Chapter 3
Savi
This close to Silverburn Castle, Savi’s ever-dependable composure was beginning to fray.
It had been one thing to make the decision, and another thing entirely to pack up the life she’d built for herself, stuff it into a trunk, and hop on a train to Scotland.
She’d enjoyed working at the Ashmolean, but the subject matter—typically coins, pottery, jewellery, or figurines—was far from what she’d choose to draw herself.
She would always prefer to work en plein air, portraying animals in their natural environments.
Although she wouldn’t miss the subjects, she would miss some of the people.
The man who ran the café on Broad Street.
The endlessly patient staff at Blackwells, a few doors down from the café.
The on-site librarians. The volunteer artists from Oxford University—several of whom she’d had dalliances with, usually after they’d offered to serve as life models for her.
What could she say? Drawing pottery became boring very quickly, whilst the male form was endlessly fascinating.
Savi swallowed, tapping her leather sketching folio.
For the last half an hour, the view from the windows had been of rolling hills of the deepest green and wide-open farmland dotted with grazing cows.
Without warning, however, the chauffeur turned off the main road and onto a narrow lane.
Mature woodland hugged the tarmac, towering over them until Savi felt ensconced by nature.
“Are we nearly there?” she asked breathlessly, feasting on the scenery. She had spent so long in Oxford she’d forgotten what it was like being in the countryside. Savi could only imagine the wildlife roaming these lands—even stags.
“Aye, this is all part of the estate,” the chauffeur responded, pointing a finger over the steering wheel as he drove. “In a minute or so, the treeline will break, then you’ll get your first glimpse of Silverburn itself.”
This was the little kingdom her husband-to-be ruled over? “I hope Lord Lakenheath knows just how lucky he is,” Savi murmured. “I couldn’t think of anywhere more beautiful.”
True to the chauffeur’s word, the treeline broke a little farther down the road, revealing a castle of reddish stone branching out across lush grounds given over to nature.
Turrets of varying widths and heights reached up into the clouds, placed over the structure almost at random, the distances between them secured with crenellations.
Some of the turrets were clustered together, only beginning on the upper floors, whilst others were based on the ground, their wide circular spread large enough to swallow a house whole.
For some reason, Savi had been expecting Silverburn to be perfectly manicured, with nature’s creativity squashed in favour of humanity’s desires.
She was thrilled to have been wrong.
As the car eased to a stop before Silverburn’s front doors, her fingers tightly gripped her sketching folio—a gift from one of her beau’s—finding the solid wooden layer within it.
She’d lived with nerves since sending the letter to her father about her wish to marry Lakenheath.
She was finding them to be a thoroughly irritating accompaniment to her everyday life.
Savi could only hope they’d bugger off once the wedding was over and done with.
Accepting the chauffeur’s proffered hand, Savi climbed from the car, throwing her pallu over her shoulder. She pasted on a smile as a young woman bounced down the stone steps.
“You must be Savitha,” she said, her short, white-blonde hair equally bouncy as it swung around her jawline. “I’m Lily. Alex’s little sister. I love your outfit.”
Savi held out her hand, gritting her teeth. Gosh, how she hated being called Savitha. “Thank you. Lovely to meet you,” she said tonelessly. It wasn’t, but she’d long since learnt to suppress her truths in favour of the pleasant inanities expected of a woman.
“And you!” Lily exclaimed, clasping Savi’s outstretched hand and giving it a single pump. “A handshake is very modern of you.”
Savi blinked. “Is it?”
“Oh yes,” Lily nodded, scooting her arm around Savi’s elbow and leading her up the steps.
“I would introduce you to Alex, but of course, it’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride the night before the wedding.
Come, come, come. I shall take you to the North Wing.
It’s where all your guests are staying.”
“I need my trunk,” she protested, turning back towards the car—only to find that the chauffeur was handing her trunk to two male servants who had materialised from nowhere.
Lily waved her off. “Christopher and Stuart will carry it to your room. Now,” she said, as they passed through the oversized front door banded with iron, “this is the entrance hall. After tomorrow, you’ll be moved up onto the second floor, where all the family bedrooms are, but tonight you’re in the North Wing with the rest of your family and friends. ”
Savi narrowly avoided grimacing in disgust, but only courtesy of the beauty on display around them.
The Ashmolean was gorgeous, but Silverburn was even more so.
Between the fluted columns, soft Persian rugs, delicate ceiling roses, and soaring windows, it was clear that this castle had been a dearly-loved home for centuries.
Even so, it was the artwork that captured her focus.
The moment Lily saw Savi looking, she launched into a detailed explanation of the paintings’ inhabitants. Most of them, it turned out, were Lakenheath ancestors—several of whom, strangely, seemed to have a white streak in their fringe—although a few pieces were by artists she recognised.
Silverburn is beautiful inside and out.
Although the more she saw of it, the emptier it looked. Was Lily her husband-to-be’s only family? She should have asked Raj more about him. A building the size of the Ashmolean only occupied by a man and his sister did seem a bit…lonely.
Savi knew the moment they crossed over into the North Wing, not because of any signage, but because of the noise.
Her heart sank. She’d been hoping she could avoid running into anyone until she’d had an hour or two to decompress from the journey, but she was about to be fed to the wolves.
Soon, she could see movement ahead—shadows on the wall across from an open doorway. Steadying herself with a breath, Savi let Lily lead her through it.
The space before her was a symphony of shades and sounds. Guests lounged on sofas, trading words with effortless familiarity, whilst others spilt out of French doors thrown wide, scattering across a terrace bursting with flowers of late summer.
Savi recognised almost no one, but that was to be expected.
Despite the distance between them, Savi knew Raj better than anyone in this room.
They’d moved to London when she was eleven, and from the moment they disembarked the ship, her obsequious father spent every waking hour fawning over the upper classes, clawing his way through their ranks. Title by title. Castle by castle.
And apparently, he’d invited all of them to her wedding.
She could only imagine his smug expression when he received her letter. Had he even questioned why she was suddenly interested in marrying Lakenheath? Savi doubted it; Raj would have only thought about how it could benefit him.
“This is the northern morning room,” Lily smiled, slowing but not stopping, picking out a path through the bustling crowd.
“We’ve set up the whole of the North Wing for you, so you can come and go as you please.
Dinner is served at eight; the dining room is just on the other side of the staircase over here. ”
Nodding, Savi slowly strolled through the room, her folio still in hand. She saw more than a few eyes coming to rest on her sari, although they were well-bred enough not to show open disdain. Her spine straightened as she glared back at them, unyielding in the face of gossip.
Had Raj requested she wear something appropriate? Yes.
Had Savi promised him she would? Also yes. They just had different definitions of appropriate.
“Savi!” The exclamation came half a second before a ball of excitement and dark hair barrelled into her, the impact almost shifting the end of her sari off her shoulder. George, her half-brother, clung to her skirts, glancing up at her with a gap-toothed smile.
“Hello, George.” A rush of affection for the little boy warmed her veins.
Before he’d been born, Savi had never really understood children.
It hadn’t taken her long to fall under George’s spell, however.
She disliked how quickly her father had rushed into marriage after her mother’s death, but she held no ill will against the boys—quite the opposite, she adored them both. “You lost another tooth.”
“I did!” George stuck his finger into the gap left by his missing front teeth, the sight making her feel unexpectedly squeamish.
Judging by Lily’s expression, she felt the same way.
“The left one I lost naturally, but the second one got knocked out when I swung against a pole. It was already loose, though.”
“Did your father tell you to put it next to a mouse’s burrow?
” she asked, remembering Ma telling her to do just that for the first tooth she lost. She showed the second to Raj’s mother, expecting her to come help her look for a burrow.
Instead, her grandmother insisted on burning it to avoid the evil eye falling upon her.
Ma had to sleep in Savi’s bed for a fortnight after that.
It was one of the things she liked most about moving to England, not having to listen to her father’s elderly relatives bleating on about the evil eye.
“No, Mama just put it in a little keepsake box.” George giggled, his little brow scrunched up with incredulity as he walked along next to them, through a set of double doors and up an expansive staircase of rich, dark wood. “Why would you give it to a mouse?”
“Because mice have very strong teeth, so it would encourage the adult tooth to grow in straight and strong.” Savi let her hand glide up the banister, carefully treading on the ribbon of dark green carpet running up the stairs.
Her eyes landed on a tapestry proudly displayed on the stone wall, before the stairs forked off into two directions; Lily guided them up the left path.
“It’s make-believe, darling, like saluting a magpie or making a wish when you blow out your birthday candles.
Do you know where your mother and father are? ”
“They’re on their bedroom balcony. Albert needed feeding.”
“As the bride-to-be,” Lily said, her heels clicking along the wooden flooring.
The stone corridor stretched out in front of them, the space occasionally broken by imposing arched doors.
“We gave you the Charles I suite, and your father and stepmother are in the one next door, the Henry Frederick suite.”
Savi suppressed another grimace. Stepmother. It wasn’t that she disliked Katherine, but it was strange for her father to marry a woman six months younger than her.
“This is the one.” Lily stopped them in front of a door at the end of the corridor. Savi was briefly able to read the name Charles I carved into the door’s dark wood in elegant letters before it swung open.
Savi’s heart gave a perilous beat.
Because what she saw first wasn’t the chocolatey wood panelling or the delicate chandelier. It wasn’t the lavishly carved fireplace flanked by sumptuous chairs upholstered in green-and-gold tartan, nor the elegant landscape paintings on the walls.
Instead, it was the lifeless, white wedding dress hanging in front of the windows, like some floating ghoul.
She had been happy to pass over responsibility for the wedding dress to Raj and Katherine.
She had more than enough on her plate finishing the illustrations for the Ashmolean before she resigned.
Somehow, Savi didn’t think they’d pick a white wedding dress.
White—the colour of death.
Before discovering the invoice from the sanatorium in Raj’s office, she had no plans to marry.
On the off chance she did, however, she would have expected a bright sari of gold and red, with a central bindi bookended with a series of red and white dots above her eyebrows.
She’d be wearing a host of jewellery passed down by Ma; her peacock bangles, a nolok—a nose ring—with a bejewelled chain that attached to the back of her bell-shaped Jhumki earrings.
Her hands and feet would be covered in alta—a dye of radiant red.
Ma would have helped her place her tikli—a piece of head jewellery that would sit on the wearer’s forehead; it was purportedly worn to help ward off that pesky evil eye, but Savi didn’t particularly care about its meaning.
The jewellery, the symbols, the rituals; Savi didn’t care what they symbolised historically, what was important to her was the person they connected her to.
Instead, all she had was a pallid dress devoid of colour, chosen for her by someone who didn’t know her at all. A colour traditionally worn at Hindu funerals.
How apposite.
Swallowing her doubts, Savi tried to remember what was at stake. This marriage wasn’t about her, not truly. It didn’t matter what her wedding outfit looked like, or who picked it for her.
The only thing that mattered was the truth about who was locked up inside Room EC1. The person who should have been there to pick out her wedding dress with her. The person who should have been by her side these last five years. The person she loved most in all the world.
Ma.