That bark of laughter rang out derisively. “Grigore grew up on this estate, niece. He probably knows it better than I do—all the holes and corners where a person may hide. Nature often seems to grant idiots with a superior sense of cunning. No, I’m not surprised that he’s eluded us.”
“Then why not bring in the police in full force?” I shot at him. “Isn’t that good reason to get help from every quarter that we can, and the most powerful help available to us? There is something you are keeping from me, uncle. You are too frightened to bring a constable to Thurnley Hall, even though it means compromising the search for my husband when his life may be at stake.” My voice gave out on me, and I screwed my eyes tight shut as if that would blot out the horrible visions that had crowded the corners of my mind ever since Atticus had vanished. Visions of him dead or dying, walled up in some secret chamber, pinned into a coffin by the blade of a scythe…
A touch on my shoulder made me jump. My uncle had silently come to my side and now laid a hand on my arm in what must have been intended as a gesture of sympathy. “You should leave Thurnley Hall,” he said quietly. “It isn’t too late for you. We will keep searching for your husband, but you should go.” He swallowed hard. “You must go.”
“I can’t,” I said.
He wheeled around with sudden energy and strode to the sideboard to pour himself a drink from a crystal decanter. “Can’t!” he mocked. “Idiotic female, can’t you see that it’s the only rational course? Listen to me and not your hysteria. Leave this place before something worse happens.” He took a swig of the amber-colored liquor and carried both glass and decanter to his desk, where he flung himself into his chair again. “This is the best advice I’ll ever give you, niece, so heed it well. Get away from here, as fast and as far as your money will take you.”
I gripped the arms of my chair and took a breath to steady my voice, for I would not appear before him as the trembling, dithering creature he wanted to believe me. “I have listened to you,” I said, “and now I must request that you do me the courtesy of hearing me. I say I can’t leave Thurnley Hall, not yet. I am going to have a child. And if I left here without doing every single thing within my power to find my husband, I could not look my child in the eye when the day comes that he will ask me where his father is. For my future son or daughter’s sake, as well as for my own, I must know what happened to Atticus—and I must do everything I can to save him.”
The effect of my speech was shocking.
My uncle leapt to his feet with such haste and carelessness that his chair toppled over, and then he in turn almost fell over it in his hurry to back away from me. His normally ruddy face had turned pale, and his eyes had gone so wide that white showed all around the irises. As he scrambled to regain his balance, he thrust out a hand as if to fend me off.
“A child!” His whisper was stricken. Not, strangely enough, with sorrow or dismay. With fear. “God help us all,” he groaned. “A child…”
“What is the matter?” I exclaimed. “What frightens you so?”
He had reached the far wall and, unable to put any more distance between us, he stared at me with the eyes of a doe cornered by hounds. “There is a curse,” he said at last, and his voice was a croak. “When my mother left Romania to marry an Englishman, her father cursed her for flouting the aristocratic match he had arranged for her. He called on all the ancient magic of their bloodline and swore that… that the first son born to any of her line would be…”
“What?” I cried.
He shut his eyes and breathed the words. “A monster.”
Silence seized the word and buried it, but its echoes rang in my head. My hand found its way to my belly, whether to reassure myself or the unborn babe I did not know.
“Superstitious nonsense,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “Claptrap.”
But the voice of Mathilde Munro whispered, Are you not afraid of what your children might be?
My uncle shook his head slowly, a motion as solemn as the swinging of a funeral bell. “I have lived to see it come true,” he said. “I do not wish to see it fulfilled again. Your child must not be born here, Clara. It would be even safer if…”
“Not one word more,” I said, my voice shaking with anger. “Not one.”
After a long moment my uncle looked away and sighed. The worst of the fear seemed to drain away from him, leaving him a strangely diminished figure, and when next he turned his face to me the look he gave me was almost pleading. “Don’t you see that you are now in even greater danger?” he said with a strange gentleness. “If Grigore is still in hiding nearby and comes to learn of your condition, what is to stop him from trying to rid the earth of the vampire’s babe?”
What indeed, if my uncle was the monster he evidently believed himself to be? How surprising that he should think it of himself. I had not credited him with so much honesty or humility, but at least I knew with certainty, from his own lips, that I could rely on him for nothing now.
“You must swear to tell no one,” I said. “My secret cannot leave this room.”
He nodded heavily but said nothing. I wondered how far I could trust him. How much had he succumbed to this conviction that he was less than human? If he was resigned to what he believed to be his nature, I could not depend upon him—for anything.
“That is why you and my mother were both forbidden to marry,” I said, as realization dawned. “So that neither of you would have sons and fulfill the curse.” Now I knew why my grandmother had said that my mother and I would have been welcome at Thurnley had it been known that I was an only child.
“If only I had found you in time,” he said in a voice of utter defeat. “If I had encountered you before your marriage…”
“It would have made no difference,” I said. “I’d not have let a ghost story determine whether I married. Why were you so determined to prevent Grandmama from telling me about it?”
His eyes darted away from mine, suddenly wary. “She wished to unburden herself of a lifetime’s worth of guilt,” he mumbled. “It would have done no good to anyone living, and possibly much harm. That is why I could not let your letters go out into the world. They might have spread secrets that could still harm our family.”
“It was more than that, wasn’t it? You knew I had suspicions about my grandmother’s death, and you didn’t want them to leave this house.”
He hung his head in a wordless confession. Whether he had had a hand in her death or merely feared being suspected of it, he had acted guilty in every way.
“I’m going to the train station to wire again for the police,” I said. “If you’ve given Thomas orders not to drive me, I’ll walk.” I hesitated, feeling a strange pang of sympathy for him. He looked so broken. “I’m going to demand an investigation,” I said, almost gently. “It’s for the best.”
I don’t know if he would have replied if the sound of running footsteps had not forestalled it. The footfalls came pounding toward the door and ended in a fusillade of frantic knocking.
“Come in,” I said, since my uncle showed no sign of answering.
The door flew open to reveal a hatless Victor Lynch, dripping with water, his clothes drenched and clinging to his body. He must have run all the way, for he was panting for breath. His eyes were full of dread and a strange tenderness as they fixed on me.
“We’ve found something,” he said. “At the river’s edge.”
He held out an object to me, and almost mechanically I reached out my hand to take it. It was a fragment of a walking stick, the shaft broken off roughly as if by some violent means. It was topped with an ivory eagle’s head.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Forgive my appearance,” he said in a hushed voice. “I lost my footing in my hurry to bring this to you. Is it…?”
With my forefinger I traced the line of the eagle’s beak, which was chipped. I could imagine a thousand dreadful ways that the stick could have been damaged so. When I looked closer, I saw a brownish red sub
stance caked in a groove of the carving. I knew at once it must be dried blood.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s his. At the river’s edge, you said? I want to see.”
He hesitated, but my face must have told him I would not be deterred, for he stood back to let me pass.
At the bend in the river where it passed at the bottom of the front meadow men were clustered near the rocks, heads bent over something I could not see. As I drew near, their voices broke off, and those who were wearing caps touched them to me with the respect due a baroness. Or a widow.
“After Mr. Lynch went to fetch you, we spied somethin’ else,” said one of the men. “Do you know this, my lady?”
Old Mr. Fowler was at the center of the group, and something in his muddy hands was the focus of the group’s attention. Silently I held out my hand, and he placed the new find in my palm. A scrap of royal blue melton with light blue piping still attached, torn from the waistcoat I had made Atticus for his birthday.
I could not speak, but my face must have shown what meaning this had for me.
“We reckon his lordship were walkin’ along the bank,” came a voice. It was hushed, deferential. “It’s slippery after all the rain, and as he fell his stick must have caught between the rocks an’ snapped. The river’s flowin’ so fast that he would have been swept away before he had time even to call for help.”
Swept away and carried off by the current with such force that his clothes tore where they scraped against the rocks. The violence of it wrenched my stomach, but it was less horrible than imagining the other: that as my husband had walked by the river, the giant Grigore had set upon him. That the stick had been broken in the struggle and Atticus overpowered, as the great hands tore at him and ripped his waistcoat.
The ground tilted suddenly, and a commotion broke out as many hands snatched at me to keep me from falling. “Let me carry you back to the house,” said a gentle voice that I knew must belong to Mr. Lynch. “You’re in no fit state to walk.”
“Don’t carry me.” My lips were so numb it was difficult to move them. “Just give me your arm.”
“We’re that sorry, my lady,” came a whisper. Then the murmurs of condolence rose and broke over me like a wave, and I felt I would drown in them just as Atticus—
“Thank you,” I said. “All of you, for—” But I could not remember what I meant to thank them for, and I stared at them dumbly until Mr. Lynch placed my hand on his arm and led me back up the hill to Thurnley Hall.
What followed remains vague to me. I remember stopping the mantel clock in my room because the tick of every second was a jeering reminder that time had stopped for Atticus. I recall Ann tipping spoonfuls of broth between my lips as if I were an invalid or an infant.
She helped me out of my black dress and into my dressing gown, but I refused to go to bed. The great dark bed with its ominous carvings and heavy hangings would have been too desolate. When Atticus had lain with me there, it had been a cozy nest, a secure cocoon. Now it would feel like a coffin.
My thoughts were disjointed. An idea would flare to life like a spark only to die away in the next moment. I sat before the fire but did not see the flames. Instead I saw my husband’s last moments in all their hideous possibilities. My mind flinched away from the knowledge of his death, yet the tormenting images would not cease.
Had he thought of me in his last moments? I wondered. If he had, did he know how much he had given me—how, in the truest sense, he had saved my life?
Before I married Atticus, I had been hard and untrusting, caring only about my own welfare. It was little wonder, for life as a woman with no protector was a hard one, and over the years I had learned to be wary and self-interested. Being his wife had changed me: made me kinder, slower to anger, more forgiving, better able to find humor and joy in life. Until Atticus, I sometimes thought I had never known laughter. I had certainly never known love in its deepest, richest, most profound sense.
Now scenes from my life with Atticus unspooled before my mind’s eye. The night at the theater when he had first approached me to propose marriage; how wary and hostile I had been at his irruption into my life. The afternoon when he came to tea and made me laugh for the first time. Our wedding day, with all my dread and apprehension about taking so great a step with a near stranger. Dancing with him before the assembled company at Gravesend, not yet knowing I had fallen in love with him but feeling more powerfully drawn to him than I could explain. Overhearing him arguing with himself, as I thought, when I dreaded that he was losing his mind. Trysting with him in the folly such a short time ago, feeling the sunlight on my skin as we lay entwined on the grass.
I remembered, too, when I had truly become his wife. It was the night that Richard had attempted to kill Atticus and had himself perished in the attempt. We had not expected that night to end in loving, certainly not after the grueling questioning, which on top of the emotional and physical strain had rendered us nearly numb with exhaustion. When we sought each other’s embrace, comfort was all we desired at first: the reassurance of each other’s nearness after we had come so perilously close to losing each other. All I expected, at least, was to sleep peacefully in my husband’s arms.
But then—but then.
Not since Adam and Eve left paradise, I believe, has any woman been loved as exquisitely as I was that night. With all the fervor and reverence of his loving heart, Atticus had at last given expression to the feelings he had stored up for me for almost twenty years. And what was just as great a marvel, his caresses awoke the same passion from me in return. Indeed, my body’s response to his touch was so powerful that it frightened me. What if my ardency shocked him, repelled him? His words when I hesitantly voiced this fear I would never forget.
“I am your safe haven, Clara,” he told me. “With me you may be as abandoned as you feel—or as shy. Give me all of yourself: your passion, your tenderness, even your ferocity. I will treasure them all, for they are all part of you.”
And my haven Atticus became, both that night and in the future. Within the circle of his arms I always felt cherished, protected, held in safekeeping away from whatever fears or anxieties tried to plague me. Secure in that knowledge of his unwavering love, I was able to cast aside my protective shell. I had been able to open my heart, to let it soften and become susceptible, because Atticus kept it in his tender protection.
Without him, I was naked and vulnerable again, lacking the armor that had kept me safe in the years before our marriage. Would I have to build it around me again, toughen and immure my feelings? A fine mother that woman would be. No, I had to be true to the Clara that Atticus had helped me find in myself—had given me the courage to be.
For he had done more than make me feel loved. Even now, even if he was gone forever, his complete acceptance of me gave me the first glimmerings of faith that I could give our child a good life on my own. Atticus, the worthiest, most honorable, most compassionate person I had ever known, had loved and honored and believed in me, and that knowledge gave me new strength.
It also gave me new resolve: I must be worthy of the honor and trust he had placed in me. For our child’s sake, for my husband’s, for my own, I wanted to be the best woman I could be, one deserving of a man such as Atticus. Having been loved like that was a charge upon me to make my life worthwhile, to continue to be the woman he admired and was proud of.
It frightened me, all the same, that I would be solely responsible for raising our child. I wondered if my mother had been frightened when my father died, leaving me in her sole care. But she was strong and courageous and determined, and I reminded myself that I took after her. If she had been able to endure through loneliness and hardship to raise me safely, I must do no less for my and Atticus’s son or daughter.
A wisp of superstitious fear in the back of my mind whispered, You shall bear a monster. But I thrust it aside. Son or daughter, my child would inherit all of the beautiful potential of Atticus, and I would nurture that promise with every ounce o
f my strength. Bloodlines alone did not make monsters; I knew that.
But how grievously unfair that Atticus would never know his child. He had been robbed of the happiness, the pride, the bittersweet pleasure of years of watching his baby grow to adulthood. Perhaps even worse, our child would never know the wonderful man who had been his father. And I too had been robbed, of my helpmeet and life’s best companion. The prospect of all the lonely years that stretched before me made me shiver.
Now the grief pressed in upon me from all sides, boxing me in, suffocating, and it was like being in my nightmare once again. I realized now that the horror of the dream had not been about anything so literal as being trapped underground. It was no wonder that venturing into the old mine had not caused me distress. For the nightmare had always been about being separated from Atticus—longing to reach him but being trapped in solitude. The thing I feared most was losing Atticus, and now the worst had happened. Life had nothing more cruel to do to me.
With that realization came a kind of clarity. Death had torn him out of my future, but not out of my past. He still lived in the thousands of memories in my heart, and in that sense Atticus would always be with me. I would still have all the shared laughter, the intimate conversations, the kisses, the passionate embraces. I pictured his vivid blue eyes, remembered his velvet voice, recalled the joy of his smile. When I closed my eyes, I could almost even recapture the sensation of being held in his arms. Atticus would never truly leave me, and my bruised heart swelled with love and gratitude for that.
A faint disturbance of the air behind me alerted me that I was not alone, and almost in the same instant there came a touch on my hair. Then a brush was being drawn slowly down the length of it, creating a faint sibilance in the silence. The motion, slowly repeated, made me feel close to Atticus again for one beautiful instant, as if my love and longing and grief had summoned up his ghostly manifestation to visit me.
Cursed Once More: The Sequel to With This Curse Page 20