Chapter Seven
I am installed in the kitchen by the housekeeper of the manor, an apple-cheeked and pepper-haired Scotswoman named Mrs. MacDougal.
Seated on a hard chair by a roaring fireplace, with a cup of tea and a tartan wool blanket, this is as warm as I’ve been in months.
Even here, in the lowest floor of the house, I can hear the rain and wind battering the walls.
Sylvie and I had managed to drag Conrad North, laird of Ravensgate, through the front door before the housekeeper had found us and let out a shriek.
Then an old man with a crinkled face and a beard to rival a goat’s—Mr. MacDougal, I’d assumed—had come stomping in to scoop the laird up and haul him upstairs. I have not seen him since.
In what I’ve seen of the house, I’ve got the impression that it has been largely left to cobwebs, with furniture covered by oilcloth, closed doors, ticking clocks, and a general air of ruin and abandonment.
But the kitchen is tidy as a pin and warm.
Dried herbs hanging on rafters above my head fill the room with the rich scent of thyme, rosemary, and mint.
Mrs. MacDougal is off tending to the injured laird, which leaves me with the little girl for company.
I have seen no sign of any other residents, either family or staff.
Mr. MacDougal was sent to gather the horse I left sleeping on the road.
I pity the man, out in this storm, and hope the lightning now crashing outside hasn’t sent the animal bolting into the wood.
Sylvie North sits on the hearth with her chin resting on her hands and her bright eyes fixed on my face. Her gaze has not left me since she opened the door; her brother’s injury hardly seemed of interest to her. It makes me wonder in what sort of condition he often turns up.
“London!” Sylvie exclaims. “I wish I were from London. I haven’t been anyplace at all. Did you go to school? Are you friends with the queen?”
For the last ten minutes, she has peppered me with an endless stream of questions, moving from place to place like a vibrating hummingbird, chair to table to hearth to floor. The dog, Captain, bounds wherever she goes and lays his shaggy black head on her lap so she can scratch his ears.
“I hope your brother is all right,” I say. “Are your parents at home?”
She waves a dismissive hand, making the knitting needles around her neck clatter. “It’s just me and Connie. No parents. And he’s hit his head harder than that before.”
My eyebrows lift. “Has he?”
“Once, he fell off the stable roof. Broke his arm and his nose.”
“What on earth was he doing on the roof?”
She grins. “Trying to fetch me down.”
I find myself not doubting a word of it. The girl hasn’t stopped fidgeting since I met her.
“What’s that?” she asks, nodding at my threadkit.
I open it to reveal the gleaming new spools inside. “Well, it’s my—”
I’m interrupted by an earsplitting squeal from Sylvie North. “You’re a Weaver!”
“Yes, I thought I might craft a pain-relieving spell for your—”
“Show me some magic!” Sylvie claps her hands together. “Make time stand still. Or—I know!—make it snow indoors! Can you turn me into a wee falcon? I’ve always wished I were a falcon.”
“Sylvie North!” The commanding Scottish voice comes from our left, and I turn to see Mrs. MacDougal approaching at a vigorous pace. “Leave our guest be.”
“I told you, I’m not Sylvie,” Sylvie says. “I am a harpy, Weaving entrails on my loom, with human heads as my weights and their bones as my needles!”
“Miss Pryor,” says the harried housekeeper, “you must excuse our resident harpy. Last week she was the Egyptian goddess of death, and the week before that she was Elaine of someplace or other—”
“Astolat,” Sylvie corrects her. “I was Elaine of Astolat, languishing for love of Lancelot.” She spins around, her needle necklace clacking. “I collect frogs. Would you like to see them, Rose Pryor of London? I have twenty-eight. Well, twenty-seven. Dionysus has escaped.”
“Not again,” groans Mrs. MacDougal. “If I find that beastie in my bed again, he’ll be in the pot for supper. Now go and sit with your brother. He is awake, but we must keep watch until we are sure the damage isn’t worse than it seems.”
Sylvie casts a wistful look at my spools. “But—”
“Now, lassie!” Mrs. MacDougal’s voice brooks no argument.
With a groan, the girl trudges away, her gaze lingering on my threadkit until she has left the kitchen.
Mrs. MacDougal sighs. “Aye, that’s our Sylvie, our wee summer squall. She has a way of getting underfoot.”
I smile, thinking of my students back home. “She seems like a bright little thing.”
She turns to me, her eyes narrowing, and I instinctively sit up straighter. Mrs. MacDougal reminds me a bit of my old teacher Sister Elizabeth, who also had that way of looking at me as if she suspected I’d spit in her tea.
“So you’re a witch, then?” she says.
I stiffen. “Weaver, madam, is the correct term. Witch is an old word and was not always used kindly.”
She flaps her hand. “Aye, I forgot how you modern types are. You are quite young, aren’t you? And pretty.” She says this the way a cook might call a carrot scraggly. “Well, I suppose it’s fortunate you found our Mr. North after his horse threw him.”
“Oh, he . . . told you what happened, then?”
“He said the storm spooked Bell, though I’ve never known the horse to jump at the wind before.”
I smile weakly. “I do know many pain-relieving charms—”
“I think that as long as you are with us,” Mrs. MacDougal replies, “it would be best to keep your spools in their box.”
“Oh.” I blink. “Well, of course, it is your house.”
“It is Mr. North’s house,” she corrects me. “And he is particular about the . . . activities performed inside it.”
Meaning he is no lover of magic. I’ve known people like that, who saw magic as perverted or wicked, even though the majority of society accepts it as useful.
Even Queen Victoria is trained in it and keeps a host of Weavers at her beck and call.
I tense, feeling protests rise in my throat, but I swallow them and feel a bit less sorry about knocking the laird of Ravensgate off his horse and onto his arse.
So much for asking if I might Weave some household spellknots for them in exchange for room and board.
“I suppose once the rain has stopped, I shall be on my way to Blackswire. Is it much further down the road?”
“An hour’s walk,” she says. Then her expression softens a little. “But I suppose we ought to feed you and set up a room for the night. It’s dark now, and rain or no, I cannot send you out in the cold.”
The moment I try to fall asleep, Ravensgate seems to awaken, creaking and groaning like an old woman with a secret she is dying to share. A hard rain patters against the windowpanes.
The guest room Mrs. MacDougal arranged for me is very much like the one I had in my aunt’s house.
The four-poster bed is too large and high, requiring steps to reach its top, and the walls are the same crimson as my uncle’s old study.
Rolling restlessly, I try to drown out the howl of the moor wind with a cashmere pillow embroidered with little leaping foxes. Its gold fringe tickles my neck.
The rain slows to a gentle patter, then stops altogether. Night deepens until the tall pendulum clock in the corner ticks an hour past midnight with its ornately scrolled hands.
Then something scratches at my door.
I bolt upright and light my bedside candle with a quick fire knot, momentarily forgetting I’d been ordered not to Weave within this house. My hair is down and wild around my shoulders, unruly brown curls relaxing after being bound tightly all day.
“Who’s there?” I call softly.
There comes another scratch, followed by a soft whine.
With a sigh of relief, I push out of bed and find a pair of silk slippers in the corner; they’re patterned in what must be the North tartan, green stripes on blue with threads of yellow and red.
Shuffling across the cold floorboards, I open the door, and there is the black dog, his nose snuffing at the carpet.
He bounds up when he sees me and issues a happy bark.
“Hush!” I scold, crouching to tap my finger on his muzzle. “What are you after, then? Shouldn’t you be sleeping by your master’s bed?”
He slaps his great wet tongue on my hand. Stifling a laugh, I push him away, and he finally goes, padding quietly down the carpeted corridor.
I start to close my door again, then stop.
The hallway bends away to the right and left, draped in soft shadows.
The floorboards beneath my feet groan as I lean forward to peer into the gloom, and on the walls, oil paintings gleam with the light of my candle; I glimpse the arch of a horse’s neck, a leaping fox, a frowning woman in stiff clothes and a high wig.
“Is that . . . ?” I murmur.
I step across the hallway and take a closer look.
The woman in the painting frowns at me, clutching a fan to her breast as if askance at my curiosity.
She is draped in a tartan arasaid that matches my slippers, pinned at her breast with a raven brooch.
The style of her gown dates her as being perhaps two hundred years old.
I press my finger to the painting, feeling the coarse brushstrokes beneath the fading varnish, and, squinting, make out the little box beneath the woman’s other hand.
“Is that a threadkit, madam?” I whisper. “Were you a Weaver?”
She glowers reproachfully, and I find the answer hidden in the delicate strokes of red paint around her bodice—unmistakably some sort of embroidered charm.
“How very curious,” I murmur, stepping back. “No magic in Ravensgate, indeed.”
I glance down the hallway, in the direction the dog had gone, my heart thumping and all hope of sleep banished. More paintings beckon in the darkness, my candle’s flame reflecting on their red walnut and silver frames.
It couldn’t hurt, perhaps, to have a bit of a snoop.
Nosiness is, after all, my third fault.