Chapter 13 #2
He turned away, walking toward the edge of the forest. Caroline nearly stumbled in her haste to keep up, but no matter how quickly she stepped, her brother was always five paces ahead, just out of reach.
On through the flowers, on and on, but the sky grew no darker and the trees grew no closer. And as she stared at her feet, careful to not turn an ankle on a rock or in a rabbit hole, she realized that something was following them.
It was large, whatever it was, and walking on all fours.
It was not trying to be stealthy; it was breathing like a winded ox.
And perhaps that’s what it was, although its breath, which was now fogging her hair, dripping down her neck, smelled of carrion.
She did not dare look back, even as she felt its feet hit the ground a second after hers, even as she felt the heat wafting from its great body.
Ahead, her brother had reached the edge of the field. He would disappear into the forest, she was certain of it, and she would lose him forever, and the creature, whatever it was, would consume her.
Charlie! Caroline cried. The word was strangled, the way words are in dreams, and barely reached her own ears. But her brother turned.
She waited for fear to spill over his face as he saw what stalked behind her. Fear, or rage, or simple shock. But his expression did not change. He continued smiling his sad smile.
Cat, he called, and his voice was in her head, in the earth and air and all around.
Cat…Cat…Cat.
Caroline had stopped, and the beast behind her had stopped, and suddenly she was face-to-face with her brother, staring down at his outstretched white fingers.
I have something to show you.
Her hand closed on empty air.
—
With a gasp, Caroline sat up.
She fumbled with the key in the oil lamp till the wick caught and bathed the room in yellow light.
She was alone.
Every nerve in her body was vibrating, and her chest heaved as though she had just run a great distance. She was drenched in nameless, reasonless fear.
A dream, she told herself. Just a dream.
She stared at her innocuous little room, at the shoes tucked neatly beneath the chair, at her mother’s cloak hanging black and crow-like behind the door. She took slow, measured breaths.
Just a dream.
But that knowledge did not make the sensation dissipate.
She rubbed the heels of her hands against her palms. Like all her dreams since she’d started rationing Dr. Hoffman’s medicine, it had been so real.
She could still feel the rocks beneath her boots, still see the perfect whorls of Charlie’s ear beneath the fringe of dark hair.
What had her brother been about to show her?
What lay behind him in the dark shadows of the trees?
And what had been chasing her?
She felt, deep in the recesses of her mind, that she already knew the answer. But she could not draw it to the surface. If only she could return to the dream. But she knew she would not sleep again tonight.
Her gaze traveled to the dark bottle on the desk, the medication Rab had brought her. Ner-Vigor tonic. Surely it would do no harm to have a spoonful. Just enough to calm her nerves, slow her stampeding heart. Perhaps Charlie was still waiting for her on the other side of consciousness.
Caroline threw off the covers. The air had a bite to it, and she hurried across the floorboards on her tiptoes with her arms over her chest. Her penknife was sitting beside the bottle.
As she raised the blade over the waxed cork, her mother’s ring fell free of her nightgown and swung from her neck on its golden chain.
Caroline set down the knife with a dull thud. She lifted the ring, turned it in the lamplight. There were the strange hooded flowers, each with its drop of blood.
The same flowers that had filled the fallow field in her dream. Turned the sky above them their impossible shade of purple-blue.
I have something to show you.
Caroline reached for her mother’s cloak.
—
As Caroline crept through the house on cat-light feet, the walls around her seemed to hold their breath.
She had never been out of her room at night, and with each step away from her door, dread dragged heavier at her heels.
She clutched the penknife in one hand, the banister with the other, whispered a curse whenever a stair creaked.
But as she opened the hidden servants’ door at the end of the second floor, the hallway stretched long and empty before her.
She had planned to creep down the stairs to the cellar kitchen, and from there up into the back garden. That was where the flowers were, after all. The field had been flooded with flowers. But her feet led her here.
The only light came from the windows on the landing, through which filtered the yellow, secondhand glow of the streetlamps, but Caroline’s vision adjusted quickly.
The birds watched from the wallpaper with their gold foil eyes, but the carpet swallowed her footsteps, and the door of room 203 made no sound as she opened it.
Charlie’s smell met her on the threshold, and she nearly wept at the absence of him.
The bedroom was unchanged from her last visit, neat and deserted.
She sat on the bed, feeling suddenly foolish.
What had she hoped to accomplish on this midnight wander?
She pulled her mother’s ring from her nightgown, slid it up and down its chain.
What she wanted, what she really wanted, was to wrap herself up in Charlie’s blankets and bury her face in his pillow.
To drift to sleep with her brother’s presence all around her.
But that was foolish. A child’s impulse.
I have something to show you.
She had already searched this room and found nothing.
Caroline stood and walked to the window.
Milky moonlight bathed the garden. The inhabitants of the vegetable beds looked enchanted; the pumpkin vines twisted ominously up the box walls; the collards bunched together like a dark little forest. Caroline’s gaze settled on the bed of purple flowers.
The moon had sapped all color from them, left them pale as silver bells.
Their stalks threw long, sharp shadows on the path.
As she stared through the glass, something crept like a spider up her spine. She was being watched.
Slowly, with her heart in her mouth, she turned.
No one was there. The door was shut, the room empty. But the sensation did not fade, and as she stared, still as a statue, she saw that the armoire door was ajar.
Caroline raised her little knife. Images of the dead women flashed through her head, skin opened, spilling scarlet. But she gripped the metal tighter and commanded her feet forward. For Charlie, she thought. Be brave for Charlie.
She flung the door open, penknife brandished before her like a rapier.
The armoire was empty.
Caroline laughed, then clapped a hand over her mouth.
How foolish she was, how utterly foolish. Fear had made her a girl again, stealing through the house, seeing ghosts.
She lowered the knife and took a long, shuddering breath.
Perhaps all her dread was imagined. Had Mrs. Easton not treated her with nothing but kindness?
Even Rab, strange as he was, had brought her medicine, always offered to help with her chores.
Perhaps the locked room in the east wing held nothing more than a few opium pipes, or crates of smuggled goods.
Perhaps Charlie was on his way, had been searching for her in Staffordshire or Wales.
But as she turned away, something caught her eye.
The bottom corner of the armoire was raised. It was a small lip, the width of a coin, a warp in the wood. She wouldn’t have noticed it but for the way the moonlight cast the darkness beneath it in such sharp relief.
Caroline knelt, hooked a finger into the gap, and pulled.
She had expected the wood to hold. But the whole panel gave way. It was not nailed in place, merely fitted over the base.
And hidden beneath was a cache of books.
Barely breathing, Caroline lifted them, one by one, and set them gently on the carpet before her.
There was an ancient embossed Bible, as thick as a thigh, and pads of drawing paper crammed with Charlie’s pen strokes. But what stopped Caroline’s heart was the littlest book, green with gold lettering. A book of Welsh fairy tales.
She opened the front cover. The book exhaled a breath that smelled of cracked leather and time.
Here was “The Monster of Afang,” “The Golden Harp,” “The Great Red Dragon.” All the stories Carys had read to her.
But this book was older than Carys’s, much older, the illustrations almost medieval.
Strange beasts prowled the margins, and the first letter of each tale was illuminated with animals and flowers.
As she flipped through, the book fell open to a well-thumbed page.
Saint Ciwa and the Wolf.
Caroline knew the story well. She had asked Carys to read it so often that they both had it memorized, and chanted it out together in a singsong. She read it now, falling into its familiar scenes as if they were the arms of an old friend.
Once upon a time, in the castle of Gwent, lived a pious girl named Ciwa. She was the only child of the Lord Talan and the Lady Coemel, who doted upon her.
Before the girl was three, Lady Coemel died of a fever.
God, taking pity on the motherless child, bestowed upon her the ability to speak with creatures of every kind, so that she might never be lonely.
The rats told her of a leak in the cistern, and Ciwa told her father, and the leak was plugged.
The deer told her of a boar in the wood, and Ciwa told her father, and the boar was hunted and slain.
And for a time, all was well in Gwent.
But one day, a cloaked woman knocked on the castle door.
“I am the Lady Angharad,” said the stranger. “And I have come from afar to care for Lord Talan’s motherless child.”