1. To Bury a Gentle Boy #2
My voice cracks, and I’m half-mortified by the juvenile words in my throat.
A throat Gabriel nearly crushed. Had Edmund not been holding my hands, I would’ve reached for my pulse point, where Gabriel whispered his love for me despite me begging him to return to the couch and sleep off his intoxication.
Edmund shatters the delusions built by the hands of comfort—of childhood adoration. “He stopped being your friend the moment he tried to attack you.”
The truth of that statement stings. Blood swirls down the drain in diluted spirals as he washes my hands.
His and mine together, like two conspiracies stitched into one.
Watching him peel blood from my fingers like bark brings to mind Pascoe’s childhood nicknames for us. They’re more accurate than ever.
Crow for Edmund, who said too little and watched too long. I used to think he gave me ‘Wren’ because I was delicate, because he thought me a girl without claws. A ghost with more bones than feathers.
Tonight, I see myself anew, walking the fine line between terrified and dangerous and what that line forces us to do.
My eyelids droop, weighed down by equal parts exhaustion and terror. “His father won’t just… grieve ; he’ll hunt us. You know that. I know that. That man will know something’s off by morning.”
“He can try, but he won’t know what to do once he discovers his son took a drunken, midnight drive.
Right by Blackwell Wash on his way home.
Come dawn and Gabriel’s BMW will be there.
” He grabs a sponge and scrubs at my knuckles.
“Nobody will question it, not when half this duchy has been petitioning for railings since last February.”
I yank my hands away and grab a cloth before the flood comes rushing through me. The more unmoored I am, the stronger the pull at the edges becomes. It’s there now, the urge to tug at his bone marrow until his memories pulsate within me. I don’t let him see the fear plain in my gaze.
Minutes tick by before I move. Dropping the cloth, I turn to face the window and cross my arms over my chest. I try to picture what he speaks of: the dangerous S-curve of the lane wrapping around the cliffside.
A shortcut to Fairbanks Manor, the seat of Gabriel’s family home.
Beneath it, Blackwell Wash churns day and night, a ravenous maw that swallowed a couple just last Easter.
“His father will want a body , Edmund,” I insist.
Edmund sighs, and momentarily, he looks like the exhausted man I’ve pulled from sleep.
“His grief will have to settle for a wreckage. Those waters don’t give back the dead.
I’ll ensure there’s a car, tyre tracks—everything.
And in a month, the man will bankroll a golf scholarship in his son’s name.
They won’t look for you. I won’t allow it. ”
His voice is muted to my ears because they’re too busy listening for the sound of wind whipping through the woods.
Storm clouds roll in, and I wait for that familiar screeching.
For the branches striking one another like rattling bones.
But none comes. The woods are silent because I’ve fed it tonight.
I hate that I’ve fed it.
My tongue swells in my mouth, and I can’t bring myself to speak Lord Samuel’s name. “His father?—”
“Families like ours have been burying their mistakes before the concept of a kingdom was even invented. We’re very skilled at telling the right sort of lies, Chess. You don’t have to worry about anything. I’ll have it all sorted out.”
It should scare me how unmoved he seems by all of this. His assurance is a physical force crashing into me, yet my body refuses the safety net being tossed. Heaviness clings where relief should rest, and I cannot bring myself to fully believe Edmund.
Even with Gabriel gone and the curse’s demand met, I remain unclean.
My hands beg for an absolution that might never come, and I want to unburden myself to the man before me.
Maybe it would make the heaviness less suffocating to force the curse into daylight and let him see the truth of this murder.
Of what I’ve had to live with and what any daughter of mine will too.
Tradition grabs hold of my pain and chains it to duty.
Heiress to heiress, this burden is my inheritance.
Sons of Sheffolk are blind to their history, and that ignorance is a shield.
So I stand there, an overflowing sink of existential dread, remorse and grief, unable to do anything but accept the flood while Redford’s ghosts remain forever unaware of the tap they left running.
“You should wash off while I burn the dress,” he speaks again, gesturing towards the silk I’m wearing. That pulls another mindless nod from me. “We will get through this, Chess.”
“ We ,” I echo, clinging to it like a lifeline.
For emphasis, he repeats it, and I’m breathing again.
Obediently, I make my way to the bathroom where I strip out of my clothes and toss them into the hamper for Edmund to find.
I’m moving on puppet strings I don’t fully know who controls.
Is it my guilt? Edmund’s resolve? Or the deep sense of knowing attempting to come alive, to reach my mind and reiterate what I’ve known since the letter opener sank into Gabriel’s chest.
That this didn’t matter. Murder didn’t matter here in his family.The Sheffolks have buried worse.
I just never imagined myself planting the same seeds in these graves.