Chapter Twelve #3
Aside from the inobtrusive lidded vases with their rose and lavender potpourri, it seemed William Rosebourne had kept his home only lightly scented, likely to avoid antagonizing his superior sense of smell. It was what I had done in my own room, albeit with simple pots and my own dried herbs.
I looked back, surprised to find Foxcourt ambling behind me with his cane, his gaze fixed on me even as he allowed for a polite
distance between us. The realization he was allowing me my space left me all the more disoriented.
I had the strangest sense of having been here before, but . . . of course not. I had visited Briarwood Palace only in my imagination,
reading Mama’s words in her journal or falling asleep to her stories of it. She had described a palace of glass and the way
its immense size only deepened the distance between her and her father as the years passed.
The hair on my arms rose as I took in the ghostly shapes of the furniture hidden beneath their protective cloths. The hearths
were cold and dark behind their screens.
No. It wasn’t a home at all. Save for the insistent click of my boots on the marble floor, we were submerged in an almost
otherworldly silence, that devastating stillness of the dead.
The chill deepened as we entered the main hall, skittering painfully across my skin. I caught myself glancing down at my covered
arms, sure I would see the filth of the Brickbats and Fairgate seeping through my jacket sleeves.
Worse than an interloper, I was a secret shame never meant to be brought to light. Every object, every statue with its unseeing
eyes, every brass inlay, every ornamental molding, felt accusing.
This is not for you, the house whispered around me. This was never meant for you.
Becksford slowed as we turned down another sumptuous hall, having already seen what lay ahead.
“—didn’t take nufin’!”
A man—a footman by his impressive livery—had a child by the scruff and was shaking him with enough violence to set my teeth
on edge. The young boy was a winter’s day—that was to say, short and filthy. He looked as though he’d climbed down through
one of the chimneys. Which, I realized in growing horror, he likely had. The soot-stained scamp swung his arms wildly, trying
to dislodge himself.
“Becksford!” the footman called. “This rat lifted a silver off me.”
The butler looked to the sky as if silently praying to be struck down. “Are you quite certain?”
Foxcourt appeared at my side then, feigning difficulty in bending down. As he rose, he reached an arm out, and a silver coin
appeared in his hand as if summoned by magic. My lips parted in surprise.
“Is this perhaps yours?” he asked, some of Foxcourt’s cold precision slipping through his nasal tone. “Rather careless to
have dropped a week’s wage.”
The footman’s eyes latched on to the coin. He released the boy, tossing him to the floor like rubbish. I took a step forward,
only to be stayed by the inconspicuous pressure of Foxcourt’s other hand.
“Here you are,” Foxcourt said, pressing it into the other man’s outstretched palm.
The footman huffed, giving him a speculative glance before sauntering past the butler with a rude cluck of the tongue.
Oh, yes. He would be the first set out on the street once I was in control.
“I need to return to my duties in closing the house,” the butler said after a moment. “The study is just at the end of the
hall, the last door on your right.”
“Thank you,” I murmured as he hurried away.
The chimney sweep tried to make his own escape, only for Foxcourt to catch him by the shoulder. He leaned down, murmuring
something to the boy my ears couldn’t catch. The child gave him a look of extreme skepticism but nodded all the same, dashing
off.
Foxcourt met my astonished gaze. “What is it?” he asked.
I cleared my throat. “Don’t . . . do that.”
His inky brows drew together. “Do what, precisely?”
“Be nice,” I said. “It doesn’t suit you.”
It was confusing. An act.
“Afraid you might start liking me, Lockwood?” he asked, warm and deep, like a bracing glass of whisky.
I strode past him. “No chance of that.”
Light pooled on the marble floor from the skylights, and I found myself instinctively seeking out their warmth to drive away
that creeping chill. We were nearly to the study when I felt icy eyes fix upon me. I spun, coming face-to-face with a portrait—an
entire hall of portraits positioned to gaze out through the windows opposite them to the gardens below.
I absorbed the Rosebourne ancestors the way one tracked the progress of the sun—with awareness, but never risking a direct look.
As the bloodline stretched on, the portraits became more refined.
Larger, too. The quality of their clothing noticeably improved, the surest marker of how the family had grown its fortune.
And yet each had that same look of reproach that said, You do not belong here. You are not one of us.
“My uncle was fond of saying that doubt is poison to dreams, and the deadliest is poured from our own hands,” Foxcourt said,
again with that infallible reading of my thoughts. “So many people will try to force you to drink from its cup. You cannot
do the work for them by lifting it to your lips.”
I turned to him, surprised. “I cannot imagine you ever doubting yourself, even for a moment, you’re such a boor.”
He flashed a grin. “I never said he gave the advice to me. But regardless, I’ve found spite to be a suitable antidote. It rather keeps one going, even after the poison has set in.
You might consider trying it.”
I had spite enough to last me a dozen lifetimes. “I’ll take that under advisement.”
By the fifth portrait—a blond-haired woman who had the dead-eyed look of someone being held against her will—glittering jewels
began to appear. That had to be George Rosebourne’s mother, Daphne. My . . . I almost couldn’t comprehend it. My great-great-grandmother.
George was depicted with his lovely wife in the next painting, standing at the window of one of the sitting rooms we had passed.
Diamonds kissed the shadowed hollow of Henrietta’s throat, dangled from her delicate earlobes, and glittered like a scattering
of stars in her upswept hair. Beside them, her face turned away to gaze at the garden around her, was Iris, my grandmother,
who had died giving birth to Mama, younger than I was now.
The impressive line of portraits ended abruptly, the final two shrouded.
The tulle covering the first portrait still reeked of dye, so dark that it shadowed the man beneath it. He stared boldly at
the viewer, his dark eyes furious, his strawberry-blond hair gleaming like a fox pelt. He leaned a hand against a table littered
with crystal perfume flacons, dressed in a suit fit for the King himself.
Mama had always described her father as being as abrasive as the stench of pure alcohol, and even as a far younger man, I
saw that in him. His posture was of someone braced for battle.
And to his right, the final portrait in the long succession was of a young raven-haired woman with hazel eyes, dressed serenely in a buttercup-yellow dress, holding a rose by the stem as she lounged on one of the many silk chaises we had passed by.
A small pearl flower pendant rested at the base of her throat.
The shock of her beautiful face, as young and fresh as the rose in her lap, hit me like a fist to the throat.
Mama.
I had no image of her left to me, and it had been so very long since I’d seen her face that memory had begun to diminish the
details of it. The precise way her eyes crinkled as she smiled, the long, delicate line of her neck, and how very dark her
hair had been before the magic had stripped it of its color.
The phantom scent of her essence warmed the air around me as her arms once had, the sweetness of her love for me undercut
by that sharp, wintry pain. My eyes burned as my throat worked painfully. The tulle that shadowed her was faded to a bleak
gray and tattered, as if it had been draped there for decades.
Anger rose, tangling with that acute pain. As if her beautiful face had been too difficult to look upon.
“She was lovely,” Foxcourt said quietly behind me.
Good God, was there any escape from this man and his bloody incisive gaze? I spun on my heel, heading blindly for the closed
door at our right. If he was so interested in making a study of me, he could bloody well carve open my chest and save us both
the trouble by observing my trembling heart directly.
The familiar, comforting scent of old books enveloped me, doused with heady pinches of florals, herbs, whisky. It was the
only expected thing about the room.
As I stepped inside, my feet came to an abrupt halt. The study looked as if it had weathered the worst of summer thunderstorms.
Books had been tossed from the shelves and lay scattered over the floor.
“Lockwood,” Foxcourt began as he shut the door behind us.
I spun right with a gasp as a shadow burst forward from behind the leather sofa. Before I could so much as step back, Foxcourt’s
arm locked over my chest, spinning us both toward the door.
But there was no explosion. No gunshot. Not even the whisper of an unsheathed blade. I strained, twisting around in Foxcourt’s unyielding grasp. The dark figure tore out of the room, lurching through the open window.
“Stop!” I shouted, but the figure, their lower face covered by a mask, had vanished into the bright wash of sunlight.