“Won’t you get your ears boxed?” Mary asked with a giggle.
But Lee was already leaving us, tiptoeing down the lane and gesturing for us to follow. The full moonlight made his skin glow like polished bone.
“Oh, but I would suffer far worse to have this mystery solved.”
I believed him, and it frightened me to my core.
Chapter Thirty
“Is this the place?” I asked as we approached a trio of cottages a half mile from the village center. They were set back from the main thoroughfare leading through town. A single unmarked dirt path led to a smattering of trees ringed like a wall around the houses. We clustered together closely as we walked, Mary’s hand brushing mine as we avoided the noisier gravel of the road and kept to the overgrown grass.
“To my knowledge, yes,” Lee whispered back. “Not that these homes are particularly well marked.”
“How do you know of this place?” Mary slowed down a little. We were nearing the trees. The cottages beyond lay dark inside. I glanced back toward Derridon, its limits shaped roughly like a potato on its side. The inn was still lit and inviting, and the quaint homes laid out in orderly rows were so different from these homes that seemed to want nothing to do with the town.
“My uncle and I are looking into a matter of inheritance,” Lee explained. He pulled back a few branches on an elm and surveyed the way ahead. “I found the directions to this place in his things.”
“Why didn’t he show you himself?”
“I don’t know.” He let the branch swing back into place and turned to us, rubbing his pointed chin. “His heart doesn’t seem to be in the search. He’s hardly mentioned it since we arrived. I have to wonder . . .”
I thought again of Mr. Morningside’s suspicions but said nothing. What was the point in making him worry about that now? If anything, we could look in after George Bremerton and see just what he was up to first.
“Either he doesn’t care or he thinks it’s a lost cause,” Lee concluded. He inhaled deeply, moving carefully through the trees. “We’re here now; we might as well see what’s what.”
“At this hour? Isn’t that terribly rude?” Mary asked sheepishly.
“My uncle is going, isn’t he? He must know them. . . . I’ve waited long enough. This is my parentage, yes? I want to know what it is he’s found.”
I was less certain, and so was Mary, judging by her furrowed brow and pursed lips. Tarrying, I watched Lee push the branches and brush aside as he went ahead, and Mary grabbed my hand, squeezing it.
“Something doesn’t feel right,” she mouthed.
“Just be careful,” I replied silently.
She nodded and followed almost precisely in Lee’s footsteps. An owl hooted overhead, standing sentinel somewhere in the leaves above us. There was more than enough moonlight to navigate by, but that brightness made me feel naked and vulnerable as we passed out of the safety of the trees and into the void near the cottages. No lights. No smoke from the chimneys. No signs of life whatsoever. Two homes lay before us in a pair, the third across from them on the other side of the dirt path. The third one was more recently painted, the door glistening with a fresh coat of white paint. A one-man cart leaned against the cottage with the white door, and the raspberry bushes surrounding the walk looked trampled.
Lee pushed his shoulder against the nearest cottage, peering around the edge to look at the one with the white door. We followed, waiting on him. Mary was right—something did not sit well with me. It wasn’t just the darkness in the houses but the unnerving silence. No dogs had noticed our approach, and any crofter this far from the safety of the village would keep a hound on alert.
And there was something else—something harder to describe as more than an overall sense of emptiness. It was like knowing someone was watching you from a distance. You could always feel it, that tickle on the back of your neck, but you could also feel when there was nobody around at all. If you wanted to steal a loaf of bread in the market or filch from the kitchens at Pitney, you had better grow eyes on the back of your head. The houses felt lifeless. Hollow. Not safe, but not populated either.
Yet George Bremerton had come this way. These cottages were important enough to mention in his personal items. It wouldn’t be right to pull Lee away now, not when he was closer than ever to some hint about his blood.
“Which one do you reckon?” Mary murmured.
Without thinking, I said, “The white door.”
“Aye,” she replied, too quietly for Lee to hear. “There’s darkness beyond that door, that’s how we know.”
“We?”
A twig snapped. And yes, it was near the door we had guessed. I turned to look at her but Lee had grabbed me by the wrist, tugging me out onto the dirt path and toward that glossy white door. “Come along, that will be my uncle . . .”
There was nobody out in the lane, just us and the owl and its mournful cry. George Bremerton would have been a welcome sight, in fact, but there was nobody hiding in the shadows around the cottage. That door, however, wasn’t locked; the knob had been bashed in, splinters hanging off the ragged edge.
“Careful,” I whispered, tugging on the back of Lee’s coat. “Look, someone’s broken in.”
He lifted his hand, hesitating, placing his palm on the door before making a fist. Oh no. Mary and I lurched forward at the same time to try to stop him from knocking, but it was too late. Thunk, thunk, thunk.
“Um . . . hello? Is anyone . . . There appears to be something wrong with your door.”
I flinched, holding my breath, but the door didn’t open on an angry, armed farmer or highwayman or anyone at all. Silence. Somehow that was worse. Lee knocked again, and again. It was polite of him, but after the third or fourth time it became clear nobody would answer.
Mary gently nudged my side. “Louisa . . . do you smell that?”
God, did I. “Copper. It smells like—”
“Blood,” she mouthed.
Lee hadn’t heard us. He shifted from foot to foot, weighing the options. “Then I suppose we just go in,” he said in a croak. His hand visibly trembled as he took the crooked knob and pushed, opening the door onto a scene of unimaginable horror.
“Lord,” he whispered, covering his nose and mouth with his sleeve. “It’s . . . Dear God, it’s everywhere.”
Blood. Coating the floor. Sprayed across the walls. Dripping down the stairwell in slow, sticky rivers. The smell was hideous; I could hardly breathe. And it was not just blood, but all the other soft, flingable parts of a human body—guts and pieces of guts, skin and sinew, all of it hanging from the lamps, the banister, the buck’s head mounted in the foyer.
In the gore covering the floor was a single set of footsteps. Large ones.
“We should go,” I whispered, already backing away.
“Uncle?” Lee called out, pushing bravely or stupidly into the depths of the cottage. The foyer had three exits—the stairs leading up, a passage to the back, and an open archway to the right. He chose the room to the right, still covering his face as he picked his way through the carnage. “Uncle, are you here? Is anyone here? Are you hurt, Uncle?”
My shoes squelched, sucked down by the still-wet blood coating the floor. I followed him through the house, avoiding unidentifiable body parts on the floor. An eyeball stared up at me from under a rocking chair and I felt my stomach drop and threaten to empty. It was almost too much to take in, too violent to make sense of.
Lee no longer called for his uncle. He had frozen in the middle of what must have been the cottage sitting room. Over the hearth, suspended by two ropes around the wrist, was the pink and dripping skeleton, untidily shredded, bits of skin and muscle hanging like tattered linens from the bones.
I heard Lee vomiting and forced down my own bile.
“This isn’t just a murder,” Mary said, standing next to me, her voice muffled by her own sleeve. “I think it’s a warning, aye? There’s a message.” She pointed to the splattered wall behind the h
anging corpse. Someone had drawn a symbol in blood, a crude drawing of a lamb curled up and eating its own tail surrounded by a sun.
“Not much of a message if it cannot be discerned.” Lee coughed, righting himself and wiping discreetly at his mouth.
“That only means it isn’t meant for us,” I said. But I memorized it. If George Bremerton’s trip in this direction wasn’t suspicious, I didn’t know what was. Mr. Morningside was right—something was amiss with Lee’s uncle. Even if he had nothing to do with the massacre in the house, this address had been put down in his things. I hazarded a tiny step toward the hearth and the skeleton dangling above it. There had been a fire lit recently, the ashes still giving off a subtle heat. Something curled and white winked from the otherwise black pile of burnings, and I crouched down, careful to avoid the slimy foot just above my head.
I pulled the little curl of paper out swiftly, hissing from the heat of the ashes.
“What did you find there?” Lee asked. I could hear the lingering queasiness in his voice.
“Not sure,” I said. And I wasn’t, until I read the single, burned line of script. It was nonsense, but I kept it, hiding it in my palm and then sliding it into my sleeve, the old grifter tricks proving useful.
The only words I could make out were the last word of a sentence and the first few of another: traitor. The first and last children will ascend with or without your
“It’s nothing,” I told them. “Just a bit of rubbish that didn’t burn through.”
“Shhh!” Mary whipped around, clutching my shoulder. “Someone is here.”
I heard a single heavy footstep in the hall and went rigid, convinced that we were about to meet the unholy monster that had ripped this person to pieces. Turning only my head, I watched Mary dash to the archway, hiding away from the door. It was Lee who brought me out of my fright, taking me by the hand and pulling me toward a shadowy corner made by the stony bulk of the fireplace. He pulled me close to his chest, flattening us against the wall. His heart pounded against my back, his panicked breath hot on my neck. His arms folded across my stomach and held me. He gave one squeeze, and it felt paralyzingly like a good-bye.
The footsteps advanced slowly. The wooden boards creaked, then louder. They were close now. I kept my eyes half lidded, waiting, wondering if Mary would stay hidden or strike, wondering if we had any chance at all of making it out of that cursed house alive.
Then the stranger spoke and I felt all the breath rush out of both of us at once.
“Rawleigh?” It was George Bremerton. “Are you there, boy? Are you alive?”
“Uncle!” Lee shot out from behind me, stumbling to the middle of the room. The skeleton stared down at them with eyeless holes, a silent and terrible audience. “We should flee this place; the murderer could be anywhere!”
They embraced, and George Bremerton caught my gaze, his jaw tightening with anger or despair, I couldn’t say. He closed his eyes tightly and held his nephew, turning them until his back shielded Lee from the corpse’s watch.
“I told you not to come,” I heard him whisper fiercely. “I told you not to come. Look away now, Rawleigh. By God, this is not the way for a mother to meet her son.”
Chapter Thirty-One
The ride back to Coldthistle House was long and wordless. George Bremerton did not protest when Lee silently signaled for me to ride in the carriage with them. I knew it was because I had been attacked by the doctor on the initial trip, but I also sensed he wanted me there. He wanted comfort.
And God, did he deserve it.
I was glad that he wanted no conversation at all, for what did one say to a young man who had just seen his mother in the most nightmarish state? It was unthinkable. Devastating. My heart ached for him. It ached in a way that left me deeply confused. Was this what it felt like to really have a friend? To care almost to distraction about another’s welfare and happiness? Of course I hadn’t had the heart to speak of escape after the shock. . . . That dream seemed distant again now, hidden behind a heavy black curtain that I had no tools or energy to move.
Yet something had to be done. Never had so much death descended on my life until I came to Coldthistle House.
The journey was nearly complete when Lee brought his head away from the window. He had laid it there for the entirety of the ride, his forehead pressed hard to the glass. His skin had left a smudge on the foggy window. Slowly, he turned to me with a pained, helpless expression, a smile that wasn’t a smile but a buttressed door for the hurt that might spill out.
He pushed something across the seat toward me, a little shiny thing, slender and engraved with leaves.
A spoon.
“Thought it might be a funny gift,” he said in a small voice. “I nicked it from the Rook and Crook. Then I felt so bad about stealing it that I left a bit of coin behind to pay for it. I thought I would feel bad about it for a while, but it’s just a small thing now. Just a stupid, small thing.”
“It isn’t stupid,” I replied. George Bremerton regarded us openly, but that didn’t matter; his judgment and his opinion were irrelevant. The world outside the carriage was irrelevant, because this person who had become my friend without my wanting him to was suffering. “Thank you, Lee. I think it’s perfect. And I think any establishment called the Rook and Crook should expect the occasional act of petty thievery.”
He almost smiled, ducking his head before looking out the window again. Across from us, George Bremerton stared. Or rather, he glowered at me under a brow heavy with consternation, rarely blinking, hardly moving, just silently communicating his displeasure.
“Why were you at the house?” He was asking me, Lee apparently being beyond reproach in this matter.
This I could do. It was easier to make a mask of my face and respond coolly than to deal with Lee’s sadness. “We followed you.”
“This was your bloody idea, wasn’t it?” He snorted and tossed his hair like an angry horse. “Bad influence. I knew it. Can spot a jumped-up grasper like you from a mile off.”
“Uncle,” Lee said softly, uncertainly, rousing himself as if from a deep sleep.
Bremerton smirked. “You stay away from my nephew or I’ll have you sacked.”
“By all means,” I replied boldly. “Give it your all.”
“Don’t speak to Louisa that way,” Lee grumbled. He crossed his arms over his chest, shifting infinitesimally closer to me on the cushioned bench. The carriage teetered on; we had to be nearing our destination. “It wasn’t her idea at all; it was mine. If you want someone to blame, then blame me, but why you need anyone to blame at all right now I cannot imagine. There’s been a tragedy, I’ve lost my mother, and all you can do is pick a fight with my friend!”
“This is not the time or place for this discussion,” Bremerton began.
“And why not? Say what you will, Uncle, I trust her.”
“Rawleigh . . .” He pinched his forehead between thumb and forefinger, pressing his lips together until they were white. “Very well. I hadn’t gone to the house earlier because my contacts in Derridon sent a note to me at Coldthistle. It was about your mother. About her recent . . . predilections. She got herself wrapped up in unnatural practices. Devil worship. Witchery. I did not want you to think less of her. I wanted to protect you from an ugly truth.”
Silence. It was not my place to speak, and instead I watched the blood drain from Lee’s face. His mouth opened and closed a few times, but no words came out.
“I’m sorry—more sorry than you know—that it turned out this way,” Bremerton added. “That woman did not deserve to die.”
Lee did nothing but nod, over and over again, locked in a daze. “Then I suppose we shall be leaving. She can provide no proof of my parentage now.”
“I will have her belongings removed and sort through them. Perhaps she left something behind to back your claim. After the burial is finalized, it will be time for us to leave,” he said. “Unless of course you would rather return to the estate without me,
nephew. You are not obligated to stay.”
“No,” Lee replied firmly. “I want to be there. I don’t care what she became in the end; I belong here until she is at rest.”
The carriage rolled into the drive as dawn broke across the sky. A thin blue ribbon shimmered on the horizon, ravens gathering in the trees on the lawn and the gables. I was not happy to see Coldthistle again, but I knew at least a bed waited for me somewhere. The exhaustion could not be fought any longer, and my eyes drooped with each passing moment. The rocking and warmth of the carriage might have put me to sleep if it weren’t for the tense sadness hanging among us. And I felt pulled down to the ground by the weight of my failure; the night had gone completely awry. We had not escaped. I had been attacked. Lee’s mother was dead, and brutally so. No matter how hard I tried, all roads led once more to the boardinghouse.
Mrs. Haylam was waiting for us outside the door, and Foster jumped down quickly to help our exit. I stood in the looming shadow of the house and watched the housekeeper take us all in, and I saw the moment she realized Dr. Merriman was no longer in our party. She did not look to me for answers, but to Chijioke, who had stopped the supply wagon just behind us. Mary trotted into the yard on her horse, diverting her course at once to the barn.
“Has the good doctor elected to stay in town?” she asked tightly.
“He preferred the comforts of the inn there,” Chijioke smoothly explained. “We will not be seeing him again. I will have his things packed and delivered right away.”
It was a performance for the guests, I knew, and Lee did nothing to amend the story. I wasn’t even certain he heard any of it. He simply drifted into the house, as slow and pale as a ghost.
When the men were inside, I volunteered myself to Mrs. Haylam, walking slowly with her inside and into the vaulted expanse of the foyer. “He went mad after talking about his dead daughter,” I told her without prompting. “I thought he would kill me; he would have, I’m sure of it, if Mary and Chijioke hadn’t helped.”