Page 35 of Darkest at Dusk (Revenant Roses)

Chapter Fifteen

T omorrow came with a sky the color of tarnished silver and a wind that poked through every crack of Harrowgate’s stone. Isabella rose late, her sleep ragged with dreams of smoke and flame and a voice calling Peg’s name. The taste of ash still coated her tongue when she left her chamber

She passed the long gallery with its faces in oil, turned down a dim hallway, then another until she stood with her hand on the knob of the library door, her heartbeat thudding a dull rhythm.

She opened the door to the cavernous space. Her ledger waited with its blotter; the paste pot sat capped. The brass box gleamed on the corner of the desk. When she laid her palm on it, heat came up through the metal as though fire raged on the other side. She jerked her hand away at the burn.

From deep in the walls came a whisper, angry as wasps.

The hesitation she had felt when first she opened the box was absent now. She cared not for courtesy or Rhys’s privacy. The things she had learned in the village weighed heavy on her soul.

Coincidence could not be trusted. Dr. Hargreaves’s presence in Marlow could not be trusted.

There were layers here she had not begun to fathom, and they frightened her, threatening to drag her down and bury her.

But here in this box were answers laid down in ink, truths she could see with her own eyes, truth she would drag, hissing, into the light.

She turned Papa’s key in the lock then lifted the lid.

The letters lay where she had set them the last time, creamy wove and faded ink, tidy as knives in a surgeon’s roll. She ran a finger along the edges then gentled the letters free, setting aside the first two, for she had already read them. She unfolded the third.

Harrowgate, 7 April 1831

My dearest Rhys,

You must come home at once.

Our little Ned is gone. They found his cap by the willow and then—oh!

my hand shakes, and I cannot be plain—Mr. Baines waded in and brought him out.

The rector will speak to you when you arrive.

The hour is not yet fixed. Will is distraught and will not be parted from me.

Your father says he has written the schoolmaster; do not wait for a reply.

I cannot put the particulars here. They will keep until I can look at you. Only come.

Your loving Mother

Isabella set the letter down and pressed two fingers to her brow.

Her vision blurred. She blinked hard and only then realized her jaw hurt from clenching.

Ned. She recalled his name from the previous letter.

She could see the willow without meaning to, its long green fronds combing the current like a woman dragging her hair.

A child’s cap caught. A man wading. A boy borne in his arms like a bundle of wet laundry.

She could not help but see schoolboy Rhys sitting with this letter, a single candle guttering to tallow tears.

Another blow he could not set right. She imagined him shoving clothes into a bag with fingers that shook, walking too quickly down a corridor so the others could not look at his face.

He had known grief and loss, this man who held himself so still, so calm.

A sound rose in the flue, a hum and tick. The whispers that clung to the edges of perception thinned, then swelled. Isabella did not look up. She reached for the next letter, a feeling of dread suffusing her.

Harrowgate, 29 September 1831

My dearest boy,

I have written and torn three letters this day because I do not know how to tell you what I must. Our Will is gone from us.

It began with a cough that would not be stilled.

The apothecary sent laudanum, a soothing draught to ease his nights; a few drops in water, no more.

He smiled and said he would be brave for me, and he was.

By week’s end, the cough gentled and the tightness left his little chest. Catrin—good child—begged to sit with him that I might close my eyes an hour.

We kept the curtains drawn and the room as calm as might be.

I left her with the lamp turned and the spoon set by, and kissed his temple.

I settled in the chair at the foot of his bed.

When I woke, the room was very quiet. His lashes lay on his cheek and his breathing grew soft as a kitten’s.

So soft, I bent to feel it. He slept, my dear, and he did not wake.

I could not write you before it was done.

I wanted to hold him here by word if I could not by hand and you would only have run and missed his breath by a day.

The rector is kind. He says the Lord gathers the little ones up and they do not fear.

You and I know our Will was not little anymore, but I hope the rector is right about the fear.

I do not know how to be plain. Forgive me.

Your most affectionate Mother

The nib had bitten the paper hard in places.

The downstrokes were darker than they ought to have been.

Isabella touched the ink and imagined it drying, blotched by a mother’s tears.

Two sons in one year. The ledger of loss building, line upon line.

Rhys had been away at school when sorrow had called him home and sent him out again and called him home once more.

Some boys returned to school with longer legs and a new Latin primer. He had returned fewer brothers.

The horror of it crept through her.

Tap…tap…tap , the flue said, distinct, deliberate.

The sound unstitched something near her heart.

A fine sifting of ash lifted and fell as if the hearth breathed.

Steam drifted down the chimney’s throat, a thin fall that kissed the back of her hand and vanished with a hiss.

She looked up then and saw the air above the grate shimmer as if heat rose from a fire though there was none.

The smell, wet coal and scorched fat, curdled on the back of her tongue.

She reached for the last letter. It was written in a different hand, blunter, stronger. The paper was thicker, the fold exact.

Harrowgate, 21 January 1832

My son,

Your mother is dead.

You will return at once and remain for a time. There are matters here which require attention and I will not have the running of this house left to servants. I am not inclined to write more particulars by post.

Send word of your train and the carriage shall meet you at the junction.

Your ever affectionate Father,

A. Caradoc

Isabella read it twice to be certain she had not mistaken the economy of words for cruelty.

But she read, beneath the clipped declarations, the words of a man who would not set grief to paper because ink made it true.

Aunt. Uncle. One brother, then the next.

And finally, mother. All dead. The tragedy of it tore at her.

She laid the letter with the others and sat very straight in the chair because if she bent even a little she might fold in half and not unfold again.

She thought of Rhys standing in this room, grieving.

She imagined him returning and returning until he had no returns left.

She slid her hand into her pocket and worried the slip of ribbon between her thumb and forefinger.

The hush shifted, changing its pitch. The needles along her skin sharpened, then smoothed.

Somewhere in the wall, metal dragged along stone, slow and purposeful.

The same drawling scrape she had heard the first night, as if a poker were being pulled along a hearth one inch at a time, as if someone wished to make the world look up and listen.

All she had read blended with all she had learned in Marlow, stirred into a stew of confusion.

Hargreaves’s name worked under her ribs like a sliver.

Men with a wagon at dawn. Men Rhys had hired.

He had wanted something from that office, something Hargreaves had left in his bottles and ledgers and cabinets.

Not the man himself, but the man’s knowledge.

Of what? Of whom? Her mouth tasted of metal.

She rose, certain of her destination. She could seek the kitchen, the comfort of tea and Mrs. Abernathy’s good sense. She could look for Matty’s solemn eyes and Peg’s quick smile. She could go to her room and wash her face and lie down until the tremors passed.

Instead, she took up the lamp.

This was madness, she knew. Mrs. Abernathy would call her foolhardy. But ignorance, for her, was a greater terror than any wraith. Better to risk the house’s malice than to let her mind gnaw itself hollow.

She told herself she would only look. She would stand at the foot of the north stair and breathe and listen.

She would not touch any lock, any latch.

She would not turn any knob. She would not go where she had been told not to go.

She merely wished to know if the air was as wrong as Peg had said, if the draft came hot when the weather went cold.

She wished to hear, perhaps, the chorus the workmen had heard, the howling down a cold flue, because hearing was better than imagining.

At the bottom of the stairs, she paused.

Treads pounded by centuries of feet had been worn into shallow boats. The lamps here were bracketed and cold; no one lit this place now. The dark above was heavy and thick. Isabella tested the first step with the toe of her boot, then set her weight and climbed.

The house smelled of old dust and chimney soot. And threaded through it, faint and cruel, of roses spoiled by stagnant water. Peg’s whispered rhyme brushed her memory. Iron to bind. Hearth to keep. The words deserted her now, leaving her bare.

At the landing she stopped and turned her face toward the corridor that led to the locked doors. A current drifted along the floor growing warm, then hot, swirling around her ankles, heating her face. Her shins prickled as if she stood too close to Cook’s range.