The Secret of the Emerald Sea

by Heather Matthews

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The next morning it rained, and some of the January snows melted away. Rain pelted the windows like falling tears as Jane sadly stared outside. It hasn’t rained for weeks, she thought, irritated, and now, on this day, it pours down... He’ll come anyway. He has to come...

  * * * *

  Blake woke and sent a message with a servant to his tutor. He would not have his classes today. He feigned illness, knowing full well he would be caught when his father returned. He found himself feeling low as he looked outside at the dismal weather. If it had been sunny and bright, he could have taken Jane and her brother around the outskirts of his estate, showing them where the stables were, and all the other things he longed to show them.

  He knew he would go anyway. He’d barely slept, not more than an hour or two, so intense was his euphoria over the previous night. Her lips had tasted sweet, like honey, and they had been so soft. He had wanted to hold her close for hours, smelling her hair, and the faint scent of lavender that he would now always associate with her.

  What can I do, he wondered, to make the day special? Something she’ll like....

  He rose up out of bed, and hastily washed and dressed. He must leave the house to avoid any questions from his mother. He had come home later than usual last night, and she had been waiting for him. He told her about the pub, but not about the girl. He could not bring himself to expose her to his parents, not yet. Not ever, he thought worriedly, hating himself. She is but a fortune-teller, and I am a Lord.

  He ran his hands through his newly rinsed, damp hair in consternation. He was a coward, he knew; he should be shouting his love from the hilltops, but he had not the courage to do it. Instead, he kept secrets and told lies. Jane would be disappointed in him, in time, just as his parents always were.

  He went to the kitchen and drank some tea. The servants made a pot for themselves while they got the house ready for breakfast. They welcomed him warmly, wondering what on earth would bring the master down at this hour. It was only six-thirty. He drank it quickly, and around seven, he went outside just to be gone before his mother could find him.

  I cannot go there this early, he thought, smiling. Not without looking foolish. I’ll ride out on my horse, down the main road, and give it some exercise while I wait. He woke the stable lad who lived in rooms above the stables, and told him he was taking out Baroness, his favorite horse.

  “Get her saddled quickly, please,” he ordered the sleepy boy, who scurried to do his bidding. Blake got an apple out of his pocket and ate it while he waited. The boy was back with the horse in fifteen minutes. The day was brightening, although it still rained a little. Blake put on his hat to shield him from the rain, and he mounted the horse and rode off, telling the stable boy he would return the horse later, but he was not sure just when.

  Since the pouring rain had gentled to a light, soft sprinkle, he thought perhaps he could take Jane out on his horse for a ride, or give the boy a little ride in his lap. Arthur would like that. He headed out, avoiding the main drive where his mother might be watching, and he crossed a soaked field that only last night had been covered in snow. Only then did he head to the main road. He would work the horse until they were both tired. It would drain the tension from his body so that he would feel calm when he arrived at Jane’s little house...around ten, perhaps.

  The main road was deserted. Usually, when he was out this early, there would be the odd worker walking to a farm or foundry nearby, but this morning the road was empty. The morning was still...eerily still. He rode onward, talking gently to his horse all the while, and feeling guilty for taking him out through the wet, muddy field. He felt guilty, too, for waking the stable lad and ordering him about. His father did these things naturally, without any guilt, but Blake had yet to learn that the servants were not to be worried about. This was yet another thing upon which he and his father disagreed. He told Blake not to chat with the cooks and the stable boys; his son should keep a distance and avoid such familiarity.

  “The friendlier you are,” he would tell him, “the harder it will be to control them. You must remain remote at all times with them.” This lesson was another he had failed to learn.

  He rode for an hour before the muscles in his strong, young legs started to ache, and then he saw his father’s carriage in the middle of the road. He put the whip to his horse and galloped dangerously fast to get to it. His pulse was racing, and a vein throbbed in his temple. It was their carriage...he knew it was! Why was it parked here, in the middle of the road? Father should be getting ready for his first meeting in the city by now, he thought, frightened. Why is it here? The horses that were tied to the brougham appeared to be dead! What happened to the animals?

  He got off of Baroness and tied her fast to a tree by the side of the road, and then he ran to the carriage. Its black, polished exterior was wet with rain. He pulled at the door and tried to open it, but it was jammed. He yanked at it with all his strength until it gave way, and then he looked inside...

  He could not believe what he was seeing. He thought at first that it must be some sort of cruel joke. Inside the carriage was a statue of his father, but a terrible statue. His father seemed to be screaming, and his stone hands were gnarled and ugly, and his eyes were wide with horror. Blake went and touched the statue in wonder. It was such a perfect likeness. There was a knife in his father’s hands that pointed upward.

  Blake sat across from the statue, drawing his own knife from his cloak. He felt sick to his stomach, as though he might throw up. The carriage smelled strange. It carried a musty smell that was dark and fetid and awful. Blake leaned out of the carriage door and was sick, his knife still clutched in his hand. Then, he wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, and he got out and walked around the carriage to try to find some reason for this evil prank. He knew something horrible had happened, a kidnapping perhaps, and thought that perhaps the thieves had left this...thing in his father’s place. He could not bear to think of any other explanation. Yet he knew that the statue was too perfect a likeness...too real....

  Around the carriage the two horses stood and gazed into space with their large, unseeing eyes. He touched their flesh, and it was cold and stiff. They stared through him, as though he wasn’t there, and yet they had not fallen down in a heap. They were dead, but standing up, still yoked to the carriage. I do not understand! he thought desperately, tears filling his eyes. The sight of the animals made his skin crawl. It was as though the two animals were bewitched. He had never believed in magic, but he knew now that he was in the presence of something otherworldly and something profoundly evil. He walked around the carriage, his knife still at the ready, and stared into the forest, then walked a ways down the road. His own horse seemed spooked now. It was straining against its bonds and trying to get free.

  He walked over to Baroness and tried to soothe her, speaking in a low voice that was choked with tears. The horse continued to pull at its tether, and Blake checked it to see if the knot would hold against the large animal’s efforts. It was secure, and so he went back into the carriage and sat for a long time, breathing in the bittersweet stench that seemed to taint the morning air with its scent. He looked into his father’s stone eyes and he felt as though his heart was breaking. It is him, he thought, desolate. I know it is, and yet, it cannot be....

  His mind turned to the Death card he had seen last night, the Reaper on horseback, and he started to sob.

  For a long while he sat, staring and even yelling at the gray statue of his father. He felt he had gone mad now. If it was a spell that turned his father to stone, then perhaps it could be removed as well? He’d heard of such things; of curses and counter curses, and black and white magic. He felt about the carriage floor, but it was still quite dark on the early, overcast winter morning, and he could find no clues at all. No evidence, no papers, and no luggage. It had all been taken, but by whom?

  He knew his father traveled with a lot of money. Most rich men did when they wen
t to the city. His father planned to put it in the bank there for safekeeping. He had his driver—who Blake assumed was involved in this, or else dead himself, but where was his body?—who was armed and should have been able protect him from thieves. What has happened here? he wondered. My God, who would do such a thing?

  He untied his horse and rode back to the village at a breakneck pace. All the while, he tried to tell himself that it was only a statue and a likeness of Lord Stirling. But the terrible smell in the carriage and the look of horror on the stone...thing’s face was impossible to explain. He rode to the police, sick at heart, and angrier than he had ever been before. They had not been on good terms, it was true, but he loved his father.

  I was so disobedient, so insolent sometimes, he thought as he rode, tears streaming down his cheeks. The villagers shuffling about in the street looked up and stared. “My Lord, are you all right?” they called up to him, but he rode on in silence to where the petty constable lived. He got off of his horse and he did not even bother to tie him. He banged on the door like a lunatic, yelling for the man to open up.

  The petty constable, with a napkin tucked into his collar, rushed to the door and stared at him and asked, “My God, boy, what’s happened? Come in” Then, he took Blake into his warm drawing room and let him cry for several minutes. Blake, shocked insensible by trauma, cried rasping sobs as he began to tell his tale. It was so fantastical and so horrible that the petty constable could only shake his head in disbelief.

  “Go there, now!” Blake pleaded. “Please, go and help my father. It’s about forty minutes on horseback. Please take a fast carriage, and weapons, and extra men, and go as fast as you can.”

  As he tried to answer all the petty constable’s many questions, and also explain just where the carriage was, he became consumed with grief. He sat on a hard wooden chair and sobbed as though his soul had been wrenched from him.

  * * * *

  The petty constable called for his wife to get Blake a blanket and a glass of spirits. He was young, too young, he supposed, but nothing would calm the boy as well as some strong liquor. And then he drew on his hat and his heavy cloak, and he rode on his fastest horse out of the town. There was no time to borrow a carriage. He left the boy with his wife, and told her to call a messenger to get his mother to him as soon as possible.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The petty constable rode out hell for leather, cracking his whip all the while. The villagers stared and whispered to each other as he passed. When he arrived at the scene, he peered into the carriage window and saw the cold likeness of Lord Stirling, and he crossed himself.

  * * * *

  The constable was upset. By that afternoon, the whole village was thrown into turmoil. The entire town knew that Lord Stirling had been turned to stone, right in his own carriage, right outside their safe little village. Unfortunately, villagers had wandered out after him, as he rode away on his horse, and they had seen the same frightful sight he had. Some thought it was a prank, and that bandits had kidnapped the lord himself, but most felt that black magic was at play, and that the lord was turned to stone forever. The constable had, by this time, heard every possible opinion.

  “Turned him to stone and robbed him,” the villagers told each other as he rode back, past the crowd that amassed outside the Crown of Thorns. He had advised them to stay together there, so they would be safer.

  “A sight he was, too, or so I’m told...his mouth hangin’ open, his hands clutchin’ a knife...looked as though he was screamin’ when the spell hit ’im,” the barmaid bellowed, her face white as parchment.

  All of them, including himself, wondered who could have done such a thing, and why. This was no ordinary magic, to freeze a lord into a statue. This was the blackest possible magic, and they had never seen the like. And he must find the answers.

  * * * *

  Jane waited for Blake, but he did not come, and so she made some nice soup for the Cupid for his lunch, and then she sat and watched the light rainfall. It was no longer pouring, but perhaps he felt the weather was too poor to venture out in. It was three in the afternoon now, and in a few hours, she’d have to go back to the pub, despondent, and deal with a thousand questions and sly comments about the young man she loved so well. She bent her head and wished she did not have to go. Just this once, they could stay here, where it was warm and safe, and she could avoid the drunken pawings of the older men and the silly, petty requests of the young girls who must know if they would have new gowns for spring, or have to make do with their old dresses.

  Jane wished for a moment she had her crown with her or her book of sonnets. She had nothing of the past, and the present was a muddle, and the future seemed to turn bright, then bleak, by turns.

  “We should go soon, Jane,” the Cupid told her quietly. “We should go to the pub...”

  “It’s much too early!” she protested. “I don’t see why we have to go at all. Why can’t you get us some money with all of your magic, anyway?” she snapped, her voice petulant. In all the time she’d known the Cupid, she knew she’d never mentioned his powers so openly or talked back in this way, but she wasn’t sorry.

  Blake is changing me, she thought. I’m tiring of the Cupid, though I love him well. I’m tiring of his tricks and of all his mysterious plans.

  “Why don’t you try your own magic?” he had answered lightly, teasing her.

  “I have none...only under the water...and I do not go below the Emerald Sea anymore!” she cried. She ran out of the kitchen, into their bedroom, and slammed the door.

  * * * *

  The Cupid knew she had other power, but that she was too strange to herself to find it. Sometimes it appeared suddenly when she was telling fortunes. He could almost see the change in her when her hands started to shuffle the cards. It looked as though she was in a trance. Then, he would not need to whisper to her. She would speak on her own and tell people what was to happen, and it always did seem to happen. This was rare, this trancelike state of Jane’s, but it had happened more lately.

  Afterward, she never remembered that he had not fed her the words, and he did not venture to share that information. In time, she would adjust to what she was, much as he had to, cursed being that he was. Jane, he mused darkly, we are not human, you know. We only playact at it. You must come to understand this before you can accept the truth and control your power.

  To placate the girl, he toddled to the bedroom and told her to rest. They would go in to the Crown of Thorns at the usual time. He did not continue to banter with her, for she was close to rage, and she was clearly not herself. He never answered her questions about making money. There was nothing to say. He couldn’t make money, and that was that. If he could have, he would have done it long ago, but they made more than enough to live on from their work. Although, he was sure it did get tiring for a girl so young to have no pleasure or schooling. Only nights spent with drunken folk and barmaids.

  The girl moped all afternoon, occasionally wandering about the farmhouse, then glaring at the Cupid, as though it was his fault that the boy did not come. But she still pulled on her best dress, just in case, and braided her hair as well as possible, too proud to ask for help from him, whose fingers were surprisingly adept at such things sometimes. He let her be, knowing she was volatile.

  He ached to get to the pub, for he felt something had happened, and there was no way of knowing what unless they were in town. He sat and thought, meditating on the visions he had seen, and he tried to make a plan, but that was difficult as the enemy was as yet invisible, and might be only a figment of his imagination.

  Chapter Forty

  The constable called a meeting in the square that night to discuss the death—or bewitching—of Lord Stirling. The townsfolk were in a panic and the petty constable, who was responsible for the safety and well being of the people, needed to quell the many wild rumors that were growing more fantastical over the course of the day.

  He would tell the people the facts a
nd see if anyone might know anything. He would also keep his eyes and ears open for anything unusual, any suspicious behaviour that might indicate some knowledge of the crime. He knew the people in the Crown of Thorns would all be there, but there were other villagers who seldom visited the pub, so he posted notices near all the main shops on the square, and he made sure that the teetotalers of the village—few though they were—would also be aware of the meeting.

  He told his wife, who had spent the morning and early afternoon at the Stirling estate helping the bereaved mother and son, to spread the word to the servants there, and anyone else she might come across. He hoped for a solid turnout so that he could examine and question the people. Already, word had spread to other villages, and the roads were deserted as people grew afraid to ride in carriages or travel the main road. Soon, it would be difficult to get supplies, and trade would suffer.

  Witchcraft was real to the people, although the petty constable usually set no store in it. He wracked his brain to find some other explanation of the strange events, but he had to admit, if only to himself, that this was difficult to explain away without resorting to thoughts of hexes and spells.

  The petty constable crossed himself as he went about the business of the day. He also made sure the statue of Lord Stirling was locked away where no one would find it. Another, more experienced constable from Allanshire was scheduled to come and help him investigate the case, and the petty constable did not welcome this sort of interference, but the Lord was so highly placed in the community that he had no choice but to listen to his superiors and accept the help that was offered to him.