Page 37 of The Dravenhearst Brides

My dearest Margaret,

I think of you and Merrick every day as I read the papers. There are whispers in Louisville of a legislative hearing. No imminent plans but very promising indeed. It’s beginning.

I find myself keeping more to the townhouse as the weather cools.

I must confess, the crisp morning air does constrict my stamina.

Have the leaves begun to change in Frankfort?

I watch from the windows here, and I think of you, knowing what I see is but the palest imitation of the beauty of the Bluegrass in the fall.

Forever Yours,

Pa

One could only recline on stiff, upholstered sofas for so long.

Margot gave a dramatic sigh and flopped an arm over her forehead. Being confined indoors after a fainting episode reminded her of before.

She’d spent many years like this, moving from couch to couch, window seat to window seat, trying for invisibility. Because when one has a nervous breakdown amongst all of Louisville society, one has no choice but to vanish. She hadn’t wanted to be seen anyway.

Things were different now. Now, spending even a single day with her feet up felt like a prison sentence. There was nothing to keep her mind off the melancholic letter she’d just received from her father. It wasn’t so much the things he said, rather the things he didn’t. The hints between the lines.

Keeping to the townhouse.

Constricted stamina.

The woolgathering reflections of fall in the Bluegrass.

She sighed again, louder, more drawn out.

“Gracious, Margot, I didn’t peg you as one for lachrymose dramatics,” Babette said.

Margot’s gaze snapped across the room. Her mother-in-law’s specter reposed on an adjacent chaise and mimicked Margot’s posture—arm over her head, lips plumped in an exaggerated pout.

“Leave me alone.” Margot harumphed, directing her attention to the magnolias beyond the window. A rhythmic, soft thudding sounded from outside.

“Goodness me.” Babette smiled. “Aren’t we keen to play the victim today?”

“I’m not playing the victim. I’m on doctor’s orders for bedrest, and I’ll not sit here to be your plaything. Not today.”

Babette chuckled, eyes fluttering with amusement. “My plaything? Whatever has gotten into you?”

Margot’s lips tightened as an insidious chill crept across the room. She thought of Alastair. Of Merrick and Richard. Of Eleanor. Even Xander, of what she’d begun to suspect might have happened between the butler and his former mistress.

So many people, she thought, staring Babette down, who you’ve spun ’round and ’round in your web.

Babette crowed. “Oh, I see. You learned something this morning you didn’t particularly like about me. You’ve known it all along, Margot. I showed him to you myself. Do you think I’m ashamed?” Her brows dipped, the corner of her lip quirking. “I’m not.”

“Maybe you should be.”

“Maybe you are,” Babette returned. “Maybe it’s you who’s ashamed.

Because when you look at me, you recognize the darkest part of yourself.

You recognize desire. Wanting to be wanted.

” She clucked her tongue. “Is he enough for you, my son? Of course not. They never are. It’s me you want.

My approval. My attention. My love. Same as all the others.

” She rose from her seat, prowling forward like a cat.

Slinking. Margot couldn’t tear her gaze away, for even now—especially now—the woman was so goddamn beautiful.

A frigid draft blew through the room.

“I don’t,” she whispered.

“You do. I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t already been thinking about me.” With each step closer, the temperature in the room plummeted further.

“Leave me alone,” Margot said, voice shaking. She rose to go to the door, and that was when she saw it. Through the window.

Eleanor in her white gown and veil. Eleanor at the base of the nearest magnolia. Shovel in hand, digging.

Thud. The strike of metal meeting earth. A slithering whisper as the blade raised, dirt and pebbles raining to the ground. Plunk. Eleanor shucking the debris into a pile. Thud. The blade striking deep again. Plunk.

A hand clamped on Margot’s shoulder. Ice cold. She screamed.

“She’s digging for you, Dravenhearst bride,” Babette whispered. Her fingers brushed the hair at the nape of Margot’s neck. A chill ran down her spine. “For your baby. A place with all the rest.”

Margot let out another frightened cry and ran from the room. Babette’s cackling laughter echoed in her ears as she fled the house.

The sunlight was blinding but cleansing. Strong enough to chase away ghosts.

Margot leaned on one of the pillars on the portico, her arms cradling the imperceptible swell of her stomach.

She could hardly be sure it was there at all—it was still so early.

But she knew. She felt it, the precious, tiny life growing inside her.

Early or not, she loved her baby fiercely.

A piece of her and a piece of Merrick. Theirs and theirs alone.

No one could take that from her. Not Babette. Not Eleanor. Not this house.

Could they?

She looked toward the magnolias, standing sentinel at the front of the property. Eleanor was gone. If she’d been there at all.

Margot raised a hand to her forehead, her mind racing. Had Eleanor been there? A veiled ghost digging a grave in broad daylight? It seemed unlikely.

It’s getting worse. The phantasmagoria.

She shuddered, fingers knotting in her hair.

“Yoohoo!” Evangeline stood near the corner of the house, a pair of shears in hand.

Margot was so relieved to see another warm-blooded human, the menacing glint of sunlight off the blade was no deterrent. She strode toward the gardener.

“Need a hand?”

“Always,” Evangeline replied, her throaty voice carrying over the hillside. “I’ve been trimming this morning and need to start my fall pesticide application this afternoon.” Her grin was downright cheery.

“Pesticide?” Margot repeated, close enough now to fall into step. They headed for Evangeline’s gardening shed.

“First frost will fall soon,” Evangeline said, “which means outdoor critters will be wanting to come indoors where it’s toasty. Can’t have that, now can we?” She pushed open the wooden door and dropped the shears into a metal bucket full of gardening tools.

“I suppose not.” Margot tried to peek inside the shed and caught a glimpse of drying herbs strung from the low ceiling and a workbench filled with glass apothecary bottles before Evangeline closed the door.

“Gloves.” Evangeline plunked a pair into Margot’s hands. “Don’t want to be touching any of my special friends with your bare skin, sugar.”

She led her to a small enclosure, popped a rusted key into the lock, and opened the gate.

“Yes,” Evangeline breathed, eyes closing in pleasure as she gestured ahead. “This is where I keep my special friends, the ones I use for my herbals and poisons.”

They sounded like two very different things to Margot, herbals and poisons.

Evangeline inhaled deeply. “Mmm, smell that? That’ll be the hemlock.” Her beady eyes popped open. “Musty.”

Margot wrinkled her nose in distaste.

Evangeline guided her forward. “I’ll give you a quick tour, shall I?

Let’s start with my purple lovelies—larkspur, foxglove, my dearest poppies.

” She pointed to each, tweaking the poppy with particular fondness.

As her fingers drifted away, the flower heads bent, stalks twisting and stretching—unnaturally—toward Evangeline. As if she were the sun.

Margot’s eyes widened, but Evangeline just laughed.

“See how well they listen, sugar? We reap what we sow. Now see here, a small crop of hellebore. Just a smidge, plenty more down at Ruth’s cottage. Monkshood—careful not to brush up against that one. It’ll stop your heart. Oh, and of course, my Witches’ Bells. Beautiful, aren’t they?”

Margot leaned close to examine the tilted heads, heavy and dome-shaped.

Evangeline pointed. “The greens are the ones you have to watch for, easy to mistake for innocent. Poison ivy—leaves of three, let them be. Belladonna, also called deadly nightshade, identified by the star-shaped pattern of the crown.” She lifted a stalk, bending the five-pointed leaf toward Margot, a dark berry at its center.

“A subtherapeutic ingestion causes hallucinations. A high dose is deadly.” She dropped it and moved on.

Margot backtracked, pointed. “Why isn’t the nightshade with your purples?”

“Clever girl. Because belladonna berries only turn this nice, bruising hue this time of year.” She smiled. “Now be a dear and pluck a few hellebore petals, will you? And then, right by the gate, there’s a bit of garlic from the summer harvest. Pull a few up for me.”

Margot hurried to do as instructed. Once finished, Evangeline met her at the gate, her own fingers filled with purple flora.

Monkshood, Margot suspected.

They traipsed back to the gardening shed, where a single hanging bulb illuminated the dim space. A moth beat against it, plinking softly. The shed smelled of cedar and thyme with just a hint of something more darkly pungent. Perhaps turpentine?

Evangeline busied herself with a mortar and pestle, grinding up the harvested hellebore. She peeled back the garlic next, plucked out a few rotted cloves, then tossed two bulbs into a water-filled Erlenmeyer flask.

“I always have garlic percolating,” she explained, grabbing another flask whose fluid was tinged yellow, two swollen garlic heads bobbing in situ. “We’ll use these today.”

It was fascinating to watch Evangeline, a mad scientist at work.

Her wild gray hair shone silver beneath the dusky lightbulb.

Her knobby fingers moved with precision, using pipettes to combine elements with accuracy.

Four drops here, seven there. A single drop—that was of distilled monkshood.

And all the while, Evangeline muttered softly under her breath.

“Is it a secret recipe?” Margot asked as they neared the end. Evangeline was bottling the finished solution now, oddly harmless looking. Near-translucent in its final form, just the barest tinge of yellow. Death disguised as innocence.

“Everything around here is a secret,” Evangeline replied, giving a closed-lip smile. “Haven’t you figured that out?”

Margot leaned in the doorway. “Will you share one with me?”

Her smile faltered at the edges. “Depends what you want to know.”

“Why don’t you ever go inside the manor?”

Evangeline’s smile disappeared. Her face darkened.

“Because it’s a den of vipers in there, that’s why.

A pit of pestilence. Rotting, moldering legacies will cling to you like feral ivy, if you let them.

” She snorted. “Nothing natural, nothing good, survives in that house. You need to be careful, Margot. That woman has claws like you’ve never seen. ”

“What woman?”

“Babette.” Evangeline’s eyes narrowed.

“What did you think of her, when she was alive?”

Evangeline put the pesticide on her workbench. She made a great show of attaching an atomizer to the top of the glass bottle.

“She was the most beguiling witch I’ve ever seen,” she finally said. She knotted her hands around the neck of the bottle, staring through the small window overlooking the manor. The glass was peppered with hairline fractures that rippled outward like spiderwebs.

“She could enchant a man with a single look. Women too. Babette didn’t discriminate…

she could make anyone fall in love in a heartbeat.

She had the kind of charm that can’t be bottled”—Evangeline shook her pesticide solution—“but was just as deadly. And she did it for her own amusement, the way a cat plays with a mouse before devouring it.” At this, she cut her eyes to Margot.

“That kind of power without conscience…it’s lethal.

She deserved what she got, in the end. You reap what you sow.

” She rapped the bottle twice against her workbench, nodding. “That witch had it coming.”

“She killed herself,” Margot replied uneasily.

“Oh, sugar.” Evangeline’s eyes sparked, conspiratorial. “I’ve never believed that, not for one moment. That woman was far too conceited to kill herself.”

“Then what happened?”

“Eleanor’s ghost remains here because she’s grieving—yes, I know all about Eleanor,” she said, taking in Margot’s widening eyes.

“She’s a danger to others because she’s a true threat to herself, consumed with heartache.

Babette remains because she’s vengeful. She’s a danger to others because, even now, she enjoys breaking hearts.

And she simply can’t bear the thought that someone broke hers.

Broke it beyond repair when they stopped it from beating. ”