The Age of Witches

by Louisa Morgan

  She said, “Lady Whitmore is not someone I should normally socialize with, to be frank, but these are not normal times for us.”

  “But did you have to invite these people to Seabeck? Before I’ve even met them?”

  “Don’t fuss. It will mostly be the usual summer house party, except for them. Gloria Whitmore will be there, with that dour husband of hers. I felt I had to invite them, under the circumstances. The Hyde-Smiths are coming, as always, and the Derbyshires. You’ll hardly notice the Americans.”

  “What’s their name, these Americans?”

  “Oh, I don’t recall just now. There were so many guests at Lady Whitmore’s tea. I’ve written it down somewhere.”

  James didn’t believe this for an instant. His mother had a memory for names and titles like no one else. She could have consulted for Burke’s if she cared to.

  Clearly she didn’t want him to do research of his own to determine who the Americans were, and that gave him a slight feeling of power over her, the first he had sensed. She must believe that if he put his foot down—as he could now that he was the marquess, he supposed—she couldn’t refuse him. She was, after all, only the dowager.

  It was a new and quite revolutionary thought, and his mind skittered away from it like a horse shying from an approaching train.

  He finished his breakfast, excused himself, and headed out to the stables, where he ordered Jermyn to saddle Seastar, his Andalusian stallion.

  The stableman gave him a doubtful look. “He hasn’t been out in a while, my lord. Likely to be rambunctious, especially on a sunny day like this.”

  “Good. I will welcome the distraction.”

  Seastar was, as Jermyn had warned, restive and headstrong, much in need of a good run. As James trotted him up the coombe and out into the fields above Rosefield Hall, he was fully occupied with keeping the horse under control. A half hour passed with Seastar dancing and pretending to shy at birds and breeze-stirred bushes. When they reached an open pasture, James set him to the gallop to burn off his pent-up energy.

  When the prancing and sidestepping eased, James slowed Seastar to a walk, letting his thoughts return to the problem of the London house. It had been built during the Regency, and it needed work as much as Rosefield Hall did. The window casings were beginning to splinter, and the brickwork on the upper floors was stained by coal dust. Here and there bricks had fallen from the walls, and rust grew on the ironwork balustrades.

  Perhaps, he thought, he could find the courage to tell his mother they must sell it after all. He could stay at his club when he went up to town, and she—well, they would have to find a hotel or persuade a friend to accommodate her. They could save hundreds every year in upkeep and staff salaries.

  He shuddered to think of Lady Eleanor’s ire if he were to announce such a move, but her anger wouldn’t last forever. He would just have to endure it. It was far worse to think of enduring a marriage made for money, and a marriage with a girl whose appearance was only “acceptable,” to boot. Surely, in this new age, marriages should be chosen, not arranged.

  He urged Seastar into a canter, for his own sake this time, hoping to push all of it out of his mind before it drove him completely mad.

  14

  Harriet

  Harriet took a second-class stateroom on the Majestic. In second class no one would remark on the fact that she traveled without a lady’s maid, and there was no chance whatsoever that Frances would venture below the first-class deck, so there would be no accidental encounter. She spent the voyage reading and resting as the ship carried her to Liverpool, gathering her strength for the conflict to come.

  When they docked, it was easy to follow Frances and her frantic entourage. Harriet wore unremarkable clothes and a hat with a thick veil. She had laughed when Grace suggested she pack a tea gown. She dressed simply, a woman of no particular class, a tall, solitary American spinster come for a visit to England.

  Secure in her disguise, she hired a cab to follow the Allington one, and she waited in an alcove of the Swan while Frances and Annis and the maids resolved their many issues with the staff. Once they finally disappeared upstairs, Harriet secured a room for herself, careful to ask for one much more modest than anything Frances might have considered. Her only request was a view of Regent’s Park. She settled into a small single room on the fourth floor, where she could watch the comings and goings from her window.

  She began her stay by lavishly tipping a bellboy and a housemaid, and this turned out to be a wise use of her money. Both were delighted to gossip about the hotel’s residents, and in particular the demanding Americans on the second floor. Harriet knew when they were going out, knew when they were dining in, and knew when they were to travel down to Dorset for a long weekend at a marquess’s country home.

  “Such a fuss now, miss, you wouldn’t believe it!” exclaimed the housemaid one day as she made up Harriet’s bed. “Trunks turned out, wardrobes emptied, then filled again, everyone rushing here and there as if they was going to meet the Prince of Wales instead of some old marquess!”

  “I believe a marquess is quite grand, though, is he not?” Harriet said, slipping a coin into the little woman’s pocket. “Just below a duke, if I’m not mistaken?”

  “Oh yes, miss, that’s right, but still!”

  “I gather you don’t think much of marquesses, Violet.”

  “Nobs,” Violet said instantly. “More money than sense, most of ’em.”

  “You meet a great many of them, then?”

  Violet patted the side of her nose with a stubby finger and grinned. “Too many, in my line o’ work, miss. Far too many!”

  The bellhop was useful, too, because he had managed the hire of a carriage to take the Allington party to a Lady Whitmore’s house, and he and the hired driver were friendly. The driver told the bellhop all about the conversation the ladies had on their way back to the hotel.

  “It’s that new one, the new marquess, Mrs. Bishop,” he said as she tucked another coin into his palm. He hadn’t seemed to grasp that Harriet was unmarried. “Rose-sumfin, can’t quite remember the name. His daddy just died, and now he’s got the title and the estate, too. Young gentleman, only twenty-one years old, I hear.”

  “How interesting, Sam. Rose-something? I wonder what his estate is called.”

  “Oh, I got that! Seabeck. Yah, Seabeck, funny kind of name, stuck in my head. Didn’t never hear that word before, did you?”

  “Why, no, I don’t believe I have. I wonder what it means.”

  Sam, a lad of about sixteen, adopted a look of wisdom. “I fink,” he said in a paternal way, “that it means the estate is by the sea.”

  “Oh, of course, Sam,” she said. “That’s so smart of you. Thank you.”

  “Anytime, Mrs. Bishop. Anytime. You need anyfing else, you just ring and tell ’em you want Sam.”

  “I will do that,” she assured him. “As you can see, I’m a curious sort of person.”

  “So ’m I!” He laughed. “My mum allus said I was a curious sort of boy. Good fing to be in my job.”

  “Curiosity is a great thing,” Harriet said. “It leads to all sorts of knowledge.”

  She meant it. She now knew, thanks to her new friends in service, exactly where Frances was taking Annis. There was no need to skulk around corners or hide behind a veil. She would simply buy a train ticket to Dorset.

  She ordered a pot of tea and a sandwich to be brought to her, and she sat by the window as she ate, watching the road to choose her moment. When the Allington party appeared, with their trunks and valises on trolleys, Harriet held her grandmother’s charm in her hand and concentrated.

  Frances kept one small valise on her lap as they took their places in the carriage. That, Harriet felt certain, was where she had packed her materials. The herbs, the candle, the saucer, everything she had seen in the cabin, would be in that valise.

  The manikin was there, too. Harriet sensed its presence, that tiny golem that should never have been cre
ated. It was a tiny shadow where there should be sunshine, a flaw in the bright afternoon. The wrongness of it made her fingertips ache with the memory of dark magic.

  “You’re making a terrible mistake, Frances,” she muttered, gazing down on the group settling itself into the carriage. “I fear for you.”

  Four floors beneath her, Frances’s head jerked up. She frowned deeply, gazing up at the facade of the hotel. Harriet hastily drew back, watching with just one eye through a tiny rent in the fabric of the curtain as Frances looked this way and that, scanning the windows. Frances pressed a palm to her breast.

  “Yes,” Harriet whispered. “Do you see, Grandmother? She feels it. She knows someone is looking at her.”

  Beryl didn’t answer, but Harriet thought her grandmother must be aware. She had predicted it. “There is darkness in the girl,” Beryl had said while they were still in the midst of Frances’s training. “You will need to watch out for that, Harriet.”

  The cousins had not spoken since their argument at the wedding. Frances had never set foot in the Dakota. Harriet had never passed through the doors of Allington House a second time and observed Frances only from a distance.

  She and Beryl had failed her, despite their best efforts. Nothing they did could relieve Frances’s bitterness over the poverty of her childhood. Nothing they said could erase her resentment of the dingy flat she had grown up in, the ragged clothes she had worn, the low status of her mother. It seemed now, though she wore beautiful gowns and lived in a fine house, that she still carried that hungry, angry girl inside her. Nothing cooled the fire of her craving, of her drive to vanquish the memory of her younger self.

  Frances had discovered on her own how to wield the maleficia. Harriet, cleaning out Beryl’s library, had found the old books, hidden behind a dozen newer ones on a top shelf. She wasn’t surprised her grandmother had saved them, since Beryl had cared so much about preserving the history of the Bishop witches. She was saddened to realize Frances had discovered them and learned what the worst of them contained.

  Frances had experienced the power of the maleficia and succumbed to its temptation. Beryl had been right about the danger of the dark practice. It was, inevitably, corrupting.

  Now Annis, innocent of all of this, had become Frances’s most recent weapon.

  Harriet sighed, tucked the amulet beneath her shirtwaist, and went to pack up her things for the trip to Dorset, and a place called Seabeck.

  15

  Annis

  Lady Whitmore’s tea party had been even more tedious than Annis had anticipated. Every guest seemed to her as stilted and shallow as the worst of New York society. The thin, hunched American girl from the Majestic was there with her mother, richly dressed but wan and hollow eyed, as if she were still seasick from the voyage. Annis shook her hand, and the hands of other women, young and old. There were, evidently, no gentlemen invited.

  Annis wasn’t feeling entirely well, either, although the ache in her belly that had begun the evening before had eased. She wondered if the air of the hotel might be draining her energy, or if it was the noise and bustle of London itself. The smell of coal dust clung to everything, spoiling her appetite and making her long for the fresh air of Central Park.

  The lassitude helped her get through the boredom of the party, but it also blurred her thoughts. She had difficulty recalling the names of the people she met, which was not at all like her. Frances had taken charge of that, murmuring them in Annis’s ear after each had moved away. “That’s Mrs. Harlingford. Her daughter just became engaged to an earl.” A moment later, she whispered, “Miss Smythe-Tobin, poor thing. This is her second season. Not a soul offered for her last year.”

  Annis roused herself to mutter, “How on earth do you know all that, Frances?”

  “I read the London papers, of course. Oh, do sit up straight, Annis, and smile. That’s Lady Eleanor, Dowager Marchioness of Rosefield, and she’s coming our way!”

  A stout, stern-looking woman dressed entirely in black approached them, her gloved hand extended to Frances. A conversation ensued. Annis couldn’t remember a word of it, but it seemed Lady Eleanor had approved of the Allingtons. A handwritten note of invitation was in Frances’s eager fingers before they went to bed that night. They were to travel to Dorset, to spend several days as houseguests of Lady Eleanor. Annis, lacking the energy to oppose Frances’s wishes, offered no resistance.

  At least, she told herself, as they chugged their way southward in the first-class compartment of the train, they would be out of the soot and crowds of London. She listened with indifference to Frances’s description of the house party. A grand house, supposedly, and a great estate right by the sea. “Only the best people will be there,” Frances said, almost purring with satisfaction. “It will be perfect.”

  She made no mention of a possible husband, for which Annis was grateful. In her half-dazed state she dared hope that a few days in the company of the aristocracy would satisfy Frances’s ambition.

  They were met upon their arrival at the train station by a footman in blue livery with gold braid on the shoulders. He assisted all of them into a carriage with an elaborate coat of arms on its door. A driver in the same livery sorted their trunks and valises. Frances was delighted by their attentiveness. Antoinette, looking as gratified as her mistress, settled herself on the bench seat. Velma was her usual stolid self, but she sniffed at the freshness of the salt air, and her eyes brightened a little as she gazed at the pretty houses of Seabeck Village.

  Annis’s ennui lightened, too, when she saw the matched pair of white horses in the traces of the Rosefield carriage. She thought they must be Andalusians, like the mare she had met in Regent’s Park, though these were bigger, with heavier hindquarters, larger heads, and a more pronounced curve to the nose. They would have been bred to harness, she supposed. Their manes and tails were braided with gold ribbon, and the metal fittings on their tack sparkled. When they set out, she was delighted to feel their power and to note the steadiness of their gait.

  She removed her hat and leaned as far out the window of the carriage as she dared, first to assess the movement of the horses and then to appreciate the low green hills they passed through, the prim white cottages behind well-kept stone fences. The breeze set strands of her hair whipping about her face. She caught an occasional whiff of burning wood, a relief after the smell of coal that permeated London. She inhaled a faint flowery scent, too, possibly from the small wild roses that tangled in the shrubs along the road. She wished she could ask the driver to stop and let her pick one to identify later.

  She twisted to look at the footman clinging to the back of the carriage. He noticed and touched his forehead. “Almost there, miss,” he called in an unfamiliar accent. He freed one hand to point ahead. “Just along that next coombe.”

  She had no idea what a coombe was. She turned forward in time to see the roofline of Rosefield Hall come into view above the trees. Annis had expected an ostentatious sort of building, like the lavish Fifth Avenue mansions, but this was different. She was no authority on architecture, but it seemed obvious the central hall had been added to over long years, a wing here, a stable block there, but everything constructed with careful taste. The result was elegant and restrained, a big, graceful house unlike anything she had seen in New York. They drove past formal gardens, where a white pergola stood in a well-tended shrubbery. Gargoyles jutted from the roof of the hall, and a medallion, carved with the same crest that adorned the carriage, hung above the entrance.

  As they drew near, Frances murmured an excited commentary on the grandness of the house, but Annis wasn’t listening. Still with her head out the window, she had spied a stone-fenced pasture beyond the gardens. Half a dozen glorious white horses grazed there, the faint dapples of their coats gleaming like silver coins in the sunshine. As she watched, a coal-gray foal galloped in a circle around its elders, tossing its head and flicking its tail.

  “Such beautiful horses!” she called to the footman. />
  “Yes, miss. My lord’s Andalusians.”

  “Indeed! I thought they must be!”

  Suddenly she couldn’t wait to escape the confines of the carriage. For a moment she felt like her usual self, thrumming with energy, avid to run through the gardens to the pasture, to lean across the stone fence to admire those horses.

  Frances tugged on the back of her jacket. “Annis! Stop acting like a child. Get back in here, and do something about your hair. Tuck your scarf into your bodice, for pity’s sake, and put your hat on.”

  To Annis’s dismay, the odd lassitude that had troubled her in recent days seized her again. She didn’t want to obey Frances’s order, but she seemed to have lost her ability to resist. She pulled back inside the carriage without argument. She repinned her hair, smoothing the disordered strands back into place. She settled her hat on her head, and Velma, under Frances’s critical eye, resettled the pins.

  Annis’s joy at the sight of the horses evaporated. She folded her hands in her lap and gazed blindly forward, wondering what was wrong with her.

  When the carriage rolled to a stop before a set of broad steps leading up to the front door of Seabeck Hall, Lady Eleanor was waiting for them. She sent their maids around to the service entrance and dispatched two footmen up the stairs with their trunks before she led Frances and Annis into a parlor to meet their fellow guests.

  There was an awkward issue with the small case Frances seemed so reluctant to part with. Annis thought it odd, because her stepmother rarely carried anything herself if she could help it. In this case she did ultimately relinquish the little valise into the hands of a footman, but it had seemed for a moment she might carry it with her into the parlor.

  A flurry of introductions enveloped them, and the ceremony of tea proceeded. The afternoon slipped away in a fog of small talk and formalities. Annis relinquished her urge to visit the horses and hoped, vaguely, that the morning would provide an opportunity.