Chapter 4
four
I am locked in the garden shed when they bring the body up the hill, a single window open to let in air.
Neck craned as high as I can, I watch four men—village elders—slip their way down to the riverbank and roll her onto a rough cut of burlap.
Dark hair sticks to her white face like leeches, and her dress is soaked through, half-frozen, hem ripped and stained with mud.
I cannot see much more. But the men whisper.
A tear across her throat, a clutch of wilted bitterbloom in her hands, blood smeared across her lips.
I push to my feet using a pile of rough-hewn boards as leverage against my trembling legs.
Father likes for the garden shed to serve as extra punishment for the moments when I black out, as if I have any control over it.
Those in the village who know of this turn their eyes the other way, whispering that I deserve the treatment.
Better to commune with Erybrus in private than out where Ithrandril can bear witness to my wickedness.
The bell in my pocket rubs against my thigh, and I fish it out.
The metal catches the light streaming in through the small window.
Designs are etched across the surface: twining veins, thorns, the empty sockets and toothy grin of a skull.
The sight fills my stomach with vinegar, but I only tighten my grip on the wooden handle.
I kept the bell quiet when Father brought me up from the river and locked me in the shed, covered in river mud and blood he knew could only be mine.
It was missing a piece—the tiny wire that held the bead to the dome.
I tied it up with a lavender ribbon from my hair and wrapped the whole thing in a shred of my skirt hem to keep it silent before stuffing it back in my pocket.
Now, abandoned to the cold and dirt of the garden shed, I want to ring it and hear the clear cut of its note. But fear sinks hooks into my flesh. I wrap it back in cloth, returning it to my pocket. Only in my greatest need will I ring it.
I drop to the ground and release a breath trapped between my lungs. My fingers worry the edge of my sleeve where it is cut and stained with dirt. I already know what the villagers are whispering amongst themselves, that I am the one who killed Hester. And truthfully, how am I to know I didn’t?
When my world turned black the day of Lilith’s burial, where did I go? Did I call the monsters forth, just to watch them settle their teeth into the flesh of Hester’s throat?
I glance around the darkened space of my prison.
Every inch of it makes me ache with the remembrance of what I have lost. My mother who loved her garden beds.
Upended rusty trowels, seed packets with faded print, crooked mountains of old terra-cotta pots, a pair of kidskin gloves gathering dust. I cross to the gloves and run a finger along their soft surface, blemished with dirt and the yellowing age of disuse.
Mother loved her flowers. Me most of all.
Oh, my Morning Glory.
I lift one of the gloves and fit my hand inside. The grit of old soil rubs into my palms. They are rather small, even on my own wiry fingers. I can barely remember her in full—Mother. Nine years is so much longer than it feels sometimes. But I do remember how small she was.
Father always told me it was her own sickness that kept her that way, burrowing into her bones and shrinking her from the inside out.
But I didn’t pay attention to that bit—not until the end.
When I close my eyes, I picture her as she was.
Lovely and whip-smart, always smelling of fresh citrus and lavender soap, her laugh like church bells.
Before they learned to only ring the funeral songs.
For a moment, I allow memories to wash over me. Just a sweet sting until the bitterness clouds the air once more.
I am on the edge of thirteen, my body quickly becoming something I no longer recognize.
Angles where the skin has tightened and the baby fat has trimmed itself away.
Fuller lips, wider eyes, and a slimming waist. I sit at the small table tucked in a corner beside the hearth in the kitchen, braiding a crown of rosemary and hyssop.
Only days before, they pulled another body from the riverbanks. Rosalyn Eckers, the butcher’s daughter. Skin sloughed from her bone, and Father shielded my eyes. But I saw enough. Enough to know Erybrus was at work in Rixton.
I braid the crown for Rosalyn, to toss it on her casket and pray that Ithrandril claims her soul. Pray I am not taken next.
Out the open window, the wind shushes in the trees, and the sparrows sing their night songs in the lilac bushes. Despite the death and fear running like the plague through the village, there is a peace to be found. I twist off the end of the braid, securing it with a mauve ribbon.
And that’s when the shouting starts.
I leap from my chair, rushing to the kitchen door leading down to the valley. Shadows gather at the edge of the river, voices of my parents. Mother’s coughing fits started months ago, small at first, then tinged with blood. I narrow my eyes, searching the darkness for their forms.
Stars glitter above, but they are the only lights shining when Father appears on the crest of the hill. He holds something in his arms.
Someone.
“Mother!” My feet are bare on the dusk-dew grass.
Father drops to a knee, chest heaving with effort. The light from the kitchen catches the shadows on his face. Something is wrong. Tears stream wetly down his cheeks and into the grizzled salt and pepper of his unkempt beard.
“What happened?” My voice is small.
I glance down at Mother. Her skin is paler than snow, eyes closed, lids limned in shades of indigo and mulberry.
He does not answer at first, labored breathing, his chest a rugged cadence against the slow rise and fall of my mother’s lungs. She is still alive.
“Father. Tell me.”
He glances at me then, eyes haunted, rimmed red. When his lips part, saliva strings between them, like the veins of a gutted rabbit. “Your mother is sick, Adelaide. She has been for a long time. You should prepare yourself for the worst.”
He says nothing more, simply stands and sweeps Mother up to their bedchamber.
Over the next few days, I see hardly a thing of them, abandoned to my own devices.
When Father finally does appear in the doorway of the kitchen, dressed in funeral blacks to lay Rosalyn Eckers in the ground, he takes one look at the crown of herbs in my hand and tears it from my grasp, throwing the braid in the fire.
My chest cracks with an unnamed emotion. Something I have never felt before. It aches, burns up the back of my throat. Tears well in my eyes when the ribbon catches flame, then the hyssop, the lavender I picked with my own fingers.
“Save your prayers and weeds, Adelaide. The gods do not listen to our supplications.”
He leaves me there, tears budding at the corners of my eyes, my mother gasping for breath in her bed while he goes to bury more bodies.
I suppose I lost my father even before Mother took her final breath.
The feel of Mother’s glove centers me back to the present. I peel it off and drop it beside the other. I don’t need any more reminders of what I have lost or what I have become. My eyes drop to my own hands, now stained with dirt.
Wind buffets the garden shed, rattling the broken window.
My gaze snags on a collection of stiff pages, scribbles in ink.
I reach for them, and a plume of dust rises to greet me.
On the other side of it, a leather-bound journal.
Mother’s journal. My chest caves with heartache as my fingers brush the soft cover.
I open the pages, wipe the grime and the dark stains, like blots of ink.
Sketches, diagrams, lists. Names I know and names I do not.
Larkspur, foxglove, belladonna, oleander, bitterbloom.
I trail a finger over the looping script.
A bell rings, low and somber, from the church. A death knell. I tuck the journal into my waistband. Just another dead girl to bury. And this time, I know the face all too well.
Closing my eyes, I picture Hester. When we were children, she used to bring me herbs from her own mother’s garden to braid into crowns.
Part of me knows I should pray, repent of my wickedness and beg forgiveness from Ithrandril above. And another fragment of me, the one that sees the monsters, recognizes the wrongness of my own heart, wonders if Hester Samuels suffered when she died.
If she cried and begged the monsters to stop while they peeled her flesh from her bones.
Father lets me out the next morning, my skirts stained from sweat, stomach rumbling.
He leads me back into the vicarage and up to my room, where he points at my darkest frock and then at my boots, a jerk of his chin toward the door.
I know these movements well, what they mean.
Time to stare death in the face once more, see what awaits those who stray from the path of light.
Because that is what Father truly thinks, isn’t it? That the girls of Rixton are dying of their own accord? Perhaps not by their own hands, but surely—to his twisted mind—their sins play a part of it. Their own wickedness.
I fight the burn to smash my fist against his jaw. Instead, I do nothing. Instead, I will stare into the face of death today, and I will ask why it hasn’t yet taken me.
We make our way to the churchyard, and I ignore the sideways glances from villagers, the words I pretend not to hear.
Cursed, she is. Didn’t you hear? She was caught out at the river, summoning Erybrus, calling for the death of Hester.
My heart freezes in my chest, skips a beat, rumbles back to life. The breath whooshes from my lungs while I hurry past the gossipers, quick on Father’s heels. Perhaps they are right to fear me—I fear me—but I am not a murderer. I look down at my trembling hands.
At least, I don’t think I am.