the spectacle. A frail looking woman next to Arabel fainted suddenly and her male companion quickly grabbed the unconscious woman and moved her away from the perimeter of the Torch. Others edged closer, drawn to disaster and death like flies or vultures.

  Arabel heard the screams. She saw the grey swirling energy possessively
circling the body and she felt both the sorrow and the bloodlust of those around her. Arabel turned away. The night of Lost Souls was no longer a moniker for veil lifting or reconnecting with the other side; it had turned into a night of murder and a lost soul had personally visited their domain.

  Hours later, the coroner, Mayor Aldritch and Chief Constable Bartlin were locked away with the corpse in the morgue. Arabel had never been inside the morgue but she imagined it to be a cold, ultra bright, antiseptic room where everyone wore snappy white gloves and wielded sharp scalpels on dead flesh. The smell would gag her most likely, so Arabel was glad when everyone pulled lots to see who was to investigate what, and she got the Copse instead.

  Since no one knew who the dead girl was, most likely she was a drifter, a runaway, lost and murdered on her sad journey to nowhere and answers were needed. The Copse housed the Gypsy encampment which had sprung up in the murky depths of the deep green forest. The Copse was extensive, it bordered from Ravenswood Glen to Crow’s Nest Pass and that took two full days on horseback to complete. The majority of the encampment was located in Ravenswood Glen and it was an hour by horseback from the border of Crow’s Nest Pass.

  Arabel and her partner, Sylvious North, an eager, if somewhat oblivious companion, did not have a horse and instead traveled by foot the following dawn, laden with emergency supplies, should they traverse too deeply into the woods and night-time fall upon them. They could easily set up camp but Arabel hoped it would not come to that. She’d no desire to sleep in the woods with Sylvious North.

  Sylvious, however, quite longed to touch Arabel’s long, thick black hair to see if it could possibly be as soft as it looked. Sylvious hoped circumstance would conspire to nestle him in the woods with the pixie maiden Arabel and her lithe body and sharp blue eyes.

  Arabel, the witchy girl.

  “I think I’ve found something!” Sylvious shouted.

  Arabel glanced up from the broken tree branches she’d been studying for clues.

  “Come quick!” Sylvious shouted out again and Arabel made her way over to him.

  Sylvious had found a black dress. A dress that could easily have been the dead girls, since she wasn’t wearing more than a scrap of clothing when discovered and clearly she’d been clothed at some point before her murder.

  “It’s torn, badly, but no blood,” Sylvious announced, passing it to Arabel for further inspection. Arabel took it from him gingerly, as if the material would fall apart upon contact.

  Like a fist to the gut, Arabel fell back against a series of protruding tree roots that jutted out proprietarily across the forest carpet. Sylvious reached out a hand to steady her.

  “You got something off it?” he asked her excitedly.

  Arabel’s pale face was more waxy and translucent than Sylvious had ever seen before. Arabel’s hands clutched at the dress, her knuckles fisted around the cloth in a grief-fuelled rage.

  “He gave her this dress,” Arabel said softly, “so she would look pretty when she died. When he killed her,” she amended immediately.

  Sylvious let out a low whistle. He laid a tentative hand on Arabel’s taut shoulder.

  “Let’s go back,” Sylvious suggested, the unsettling discovery forcing him to forgo completely his plan to attempt some sort of seduction.

  The canopied forest seemed to murmur in assent; the leaves rustled secretively and whispered intangible sorrows, but the birds, the talkative crows, were absent, and no birdsong pierced the gloom.

  The Orphaned Girl

  When Arabel was six she’d been orphaned after both her parents succumbed to a deadly fever which decimated almost a quarter of the population of The Corvids. People referred to it as “the dark times” as most lost loved ones, and even if they hadn’t, all were affected in one way or another.

  After her parents’ deaths, Arabel stopped speaking. For two years she was silent. How was she to tell those she interacted with that her parents had left their bodies but were still around her? Arabel couldn’t explain that her parents had never left her, not really. They were just harder to see and harder to hear and not always available when she would like. They had stopped aging and their forms were milky-white and see-through, but they existed, and advised her and comforted her through her silent years.

  In later times, their appearances were scarce and intermittent and Arabel could never be sure she would ever see them again. This gnawed at her, quietly, silently, and in the background of her mind, continuously.

  Arabel went to live with her grandmother, Amelia Bodean Johnston, in a rambling, somewhat rickety old house in Crow’s Nest Pass. Arabel missed Blue Jay Hollow and the quaint three story home of eccentric beauty she’d shared with her parents but it had been sold and the money put away for Arabel’s future.

  Amelia Bodean Johnston was a strong character who believed firmly in both the rules of society and the reward of a nice glass of rum in the front parlour every evening. Arabel was routinely and alternately scrutinized and ignored but the pattern ran consistently enough for her to know which weeks she would have the freedom to run about unheeded and which weeks she would need to be accounted for within a breath of her body.

  It was during a freedom week that the corpse was found draped across the base of the Great Torch and thus when Arabel and Sylvious returned to the Priory with the dead girls dress, after duly explaining where they’d found the dress, Arabel snuck away and set out alone the next morning to find the killer.

  A shadowy face was etched within Arabel’s brain – nondescript brown hair, a small nose with a discernable bump and eerie blank grey eyes. It was no one she’d ever met, she was certain of that. The face had revealed itself when she’d touched the dress, the dress Lady X, as Arabel was now calling the unknown corpse, had been murdered in.

  If Arabel could’ve drawn, she might have rendered a sketch for Chief Constable Bartlin to pursue but she was not handy with a pencil and her information would be greeted with a sceptical and possibly hostile resistance. Arabel was known as a witchy girl and it made others either overly fascinated or distinctly uncomfortable.

  Grandmother Amelia Bodean would stand for no such nonsense in her home.

  “You’re too much like your mother, young lady,” Amelia Bodean would scold. She was a formerly wise-eyed woman, now simply one full of rum liquor. A sad, distant look would perch upon Amelia Bodean’s face, aging her, and setting the wrinkles and creases more deeply into her once handsome and still proud face.

  “Just like your mother,” she would mutter.

  Arabel, of course, was pleased to be just like her mother because her earthly memories and her ghostly self were so loving and joyful. But Arabel did not admit this to anyone, for really, to whom can you admit this sort of thing?

  Having a distinction amongst your friends is one thing; seeing through things, into things and otherworldly things, is quite another. Of more immediate concern to Arabel, however, was that she needed a horse. Luckily, she knew exactly where to procure one.

  The path to Shelaine’s family estate was well marked with signs and directions as their business was lucrative and Shelaine’s grandfather believed firmly in the value of advertising. Their established and respected family name went a long way toward attracting well-moneyed horse breeders and enthusiasts. Murphy Estates was truly a renowned showplace for impeccably bred horses and they possessed the cups, trophies, and winning ribbons to prove it.

  Blue Jay Hollow spread out grandly in front of Arabel with its wide fields, brightly coloured spectrum of flowers bordering lush shrubbery, and vast sense of space unspoken for. Arabel’s former home looked good, she noted as she passed; repairs had been recently completed on the front porch. Where before it had been cracked and unsafe, it now stood whole and able, with two new rocking chairs painted in bright sky blue and sunny yellow standing at the ready. Arabel longed, for just a moment, to sit on that stoop with her parents, but the image and intense yearning were just a flash. The house belonged to the past and Arabel
knew the past was gone.

  Arabel intended to ride to Magpie Moor, reasoning that her scouting ought to begin there. As she did not know the man whose image she’d gotten from Lady X’s dress, Arabel ruled out the places she was most familiar with – Blue Jay Hollow, Crow’s Nest Pass, and, to a lesser degree, Ravenswood Glen, as she was reasonably certain she knew most everyone within those townships.

  Magpie Moor was half a day by horseback and Arabel was keen to be on her way. Shelaine and her stable master were quite agreeable and Arabel was lent a honey coloured roan named Whipsie who was both gentle and tenacious, lovely to look at, and sturdy enough for the trip.

  “She’ll keep you good company,” Shelaine said, “but I do wish you weren’t going alone.”

  Arabel shook her head. “There’s no one to come with, and besides, I’ll be back before anyone knows I’m gone. I’ll stay at the Rosewood Inn tonight and be returned here by the following nightfall.”

  Shelaine looked at her friend thoughtfully. “Actually,” she mused, “I’m not so certain you need go alone!”

  Shelaine disappeared quickly and when she returned, a tall, dark haired young man accompanied her. His kind brown eyes met Arabel’s with a mild curiosity. He smiled, revealing a wide, engaging grin.

  “Arabel, this is Eli Frankel, my grandfather’s newest stable boy. He has agreed to go with you!” Shelaine spoke triumphantly, relief visible in her tone.

  “If you just give me a minute, miss, I’ll saddle up and meet you at the paddock,” Eli said.

  “I don’t want to put you out-”, Arabel began, but Shelaine silenced her with a look.

  “I’ve already cleared it with the stable master,” Shelaine declared, settling the matter firmly.

  Eli smiled again. “Be right there,” he said, and disappeared into the stable, his lanky frame moving quickly. Arabel knew she was outvoted but strangely, she didn’t mind. There was just something about Eli that made her feel relaxed, though she didn’t know why, and at the moment, it wasn’t worth questioning.