Page 22 of Savage Blooms (Unearthly Delights #1)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Adam

Adam tried to take Eileen’s advice and entertain himself by exploring the house, but he just got turned around again. When he found himself once again on the threshold of the library, he couldn’t be sure how he got there, but Eileen was waiting for him.

“Welcome,” she said in that antiquated lilt, looking up from a stack of papers on the desk.

“Hey,” Adam responded, shrugging off his backpack. “I brought my laptop in case we wanted to look anything up online.”

“Good thinking,” Eileen said.

Adam drifted past the bookshelves, slower this time, taking in the titles.

It was mostly old novels and local history and books of letters from philosophers and politicians Adam had never heard of.

He plucked up one of the histories, flipping through the pages until he discovered an illustration protected by tissue paper in the center of the tome.

It was a penciled rendition of the rolling hills of the Craigmar estate, the house a tiny smudge in the distance.

“How old is this drawing, do you think?” Adam asked, setting the open book down on the table before Eileen.

“A hundred years old or so, I’d say.”

“It doesn’t look any different than the view outside the window now.”

“Craigmar changes at a glacial pace. She was the same when my father was a boy, and when his father’s father was a boy. Industrialization improved the machinery we used and the speed at which we were able to communicate with the outside world, but not much else changed.”

“Where does the money come from?” Adam asked, realizing too late that his all-too-American curiosity about local economics might come off as tactless. Eileen didn’t seem bothered.

“Investments, real estate and sheep, mostly. I own most of Wyke, the little village you passed through to get here.”

“So you’re a landlady,” he said, a smile pulling at his lips as he flipped through the books, admiring another sketch of the rocky coastline beyond the grazing green.

“More or less,” she said.

Adam glanced up to find that Eileen was standing very close to him, her dark eyes fixed on his face. For a moment, he was seized by the thought – the hope? – that she might kiss him.

He cleared his throat and closed the book.

“Sorry, I got distracted. Where do you think we should start?”

“It seems wisest to start with my grandmother,” Eileen said, turning from Adam as though sensing his self-consciousness.

Eileen hoisted up an iron poker and stabbed at the crackling fire, still warming the room well into spring.

It was colder out here on the coast than it had been on the drive over from Edinburgh, and the house was impressively drafty.

“From her birth up until her disappearance.”

“Disappearance?” Adam said. “I thought you said she died.”

“I’m sure she did, eventually.”

“Well, how did she disappear? What happened to her?”

“I don’t know,” Eileen said, shrugging one shoulder. “No one does. Maybe she managed to run away from this place without getting dragged back. That would have been a feat.”

Adam’s hand hovered over one of the boxes of family records, and Eileen nodded, bidding him on. Adam removed the lid and peered down into piles of handwritten letters, some stored safely away in their envelopes, others unevenly folded or crinkled at the edges.

“Looks like this is one of my mother’s boxes,” Eileen said, picking up a letter and running her finger over the name it was addressed to. Jennifer Kirkfoyle.

“They all smell like flowers,” Adam said. “And maybe raspberries?”

“Guerlain Idylle,” Eileen responded with a fond smile.

She pressed one of the letters to her nose and inhaled deeply, her face softening into a girlish smile.

“Her signature perfume. She was a prolific letter-writer. It was her favorite way to keep in touch with her friends back in England. She sprayed every letter with that perfume.”

“Is England where she met your dad?” Adam asked. He found that he was truly curious about Eileen’s tangled family history, and not just about the way it may intersect with his own. She was a riddle of a girl, and part of him hoped her upbringing might hold some clues to help him solve her.

“At Cambridge,” Eileen said, removing letters by the handful and beginning to sort them into piles.

Categorized by the person her mother had been in correspondence with, it looked like.

“They were university sweethearts. My mum wasn’t Scottish, though.

She was a blonde English rose, if you can believe it. I look nothing like her.”

Adam couldn’t parse her tone, nor read the expression in her downcast eyes, so he asked: “Did you two get along?”

“I always took more after my father. We were both quick to anger and quick to affection. It wasn’t that my mother and I didn’t get along; I know she loved me very much. I just think she wasn’t sure what to do with me, most days.”

“So it was just the three of you out here, growing up?” Adam went on, taking up a handful of letters and sorting through for his grandfather’s name.

“That’s right. My father’s father was long dead by the time I was born.

It’s a miracle he lasted long enough for my father to go away to university.

My grandfather always had a weak heart; cardiac arrest did for him at the end.

At least that’s what the doctor said. Personally, I think some creature from underground frightened him to death.

That’s one of their favorite ways to pick off the nervous ones in my family. ”

Adam still wasn’t sure how to approach the whole family curse thing, or Eileen’s bone-deep conviction that there were magical creatures out in the woods who wanted to kill her, so he tried to keep the conversation focused on more mundane things.

“Didn’t you get lonely? It doesn’t sound like you ever left Craigmar to go to school.”

“Certainly not. I wasn’t well enough, and I didn’t like other children much. But how could I have been lonely? I had Finley right next door. He’s all I ever needed.”

Adam stopped what he was doing and stared at her. She spoke so plainly, as though it were the simplest thing in the world. Adam couldn’t tell if she was putting on a strong face by being dismissive, or if she really didn’t see how that was not at all normal.

“Have you ever left Craigmar?”

“Of course. When my parents were still alive, one of them would stay here while the other took me into town, or on drives to see the countryside. I went to Glasgow once, for my tenth birthday. That was exciting. But my father called my mother in a panic, and we had to come home early. He had volunteered to stay behind and watch the estate, but then he started hearing voices in his sleep telling him to jump from the third-story window.”

“Did your dad have, like, mental health stuff going on?” Adam asked delicately.

It was probably invasive, but he had to ask.

He had to know that Eileen was at least considering the fact that perhaps faeries had nothing to do with her family’s hereditary propensity for emotional anguish and sudden death.

Eileen let out a sharp bark of a laugh, like a Pomeranian.

“Don’t we all! Let’s move on to the next box. I don’t think there’s anything relevant in this one.” She carefully stacked her mother’s letters back in the box, then wiped the perfumed dust from her hands. “Let’s try photos next. What did your grandfather look like?”

“A lot like me,” Adam replied, scrubbing at his eyes. They were already burning from looking through the letters, and they had barely started. There must be eight boxes piled on this desk, and Eileen said there were more in storage. “Blond hair, blue eyes. Not as tall, though.”

“I can work with that,” Eileen said, placing her mother’s box of letters on the ground and hoisting a box labelled Memories towards them both. She popped the lid to reveal stacks of loose photographs, along with a few bound albums.

“Do you think there’ll be pictures of him in with the family stuff?”

“Probably not, but it’s worth trying,” Eileen said. “If you’ll recall my father’s portrait, Kirkfoyle blood runs strong. We tend towards dark coloring, not fair. No matter who we marry, that brunette hair tends to pull through. If your grandfather is here, he’ll be easy to spot.”

“You’re sure you’re okay with me going through all this with you?” Adam said, fingers itching to touch the yellowed photographs.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I don’t know, it just seems…”

“Intimate?” Eileen asked with a wolfish smile. “Maybe I like being intimate with you, Adam Lancaster.”

Adam ignored the way his cheeks heated at that remark, then nodded and plunged his hands into the photographs.

Eileen helped him sort the photographs into piles, stopping occasionally to introduce him to a family member via their ghostly visage, imprinted forever on Polaroid.

Adam saw countless pictures of her parents when they were young and in love, Jennifer gamine-slender and grinning with her long honey-straw hair tousled by the wind, James with his arms slung around his wife, looking slightly bohemian despite the expensive clothes with deliberate five o’clock shadow and his waves of dark hair curling past his ears.

He also saw a couple of pictures of a teenage Arabella, one in which she was striking an arabesque pose, in tights and ballet shoes, on the upstairs landing, and another in which she was dressed for some type of formal event in the library, primly done up in a cream brocade dress.

She looked very much like Eileen, if Eileen’s long oval face was pinched into a heart, and if Eileen gave off ultra feminine energy as opposed to unexpected but alluring androgyny.

“Is everyone in your family ridiculously good-looking?” Adam muttered, pausing for a half second too long on a candid picture of James in evening dress smiling rakishly over a glass of champagne at the camera, no doubt held by Jennifer.

“Are you trying to use my dead family to come onto me?” Eileen asked with a smirk. “How macabre.”

She bumped shoulders with him companionably, and it put Adam enough at ease to flirt back, if only a little bit. There was no harm in a bit of good-natured flirting, right? Society was basically built on flirting.

“You seem like the type of person who appreciates a macabre compliment.”

“Maybe I am.”

Adam was quickly forgetting what the purpose of this exercise was, especially when Eileen’s eyes slid languidly to his mouth. But then she looked past him and let out a gasp of triumph.

“Ah! Is this him?”

Adam didn’t see the picture at first among the dozens of photographs spread out on the table. But then Eileen plucked up a single Polaroid, and a knot formed in Adam’s throat.

Robert Lancaster stood in three-quarters profile, gazing out over the green with his hands tucked into the pockets of an oversized gray wool coat, his scarf catching in the wind.

There was no date on the photograph, no hint to who had taken it, and no seasonal indicator in the gray haze of the sky above Craigmar, but it was definitely him.

Robert was young in this picture, maybe not yet twenty.

His head of stick-straight blond hair hadn’t begun to thin, and his cornflower eyes – Adam’s eyes – were clear.

“Oh my God,” Adam said, pinching the photograph tight between his fingers like a gust of wind might snatch it away.

“It is him, isn’t it?” Eileen said.

“It’s him,” Adam said, eyes suddenly stinging. He blinked away the tears, more a physiological response to unexpectedly seeing his grandfather than an expression of sadness. “That’s my grandad.”

“He was here,” Eileen said, squeezing Adam’s bicep tight. That touch anchored Adam to reality, to the solid warmth of Eileen beside him, and he was grateful for it. “He was here, Adam. You were right.”

“Yeah,” Adam said, nodding and trying to keep his head. “But we still don’t know why he was here, or for how long, or what he knew about Craigmar.”

“He knew about the faeries. I feel it in my gut. My grandmother must have told him.”

“Maybe,” Adam conceded. “But I’d like more details, or at least a little more evidence.”

“And there’s time for that,” Eileen said, dark eyes suddenly softer than Adam had yet seen them, softer than he thought possible. “But we don’t have to rush. You can just enjoy this small win for now.”

Eileen fell silent as they both gazed at the photograph, taking in every detail.

“He looks happy,” Eileen said after a long while, and it was this simple statement that made a stray tear trickle down Adam’s cheek. He swiped it away quickly with his fist, and Eileen, thankfully, didn’t say anything about it.

“Can I keep this?” Adam asked. “I’ll make sure it stays safe.”

“Of course,” Eileen said. “I’m happy you have this photograph, at least. And, for what it’s worth, I’m glad you found your way here.”

Adam looked at her, the chestnut highlights in her dark hair shining in the light falling through the windows, and allowed himself, for one moment, to feel that same happiness his grandfather must have felt discovering this place and its strange, lovely people for the first time.

“I am too,” he said.