“There is no bond stronger than brotherhood,” the boys said in unison. The old woman didn’t hear them. Only Gwen heard them.
The old woman recited it softly to herself. Gwen recited it with her.
“And then the roof collapsed completely. And Headmaster Yorke and all the boys were trapped inside.”
“Oh my God,” Ryan said, his hand on his stomach as if he was about to be ill.
“They all died,” the woman said. “Died together.”
“Fidus ultra finem,” Edwin said.
“Faithful beyond the end,” all the boys replied.
“Fifty years ago today…” The old woman looked at her grandson. “They all died…every last one of them. Here on campus. Mr. Price and Mr. Reynolds died of smoke inhalation. But the rest of the boys burned to death, burned beyond recognition. They could only identify Samuel. Headmaster Yorke had shielded him from the fire as best he could. And they could identify Christopher. We think it was Laird who covered his body to protect him from the fire. Thirty-three dead in total. All because of me.”
“Grandma, there was no way you could have seen this would happen.”
“No. But it’s done and those beautiful boys and their headmaster and teachers are all dead. Headmaster Yorke would have been ninety years old this year had he lived. My age.”
“Come on, Grandma,” Ryan said, gently taking her by the arm. “We should go.”
“They’re all buried here, you know.” She pointed across the campus. Gwen followed her finger and saw that all the Marshal buildings were gone now. Only an empty field greeted her. An empty field and thirty-three white crosses in the ground. “The parents buried their sons together. They died together trying to save each other. They would be buried together. Together for eternity.”
A tear spilled out of Ryan’s eye and rolled down his cheek.
“I want to be buried here, too,” she said.
“Grandma, don’t talk like that.”
The old woman shook her head. “But I don’t deserve to be buried here. For fifty years, I have prayed for forgiveness. I asked God to somehow take back what I’d done. I’d half believed that if you brought me here, I’d see the buildings standing again. Hawkwood Hall—that’s where I taught my classes. The headmaster lived on the fifth floor. And there was a cottage right over there,” she pointed at Gwen's house. “I lived there. And you see those patches where there’s no grass? That’s where the two dorms were…Pembroke and Newbury…side by side.”
Gwen sobbed in silence, afraid to miss any word the old woman spoke.
“I prayed God would bring the school back, and the boys, and Headmaster Yorke. And they would be together. These boys…this school was their Heaven. And I prayed they would have a teacher come take my place who would not make the mistakes I made, not be the fool I was. And she would love and cherish the boys and Headmaster Yorke. That is what I have prayed for.”
“I’m sure they’re all in Heaven,” Ryan said and touched his grandmother’s arm.
“But I won’t be,” the old woman said. “I’ll go to Hell for what I’ve done. I will burn as they burned. Except my burning will never end.”
Gwen inhaled deeply and smelled the smoke again. It came not from the burned rubble of the buildings or the scorched grass, or even from the past. It came from the old woman, from Miss Muir.
“Forgive me, Edwin,” the old woman said. “Forgive me.”
“I forgive you,” Edwin said. But the old woman didn’t hear him. “We all forgive you.”
“Take me home,” the old woman said to her grandson. “I was wrong to come here. I don’t belong here. I never did.”
Ryan took his grandmother by the arm and tried to lead her away. Gwen took a step, intending to follow her.
“Gwendolyn, you can leave,” Edwin called out. She turned and faced him. “You can leave, but if you do leave, there’s no coming back.”
“And if I stay?” she asked.
“Then you will stay here always. Just as we have, just as we are.”
Last night she had lain next to him in his bed and asked him to promise her that nothing would ever change, that it would always be this wonderful, this passionate, this good. A foolish romantic question, the sort of question everyone asks when they first fall in love. The answer should have been no. Of course it wouldn’t always be like this. They would grow older, grow wiser, grow more comfortable with each other. The passion would wax and wane. And then someday it would end. It would all end, because no one lives forever.
But Edwin was already dead. He’d been dead for decades.
“It’s so strange,” the old woman whispered. Gwen turned back to her. “I had such a vivid dream last night. I dreamed that I came back here and the school was still here and it looked like it did fifty years ago. The boys were all here—Christopher and Laird, Jefferson, Samuel, Eliot…all my sweet young gentlemen. And Headmaster Yorke was here. And a lady. They’d decorated the whole school in white for a wedding. I thought it was my wedding. But it wasn’t. I wasn’t even a guest at the wedding. They didn’t want me here…”
“We’ll go now, Grandma. You have to eat, take your medicine.” Ryan tried to coax her toward the exit.
“They rebuilt the school, Ryan. But it wasn’t my Marshal. Five miles from here is the new school. The Marshal School they call it. It’s not the same, though. It’s not the same at all….”
The old woman and her grandson walked back through the arch. Gwen touched her face and found it wet with tears. She looked back and saw the crosses were gone now, all those graves. But the boys were still in a line, Edwin in their midst.
“There was no way to tell you,” Edwin said. “Forgive me.”
She raised her hand to stop his words.
It all made sense now. The waitress at the diner…it was The Marshal School, the new school, that was hiring teachers, not the Marshal Academy. And then the waitress had given the old man extra napkins…she knew he would cry like Christopher’s grandfather had when he visited. No. The elderly man walking with Christopher—it hadn’t been his grandfather. It had been his father come to mourn the fiftieth anniversary of the school burning to the ground, the anniversary of the day he’d killed his son by trying to save him from his sins. No computers. No cell phones. The shock over Edwin’s divorce. Christopher and Laird being terrified of discovery. Christopher said banks weren’t open on Saturdays. They were now, but not in 1964. And of course…
The scent of smoke.
Now that the old woman had gone, the scent of smoke disappeared from Gwen's nostrils, and all she could smell was the dewy grass beneath her feet, the warm and living forest. Life. She smelled life. Even though all her boys…
“My sweet boys,” she said and looked at their faces, eternally frozen in youth. Somehow Miss Muir’s prayer had been answered. The school lived. The boys lived. The headmaster lived. “My angels…”
All of them dead fifty years, and yet here they were and here they would stay. Miss Muir’s wish had been granted—the school had risen from the ashes, the boys from their graves. Here was the school, the boys, the headmaster…and Miss Muir couldn’t even see it and never would. Her prayer was answered and she would never know it. Their Heaven was her Hell.
But what about Gwen?
She looked past the old woman who’d once been Miss Muir and saw her car again. The wreckage of her car. The battered, fiery wreckage…
“Gwendolyn?” She heard the voice calling her name. Not Edwin’s voice. Not the boys’. She’d never heard the voice before. Her eyelids fluttered. She blinked and blinked again. A white light flashed. She closed her eyes tight and opened them again. She lay in a hospital bed, and above her stood a man in a doctor’s scrubs and coat. “Gwendolyn Ashby. Can you hear me? You’re in the hospital. You were in a car accident, and you’ve been unconscious. Nod if you understand.”
Gwen closed her eyes again and when she opened them she was back at Marshal, back with Edwin.
“Edwi
n?” she said, her voice trembling with fear and confusion.
“You can go back if you wish,” Edwin said to Gwen. “Or you can stay and…”
He didn’t have to finish his sentence. If she stayed it would be like he promised—always like this. The days would blur into each other in a haze of books and laughter and learning. The nights would be always like last night. Heated, ardent, hungry. Every night like the first night. New love forever.
The old world was there, waiting for her. She could wake up and rejoin it. But if she left she could not return. If she stayed she would never leave. The door that had let her in would close, and she would never leave again. Somehow she knew she would forget this morning and Miss Muir’s visit like one forgot a dream upon waking. The boys would forget. Edwin would forget. This would be her life forever and her life would be…
“Perfect,” she whispered.
She walked up to Edwin. Thirty pairs of eyes watched her.
“Boys,” she said. “Don’t look.”
The boys covered their eyes with both hands.
She put her hand on the back of Edwin’s neck and pulled his mouth down to hers for a long hard kiss.
Thirty boys ohhh-ed and wolf-whistled before bursting into embarrassed teenage laughter. Behind them the bell broke through the morning fog and sounded the first period five-minute warning.
“Boys,” Edwin said sternly as he stood back up from the kiss. “Class. Now.”
The boys, all of them wearing watchful smiles, didn’t move a muscle.
Silly boys. Didn’t they know she was teaching them A Midsummer Night’s Dream in class today? Surely they were eager for that discussion.
She gave Edwin one more kiss, and headed toward Hawkwood Hall.
“You heard the headmaster,” Gwen said, and clapped her hands once to get their attention. “Get to class.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind she heard the sound of a heart rate monitor beeping a flat line.
Gwen ignored it and went back to work.
Tiffany Reisz lives in Lexington, Kentucky. She graduated with a B.A. in English from Centre College and is making her parents and her professors proud by writing erotica under her real name. She has five piercings, one tattoo, and she has been arrested twice. When not under arrest, Tiffany enjoys Latin dance, Latin men and Latin verbs. She dropped out of a conservative seminary in order to pursue her dream of becoming a smut peddler. If she couldn’t write, she would die.
For more books by Tiffany Reisz, visit www.tiffanyreisz.com.
Darkness Unchained
By Jane Godman
Dedication
Part of this story takes the characters on a journey to South Africa, a place where I spent several happy years when I was growing up. This book is dedicated to that beautiful country and its wonderful, vibrant people.
Natal, South Africa, 1907
The mystical beauty of the Drakensberg Mountains provided a dramatic backdrop to the otherwise cosy, domestic scene. The servants had carried the boy’s bed out onto the back stoep, and his mother and grandmother paused now and then in their daily routine to talk to him. Although they knew the pain from his most recent operation was almost unbearable, he smiled his sweet smile and answered them vaguely. All the while, his thin hands flew ceaselessly backward and forward over the page.
For once, he wasn’t drawing the castle, and his mother observed this change with a profound sense of relief. Ever since he had been able to hold a pencil he had sketched—as if from memory—a soaring medieval fortress set high on wave-maddened cliffs. Sometimes complete, sometimes in ruins, now and then ablaze with the surging flames of an all-consuming fire. Always with a sense of menace that crawled from the page and into the heart of the beholder.
He paused now, looking up as Annie sprang from her pony, threw the reins to a waiting stable boy and hurtled toward the house, her curls like black streamers flying out behind her. His twin sister never walked if she could run, never smiled if she could laugh, never whispered if she could shout. At seven, Rudi accepted without rancour that she was more robust, more vibrant, more everything than he would ever be. Chattering excitedly as she told him about her ride, Annie threw herself to her knees on the rug beside his bed, sliding an arm about his shoulders and pressing her lips to the near-opaque flesh of his cheek.
Their mother could never see them together like this without drinking in her children’s remarkable resemblance to the father they had never known. Resolutely, she pushed away the sharp pain the thought provoked.
Never one to sit still for long, Annie began to stack her brother’s sketches into a pile. She nodded approvingly. Although Annie shared his visions, Rudi’s was the hand that transferred their imaginings to paper and made them a reality. Annie placed the latest one on top and it caught their mother’s eye immediately. Moving closer, she studied it, her hand pressed hard up against her breastbone in an attempt to stifle the sudden, inexplicable pounding of her heart. Rudi had drawn a man. Tall and powerfully built, with an arrogance that resonated through every aspect of his stance. His features were indistinct and, after consulting with his sister to get the precise shades, the only colour the boy had added to the picture was the sleek darkness of his hair and a pair of mesmerising, tigerlike eyes.
“Who is this?” their mother asked. She tried to make the question light, but her laughter trembled and the paper fluttered ever so slightly between her fingers.
The twins tilted their side-by-side faces up. Two pairs of identical eyes reflected the amber glow of those on the page back at her. Their voices chimed together in one decisive statement.
“He is Uther.”
Chapter One
The old house slumbered in the morning sunlight. It allowed that unique Cornish glow—the one that bounced back from the sea in all directions—to bathe its tired corners and crevices with warmth. After centuries of darkness, Tenebris had enjoyed a brief period of quiet. This world, a whirl of automobiles, telephones and air travel, could not understand the ancient creeds. This brave new century thought it knew everything. It had survived a great war, one that it arrogantly called “the war to end all wars,” but there was greater horror to come. The darkness that waited patiently within the ancient walls knew it. A man who led a small, but vocal, political party in Germany—a man named Adolf Hitler—knew it, too. The world would cringe before the awful truth in time.
The darkness missed the Jago clan, the true family of Athal. The Hungarian woman had brought peace, and with her coming, the evil had moved on. For a while it had stalked the streets of London’s Whitechapel district, knife in hand. But it was on its way back. Tenebris sensed the true darkness drawing ever closer. It smiled to itself, hugging its secrets tightly. The Jago legacy was about to be unchained once more.
∗ ∗ ∗
Cornwall, England, 1922
I paused astride the top of the wall, looking down at the expanse of garden below me. Nothing moved. When I was absolutely certain that there was no other living creature around, I dropped down onto the grass and crouched low in the late afternoon shadows. If I’d thought this through, I’d have come at night, equipped with a torch. But I’d reached the age of twenty-two and not yet acquired the skill of thinking things through. The garden was overgrown and deserted, not at all what I had expected or imagined. I thought of Rudi’s paintings. They invariably depicted this pale marble manor, a castle with its soaring ramparts and flying pennants, or an impossibly handsome man with golden eyes and a cruel smile.
“Sies tog, Annie! For shame,” I scolded myself under my breath. “Did you think he would be here, waiting to greet you?”
I moved away from the wall, confident now that the house really was, as I had believed, empty. It was a hauntingly beautiful place. Rudi’s brushstrokes had been remarkably accurate. He had even managed to reproduce the shape of the ornate lake, now a still, dark mirror, and the way the contours of the house clung sinuously to the scorching drama of the cliffs. Bolder now, I followed
a path through well-planned gardens. Someone had put great thought and love into the arrangement of these, but their upkeep now showed signs of definite neglect.
I had attempted, in what Rudi would doubtless call my “sledge-hammer Annie” fashion, to get into the house by more conventional means two days ago. Ever since we had first seen this place and realised, with an awe-filled exchange of glances, that we were here, I had been determined to get over the doorstep. Rudi, always more cautious than I, had put forward a series of reasoned arguments.
“It’s a coincidence, Annie. It must be.”
I gazed steadily back at him. “Coincidence?” I said at last, pointing to his sketchpad. He had the grace to hunch one thin shoulder. “Don’t worry, broer, I’ll make some excuse. I was out walking and the laces on my shoe broke, or something like that. Even I’m not going to march up to their front door and blurt out the real reason.” I fluttered my eyelashes and affected a flirtatious tone. “Oh, goeie more, meneer. Good morning to you, sir. Yes, you with the eyes like a hunting lion. My broer and I live over five thousand miles away, but I just dropped by to say ‘hello’ because we’ve known about you and your house ever since we were little babas. We have the pictures to prove it.”
I had made some enquiries in Port Isaac. People seemed surprisingly reluctant to talk about the impressive mansion on the jutting peninsula, but I learned it was called Athal House. The name meant nothing to me, which I found slightly disappointing. I had expected a cacophony of bells to chime in my mind when at last I heard its name. I swung briskly along the cliff path in preparation to put my plan into action, only to encounter an ornate gatehouse that spanned the drive. The huge gates themselves, carved from wrought iron, were embellished with a crest of gold stars on a black background. The words Lucent in Tenebris were engraved in flowing script across the top of the closed barrier. I didn’t know any Latin, but these words did strike a chord somewhere deep inside my subconscious. Not bells and whistles, but something I didn’t understand stirred within me, and the hairs on the back of my neck lifted. The feeling intensified when I had reached out a hand to touch the cold metal of the gate. I knew it would be firmly locked against me before I tried it. You are not welcome here, Annie. We are not ready for you…yet.
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