Chapter 3
CHAPTER
Three
The marshes of Wolf’s Run spanned far into the horizons on either side of the narrow dirt road.
It was an ocean of limply wavering grass and congealed puddles of slop, and all Jane could see through a creeping fog so thick that it blotted out the sun were crosses.
There were hundreds of them, sprouted from the mud in sprigs of rust, wood, and stone that the carriage carelessly rattled past every couple of yards.
Jane’s mouth ran dry and her palms sweated within her gloves as she wondered how many of them marked the placement of a body.
Peat ensured that a corpse drowned in a bog would be preserved, making it into something of a mummy.
And the more Jane thought of a potential hoard of mummified dead haunting the depths of the marsh, the more she fiddled with the trilobite necklace between her fingers.
Once she imagined Terence’s brother’s grave being somewhere out in those reedy waters, she decided she was dwelling on the subject too much.
“The villagers believe they bring protection,” Terence’s voice startled her free of her morbid daydreaming as they passed a crudely made wooden cross with several rosaries draped across it.
He had been abnormally silent during the ride north from Cambridge, and it waned Jane’s initial excitement about this whole trip into indistinguishable nerves.
He was ill at ease, but not because of her.
It was something else, she knew it, but not knowing what that something else was made her ill at ease, too.
The leers of the locals did little to alleviate those pins and needles prickling beneath her skin.
As they passed through Wolf’s Run—a gray little village bisected down its center by a road that branched into a spiderweb of alleyways, walls of mills, brick huts, a pub, a post office, a church with a bent steeple, and a graveyard—those who had been on the street abandoned chores of stringing laundry and sweeping front stoops to rush inside, where they then peeked from between their curtains to burn their stares into Jane.
Those who remained on the road went still as they watched the cab roll past, lips curled, eyes dark.
Jane wished Terence sat beside her so she could turn and hide against his shoulder.
As much as she tried to shake away the sensation, the sight of the multitude of crosses paired with Terence’s silence made it cling to her with cold, sticky fingers.
Protection against what? she questioned behind sealed lips as they passed another cross, rusted and bent.
“Are any of them bodies?” she asked instead.
Not that she feared the undead. Though she never carried weapons with her, she at least had a hairpin that, when unsheathed, bore a wicked little blade.
A weapon such as that would suffice when fending off the undead, wouldn’t it?
Her confidence wavered into oblivion as she reached into her bag to grasp the pin, nestled among the textbook and parchment she’d packed that morning, and the silver bent slightly in her grip.
Terence held her gaze for a moment, something abstruse burbling in his eyes’ dark depths, before murmuring a gentle, “I do not know. I’d rather not think of it.”
The carriage rocked as it continued down the road, kicking up thick mud beneath its wheels. The road was long and thin, being only wide enough to fit a single carriage, as it wound its way through the marshes to what the locals had christened, according to Terence, “the Drowning House.”
Jane had wondered why they would’ve called it that, but then she saw the approaching hill that arose from the water before them.
Atop it was a house jutting upward from the earth with the lopsidedness of a cracked incisor.
The closer they got, the more sparse the crosses became, as if whoever had been planting them was too afraid to dare take a step closer to the house.
Jane gripped the knife even tighter as they passed the final cross, a rather primitive one made of sticks and twine.
What had made the house so horrible in the first place that not even some vandal armed with crucifixes felt safe enough to approach?
And why are we approaching?
Rain pattered against the carriage as it rolled to a stop before a set of stone steps, and Jane stared up at the house with a seedling of disappointment planted in her belly.
It looked painfully ordinary, with what appeared to be rot gnawing away at the brick siding, darkening the exterior with some blank, moldering infection.
The house was two stories high and geometric in shape, with four windows on the first floor, four on the second, and a modest turret extended upward from its eastern wing.
On its backside were arched, protruding windows that hinted at a conservatory, or even a greenhouse.
Also behind the house was a wilted garden and a small bundle of trees that Jane supposed was a forest. Too many ravens roosted in the bare branches in cawing bundles of night-colored feathers.
“Welcome to the Drowning House,” Terence said, offering her an apologetic smile. He must’ve caught the instinctual curl of her lip because he sighed. “I wish I were able to present you with something more grand. But I can assure you that it isn’t so terrible once you’re inside.”
He stepped from the carriage, hunched his shoulders to shield himself from the rain, and held out a hand to Jane.
Very softly, he whispered, “Watch your step,” as she hopped down to join him on the wet, hungry earth. She resisted a wince as mud stained the pastel pink of her skirts. The dampness from the mud was already seeping through her boots, her stockings, deep into her flesh.
“The place is huge,” she remarked, allowing Terence to usher her toward it. They left Ruben to bring the mare (who he had introduced as “Mistletoe” when Jane asked) and carriage to the stables on a corner of the property. “Has it always been in your family?”
Terence opened the door and stepped aside so she may enter first once she finished cleaning the mud from her boots with the iron scraper just outside the threshold.
“I do not know, unfortunately. It has just always… been here, from a time before even my father was a boy, I think,” he said.
“A phantom that rose from the marshes’ depths, is what the locals say.
That is why they call it the Drowning House: it is a house that is, or at least once was, perpetually drowning in the swamp. ”
Jane only nodded to his words as she looked around the entrance hall.
The place was immaculate in its cleanliness, with floors so newly washed that the smell of vinegar and lemon juice lingered in the air, and was illuminated by frosted glass sconces.
She hated the wallpaper, which was a sad shade of periwinkle-blue.
She never really liked blue as a color, it reminded her too much of the isolation of oceans and lakes—it was a color that inspired only feelings of loneliness.
That was how she would describe the Drowning House thus far: lonely, and perhaps even artificial in how clean it was.
She grimaced whilst running a finger along the paper’s flowering, leafy pattern, and instead found herself tracing what felt like a deep groove beneath the paper.
Too deep, too long, too parallel with the trimming to be a simple rotting of the wood, especially when she splayed her fingers against the wall and each of her four fingers found themselves almost perfectly nestled in more of the marks.
Jane couldn’t help but speculate that they had been clawed in by an animal.
An opossum or a raccoon in the walls, perhaps? Did England even have such critters?
She retracted, then, and eyed the faint indentations in the wallpaper, camouflaged by its pattern.
“I would’ve half-expected this place to be positively riddled with damp and mold,” she said. That is to say, it already isn’t so underneath all that pretty paper.
Terence laughed a bit, more to ease tension rather than out of genuine merriment, when he offered to take her coat. “Oh, believe me, Jane, this house isn’t impervious to damp. I am just particular about cleanliness.”
The jangling of metal and many keys announced her arrival long before a woman with a hawkish demeanor and pale gray hair tucked beneath a bonnet joined them in the hall.
The smile she offered Jane was tight and showed little of her teeth, but her brown eyes held a kind warmth that unraveled the tension knotted between Jane’s shoulders.
A chatelaine jangled chunkily at her hip with every step she took, and when she stopped she clasped her hands before her.
An overabundance of lace frills frothed from the woman’s sleeves, hiding all but her fingertips.
“And such wouldn’t be so if it weren’t for the marvelous work of our own Mrs. Foster,” Terence said warmly as he at last shucked off his coat.
“You flatter me, Mr. Hayes,” the woman said, eyes shining as she then turned to Jane.
She briefly squinted when she must’ve noticed Jane’s shortly-cropped hair, but her friendliness did not falter.
“We were informed that you were to be visiting for the day so we have everything all prepared for you in the sitting room. Ms. Hudson should have tea ready if you’re at all in need of a refreshment, Miss Sterling. ”
“Thank you, that is very kind of you,” Jane said.