by Gaelen Foley
“Azrael?” She scanned his face and noted that he looked a bit better than when they’d first left his father’s tomb. “Take me over there, please? I want to see my parents’ place.”
He studied her with a guarded expression between reluctance and weary resignation. It was clear, however, that her request did not surprise him.
Serena stared at him, unwilling to budge.
Perhaps he was learning how to read her, or at least was now able to recognize when she had set her mind on a thing. He sighed and shook his head while the breeze played with his long hair, then captured her gaze soberly. “Do you really want to do this? I’m sure it won’t be pleasant.”
“I have to, Azrael. Please, you’re not the only one who lost somebody here. I once had a sister.”
He dropped his gaze, as though he couldn’t argue with that. “Very well,” he murmured. Then he took her by the hand and led her back toward the carriage.
CHAPTER 10
Ghosts
On the drive from the Rivenwood mansion to her parents’ abandoned estate, Serena stared down at the snake-leather box on the carriage floor beside their now nearly empty picnic hamper.
What mysteries it contained, for now, she could only wonder, but on the journey back to London, she intended to sift through it for any clues about her birth father’s identity.
Azrael sat beside her, silent. She looked askance at him, intensely curious about what might be going through his head.
“You know,” she said, “I noticed from atop of the barrow that it looked as if the other country houses were arrayed in a circle.”
“Not a circle—a star. The five points of a pentagram,” he said dully, keeping his gaze fixed straight ahead.
Serena furrowed her brow, not knowing what to make of that.
“Why would you not come up onto the barrow, Your Grace? Do you share Toby’s view that it’s cursed?”
“I’ve seen it.” He shrugged. “I climbed up there many times as a boy.”
He said nothing more, but when they arrived at the Dunhaven estate, the driveway gate was locked, and this time they had no key.
Instead, Azrael got out and Paulson climbed down, and both men followed the fence line in opposite directions, searching for a break.
Serena waited in the coach, musing on how strange it was to think that her parents had a whole property they’d never even mentioned. There had to be something suspicious about their home here, for a tall spiked fence girded the whole property. What exactly were they hiding?
At last, Azrael found a gap in a sagging length of the fence. He beckoned to Serena; she joined him, and there, they squeezed in.
She grimaced as the cold, rusty metal snagged at her clothes.
Meanwhile, Paulson stomped back to the roadside, where he’d pulled the carriage over. Once more, the ruddy-cheeked driver climbed up and waited with the team.
“You all right?” Azrael asked as Serena tugged the ribbon-trimmed hem of her carriage dress through the gapped fencing after her, then dusted off her gloved hands.
She nodded, but mentally berated herself for wearing such a nice dress. If she’d had any idea that she’d be graverobbing and hiking today, she would’ve dressed differently, but she had so wanted to impress him.
Henwit. It was just as well she’d left her bonnet in the coach—the wide brim wouldn’t have fit through the narrow gap in the fence.
“Right,” he said, turning. “Let’s go.”
The dreary russet woods of the Dunhaven estate were as overgrown as those at the duke’s house, and there was no path. But since Azrael seemed to know where he was going, she followed him through the tangled forest, picking her way as best she could through leaf mold and mulch, huffing when her skirts caught on some brambles. She yanked them free and nearly tore the hem.
“Everything all right back there?”
“Fine,” Serena muttered. She kept her gaze fixed on the wide expanse of his shoulders as he strode ahead of her. She had never noticed before how his flaxen queue curled just a bit at the end, where it lay between his shoulder blades.
He certainly moved like the fey woodland prince she had once fancied him to be, back when she had been his child bride.
It wasn’t long before they’d crossed the ring of forest that hid the manor behind a screen of privacy. They stepped out onto the edge of a greensward whose grasses had grown hip-high, and there loomed the house.
She stared, amazed somehow, now that she was here, to see that it was truly real. They had come out of the woods beside the house. Azrael nodded to her to follow him, and they walked around to the front.
It wasn’t as grand as the Rivenwoods’ abode. Instead of a white Greek temple, the L-shaped Dunhaven manor was a rather ugly, brown, angular thing with three stories and dormer windows leering out from the gabled roof. The design seemed haphazard, unsure; the house looked like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a rustic hunting lodge, a cozy cottage, or a faux-Elizabethan manor.
Serena, however, barely paid attention to the ill-favored building, for out in front of it lay the ornamental pond where her lost elder sister had supposedly drowned.
Her steps faltered when she saw it.
Azrael glanced somberly at her. She swallowed hard, steadying herself. He gave her a moment to take it all in and went up to the entrance of the house.
While he jiggled the front door, Serena studied the long-stagnant little lake with chills running down her spine.
What a dismal sight it was. The rusted metal head of a fountain poked up above the bright green algae slime coating the brown water. Dead, dried-out pussy willows ringed the pond’s banks. In the summertime, she thought, this place must be thick with frogs and insects, dragonflies…
“I’ve found a window that’s unlocked,” Azrael called in the eerie silence. “Do you want to go inside?”
She nodded, pulling her spencer closer around herself as she turned away from the pond and walked numbly toward the house.
He slung his leg over the sill of the ground-floor window, climbed in, then came around a couple minutes later and unlocked the front door for her from the inside.
“Welcome home,” he said with guarded irony as he opened it.
She gave him a nod, wordlessly expressing her astonishment at all this. Then she peered into the dim interior, grimacing and shielding her nose from the wave of stale, unhealthy air that poured out and washed over her.
Stepping cautiously over the threshold, she found herself in an oak-paneled entrance hall. Aside from the dank smell, the first two things Serena noticed were the thick, dusty cobwebs that grew like hoary white hair all down the chain of the round iron chandelier above them, and the black crape that had been left draped over the mirror on the wall, a symbol of mourning.
Antlered deer heads stared down from the walls. A dark red and blue Persian rug lay across the cold floor tiles before a ponderous wooden staircase opposite the door.
Azrael started to shut the door behind her, but Serena shook her head. “Leave it open.”
The house was in desperate need of fresh air. He did, then they began their wary exploration of the place.
With every step, Serena felt increasingly unsettled.
Where the late Duke of Rivenwood’s cold marble palace had held a sinister sensation, the Dunhaven manor seemed utterly forlorn. Instead of the nameless dread she’d felt over there, here, a thick pall of sadness, grief, even despair tinged the atmosphere.
Perhaps servants had cared for the duke’s mansion for some years before it had been sealed up for good, but this place appeared to have been simply locked up and left to rot.
Musty smells rose from the carpets and upholstered furniture. Black stains of water damage marred one of the walls all the way down to the wainscoting.
In a dark green dining room whose long table offered seats for twelve, Serena found a portrait of her mother hung over the mantelpiece.
The fireplace below it had been boarded up, but the gilt-fra
med picture of the countess showed a breathtaking beauty in her prime.
It must’ve been made when Mama was just a few years older than she was now. Serena stared up at it, amazed at the resemblance, but no. Mama had been far more beautiful than she was.
Looking at the smiling, raven-haired vixen, it was easy to believe that Lady Dunhaven would have been pursued by any adulterous-minded lord who saw her.
Which meant that any blasted fool in England might be Serena’s father. Her heart sank as she turned away, only to find Azrael glancing from her to the portrait and back again, meaningfully.
She said nothing, but walked on. She climbed the stairs, determined to see the nursery that had been her dead sister’s room. With every step, a puff of dust rose beneath her feet from the carpet runner softening the staircase.
She sneezed again, and Azrael murmured, “Bless you.”
She mumbled her thanks, absently reminded of how she’d gone exploring in his house on the night of the masked ball.
They peered into the large, once-elegant rooms of the first floor as they went. But when Azrael opened the door to the drawing room, Serena got quite a start.
The upper regions of the drawing room walls were honeycombed with the bulbous, claylike nests of a colony of swallows. The nests were empty at the moment, thank goodness, since the birds had already flown south for the winter. But she winced in disgust to see the once-stately room covered in bird droppings.
Azrael pointed to a hole high up in one of the tall, arched windows through which the feathered tenants must have come and gone for years as they pleased.
That explained why it was so cold on this floor, she thought.
“We’re lucky the door was left closed,” she muttered as he pulled it shut again.
They moved on.
It was not until they reached the attic level, where the servants’ quarters sat, that Serena finally found the nursery, its pink and yellow wallpaper curling in places, the empty white crib sitting starkly beneath the sloped wall of the roof.
The nursery looked practically untouched from the day the two-year-old Lady Georgette had drowned. The moldering blankets in the crib were not made up, left rumpled from the last time the child had lain there.
Toys were strewn about the floor. The blank, staring eyes of a doll propped on a wee rocking chair unsettled her.
Little clothes hung from the wall pegs. Washcloths and towels, a baby-fine hairbrush, a jar of expensive salve, and a soft puff for talcum powder had been abandoned on the dresser.
It was as though the shattered mother of the lost child had somehow believed for a time that it was all just a mistake, that her daughter would somehow be magically returned to her.
Tears welled up in Serena’s eyes with a newfound understanding of the raw pain her mother had gone through. She suddenly wanted with all her heart to see her, to hold her in her arms.
And she repented to her soul of all the harsh words she had spoken to her mother these past few months. All the times they’d fought since Toby’s revelations…
Now that she was here, she almost couldn’t blame her mother for never speaking of this, covering it up. Trying to pretend that this chapter of her life never existed.
Serena felt terrible now about how she’d behaved. But not had she fully understood until now.
To hear that she’d once had a sister whose entire existence had been hidden from her was one thing. But to be here, to see this place for herself, to feel all its ghostly sorrows floating through the dead, abandoned rooms, was something else altogether. Finally, she had some inkling of the true devastation that her mother had survived.
All she wanted to do was put her arms around her and cry with her for what she’d suffered. Not for one second could Serena condemn her anymore for seeking escape from her broken heart in the arms of these lovers, misguided as her actions might have been. Indeed, if not for one of these men, Serena knew she wouldn’t have existed.
She crept across the room, loath to disturb anything in it, for this house felt like as much of a tomb as the barrow or the duke’s mausoleum.
A floorboard groaned behind her as Azrael arrived in the doorway, but he leaned there, keeping a respectful distance, only offering silent support.
Serena sniffled as she gazed down at the items on the babe’s dressing table. A dainty silver rattle rested there atop a bib. She picked it up and shook it, smiling at the sound, tears in her eyes.
She wiped the thick dust off it with her sleeve and turned around.
“I’m taking this as a memento of my sister,” she said, more to herself than to him. “Then, someday, when I have a child, I will give it to him to play with in honor of the aunt he never knew.”
He gazed at her with a sad, wistful smile.
She very much wanted to leave the house then. She walked toward the door, but when she reached Azrael, still leaning there, he did not move out of her way.
He cupped her face in his hand and tenderly wiped her tear away with his thumb. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he whispered.
“And I, yours.”
That familiar shadow flickered behind his eyes at her words. Serena didn’t know what it meant, but was too shaken up to puzzle it out at the moment.
She stepped past him gently and walked back down the stairs with a sense of unreality.
She was overwhelmed by this tomb of a house and almost felt she couldn’t breathe within its cursed walls. She found her way back to the entrance hall and marched outside, chest heaving for air. She left the door open behind her for Azrael, who followed.
As she walked away from the house, at last, she could pull air into her lungs, and the sharp breeze helped to clear her head.
But now she was faced with the ugly, stagnant pond that had claimed her sister’s life.
She stared at it, straight ahead.
Drawn to it for some inexplicable reason, she went closer, mystified by its air of decay. Picking her way around the mud, she found a grassy spot near the edge and stood there in silence for a long moment, trying to wrap her mind around all this day had held for her so far—and it was only midday.
She could not see Azrael behind her, but she could feel him. His quiet, mysterious presence comforted her.
“For what it’s worth,” he said all of a sudden, “you’re not the only one whose whole life has been a lie, Serena.”
She turned to him uncertainly. He was staring at the pond.
The skin was drawn taut across his high cheekbones and brow, the corners of his mouth grimly turned down.
He cast her a dark glance. “So has mine.”
“What do you mean?” she whispered.
“All through my childhood, people felt sorry for me because my father was murdered.” His tone was studied, faraway. “Little did they know his death was my fault.”
Her eyes widened, but he returned his gaze to the brown water, the crisp line of his jaw angled down. He stood with hands in pockets, his feet planted wide.
“What are you talking about?” she asked warily.
He was silent for a long moment, as though debating whether to answer.
“The man in the woods that day wasn’t a poacher,” he said at last in a low tone. “Not some vagrant.”
She stood motionless, knowing exactly what day he was referring to—though she could hardly believe he’d broached the subject.
Perhaps, having faced his father’s estate, now that he was clear of it, he finally felt able to discuss it.
His gaze was veiled as he met her glance briefly. Then he nodded to himself and forced the words out. “He was only posing as a homeless man camping on our property. In fact, the man was a government agent, sent there to surveil my father.”
Serena drew in her breath. “How do you know that?”
“He told me so just before he died. I don’t even know how many weeks he’d been there, making observations to report back to his superiors.”
“But, Azrael,” she said, “why woul
d the government be surveilling your father?”
“Oh, my darling. Can you be so naïve?” He glanced at her. “Surely by now you’ve realized that the Prometheans’ occult fascination is all just a mask to cloak their true purpose—accumulating political power.”
She stared at him, shocked.
“They actually mean to run the world in time,” he told her with disgust, then laughed. “They very nearly do. It’s not just England that harbors their factions, you see. These enclaves, various secret societies exist in most of the countries of Europe; they collude with each other, and their fanatical believers always try to get as close to the seat of power as they can. They love to worm their way into posts as advisers to kings, bosom friends to princes. They make their marks among the aristocracy, court fashionable society…and betray them all in due time.”
His words trailed off while she stood there, astonished.
“There is at least one secret division under the Crown that I know of devoted to untangling the Prometheans’ international spider web. They’re called the Order of St. Michael the Archangel. Few even know they exist, but they answer directly to the sovereign.
“The man in the woods that day was one of their operatives,” Azrael continued. “He was collecting information on my father to send back to his superiors when, by merest chance, we discovered him on our property. My father shot him, but he didn’t die. Not right away.”
Serena stared at him.
Azrael folded his arms across his chest and judiciously studied the pond. She waited, and he continued.
“We went out to do a bit of shooting. It was August, grouse season. I hated killing those birds, so Father sent me ahead to serve as beater. I was always terrified that if I couldn’t scare some birds out of the brush, it would be me he shot for sport.”
“Oh, God,” she whispered.
“We were walking through the woods on our way out to the fields when we happened across our trespasser’s makeshift camp. We caught him unawares, and, of course, Father was too shrewd to be fooled by his lowly disguise.
“Guilty as my father was, he immediately suspected why the man was there. Rather than wait for explanations, he fired upon him, just as he would a poacher, since he had a legal right. Only, it wasn’t a clean shot. While my father was reloading, the spy attacked him. They fought. Father dropped his rifle but yelled at me to get it and reload.