xviii. In which Charlotte goes after her brother, because no one else will
“If I’m not back in two days,” Charlotte said, “Miss Tierney will take you to the convent. The sisters will take care of you.”
“I don’t want nuns to take care of me,” Sasha wailed. “I want to come with you.”
“You can’t, dearest. I need to know you’re safe.”
Charlotte sorted through her bags once more. A change of clothing, her travel medical kit—fully restocked, with extra items
added—a bottle of water, a heating pad, a knife, firelighters, a torch, matches, a cooking pot, a kettle, and dried fruit.
Standing beside her, Elspeth grabbed her wrist. “You’re stalling, Lottie. You been through your bags three times this morning.”
“It won’t hurt to check again,” Charlotte snapped, shaking her off, “and stop calling me Lottie.”
She already regretted taking Elspeth’s offer, but if she entered the forest, better not to go alone. Besides her own supplies,
she’d have Elspeth’s, including the knives at her belt.
Kitty Tierney sat across from them, chewing her lip but saying nothing. Apart from Agnes and the children, she was the only one Charlotte and Elspeth had told about their plans. Charlotte hadn’t wanted to leave the children alone for two days.
And in case she didn’t return . . . Well, someone had to make sure they went to the convent.
Not for the first time, she wondered if this was a mistake. She’d told Elspeth she couldn’t go, told Cormac Young she couldn’t
go, because of her children, but here she was, leaving them anyway. Safer with Elspeth she may have been, but there was a
good chance the forest would swallow Charlotte whole, never to be seen again. Or that she would only leave its depths veined
in black, another victim of wood sickness. She resented her mother for all but abandoning her and Arthur after their father’s
disappearance; could she risk actually orphaning her children?
But no one else would search for her brother. Sasha would never forgive her if she didn’t do everything within her power to
bring him home. And part of Charlotte—possibly a nonsensical part—believed she might find a cure for the sickness if only
she saw where it came from.
It was easier to focus on all that than on her own despair should Arthur never return.
Compulsively, she checked her travel medical kit to make sure she’d added glass vials to it like she’d intended. She had an
idea of taking samples in the forest. Samples of what, exactly, she couldn’t say. The vials were right where she’d nestled
them, wrapped in a pair of gloves.
“You won’t be safe,” Sasha insisted. “I could protect you.”
Unbidden, an image of Sasha yelling and hitting a bear with a stick sprang to Charlotte’s mind. Her lips twitched despite
herself.
“I’m sure you could, but I’d much rather you stayed here with Miss Tierney. Please, love.”
Grumpily, Sasha banged her feet against the legs of her chair.
“Wheest, my little bug.” Elspeth tweaked Sasha’s pigtails and crouched beside her. “Think I’ll let your mam get ate up? She’ll
come back all right.”
“Tell her to let me come! She’d have to say yes if you said.”
Elspeth laughed. “Oh, aye, I reckon she’d do anything I asked. She scowls at me so sweet.”
Charlotte flushed but didn’t dignify the comment with response. She resented how quickly her daughter had taken to Elspeth
McIntire (and her trousers) and was trying not to because there was enough resentment in her life already.
Kitty touched the girl’s wrist. “Your mam tells me you like a good bedtime story. Times were I used to tell my sisters stories
after Ma sent us to bed. I’ll tell you one tonight, if you like.”
“Every night,” Sasha mumbled, sounding less enthused than she usually did when negotiating such things.
Elspeth chuckled. Kitty frowned at her but merely agreed, “Every night,” and withdrew her hand.
Rain pattered, but when Jonas took Charlotte’s bags outside, everyone trailed out with them. Elspeth strode on ahead. At her
insistence, Charlotte had borrowed a mule and gig from Agnes.
The gig was a good idea. Charlotte didn’t know how to ride, but Elspeth knew how to drive, and riding or walking for long
periods would be hard on Charlotte. Sitting in the gig would likely be uncomfortable, too, but she’d last longer in a vehicle
than on foot.
On their way through the cobbled streets, the villagers had stared. Cormac Young had raised a hand briefly before turning
away. All her life, Charlotte had avoided giving the villagers a reason to talk about her, except when she’d married John.
Then, the villagers had shrugged and said, What can you expect from a silly young girl but to marry a stranger whose family is unknown? They’d blamed her mother instead, for shirking her parental duties and allowing it.
Now, however, Charlotte was doing something truly impractical, and this time she wasn’t a nineteen-year-old whose whims might
be excused as youthful foolishness. Moreover, she’d given Seacliff a good reason for gossip, riding through town in a borrowed
gig with a stranger who was, as far as the villagers knew, a single man.
Let them talk, Charlotte thought angrily. She had plenty to say about them, with how they’d always treated her family and her brother in
particular.
Elspeth stowed their bags under the cross-seat. Charlotte stroked the mule’s nose, asking, “What shall we name him, Sasha?”
Sasha kicked at a garden plot. When Charlotte held out a hand, Sasha ran to her and buried her face in her mother’s apron.
Charlotte’s eyes stung. She kissed her daughter’s forehead.
“Be good for Miss Tierney,” she said, and added, as a kind of prayer, “I hope to see you all soon. Thank you for keeping an
eye on them, Miss Tierney.”
Kitty nodded. As Elspeth rearranged the bags to fit better, Kitty grabbed Charlotte’s hand. Raindrops frizzed her fringe and
dripped on her nose and cheeks, but she didn’t wipe them away.
“You sure about this, Mrs. Prentice?” she asked in a low voice. “Mr. Throckmorton’s nice enough, but you got children. You
really think you can find him? With that—that woman?”
Charlotte’s skin prickled. Elspeth had kept the disguise on through the village, but she hadn’t bothered in the cottage. Kitty
had been astonished to find her sitting in Charlotte’s kitchen and had not warmed to her, eyes lingering with disapproval
on Elspeth’s trousers and braces.
Sasha sidled over to listen. As with Jonas the other night, Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to spout false hopes with no reasoning. But she couldn’t bring herself to admit she wasn’t certain at all, either.
“I don’t know.” She left the comment about Elspeth unacknowledged. “But I can’t leave him out there, not if there’s a chance
of bringing him home.”
Kitty bit her lip. “I hope you come back all right, Mrs. Prentice.”
She backed away, grasping the children’s hands and glancing suspiciously at Elspeth. Sasha’s eyes were liquid. The sight made
Charlotte want to go back inside, sit on the settee with her children tucked on either side of her, and tell them a story
as Arthur did while she worked on her needlepoint.
She swallowed. “Two days. Don’t forget.”
Jonas nodded. Sasha merely clung tighter to Kitty’s hand.
“Lottie!” Elspeth had finished with the bags. “You coming or not?”
“Don’t call me Lottie.”
Charlotte clambered into the gig, wedging her cane beside her. Elspeth vaulted into the other seat and clicked her tongue
at the mule. The trees rustled in the breeze off the sea. Charlotte held her breath as they closed around her, ducking to
avoid the branches reaching across the path like fingers.
The wind seemed suddenly quiet and distant. Leaves rustled overhead, but no wind breached the undergrowth. Though the rain
continued, few raindrops made it past the thick canopy.
Charlotte’s skin crawled at the silence.
She reached for the wedding ring hanging on its chain from her neck, rubbing it for comfort.
John had ventured into the wood occasionally for firewood, or to hunt, never straying far because she’d worried about him, and he’d always returned.
She tried to believe his ring would bring her luck as she journeyed through the forest, but she didn’t believe in luck.
Each new storm life hurled at her weathered away the little she dared believe.
Despite herself, she’d believed the rowan cross would protect her brother.
Now his horse had come back without him.
She’d been foolish to think anything could keep him safe.
If the wood wanted to take him, it would.
She bit her lip. “Should we be doing this?”
“Too late for that. We’re in the forest, and I ain’t turning this mule around because you’re having second thoughts.”
Charlotte regretted, again, taking Elspeth up on her offer. She wondered how many more times she’d regret it before they were
done. However it ended. With their siblings found, alive and well, or dead, or—more likely—Charlotte and Elspeth lost to the
wood, too.
In the dirt before them, wheel tracks. Light impressions, as might be made by a cart weighed down with nothing more than a
man, a cat, a knapsack, and a suitcase, but unmistakably wheel tracks.
“Arthur?”
Charlotte’s voice fell short. In the forest, she felt more insignificant than she ever had in her life.
“Sure, he’ll answer right off if you call,” Elspeth said. “Just off the path, I shouldn’t wonder. Not far from home at all.”
Charlotte scowled.
Glancing at her, Elspeth added, “Probably lost the path.”
“How would you know?” Charlotte snapped, though losing the path sounded exactly like something Arthur would do.
Elspeth smirked. None of Charlotte’s barbs ever seemed to land. Charlotte wasn’t sure whether that annoyed her. Every time
she snapped, she remembered how Elspeth had helped her home Monday, without even knowing who she was.
“Been all through here before, remember?” Elspeth nodded at the trees. “The path don’t like to stay underfoot. I don’t know
what kinda stories your village tells about the forest, Lottie, but it’s named like it is for a reason.”