Chapter 17 #4
“Dead before he got up there?” Lady Theresa said, ignoring this. “Oh no, poor, poor man.”
“Poor man?” Millie scoffed. “What hogwash. It is just like you to point blame at Her Grace for disliking Master Everel when you hated Gillingham just as much.”
“Millie! How beastly you are!”
At the head of the table, the duke’s chair scraped back. His balled-up napkin dropped onto his unfinished plate and he spun away to stalk for the door. Castor sped to open it for him, and closed it in his wake—the look he threw the gathered company as near deep reproach as the old butler dared.
“Val!”
Lord Charborough rose as, beside him, Millie spat across the table, “Beastly is rich. You have your servants flogged if they so much as misplace a handkerchief!”
“Oh, my lord,” Lady Theresa wailed at her husband. “Look how dreadfully she uses me. Such nasty ways that she can only have gotten from that mother of hers. If that woman—”
“Enough!” Lord Ricard rose too, throwing his own napkin down onto the table. “I put up with you spitting your poison about Caroline, my lady, but when it comes to my daughter you will hold your damn tongue.”
“Oh! She is Caroline, but I am just my lady!”
“If it were up to me, you would not even be that!”
“Ricard!”
Lord Ricard glared at his brother across the table. “If you have nothing better to do than gasp our names whenever we displease you, do shut up, Charles.”
“Ricard!”
With a snort, Lord Ricard took in the sea of shocked faces. “For once, Val had the right idea. If anyone needs me, I’ll be—”
Lady Lisbeth shrieked and shrank into her chair, eyes caught to the ceiling. “What is that?”
Nic looked up, other cries erupting around him as a familiar darkness oozed through the plasterwork. Descending like mist in heavy swirls, it spread from the chandelier, a dark portent with fingers like cold knives.
Remembering its touch all too well, Nic leapt up from the table as tendrils lashed.
“Magic,” Lord Charborough said, and then as though seeking to quell the note of doubt in his own voice, he added, “Some kind of conjuring, surely. Nothing to worry about.”
Dashiell looked across the table. “Nic? Do you feel anything?”
Nic shook his head, not daring to mention he had seen such darkness before. “No, nothing. A faint stickiness, but no sigils.”
“Oh, but if it is not magic, it must be a ghost!” Lady Theresa cried. “Or that malaise Master Everel warned us about. Don’t let it touch you!”
At the foot of the table, Millie had gripped the duchess’s hand. “Your Grace? What is that? Your Grace?” But the duchess’s eyes had lost focus as she slid away into her own mind, leaving Silla to shake her head in warning, one arm sliding protectively around her mistress’s shoulders.
“I can assure you, my lady, that Her Grace has never seen anything like that,” the maid said. “Perhaps it would be wise to remove to the drawing room.”
“Yes. Yes, everyone out,” Lord Charborough said. “No doubt it is nothing, but we cannot be too careful. If you would take—”
A heavy knock sounded on the door.
Lord Charborough visibly relaxed. “Ah, that’ll be Val. He will explain what this is.”
A second knock. A third. Slow and rhythmic and oddly hollow as Castor crossed the floor to open it.
Dread spilled through Nic at the strangeness of it all, and he started forward even as Castor pulled open the door.
Only to halt midstep, sucking a sharp breath.
Framed there in the aperture stood the automaton from the style wing, its empty oval face luminescent in the candlelight.
From one metal shoulder still hung Nic’s ruined waistcoat, its limp cording dragging like so much torn skin.
Amid a chorus of cries, Castor slammed the door.
“What was that thing?”
“Oh, God help us!”
“Castor! What was that? Open the door.”
“No! Don’t let it in!”
The noise swirled as Nic grabbed for the handle.
“Lord Monterris, no!”
He yanked it open, bracing for the thing to lunge metal fingers toward his throat. But there was nothing. Beyond the door the hallway stood empty, only a hint of automaton oil hanging ghostlike in the air.
“Is it gone?” Leaf said, appearing at his shoulder.
“Gone.”
Around him, the parlour lightened, and Nic looked up to find the chandelier candles brightly shining once more.
A tableau of guests stared about with frozen expressions of horror, but the darkness had gone, vanishing like it had never been.
Yet in its wake Nic thought he felt the faintest sigil, something like a pa at the edge of hearing.
It seemed to come from a world away and yet hum right beside his ear.
“What is going on here?”
The duke appeared in the open doorway, candlelight gleaming on his dark glasses.
A beat of shocked silence became a babble of panicked voices, but it was Lord Charborough who said, “Castor saw it, didn’t you, Castor?”
The duke turned to his butler, brows raised. “Castor?”
“Yes, Your Grace, but as it was not there when Lord Monterris opened the door again, it must have been just a trick of the light.”
“A trick of the light?” Lady Theresa cried. “This house is cursed! We are all doomed!”
The duke stepped forward. “It is just a house, Lady Theresa. An old house that has seen much life, I grant you, and one in which there are no doubt a few dormant spells the wrong conditions could set off, but it is still just a house. It cannot harm anyone.”
“What about Lord Francis? Why will no one talk about what happened to him?”
Lady Theresa seemed to realise she had stepped into dangerous water as soon as the words were out of her mouth, her lips parting as though in shock at her own daring.
For a long moment the duke just stared at her, before slowly removing his glasses.
Lady Theresa gasped. Nic had seen the scars before, but rarely enough that each occasion was like seeing them for the first time, the shock enough to turn anyone’s stomach.
They crisscrossed the skin around the underside of his father’s eyes like the tangled twigs of an echo nest, turning what ought to be smooth skin into puckered flesh and giving his lower eyelids a ragged edge.
“See ghosts in odd shadows if you must, Lady Theresa,” he said, glaring at her with the full force of his frightening eyes. “But I can assure you Lord Francis was not killed by a house. Monterris Court is not alive. It hates no one. And it is not cursed.”
He gestured toward the drawing room. “Now, shall we?”