Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
This is it. This is the moment where I die.
Valerie Wightman didn’t bother to hold back a scream as the carriage threw her around like a rag doll drying on a laundry line in high winds. She clung onto the squabs, digging her fingernails into the velvet upholstery, but it barely helped.
The carriage was going too fast, and she had heard the splintering crack that spelled disaster.
At first, she had mistaken it for a thunderclap, for the skies had been threatening a storm since she departed her home of Gramfield Manor.
But when the carriage began to rock violently, she realized it was something else: a wheel must have broken off, part of it at least.
Oh, how I wish I had done more. How I wish I had seen more, experienced more.
“Lord, help me,” she prayed, scrunching her eyes shut. “Oh, heavens, please help me.”
Everyone had warned her that the road to Scotland could be a treacherous one, but she had assumed she would at least get to cross the border before any difficulty befell her.
At her best guess from the landscape, which wasn’t so considerable, having spent the majority of her life on the outskirts of London—they were still somewhere in the north of England.
“A godless place,” her mother would have said in a breathless whisper, if she were there. She, too, had been a city woman, never venturing further than the Chiltern Hills all her life.
“Oh, Mama, if you can hear me, please ask the Lord to spare me,” she begged, as the carriage tipped, and she felt certain that it was about to topple over entirely.
Then, as if her prayer had been answered, the carriage jarred to a sudden and stomach-churning halt.
Valerie couldn’t quite believe it. So much so that, for the first minute or two, her fingernails remained embedded in the upholstery, her shallow breaths a rasping echo in the abrupt silence.
Am I alive? She seemed to be. Nothing broken, nothing bruised, aside from her pride at the girlish scream she had unleashed.
From outside the relative safety of the carriage, she heard the oddly comforting sound of the driver grumbling and cursing, accompanied by the agreeing nicker of the magnificent pair of draft horses.
Her father would have turned purple with anger at the driver’s coarse language, but he was far away in London.
In Valerie’s opinion, she had never heard anything more fitting for how she felt, in that moment, than those uncouth bursts of relief and latent terror.
She straightened up as she heard footsteps coming down the side of the carriage, hoping she didn’t look quite as disheveled as she felt.
The door opened to reveal the pale driver, who had lost his hat and all the blood from his face in the effort to keep the carriage upright. “Miss Wightman, I apologize,” he said with a tremor in his voice. “It seems we’ve lost a wheel. Hit a rut somewhere and it’s snapped right off.”
“I thought as much,” Valerie replied. “You have my eternal gratitude for preventing true disaster.”
The driver scratched a gray-bearded jaw. “I don’t know about that, Miss Wightman. You won’t want to thank me yet.” He paused. “I’ll have to leave you here while I fetch help. There’s a town about five or six miles up the road, so it’ll be a fair few hours before I come back.”
A shudder ran down Valerie’s spine. “Stay here? Alone?”
She peered past the driver to survey the landscape.
The hour wasn’t terribly late, but the winter evening had already inked the sky with its dusky palette.
She hadn’t noticed the change in light when the journey had been smoother, too engrossed in a book of poetry that was easily read by lantern, but now that gloom seemed very dark indeed. Not quite night, but it soon would be.
“There must be a… farm or something, nearer to us,” she added with an anxious swallow.
The driver shook his head. “There’s nothing around here but moors and hills and sheep.
” He hesitated. “Well, no, that’s not exactly true.
The Duke of Norwood has a castle about half a mile that way,” he gestured vaguely to the west, “but that’s as good as nothing.
You’ll be better off waiting here until I return. ”
“Surely, a duke with a castle must have a carriage wheel to spare?” Valerie urged.
How could a wait of several hours, alone on a country road, be better than a half-mile walk to a duke’s residence? Evidently, she was missing something.
The uneasy driver clawed a hand through limp gray hair. “With respect, Miss Wightman, I’d rather fetch the wheel from the town.” His voice hardened at the edges. “I’m sorry, Miss, but I won’t go anywhere near that duke’s castle.”
“Whyever not?” she pressed. “You must tell me, Saxby, or I shall have no hope of understanding why you would rather walk so far and abandon me here in the meanwhile.”
“Because… It’s haunted, Miss,” the man replied in a hushed tone.
“I don’t journey this way often anymore, but I did in my younger years.
Anyone you passed told you not to ride near that castle, else you’d be touched by the curse of the estate.
Filled with ghosts it is, and I’d much rather err on the side of caution than have us journeying on with a curse following us.
You don’t ignore the local stories, Miss. ”
Valerie covered her mouth with her hand to stifle the laugh that tried to bubble out.
She didn’t know what she had expected him to say, but it was not that.
The driver, Saxby, was a gruff and grizzled sort of fellow; the type of man who wore a neat uniform but never looked comfortable in it, who had an air about him that suggested he would not shy away from a fight.
Yet, apparently, he was afraid of a few ghost stories.
“It’s a serious matter, Miss,” Saxby insisted, his eyes narrowing at the sight of her trying to cover her smirk.
Buttoning up the collar of her fur-trimmed, fur-lined pelisse and grabbing her ermine stole to keep her neck warm, Valerie moved to the carriage doorway. Saxby stepped back and instinctively offered a hand to help her down, his tired eyes widening as realization caught up a moment afterward.
“Miss, I really must insist on your staying here with the carriage,” he said in desperation.
Valerie smiled. “Saxby, I am not now, nor ever have been, afraid of ghosts. Why, sometimes ghosts are far kinder than the living.”
He stared at her as if she had suddenly sprouted a full mustache. “Miss Wightman, please…”
“I cannot stop you from walking all of that way in the dark and the cold to fetch help,” she said decisively, “but I can decide where I shall wait for your return. Forgive me, Saxby, but I would much rather be in a warm drawing room beside a roaring fire than trapped in what amounts to a box, jumping at every sound. No ghost will scare me as much as my own mind will, if I stay here by myself.”
The worried older man chewed his lip in consternation.
Valerie could not help the twinge of guilt that wriggled in her stomach, knowing she had put him in a difficult position.
He was charged with keeping her safe on her journey, yet he had no choice but to leave her.
He did not want her to go to the estate, yet he lacked the authority to forbid her.
“Take the horses with you,” she suggested. “Stay in town for the night, so you can all rest and eat well, and then we shall reconvene here at first light. That way, you will not have to come anywhere near this ‘haunted’ castle.”
The driver seemed to consider the suggestion, while Valerie wrapped the stole around her neck and pulled her gloves to tighten the fit around her fingers.
“If you will excuse me, Saxby, I must begin walking before there is no longer any light to see by,” she said firmly. “I shall see you here tomorrow morning. I shall not be late.”
Before she could take more than a couple of steps, the driver lunged into the carriage, grabbed one of the lanterns off the wall, and hurried to put it in her hand.
“For your safety, Miss,” he said grimly.
“Why, then, you should have handed me a pistol,” she teased, inwardly scolding herself for not remembering to pick up the lantern. Without it, she would almost certainly have lost her way.
Saxby’s weathered brow furrowed, adding a few more lines. “If I had one, I would.”
“Come now, you must know that a pistol is no use against a ghost.” She offered him a blithe smile, wished him and the horses a goodnight, and followed the road to where another, narrower track—barely wide enough for a curricle—splintered off.
She looked back momentarily to find Saxby watching, his lost hat recovered and held anxiously to his chest.
“Is it this way?” she shouted, hardly able to believe their luck that they had come to a standstill so close to a duke’s castle.
The older man nodded in the light of the lantern that hung from the driver’s bench.
Satisfied that she would soon be in the civilized warmth of a drawing room, or whatever the castle equivalent might be, and that she might soon have a comfortable bed to sleep in, Valerie set off down the less trodden path, muttering “ghosts, indeed” as she went.
Some ten minutes later, breathing hard and doubting her decision completely, Valerie was about to give up and retrace her steps when she ran body-first into something hard.
A gasp of pain hissed from her mouth, though her manners prevented her from using the same coarse language that the driver had.
She reached outward with shaky hands to feel what it was she had knocked into, the cold touch of metal kissing her skin.
The texture wasn’t smooth but rough and powdery, the air tinged with the sharp scent of rust.
A gate…
Relief flooded her, all of her jittering nerves aiding her strength as she tugged on the bars she had bumped into.
With a jarring screech, like these gates had not been opened in an age, they stubbornly swung inward, so reluctant that Valerie ended up squeezing through the narrow gap she had made.
My pelisse will be ruined, she lamented, but that was the least of her worries.
She jumped as lightning lit up the evening sky, a vivid flash of white that silhouetted those eerie trees… and another shape, looming out of the darkness: the crenelated edges of two square towers, a torn flag flapping in the whistling wind. A castle, just as Saxby had said.
The moment she saw it, Valerie laughed away her unease. Well, I can certainly tell why there are so many stories about this place. I almost lost my nerve.
But the creepy mystique had been pulled aside now, the frightening disguise ripped away by that flash of light, the mask dropped. It was just a castle. In the daylight, she could imagine it all looked rather charming.
What if there is no one at home?
She shrugged away the thought and hurried down the oak-lined driveway, across a carriage circle of gravel, and up to the door.
She rapped the brass knocker three times before stepping back and looking up.
There did not seem to be any candles aglow, but in a castle so enormous, the duke could not possibly afford to illuminate all the rooms, all the time.
Perhaps the household preferred to spend their evenings in another wing, out of sight of the driveway.
Her hand reached for the knocker again, when the muffled sound of footsteps from inside stayed her impatience.
The door opened enough to allow a gray-haired head to poke out, dark eyes squinting at Valerie in bewilderment. “Yes?” he said, rather rudely.
“I am Miss Valerie Wightman,” she said brightly, despite his rudeness.
“My carriage suffered some trouble on the road, and my driver has gone to town to seek assistance. As such, I am without a place to stay for the night; it would not be safe for me to stay in that carriage all alone, through the night. So, if it would not be too much bother, might you permit me a chamber in this fine castle until morning?”
She could have asked more simply, but she wanted him to know how polite she was determined to be.
The man continued to stare, as if he could not quite believe she was there. “You wish to stay here?”
“Indeed, if it would not cause you any inconvenience,” she replied with a cheery smile.
The butler—at least, she assumed he was the butler—hesitated for a moment, glancing back over his shoulder. And Valerie had the most awful feeling that he was about to refuse her.
“I assure you, I shall be gone by first light,” she urged.
The man returned his attention to her and, with a nervous chew of his lip, opened the door wide enough to let her through. “Very well,” he said in a hushed whisper, closing the door quietly behind her. “But you mustn’t, under any circumstances, leave the drawing room.”
“Oh, that is no bother. I daresay I have dozed off in worse places,” she joked, realizing that she, too, was whispering.
As the butler led her toward the drawing room, he gave her a look that seemed to say: No, Miss Wightman, I don’t think you have.