Page 21 of The Moorwitch
She flaps her hand. “Aye, I forgot how you modern types are. You are quite young, aren’t you? And pretty.” She says this the way a cook might call a carrotscraggly. “Well, I suppose it’s fortunate you found our Mr. North after his horse threw him.”
“Oh, he ... told you what happened, then?”
“He said the storm spooked Bell, though I’ve never known the horse to jump at the wind before.”
I smile weakly. “I do know many pain-relieving charms—”
“I think that as long as you are with us,” Mrs. MacDougal replies, “it would be best to keep your spools in their box.”
“Oh.” I blink. “Well, of course, it is your house.”
“It is Mr. North’s house,” she corrects me. “And he is particular about the ... activities performed inside it.”
Meaning he is no lover of magic. I’ve known people like that, who saw magic as perverted or wicked, even though the majority of society accepts it as useful. Even Queen Victoria is trained in it and keeps a host of Weavers at her beck and call. I tense, feeling protests rise in my throat, but I swallow them and feel a bit less sorry about knocking the laird of Ravensgate off his horse and onto his arse. So much for asking if I might Weave some household spellknots for them in exchange for room and board. “I suppose once the rain has stopped, I shall be on my way to Blackswire. Is it much further down the road?”
“An hour’s walk,” she says. Then her expression softens a little. “But I suppose we ought to feed you and set up a room for the night. It’s dark now, and rain or no, I cannot send you out in the cold.”
The moment I try to fall asleep, Ravensgate seems to awaken, creaking and groaning like an old woman with a secret she is dying to share. A hard rain patters against the windowpanes.
The guest room Mrs. MacDougal arranged for me is very much like the one I had in my aunt’s house. The four-poster bed is too largeand high, requiring steps to reach its top, and the walls are the same crimson as my uncle’s old study. Rolling restlessly, I try to drown out the howl of the moor wind with a cashmere pillow embroidered with little leaping foxes. Its gold fringe tickles my neck.
The rain slows to a gentle patter, then stops altogether. Night deepens until the tall pendulum clock in the corner ticks an hour past midnight with its ornately scrolled hands.
Then something scratches at my door.
I bolt upright and light my bedside candle with a quick fire knot, momentarily forgetting I’d been ordered not to Weave within this house. My hair is down and wild around my shoulders, unruly brown curls relaxing after being bound tightly all day.
“Who’s there?” I call softly.
There comes another scratch, followed by a soft whine.
With a sigh of relief, I push out of bed and find a pair of silk slippers in the corner; they’re patterned in what must be the North tartan, green stripes on blue with threads of yellow and red. Shuffling across the cold floorboards, I open the door, and there is the black dog, his nose snuffing at the carpet. He bounds up when he sees me and issues a happy bark.
“Hush!” I scold, crouching to tap my finger on his muzzle. “What are you after, then? Shouldn’t you be sleeping by your master’s bed?”
He slaps his great wet tongue on my hand. Stifling a laugh, I push him away, and he finally goes, padding quietly down the carpeted corridor.
I start to close my door again, then stop.
The hallway bends away to the right and left, draped in soft shadows. The floorboards beneath my feet groan as I lean forward to peer into the gloom, and on the walls, oil paintings gleam with the light of my candle; I glimpse the arch of a horse’s neck, a leaping fox, a frowning woman in stiff clothes and a high wig.
“Is that . . . ?” I murmur.
I step across the hallway and take a closer look. The woman in the painting frowns at me, clutching a fan to her breast as if askance at my curiosity. She is draped in a tartan arasaid that matches my slippers, pinned at her breast with a raven brooch. The style of her gown dates her as being perhaps two hundred years old. I press my finger to the painting, feeling the coarse brushstrokes beneath the fading varnish, and, squinting, make out the little box beneath the woman’s other hand.
“Is that a threadkit, madam?” I whisper. “Were you a Weaver?”
She glowers reproachfully, and I find the answer hidden in the delicate strokes of red paint around her bodice—unmistakably some sort of embroidered charm.
“How very curious,” I murmur, stepping back. “No magic in Ravensgate, indeed.”
I glance down the hallway, in the direction the dog had gone, my heart thumping and all hope of sleep banished. More paintings beckon in the darkness, my candle’s flame reflecting on their red walnut and silver frames.
It couldn’t hurt, perhaps, to have abitof a snoop.
Nosiness is, after all, my third fault.
I snatch the candle from my bedside and slip down the hall. I worked out that Sylvie and Mr. North sleep one floor above, and the MacDougals a floor below, so I don’t fear waking them. Even so, I go quietly, feeling like a spirit in a ruin. I creep past austere portraits, the eyes of North ancestors boring into my back, and suits of armor that glint in the light of my candle. None of them hold threadkits or spools, though I find one little portrait of a woman at a spinning wheel. There’s no telling whether the thread she spun was meant for spells or for simple cloth.