Chapter 34 The Motherless Boy
On the night before the duel, Leena did not encircle her bed with salt.
She understood the risk, felt the fear of being possessed curl in her stomach, but her desperate need to find any means to help outweighed the consequences. Especially on this night, above all others, as her brother and St. Silas readied themselves to face the sword.
“Lady Hargreaves,” she whispered into the empty room. Theo Daye had not re-emerged and, for the first time, Leena ushered in her own haunting. “Return. Finish your story.”
It took some time before Leena’s restless mind fell asleep, the copper coins nestled in her hands.
When sleep finally took hold of her, she dreamed of Lady Hargreaves.
—
It was only a few months into the marriage when Lady Hargreaves felt the first inklings that something was not right.
Her husband was often busy. This was not unusual; he was an important man, with estates and lands to oversee.
It was the host of men who entered his study at all hours that bothered her—some of them of the undesirable sort that made the skin crawl on her neck.
There was that loathsome Orley, with his long, trailing fingers and expanding eyes.
And, almost always, there was Lord Avon.
Lady Hargreaves disliked him most of all.
Lord Avon had a way of speaking that was designed to smooth and manipulate any obstacles from his path. She had seen him twist the truth, threading wrong into right, turning water into wine. She’d seen the influence he had over her husband.
Oftentimes, she’d catch the tail end of their conversation.
“…if His Grace is to continue business with us, we must provide him with more boys. He won’t take prisoners; says that their emotions are tainted.” That was Lord Avon.
Lady Hargreaves stopped in the stairwell to listen. Frightened, she wondered who these boys were. A shiver overtook her spine.
“I do not like this, Percy.” Her husband’s tone was uneasy. “We are walking down a path of no return.”
She heard the disappointment in Lord Avon’s voice. “Hargreaves, these boys are from the workhouses. They are half starved, the refuse of society. We are giving them a chance…”
Their voices began to drift down the hall, and Lady Hargreaves could hear no more.
Later that night, as Lord Hargreaves prepared for bed, she asked him about the conversation she’d overheard.
While it was custom for husbands and wives of the nobility to sleep apart, her husband never followed that rule.
She’d heard some of the servants remark upon it, but she paid no heed, preferring the way her husband’s body felt cradled by her own.
He looked momentarily taken aback that she’d overheard them, then his voice turned mild as it always did when he tried to hide something. “It is nothing, my dearest Gemma. Do not trouble yourself over such petty matters.”
Lady Hargreaves shook her head, putting down the brush she’d been running through her hair. “Be wary of Lord Avon, my love. He cares about nothing save Weavingshaw and begetting an heir. The way he keeps his wife all alone…”
“Do not speak of what you do not understand.” It was the first time her husband had spoken sharply to her, and Lady Hargreaves halted, her fingers still clutching the handle of the brush.
When her husband saw the hurt on her face, his expression softened, and he leaned across to brush a kiss over her hair. “I apologize for speaking to you in such a boorish manner, my love. It is only that Percy is my oldest friend, and he has had some unfortunate luck.”
“How so?” Lady Hargreaves asked tentatively. She’d heard rumors, but she’d often dismissed them as idle gossip.
Her husband reached for her wrist, his eyebrows furrowed as he concentrated on unbuttoning the cuffs of her nightgown.
Goosebumps pebbled her skin at his touch.
“Excuse the vulgarity of my frank speech, but Percy married his wife for the money her father had promised him. He owned a shipping company.” He took her other hand, undoing those buttons as well.
“A few days into the marriage, it was revealed that all of the money that had been promised to Percy was gone. The girl’s father had made some bad investments, and a ship he’d been counting on to restore his wealth had sunk in the Westin Ocean a day after the wedding.
When the girl’s father learned of this, he suffered a heart attack, leaving all his debts to poor Percy. ”
“That’s terrible,” Lady Hargreaves said, as her husband moved on to the ribbon at her neckline.
“It is worse than terrible. If Percy does not find a way to restore his wealth, he will lose Weavingshaw. He will die before he allows that to happen.”
“What about those boys Lord Avon was speaking of? The ones that His Grace wanted?”
Her husband paused, the white ribbon caught between his thumb and index finger.
Once more, his voice turned mild. “A Duke has offered Percy a few coins to find him some suitable servants, that is all.” He leaned toward her when he saw the worried notch on her brow, tucking her neckline lower.
“Come, let us forget all of this. Percy already has a wife to content himself with. Let me content myself with my own wife tonight.”
—
The boy was motherless.
Lady Hargreaves held the babe in her arms, fascinated by the dark wisps of hair that fell over his brow. She hummed to him, the young master Bramwell Avon, relishing the way his tiny fist held her finger.
“He grows well.” Her husband had paused at the threshold, watching as she rocked the sleeping baby back and forth. “He’s a handsome lad.”
“Takes after his father.” Lord Avon was steps behind him, a smile crinkling the corners of his eyes.
Lady Hargreaves watched him covertly beneath her lashes.
There was no grief on Lord Avon’s face, no remnant of feeling from his wife’s passing only a few months prior, during childbirth.
Not a single mention of her name. Even the black he wore did not resemble mourning attire, cut impeccably in the latest fashion.
She gripped the baby tighter to her chest. “I think he takes after his mother.”
She didn’t miss the narrowing of Lord Avon’s blue eyes, nor the way he took the boy from her, anchoring him to his own chest, his hand possessively snaking over the sleeping infant.
“He is an Avon through and through,” was His Lordship’s only reply, as if the boy had been born in isolation, from a single line. A motherless child even before birth.
—
Lady Hargreaves’s delight expanded the more she watched Bram grow.
He was a quick learner, and he understood the world in different ways from the adults around him.
He would notice small details that escaped everyone else’s attention—that the tonic Lady Hargreaves had each morning to calm her nerves made her drowsy and dazed, or that the parade of men who entered Hythe House always left with a brand on their forearm: The Wake.
Bram was only seven when he asked her about the Wake, and when he saw Lady Hargreaves freeze, her eyes wild with fright thanks to all the things she’d seen and heard over the years, he learned not to ask again.
Her husband and Lord Avon had begun to take the young master into their meetings, excluding Lady Hargreaves on the other side of the closed door, and she knew that they were molding him to one day inherit it all.
She watched with growing dread the way Lord Avon treated the child.
He was not a neglectful father, nor even a cruel one, but he was forgetful.
It was obvious he loved the boy, taking great pride in both his intellect and handsome features.
But Lord Avon was prone to taking long trips, leaving the boy either with Mrs. Van, the governess, or at Hythe House with Lady Hargreaves.
When he returned, he’d whisk the boy back to Weavingshaw, and Lady Hargreaves felt the gap in her chest grow wider at Bram’s absence.
Sometimes, her husband would accompany Lord Avon on those trips north, and every time he returned from Weavingshaw, Lady Hargreaves sensed a change in him.
Something dark had rooted itself in her husband’s chest and he barricaded himself for longer in his study.
Bram also returned changed.
Childhood seemed to fall off him quicker, leaving behind something ancient and cold.
He still knew how to smile at her in that boyish way that had always charmed her, but she’d seen the way that smile dropped the moment she turned her head.
All the unease Lady Hargreaves felt seemed to build and build with each passing hour until she felt smothered beneath the weight of it.
But…her husband still visited her at night. Lady Hargreaves told herself that she could live with the disquiet she felt during the day if it meant she could have those nights with him.
—
Just before Bram’s twelfth year, her husband took her to spend the summer at Weavingshaw.
It was her first time at the estate, and Lady Hargreaves longed to see the land that had captivated the child she’d grown to love with her entire being.
The estate was beautiful.
But it seemed to hate Lady Hargreaves beyond compare.
She felt suffocated within the house. Sometimes, she imagined the walls were closing in on her, depriving her of breath. During the nights, even though she could see her husband’s sleeping form beside her, she felt cut off. Isolated. Without shelter.