by Eve Silver
“I am on my way there now and would be pleased to offer you a ride,” he continued. “May I presume that you are the new teacher?” He raised a brow in question.
So he knew there was a teacher expected. She supposed that was a recommendation of sorts.
Studying him, she assessed both his appearance and her options. His hair was dark, wind rumpled and overlong, with a thick hank falling across his brow at the front, and the ends curling slightly where they brushed the back of his collar. He was close enough now that she could see that his dark eyes were lit by a shimmer of gold and, when he turned his head just so, a whisper of green.
He was studying her as she studied him, and something she saw there made her pulse trip over itself with eager glee.
She was startled by such unprecedented and strange excitement.
Well. He was... beautiful. Like the exotic panther she had seen when her father took her once to Peddleton’s Menagerie. She had felt sick for the panther, locked away in his cage, had wished for a way to break the bars even as she had recognized that if she did somehow release him, she would likely be his next meal. And a bloody and screaming one at that.
This man had that same look, that dangerous, feral look. Only there was no safe cage around him, save the one he built for himself.
“I am Miss Elizabeth Canham, come to Burndale Academy to teach history and geography and literature.” She waited a moment and, hoping she did not sound forlorn, asked, “Why will they have forgotten me?”
That hard mouth curved a little. She thought his smile held more darkness than mirth or amiability. A cynical sensuality that even she, an untutored girl, recognized.
He glanced at the laden sky, and said, “The headmistress has a weighty matter to occupy her afternoon, and Mr. Waters is not known for his remarkable memory. Unless it is remarkable for its unreliability.”
His tone left Beth uncertain if she should step back in unease or smile in collusion.
“Your name, sir?” she asked boldly, not pausing to wonder how she dared.
He sent her a look she could not read.
“My apologies, Miss Canham. My manners are rusty, indeed. Griffin Fairfax.” He bowed, most gentlemanly, but she had the impression he was somehow mocking her. Or perhaps himself. He had placed a strange inflection on the word “manners”.
“Yours?” he asked, with a gesture toward her luggage. At her nod of assent, he hefted her trunk as though it weighed nothing, and made quick work of tying it to the back of the curricle.
Turning to her once more, he held out his hand in open invitation. His features were purely sculpted and artful, fine enough to be cast in bright polished bronze, carved by a skilled hand, kissed by the sun.
She studied his hand, hesitating, wondering if accepting a ride with this stranger was indeed her best course. He was dressed well enough, like a gentleman, and his carriage was fine. He knew she was the new teacher for Burndale Academy, which likely meant he was some part of the local community. Did all that recommend him?
To some degree.
He huffed a breath, tapped his foot on the road, while in the distance thunder rumbled.
After a moment, he said, “You do like to mull things over, Miss Canham.” He glanced at the sky. “Might I impose upon you to conclude your ponderings before the storm?”
It was the hint of amusement in his tone that decided it. She lifted her skirt and walked the few steps to his side. He handed her up onto the seat.
His was a lightly sprung carriage with room only for a driver and passenger, the design necessitating a closeness that made Beth a little uncomfortable. Once he took his place, Mr. Fairfax would be shoulder to shoulder with her. Thigh to thigh.
An unfamiliar flutter tickled her belly. Butterflies dancing.
Mortified, she was at a loss to explain her odd reaction. But she was not so mortified that she denied herself the intriguing sight of his long limbs pacing off the distance as he strode around to the other side of the carriage.
He did not climb up. Instead, he paused to stare at her in a most unmannerly way, his gaze lingering on her mouth, her eyes, and finally, longest of all, her hair.
Heat rushed to her cheeks, and she parted her lips to better draw air.
Instinct bade her raise her hand, smooth her wild curls, apologize for her shabby appearance. She thought she must look a fright, having sat in the stagecoach for so many days. Stubbornness and a little pride—both were sins she laid claim to—stayed her actions and her tongue. Instead, she gazed down at him steadily, her hands folded demurely in her lap.
His lips thinned. “Flax-pale and curled. They’d have been better to choose a dark girl.”
Strange words, without context, and the soft way he said them made her shiver.
Chapter Three
Beth held tight to her bonnet with one hand and the edge of the seat with the other. She thought they traveled far too fast for either safety or common sense, and she was stunned to realize that though a part of her was terrified, another part reveled in the excitement of their pace, the open carriage, the feeling of freedom. The wind snatched her breath and the countryside flitted past too quickly to see much of anything.
She slanted Griffin Fairfax a glance from beneath her lashes. For his part, Mr. Fairfax spared her no further notice, instead focusing his attention on the pair of matched horses, his strong, blunt-fingered hands at ease with the reins.
He made no attempt at companionable discourse, and that was of no matter to Beth. She was just as happy to remain silent for she feared that her tongue had been loosened by the fatigue of her lengthy journey. She would be hard-pressed to limit her discussion to polite observations of the weather. Likely, too many questions would find their way into her remarks, and without a doubt they would center about the odd comment he had made earlier.
What could he have meant when he said they’d have been better to choose a dark girl?
Had his intent been to disconcert her with that enigmatic observation? If so, he had succeeded.
A feeling of discomfort and disquiet chased through her as she recalled his tone and the alarming nuance of his expression as he had spoken. The way he had looked at her hair.
Beautiful he might be but, thus far, she had found Mr. Fairfax to be particularly confounding.
Beth twisted to glance over her shoulder as thunder rumbled in the distance. The heavy sky had grown more ominous still, a damp pewter blanket sitting low against the ground. She wondered if she would be caught in the rain, after all.
“Have we a long way to go, Mr. Fairfax?” She raised her voice to be heard over the pounding of the horse’s hooves and the rushing of the wind.
“No.”
Beth raised her brows. She had gone from Mrs. Beacon’s verbose company to Griffin Fairfax’s taciturn and discouraging society. She would find it a difficult task to choose the more annoying of the two.
He turned the curricle into a narrow lane, got down from his place, and went to open a pair of iron gates. Beth stared at them for a moment, nonplussed. There were neither stone walls nor ironwork fencing on either side, just two square brick columns and a pair of gates whose only discernable purpose was to block the road.
They resumed their journey once more, and Beth noted that Mr. Fairfax left the gates open behind him.
“I suppose they are ornamental,” Beth observed, having no need to shout now over the sound of the horses, for their current pace was quite sedate.
Mr. Fairfax made a soft sound she chose to interpret as a huff of laughter.
“They serve no purpose but to block the road,” he said.
She pressed her lips together against a smile, oddly pleased that he voiced her exact thoughts. It was a strange sort of connection, true, but her first in this new and foreign place.
With a sidelong glance, he caught her eye. Humor shimmered in his gaze, and for that instant, Beth thought they were in harmony, connected by some intangible accord.
He turned his f
ace toward her, brows pulling together so a faint line. Inquiring. Puzzled. His gaze dropped to her mouth, and he quickly looked away.
Again came that strange little flutter in her belly.
Hunger? Fatigue? Perhaps. An oblique glance at Mr. Fairfax, and the butterflies danced harder.
Unsettled, Beth turned her head to study the rows of trees that stood sentinel to either side, their line curving as the narrow road curved, their foliage blocking out all else. They had left the open fields behind, and here the forest grew dense and thick, separated from the road by only a narrow margin of long grass. Again, thunder rumbled, closer now, and she twisted once more to look behind her toward the source of the sound.
She curled her fingers tight round the edge of the seat, and held on to steady her balance as they rounded a sharp bend. To one side was a break in the trees, a flat field with long, swaying grass.
A moment later, Mr. Fairfax drew the curricle to a precipitous halt.
“Burndale Academy,” he said, his tone strangely devoid of inflection.
Beth’s gaze snapped forward and up. Before her was a long gravel drive leading to a massive house of two stories, framed on either side by a stretch of manicured lawn bordered by the encroaching forest. The brick was red, the window frames white, the roof black with high, narrow chimneys that reached toward the sky. A wisp of gray smoke curled from one chimney.
Eight large windows spanned the upper floor, and on the lower floor was a door in the center with three windows on either side. At the top of the house, a gable tented over a clock, and above that was a short tower with a bell. From the rear of the main structure, additional wings extended toward the woods beyond. From her current vantage point, Beth could only see a small bit of them.
“It is... large,” she said, searching for some warmer observation and failing to find it.
This imposing structure was Burndale Academy. This was her new place in the world. A more unwelcoming facade she could not have imagined.
She shuddered, suddenly feeling inexplicably low. There was a frigidity, a barrenness about the place. The house appeared both looming and impersonal and, surrounded as it was by dense woods, so isolated as to make her shiver.
Perhaps, it was the vast size, the isolation, or the sullen and dreary sky overhead that made her feel so. Or perhaps it was her fatigue and travel-worn patience. She thought it was neither; she thought Burndale Academy both grand and grim.
There was something...
Frowning, she noted three black and barren trees standing close to the west side of the building, their twisted, bare branches twining together like the clawed talons of three mythic beasts. Their presence only darkened her impression of the whole.
Foolish notions, she knew, but she could not seem to chase them away.
She started as the bell began to toll, a slow, mournful noise. It tolled six times, the sound heavy and burdened, twisting about her heart and squeezing with a brutal fist.
“Does the bell toll all day?” she asked, turning to look at Mr. Fairfax.
His lips twitched in what might have been humor. Or disgust.
“It calls the girls to a light supper, now. It tolls at dawn to call them from their beds, then to summon them to break their fast, to mark the start of lessons, and the end of them. So, yes, you could say it tolls all day.”
Any uncertainty she had harbored vanished now. His expression was definitely one of disgust, his tone sardonic as he continued, “Nothing like order and regimentation to bring light to the day.”
Beth thought of her penchant for neatness, for arranging her clothing according to color and shade, for lining her hairpins side by side like little soldiers. No, not merely a penchant, order was a necessity that did bring light to her day and staved off her ever-present fears.
“You prefer chaos, Mr. Fairfax?” she asked.
“At times.” He shrugged, and his lips curved in a dangerous smile. “Disorder can be liberating.”
He sent her a sidelong glance. Dark lashes, straight and thick and long. The ridge of his cheek, the stubble darkening the plane of his jaw. Masculine beauty.
She ought to look away. Instead, she simply stared.
His dark brows rose, and then she did look away, taken aback to have been caught ogling at him like a lack-wit.
Clearly reading her expression as one of dismay, he offered a paltry encouragement for he what he must have thought was the cause, though his grim tone nullified any comfort his words might have offered.
“You can grow accustomed to almost anything, Miss Canham. A day or two, and your notice of the regimentation will lessen.”
You can grow accustomed to almost anything. She thought of the pretty little house in South London, and of her father, laughing and teaching her to solve riddles and puzzles, and of her mother and her brother... then she thought of the ugly, rank flat they had been forced to, and the noise and the smells, and the rooms so small and tight, and the terrible fear that chewed at her all the time—
Mr. Fairfax was watching her. She gave a nervous little laugh.
“Yes,” she murmured. “I am certain you have the right of it. One can grow accustomed to almost anything.”
He looked at her queerly, then set the curricle in motion once more, closing the last of the distance to the gloomy, forbidding structure that was Burndale Academy. As they drew nigh, the building seemed to grow larger, darker. Colder.
A fat raindrop slapped the back of Beth’s hand, making her start just as the door of the school opened. A black-clad, white-aproned maid stepped out, hovering just beyond the portal with her palm pressed flat across her breastbone.
“Who’s there?” she called timorously. Mr. Fairfax pulled the horses up, and when recognition dawned, the maid’s features took on a wary and guarded mien. “Oh, ‘tis you, sir.” The observation sounded anything but pleased.
Beth glanced at Mr. Fairfax. He was watching her, his dark eyes shadowed, his expression intent. It was the strangest thing, the way he looked at her, pensive, his gaze dropping to her lips once more, and then jerking away.
Setting the brake, he then climbed down from the curricle and went to untie her trunk. His dark hair fell forward, obscuring his expression.
Her movements as subtle as she could make them, Beth twisted in her seat and watched him. The cloth of his coat pulled taut as he bent and reached, accenting the breadth of his shoulders and the shape of his back. She found the sight both alluring and... disturbing. Confusing. She had the peculiar inclination to lay her hand on his arm, his shoulder, to feel the play of muscle, to test the strength.
The urge was terribly disconcerting.
Beth dragged her gaze away, took a moment to gather her thoughts and the climbed down unaided from the curricle. She strode toward the maid.
“Good evening,” she said. “I am Miss Elizabeth Canham, the new teacher.”
The wind burgeoned, snagging the hem of her skirt and stray strands of her hair, snatching her words to carry them away. She was forced to repeat them, louder, and as she spoke the last, an eerie wail carried from above, raising the fine hairs at Beth’s nape.
Her head snapped back, and she studied the windows overhead, but they were dark and blank, revealing nothing.
She swallowed and glanced quickly about, but neither the maid nor Mr. Fairfax gave indication of aught amiss. Perhaps it had been only the moaning of the wind.
The maid, a dark-haired girl with a frame as light as a bird’s and enormous eyes that were slightly protuberant, blinked at her, and blinked again. Then her gaze slid over Beth’s shoulder and she shivered.
“I’m sorry,” the girl whispered miserably. “I have no liking for storms.”
Startled by this greeting, Beth stared at her. She followed the girl’s gaze, noting that she looked not at the storm-darkened sky, but at Mr. Fairfax.
Tipping her head, Beth studied the menacing sky, ash and pewter and, in places, almost black.
“Well, it is not so very da
rk, yet,” she offered placatingly.
The girl peered at her for an instant, her enormous, dark eyes flickering with an unsettling edge of fear.
“Is she ready?” Mr. Fairfax asked in clipped tones.
Thinking he spoke to her, Beth spun about, but she found his attention directed at the maid. Beside him was her canvas-covered trunk, sitting now on the gravel drive.
“She is not ready, sir.” The girl shook her head. “She will not come!”
Mr. Fairfax made no effort to mask his displeasure. Two lines drew parallel furrows between his brows, and the corners of his mouth pulled taut. Sleek, long strands of dark hair fell across his brow, then whipped back, caught by the wind, making him look all the more forbidding.
In an instant, he leashed it, leashed the anger, the displeasure, and his expression turned cool, blank. He looked hard and cold, chiseled from marble, and again Beth thought of a panther in a cage, leashed by self-imposed bars.
He was angry still. Beth knew it, though no emotion played across his features now.
Why, he can lock himself away, as I do, she thought, surprised, the realization making her feel an affinity for him once more, as she had when they shared their thoughts about the gates that guarded the road to Burndale Academy.
Then she wondered if he was any more adept at this feat than she, if the walls he erected were impregnable. Hers certainly were not. Though she was far better now than she had been as a child, there were yet days that her anxious thoughts burgeoned and grew and overcame her best intentions.
“What has set her off this time?” Mr. Fairfax tapped his fingers against his thigh, a steady beat.
The maid made a choked sound. “She had an awful afternoon, sir. Miss Percy could scarce settle her,” she said, twisting the cloth of her apron with a desperate wringing motion.
Beth wondered of whom they spoke.
Letting go the now-wrinkled apron, the maid dropped her hands to her sides. The white cloth fell over her black skirt in creased disarray. “Miss Percy says ‘tis the storm,” she said.
Griffin Fairfax pinned her with a hard stare, and his tone was silky soft. “Does she?”