Chapter Two
Arabella Strickland was here, in Garlin of all places, and somehow she was even more beautiful than he remembered. A thousand questions spun through Arden’s mind, the first of which being Have I finally lost what little remains of my sanity?
“Arden, have you heard a word I’ve said?”
Arden forced his attention away from the window and toward the elderly woman seated across from him, a single silver eyebrow arched high.
Until today, he had never met his great-aunt, though her portrait hung with those of dozens of other ancestors in his family home back in Strall.
It was her debutante portrait, showing her at eighteen, with apple cheeks, bright eyes, and an impish smile.
Philomena Gellis, née Ryskamp, was no longer eighteen, and the apples of her cheeks had long since shrunken and wrinkled.
Her eyes were the same, though—a particular shade of twilight blue that was notoriously associated with the Ryskamp family back in Strall.
Nearly every ancestor whose portrait hung in Ryskamp House had eyes that color, inherited alongside a gift for invisibility that had been unwavering for five generations.
Now, Arden and his great-aunt were the only two Ryskamps left.
Arden hadn’t been forced to sell the portraits yet.
They would likely fetch a good sum, given that they had all been painted by artists of great renown.
He tried to imagine the Ryskamps of history hanging on the walls of different homes, their twilight eyes casting judgment on strangers instead of him, and the thought made him feel ill.
He reached for the glass of wine a server had poured him, before stilling his hand—he would need a clear head tonight.
It was bad enough he was seeing ghosts of long-buried mistakes on the balcony.
“I’m sorry, Aunt,” Arden said. “The travel exhausted me more than I thought.”
It was a pitiful excuse, even to his own ears. The train ride from Strall to Garlin had indeed been long—two days, broken up by a night at a hotel far cheaper than what he was used to—but it wasn’t the culprit for his wandering mind.
A quick glance out the window showed the woman still there, though now her back was to him and all he could see were coils of long copper hair and the graceful silhouette of her pale, freckled shoulders bared by the draping sleeves of her lilac gown.
How many times had Arden caught a glimpse of familiar copper hair or feline-green eyes in a crowd?
How many times had his heart surged with hope?
How many times had he believed he finally found her only to end up disappointed?
This was no different, he told himself, but still, he couldn’t keep his gaze from straying to the window again, to the copper-haired woman, trying to catch another glimpse of her face.
“Do you know why I’ve summoned you here, Arden?” his aunt asked.
Arden turned back to her and shook his head.
Before tonight, the only thing he knew about his great-aunt was that not long after she turned eighteen, she’d met a young man visiting his cousins in Strall, and after a whirlwind romance that lasted all of a week, she left everything she knew to move with him here, clear across the country, to Garlin.
He expected to find her a sentimental old woman, prone to the same sort of romantic fancies that marked her younger years, but it seemed he was sorely mistaken.
Aunt Philomena was certainly elderly, but there was nothing sentimental or fanciful about her.
She hadn’t spoken more than five words to him since he arrived from Strall mere hours ago and she informed him they would be dining out.
Now, here they were, and all Arden had to go off was the letter she’d sent a week ago, offering instruction rather than information.
You’ve gotten yourself in trouble, boy. I’ve put off the creditors for the next three months. You can thank me in person, and we’ll discuss how to clean up your mess. Do hurry, it would be a shame if my heart gave out before you arrived.
With it had been a train ticket to Garlin, and while Arden balked at the thought of accepting charity, he knew he had little choice.
Before his aunt intervened, creditors had been all but beating down his door, and Arden feared there was no other choice but to sell the house that had been in his family for seven generations.
He’d grown up there, as had his father, as had his grandfather—and Aunt Philomena had grown up there too.
“Surely you have a guess—go on and ask me. I know you’re dying to.” She sipped her glass of sherry.
Arden shifted in his seat awkwardly, realizing he’d been caught staring, though better to stare at his aunt than the woman on the balcony.
Now that he’d had a moment to clear his mind, he was sure it wasn’t Arabella.
It couldn’t be. He refused to let himself be lost to foolish hope again, not when there was so much more at stake.
He didn’t have time for fantasies anymore.
“In your letter, you mentioned a failing heart,” he said carefully. “But you seem the picture of health.”
Aunt Philomena gave a snort. “The picture of health. I’ll be ninety-four before the year is out—if I’m the picture of anything, it’s old.”
Arden smothered a smile. “Regardless, you don’t appear to be ill.”
“Were you expecting to find me clinging to life?” She scoffed. “You thought you would arrive to my deathbed, where I would bequeath you my entire estate and save you from ruin with my final breath?”
Arden didn’t answer. All manner of possibilities had rambled through his mind since he received her letter, and that had counted among them, though he wasn’t proud of it.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” his aunt said, but she didn’t seem offended at his lack of denial.
A flush worked its way up his neck as he sat up straighter, focusing again on his aunt. “I’m not disappointed,” he insisted. “Truly, I’m grateful for your invitation. As well as your assistance with my . . . problems.”
“Your problems,” Aunt Philomena repeated dryly. “Yes, we’ll get to those. But as you have realized, I’m not dead yet, and while I don’t plan on that changing anytime soon, I seem to be alone in that opinion, and I’d be a fool not to make provisions.”
Arden took a tight-lipped sip of his wine to hide how unnerved the conversation made him. They were in the middle of a busy restaurant, servers and half of society all around them, and here she was, discussing her death as casually as the weather.
“Is there a diagnosis?” Arden asked when he gathered himself.
“Of a sort.” She shrugged. “My heart has become a nuisance over the last year. Thus far, someone has always been able to sort it out when it misbehaves—the Ruteledge family lives next door, which is handy. You know their distant cousins, the Kitzengers.”
Arden nodded, understanding. In Strall, most members of the Kitzenger family inherited a gift for manipulating the organs and muscles of a body, making them skilled at healing in a way that trained Lack doctors couldn’t come close to.
“But even the Ruteledges have their limits, and my heart’s little bouts of theatrics are becoming more frequent, and more dramatic. After my last attack, the Ruteledge boy warned me that the odds of me living to see summer’s end were devastatingly low.”
She paused, a flicker of unease crossing her face, though she masked it quickly with another sip of her sherry before steeling herself once again.
“My late husband and I were never able to have children—something that suited us both quite well after we made our peace with it. Luckily Ernest had siblings who went on to have sprawling families that carried on the Gellis gift for weather and, of course, my brother ensured that our gift was passed on to your father, who saw it passed on to you.”
Arden nodded. Being able to make himself invisible was a gift that had come in handy these past years, when he’d had to dodge creditors.
His aunt continued. “A few spares would have been prudent, given how rare a gift ours is, but I know better than most that sometimes these things are out of our control.”
Arden had his share of memories of his parents cycling through bouts of joy and grief that he hadn’t understood until later.
Only once, when Arden was six, had his mother been far enough along in her pregnancy to share the news with him, and he remembered her hand pressing his to the swell of her stomach, telling him his brother or sister was there, but a week later, that child was lost too.
After Arden’s mother had died of pneumonia a few years later, there had been plenty of matchmaking society matrons trying to push Arden’s father to remarry and pass his gift on to more children, but as far as Arden knew, his father never so much as looked at another woman.
His aunt cleared her throat, bringing him back to the present.
“I do, however, have to consider more . . . material inheritances that will need to be meted out.”
Disconcerting as the conversation was, a part of Arden was relieved at where it was going.
His aunt may have paid his creditors off for the next three months, but if the last few years had taught him anything, it was how difficult it was to pull oneself out of debt once one was in it, and that generous gift was a drop in the pond.
While Arden didn’t know the extent of her estate, he guessed it would be more than enough to bring him out of debt firmly, ushering him back into the realm of comfort he’d been raised in and restoring the Ryskamps’ reputation among the Lusters in Strall.
Still, he didn’t want to appear too eager.
He felt enough like a vulture circling a corpse as it was.
“I’m sure you have many beneficiaries to consider,” he said carefully.
Philomena snorted. “Ernest’s family doesn’t need it. No doubt if I left it to them, they wouldn’t even notice. You, however, would.”