Chapter 25 Lady Hargreaves
Leena did not sleep easy within Weavingshaw, even with the pouch of salt Mrs. Van had procured for her.
It was on the third night that she dreamed of Lady Hargreaves.
No, not dreamed. Leena was Lady Hargreaves, back when she was alive and still known only as Gemma, attending a ball in the first blush of youth, an empty dance card in her trembling fingers.
The hundreds of flickering candles made her feel as if the entire room was on fire, the twirling men and women dancing amid the blaze.
Standing beside her was a woman Leena knew instinctively was Lady Hargreaves’s mother, her sharp eyes critiquing her daughter’s every movement.
“Stand straighter, Gemma,” her mother hissed. “No man will look twice at you slouched over like that.” She turned away from the girl with a frown, her attention reverting to the gossiping chaperones who sat among the perpetual wallflowers. “What did you say, Lady Grenville?”
“He’s not brought her with him tonight,” Lady Grenville tittered.
“Who?” the dowager sitting next to Lady Grenville asked.
“Lord Avon. This is the third party he’s not brought his wife to.”
The dowager lowered her voice, forcing all those who wished to listen to crane their necks. “He keeps her in Weavingshaw. It is Avon tradition; she is not to leave until she bears him a babe.”
“An heir,” Lady Hargreaves’s mother corrected.
Gemma felt a sinking dread at the thought of Lord Avon’s wife, isolated on those terrible northern moors. How lonely she must feel surrounded by violent waves and rocks, to be brought there as a young wife, then abandoned until she became a mother. Did she miss the girlhood she had left behind?
“It’s a shame he married a tradesman’s daughter,” the dowager continued, her voice croaky with age. “Money or no, the heir’s blood will be sullied.”
Gemma’s eyes roved the ballroom, landing on Lord Avon’s golden form.
He was surrounded by people, lords and ladies alike, each lapping up every word that left his handsomely curved mouth.
A man stood beside him on the fringes of the crowd, both somehow simultaneously within and outside of it.
She recognized him as Lord Hargreaves purely from his Algaraan features.
She lingered on his eyes, brown and deep-set, a serious tilt to his mouth that offset Lord Avon’s gaiety.
Suddenly, Lord Hargreaves’s gaze met her own, and she reddened at being caught staring. She lowered her gaze to the dance card in her hands.
Within moments, she felt a presence by her elbow. A deep voice caught her attention, and she dared to lift her eyes to see Lord Hargreaves asking for the next dance.
—
They were married in the spring.
Images flashed through Leena’s mind—at times vivid in color, at other moments blurred and slightly hazy with age. Still, despite the years that had passed, Lady Hargreaves’s wedding came to her in sharp detail, as if her happiness on that day had cemented the memory in the ghost’s mind.
Leena felt Lady Hargreaves’s exuberance as she bound her hand to Lord Hargreaves, the ribbon clasping their fingers together as a priest said a vow to the Saints.
She saw Lord Avon standing as the best man.
She saw the way Lord Hargreaves looked at his wife, as if entranced.
She felt Lady Hargreaves’s own response to her husband, the twisting of love and devotion.
She never once saw Lady Avon.
—
Leena awoke with a gasp, lurching forward, squinting frantically in the early-morning light that broke through the window.
The salt circle remained unbroken.
Lady Hargreaves stood on the other side, wringing her hands in silent entreaty. So, she had not been laid to rest after all. But Theodore Daye maintained his habitual stance beside her bed, guarding Leena through her sleep.
Great emotion rippled from the ghost boy as he gestured angrily toward Lady Hargreaves. The room grew colder, and frost crept over the windowpane. Leena could see her panting breaths as swirls of smoke.
With this drop in temperature, Lady Hargreaves began to dim.
“No…Theo—” Leena staggered out of bed, but it was too late.
Lady Hargreaves was gone. Theo had banished her.
“Saints damn it!” Leena cursed.
Lady Hargreaves had not returned to possess her, but to warn her.
Even while the salt circle remained intact, ghosts still sometimes left imprints of themselves inside Leena’s mind while she slept.
Especially here in Weavingshaw, where Leena felt more tethered to the dead than anywhere else.
Even now, Leena continued to sense Lady Hargreaves’s desperation like a steady hum in her chest, a plea for Leena to do something, but what that something was Leena had no clue.
Theo had flinched at her exclamation, and Leena’s expression softened.
“I’m sorry, Theo,” she said quietly. “I’m not angry at you. You were only protecting me. I just wanted to know what Lady Hargreaves had to say.”
Theo nodded slowly, but he had hunched over, his small frame crowded in on himself.
Leena rose from the bed, approaching him cautiously. “I truly mean it, Theo. Thank you.”
Theo looked as if he wanted to speak, but, not for the first time that morning, the words of the dead were lost to her.
—
Leena searched for a portrait of the 16th Lady Avon, Percival’s wife, but she could not find it.
The gallery in which they’d had their initial tour was filled with portraits of the Lords of Avon, all blue-eyed, all fair-haired.
There was the 1st Marquess—bewitchingly handsome, drenched in light, making it look like the golden glare originated from him.
Leena remembered what had been said on that tour: that Weavingshaw’s initial purpose had been to be a fortress, Morland’s frontline protection from the Casland invaders.
When the King had given the property to the 1st Marquess of Avon, it had comprised only the burnt remnants of a house and untamable lands, with orders to ready it as a stronghold.
To Leena, it seemed an impossible task—especially the more she saw of the north. Even the ocean was not safe. She’d caught glimpses of shipwrecks and ruined hulls left on the beach, centuries old.
It was an impossible task. The 1st Marquess should’ve failed, the Avon root cut, Weavingshaw a pile of forgotten bricks.
Yet standing here, nine hundred years later, staring at the portrait of the 1st Marquess, she wondered how he had managed to transform Weavingshaw into this enduring bastion.
Beyond the Marquess’s handsomeness, the artist had given his face an almost beastly expression, his sharp features molded in cold aristocratic cruelty.
Leena felt a quiver race up her spine at the thought of what, exactly, the Marquess might’ve done to ensure the continuation of his line.
Her eyes then drifted toward the last Lord Avon’s portrait, and she could not help but contrast this painting with how he appeared in both Moira’s and Lady Hargreaves’s memories.
He was younger in this rendering, dressed in a crimson hunting jacket with a musket slung over his shoulder.
He still wore his silver insignia ring, but the wedding band was not yet on his finger.
In Moira’s memories, there had been a different smolder to him—a fever that was all-consuming.
That had, in fact, consumed Moira to her death.
—
All four of them met in the same gallery that evening.
Leena, Rami, and Mrs. Van had spent the afternoon scouring the attics as the rain persisted outside, unveiling trunks filled with clothing from centuries past: dusty dresses with wide hoopskirts; linen pantaloons; musty, white-powdered wigs.
There were also other hidden treasures, but the diary was not one of them.
St. Silas had returned from the smugglers’ caves in a foul mood, his wet hair plastered to his forehead in thick tendrils, mud caking his boots. “I found only boxes of old rifles,” he told them grimly.
“What’s next?” Rami asked, loosening the cravat at his throat in frustration.
“The crypts.” St. Silas’s gaze flickered to the portrait of Lord Avon, his first acknowledgment of the painting since his arrival at Weavingshaw. “Tonight we go to find Percival Avon’s tomb.”