The Penwyth Bride (The Witch's Daughter Book 1)

by Bolton, Ani

  “That will not do if he has,” Sir Grover said mildly.

  I am sure Damon and Susannah froze in terror. The world hushed its breath while air leaked fitfully into my lungs.

  Footsteps approached the wrought-iron gate near where I crouched on the other side. “You had better make sure her interest is not diverted, sir. I’ve had a note from my man of affairs.”

  “Oh Christ,” Damon groaned.

  “I hope your Maker hears you, for the latest tidbit making its rounds through the drawing rooms is that since his return from the Continent, Damon Penwyth’s newly developed taste for deep play has resulted in owing Mr. Henry DeVere five hundred quid.”

  I stifled a gasp.

  “This time,” Sir Grover said, “I don’t intend to pay your debt.”

  “You cannot leave me swinging,” Damon choked. “A gentleman’s honor . . .”

  “A gentleman should not gamble with blunt he does not have. I’ve the new wheal to consider, and your sister has to be launched soon, your mother says.”

  “But Papa, I don’t wish to be launch--”

  “Silence.” Sir Grover wielded the word like a knife, and Susannah instantly stilled.

  He continued pleasantly, “I suggest that you exert yourself with regard to our houseguest, Damon. She, perhaps, might be more agreeable than I am. I--now what the devil was that?”

  I could see a hand closing about the bars of the gate; from its place on Sir Grover’s finger, the cabochon ruby winked.

  “What was what, Papa?” Susannah asked.

  “I thought I heard . . . something.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Damon muttered.

  Sweat exploded off my forehead while Sir Grover paused in a thoughtful silence. Finally he said: “Well, be off the two of you. And stay away from this part of the property. After the hay is ricked I’m going to have the hands pull the wall down.”

  Hoof beats faded as Susannah and Damon moved away, leaving Sir Grover standing by the wrought-iron gate. The hand with the ruby ring drifted along the bars to the iron knob flaked with rust, while the other came up to wrap around the bars.

  I huddled silently in the grass, terrified of discovery and praying with every nerve that he would not push open the gate and see me. Like a fox brought to bay I stared at Sir Grover’s gripping hands.

  A sound, either anger or disgust, vibrated in his throat. The gate rattled under his grip.

  To the left of me the land stirred angrily. Something undefined reared an ancient head and began to snake silently toward the defiler.

  “Bah!” Sir Grover flung himself away. Unsteady footsteps marked his retreat while the shadow sank back. I leaned against the cold stone wall, breathing freely once more and despairing that I would be unable to warn Sir Grover. The garden would be revenged upon him if he followed his plans to destroy it.

  But warning him would lead to awkward questions I had no desire to answer. The safety of a witch hinged upon discretion.

  I wiped my clammy forehead against my bent knee. Eavesdroppers got what they deserved, so Sarah Eames would say, and I certainly got mine. I wished I had not learned that Susannah had a secret lover, or that Damon amused himself with a few mistresses, and I allowed myself a watery smile over the notion that the reclusive Roger Penwyth could have any interest in me.

  But mostly I wished I had never known that Damon was desperate for money, and that I remained his only hope of getting it.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I pulled myself together and made my way back to the house. Nanny came upon me as I hobbled gingerly through the kitchen, spent by the release of my affinity and burdened with the weight of secrets I was never meant to know.

  I needed to sooth my distracted mind, but I knew what to do. I begged from Nanny the use of a spinning wheel.

  She giggled at my request, putting a cracked black nail in her mouth. “Eh, miss, I don’t know what mistress will say, me letting a quality lady do such humble work.”

  “Oh, spinning is a fine genteel occupation,” I assured her. “My stepmother always approved of it at home, and she is Lady Penwyth’s sister.”

  “Genteel, you say? Humph, I never feel genteel while I be spinning greasy hanks o’wool. But whatever you say, miss. Oh, did you know that old Tom Pyder come by? He brought ye something.”

  “Something for me? How strange.” I hadn’t seen Tom Pyder since he showed me where the walled garden lay.

  Nanny smiled, as secretive as anything Jenny could produce.

  “I’ll let ye see it for yourself. It be in the front hall on the inlay cabinet. I’ll bring the spinning wheel into the sunroom, if that be where you’d like it to go, miss?”

  “Yes, the light will be better there. You’ve set my curiosity quite on fire, Nanny!”

  I limped to the front hall. On the cabinet, as promised, sat a potted plant choked with purple blossoms. The flowers dripped like bells from slim stems, and an exotic, clove-like fragrance filled the hall.

  “Oh Tom, you rascal,” I breathed as I gently touched a bloom. A bead of nectar slid down the stamen and onto my finger. Suddenly my skin suffocated with unbearable heat, and my ears filled with the screek of equatorial birds.

  I was about to fall into dark mysteries when my fingers brushed a piece of folded paper.

  The vision shredded as I came in contact with smooth vellum pressed, the wood pulp told me, in an Amsterdam warehouse. Reluctantly I opened the note.

  This plant needs an admirer. It should serve to remind you to keep your feet on the ground.

  It was signed with a spiky RP.

  ###

  As promised, Nanny brought the spinning wheel to the sunroom where the waning light could best be had. She also fetched a large basket of wool already washed and carded into creamy piles, and ready to be spun into yarn.

  I settled next to the well-used wheel, smelling the homely musk of new wool, and felt myself search for, and find, my center. Loading onto the distaff the long-stapled, tough wool of the local sheep--very different from the lustrous, silky wool of the North--I began to spin, putting aside the unpleasant aftertaste that eavesdropping had left in my mouth.

  The wheel whirred and clicked to taps from my good foot on the treadle. The spokes became invisible, spinning hypnotically.

  My mind flew over the centuries to the other women who were spinning as I was now, and I shared in our collective satisfaction at creating a useful object from animal hair.

  Some lamented the quality of the wool they had to use, poor brittle stuff sheared from starved sheep; some marveled at my foot treadle, a recent invention; I, in turn, marveled at a woman who spun for the amusement of others who would pay her to show them the lost art . . .

  “Miss Eames.”

  My mind jerked and I found myself blinking at Damon.

  He leaned lazily at the doorway, hands under his arms as his caramel-colored eyes watched me with an undecipherable expression. “What are you doing there?”

  Anxiety cracked through me. What had he seen? Had I left myself again?

  “Spinning,” I croaked.

  He quirked a russet brow. “Isn’t it an occupation best left to the servants?”

  I ran a dry tongue over my lips. “Nanny let me.”

  “Nanny, eh? I can scarce credit that she is clever enough to cozen you into doing her work for her, therefore she must be more foolish than I thought.”

  “Don’t blame Nanny,” I protested, winding the finished yarn off the bobbin while I averted my flaming face. “I like to spin.”

  He looked me up and down as if seeing me for the first time. “Susannah’s right, you are a strange creature,” he murmured.

  Another flush rose over my cheeks. I stood up from the stool as gracefully as I could. “Is there something you wanted?”

  “Yes. I wanted to speak to you. May we sit?”

  He indicated the windowseat with an expansive wave of his hand.

  After a hesitation, I silently complied. Though I kn
ew exactly what Damon was about--he must have taken to heart his father’s instruction to begin the charm offensive on the little heiress--I still felt powerless to stop the sensation of flattered gratitude as he assumed his seat at a proper distance with a flash of his lopsided grin. Mistresses and men were the way of the world, as he had said to his sister earlier, and women of my rank were to accept the practice with as little protest as possible. The conduct books I had read on the subject preached wifely fortitude and resignation as the basis for a happy marriage, but they said nothing at all about managing the pain.

  “Old Tom Pyder’s been to Lyhalis again I see,” Damon observed as he eyed the plant shivering with the purple blooms where I had placed it on the windowsill.

  I cleared my throat. “It’s quite beautiful,” I whispered.

  “I’d better remove it before Mama lays her eyes on it.” Damon rose and moved toward the plant.

  “No--”

  “I’ll only be a trice.”

  “But it is mine. Roger sent it to me.”

  Damon froze in the act of reaching for the plant. I rose from my seat, flustered, and angry too, if truth be had. After hearing of Sir Grover’s plans for the walled garden, I wanted no part in wantonly killing more plants.

  Damon kept his eyes carefully veiled. “Forgive me. If it is yours then you should take it upstairs.”

  “Why?”

  “Because m’mother will be insufferably jealous. Conservatory beauties from Lyhalis are her prerogative to destroy.”

  “But what has Roger done to make Lady Penwyth so--” I choked off the half-formed question at the expression coalescing on his face.

  “Oh ho. Has someone been gossiping?” Damon asked, so softly it sent a chill through me.

  “Nanny?” he continued. “No. Susannah. What nasty little stories has my sister been telling you?”

  “N-nothing,” I gabbled.

  “The lie, Miss Eames, is in your eyes.”

  The hand he had held out to reach for the plant’s earthenware pot now moved to the purple blossoms. He plucked one and began ripping the petals apart.

  “Do you have something to say, Miss Eames?” he prompted as I worked to form a coherent response.

  Another petal screamed under his rending fingers.

  “Please stop,” I burst out, struggling to contain my affinity. The smell of crushed flowers filled my nostrils like blood. “I’ll tell you. S-Susannah said that Roger’s father had been bewitched by his wife to kill himself in Lyhalis cove, and that he tried to drown Roger there too.”

  Damon wore a thunderstruck look. “My sister told you that Heron Penwyth was bewitched?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you believed this faradiddle?”

  “Well . . . it did sound as if . . .”

  He threw the crumpled petal to the floor. “Heron Penwyth wasn’t bewitched, Miss Eames, though we would all like the luxury of thinking so. He was mad. As mad as a rabid dog.”

  Damon dropped heavily beside me on the window seat. “This is what comes of trying to keep skeletons hiding in their closets. Without the truth to inform them, folk start making up their own stories, even my sister. I see I shall have to tell you what really happened the night Roger’s parents died.”

  Damon gazed at the pewter buckles of his shoes for so long I had thought for a moment he had changed his mind. “I suppose Susannah told you that Heron Penwyth brought home a wife from one of the Scilly Isles,” he began at last.

  “Yes.”

  “Morgreth was beautiful, by God. I remember her even now, sculpted cheekbones, emerald eyes . . . striking. Any man who got close to her wanted her; she needed no witchcraft to tempt them. And many tried to tempt her away from her husband.

  “Heron grew jealous. Who could blame the fellow for that, but his jealousy grew into a mania. He became reclusive, shut himself up in that decaying house, Lyhalis, and he insisted on mewing up Morgreth as well. My father tried to reason with Heron, but then he too began to hunger after his cousin’s beautiful wife--”

  “Not Sir Grover!” I exclaimed.

  Damon smiled sardonically. “Hard to believe the flinty goat had enough blood left in his veins for dalliances. Not that Morgreth ever paid any attention to any of her admirers . . . she knew better than to inflame Heron, whose temper was growing out of hand, especially after Roger was born.”

  “But . . . Lady Penwyth!”

  “Oh, Mama knew, of course. But what could she do?”

  What indeed.

  “One night Heron lost control of himself. I think--now this is only a suspicion--that my father must have gone up to Lyhalis on the pretense of visiting Heron, just to get another glimpse of Morgreth. That visit must have triggered something in Heron’s addled brain.”

  Damon stared out the window. Black clouds soaked the horizon over the purpling moor, and a flock of birds arrowed through the sky. “I remember that night. I was only six, mind you, but the wind howled like a banshee and I was frightened. The rain came after dark, spattering so hard against the roof that no one heard the pounding at the door from Jem Pyder for a full ten minutes, he said.”

  “Jem Pyder . . . Tom’s brother?”

  “Aye. I was there when they let him in, wet to the bone. My mother had been carrying me around to distract me from the thunder, and she had to put me down to take the note from Jem. It was written by Morgreth, he said, and meant for Sir Grover. My mother thanked him, and when he had gone she threw the note into the fire.”

  “Oh no!”

  “Oh yes. It must have been Morgreth’s desperate plea for help. She did try to keep the Penwyth’s sordid little secrets in the family . . . she had enough breeding for that.”

  I put my hand up to my spinning head. “But this is ghastly--”

  I thought of Morgreth out in Lyhalis cove, desperately struggling to save her child from her husband while the surf pounded her and the cold leached in.

  “I don’t think Father ever forgave my mother when he learned what she had done in her jealousy, and my mother may have felt guilt when she realized the note she burned was not proposing a lover’s assignation. It was she who insisted we take Roger in. But I think Roger knew somehow, all through those years, that we had a hand in his parents’ death.”

  “But how could he?”

  Damon shrugged. “Oh, he always kept to himself, running off to the moors when the tutor came, or holing up on the cliffs where he would stare at the sea, scribbling on his sketchpad. As he grew older he began to favor Morgreth in looks, which my mother took as a personal affront. When someone inevitably blabbed about what Mama had done that night, Roger called her filthy names, so filthy that I was obliged to crack him across the mouth to keep more from coming out. He left soon after.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Lyhalis. They were waiting for him, and he’s been there ever since.”

  “Who was waiting for him?”

  “The old servants, Pyder, and the nursemaid who found him on the rock that night.”

  “This is a shocking tale,” I said slowly. “But it does not explain why Roger sends Lady Penwyth flowers.”

  “Ah yes, the flowers. Morgreth was quite the botanist. She had a gift for growing anything anywhere, in the poorest dirt, in brutal weather. Her gardens were a showplace. Heron, when he still had his wits about him, built a magnificent conservatory for her and filled it with exotic specimens from all the world over. The flowers are Morgreth’s, you see. Roger reminds my mother that she killed his whenever possible. Once a month if he can.”

  ###

  After Damon left, I fled upstairs with Roger’s conservatory treasure, and hoped that Lady Penwyth would not take offense or anger that I had kept the gift. The antipathy between Roger and her was of a kind not easily forgotten or forgiven.

  I had heard two versions of Roger Penwyth’s sad history now, from Susannah and Damon, and I wondered which one came closest to the truth. Had Morgreth Penwyth been a killer, or a victim?
<
br />   If Morgreth truly had been a witch--and I had no reason to doubt it after hearing Damon speak of her love of plants--she would be constrained by the witch’s arcane lore handed down from the One never to meddle or take life.

  And yet, the alternative was to believe that Heron Penwyth was so unbalanced that he had wanted to drown his son.

  Both versions of this story were unpleasant to contemplate. But they agreed on two counts: that Heron had tried to murder his infant son and that Sir Grover had been a frequent visitor to Lyhalis.

  My mind moved to examine Sir Grover and his character. He seemed too controlled, too canny to let himself be overset by infatuation for his kinsman’s wife. Indeed I had difficulty believing it. But true or not, his visits to Lyhalis had been enough to send his own wife into transports of jealousy.

  Sighing, I touched one of the purple fluted blossoms, feeling a ping of life on my fingertip. I was not a water-affinitied witch, and so the tangles of human emotion were too complicated for me to unravel. But one thing was clear.

  There was a war between the Penwyths, and I had been placed in the middle of it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Safely inside the Hermitage’s walled garden I sank with a sigh among the rain-sodden plants and allowed my affinity its release, happy to have escaped Lady Penwyth’s plans for me to spend another afternoon with her daughter. I drifted my hand over weedy stalks of vervain, smiling as I remembered that wise women use it as a witch’s repellant.

  The vervain hummed in pleasure. It told me when it first sprouted in this soil, and how long its seeds had been dropping . . . many human lifetimes.

  Unwillingly my hand was pulled toward the pitted rock half-hidden by ferns and bittersweet stems--the giant’s wedding ring. The squat stone with its hollowed middle was easily the most complicated thing I had ever read, brimming with all four elements. As my center flew toward it, I felt water and fire clash in a smoky flambeau while stone battled the air that would erode it.

  I also felt the remnants of its maker’s ambition clinging to its grains. Despite its age, it was still a powerful object.

  I wrenched my hand away. As I was wiping it on the grass to dispel the tingle, I was startled by birds’ wings snapping close overhead. I narrowed my eyes against the sun to see what sort of bird threw such a large shadow.