Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
At the back of the kitchen were two doors. One stood slightly ajar, letting in a thin blade of cold air. The other was closed, its latch old iron, the wood around its frame stained with age. Minerva studied the second door a long moment.
“That one can wait,” Kitty said, linking her arm with Minerva’s. “Let’s see the rest of the rooms on this floor.”
They made their way through to the dining room with its sturdy, simple table and chairs. Next, they found the parlor, a group of three chairs around a small table in one corner, a sofa with two chairs facing it in another.
“Kitty, look. A piano.” Minerva crossed to the far wall.
Her fingers found the edge of the keys and stopped there, not pressing, just resting.
The ivory was slightly yellowed, smooth and cool beneath her touch.
Three years. It had been three years since she last played in the drawing room of the house that had been her home before it was sold to pay Papa’s debts.
She had not known that rainy afternoon that it was the last time.
She had simply played as she always had, and then her world had fractured and she had not had the opportunity to play again.
She lifted her hand from the keys.
Her first chords after so long would not be random. When they were settled in, when she was ready, she would sit and she would play, and she would see what three years of absence had done to her hands.
As though sensing Minerva’s thoughts, Kitty looped an arm around her waist. “You’ll play a concert for me. Just like we saw in the music hall in London that one time.”
“Not just like that,” Minerva said with a laugh. “But I’ll play something.”
“Oh, pretty,” Kitty said when they opened the last door to find a room with a chair and a small sofa and a window looking out at the side garden.
And shelves filled with books. Minerva wondered if her cousin Catherine had read them all.
She took a moment to study the spines. She slipped a book out and opened the cover. The title page read:
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY:
A NOVEL.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
BY A LADY.
VOL. I
There were others: Mansfield Park. Pride and Prejudice. Emma. Persuasion. All credited to A Lady. Minerva wondered if they were all by the same lady.
“So many books,” Kitty said. “I wonder if your cousin read them all.” She looked skeptical. “That would be far too much reading for me.”
Minerva laughed. “But not for me. I look forward to reading every page of every book here.” Closing the book, she then returned it to the shelf.
She ran her fingertips along the spines, reading titles, until she came to a book bound in worn brown leather, the spine blank. She drew it out. The cover was soft, darkened at the edges.
As she opened it, she found Catherine’s name inside, the handwriting neat and precise.
She had seen this hand before, in the rambling letter that had arrived after her parents died.
She turned the page, startled to find the handwriting there neither neat nor precise.
The letters lurched across the page, some large, some cramped, some words slashed through with heavy lines.
She read a few lines.
The cliff calls again tonight. I do not answer. I used to answer but I know better now. The pendant is warm, but I am so tired.
Minerva turned the page.
It is clever, as it has always been, finding the gaps between. I have been reading the old accounts. A woman documented all, but I cannot find it now. I believe she wrote something about a ring. I don’t remember. Why don’t I remember?
She turned another page to find the handwriting worsening, the letters larger and less controlled.
Trap it. Trap it. Trap it in the stones. Pull it in, but not alone. Need another who can see.
Minerva closed her eyes a moment, saddened to think of her cousin trying very hard to hold onto something important and losing her grip on it by degrees. She closed the journal and set it on the small table, thinking she would return to it another time.
“The cellar now?” Kitty asked.
The wind found the chimney, rising in a long, low moan. An eerie stillness settled around her then, from somewhere behind her, came a rasping sound.
She turned sharply. The room stood empty, innocent, lit by the last vestiges of sunlight as evening gathered.
Summoning a smile, she looped her arm through Kitty’s. “We’ve other, more immediate concerns. Tea. Food. The cellar can wait until tomorrow.”
They returned to the kitchen and Minerva glanced at the neatly stacked woodbox beside the hearth.
“We won’t freeze.” She met Kitty’s eyes, seeing in her gaze mirrored memories of thin walls, icy rooms, and nights spent listening to the wind scrape at the shutters. “I’ll empty the wash basins upstairs and see the curtains set before it grows dark.”
Kitty nodded. “I’ll start a fire and make some tea.”
Minerva took a bucket and climbed the stairs once more.
She went first to Kitty’s room, drawing the thick curtains against the gathering dusk, shadows dancing along the walls. Then she emptied the wash basin into the bucket.
In her own room, she did the same.
A sound came from the hallway, a whisper, dry as winter leaves.
“Kitty?” She moved to the open door. The landing lay quiet, the banister casting long, thin shadows across the floor.
The sound came again, closer.
She told herself that old houses whisper and groan as they settle. Still, she set the bucket on the floor and followed the sound to the third room, the one neither she nor Kitty had chosen. When she pushed open the door, the hinges creaked in protest.
A narrow bed stood against the far wall, the coverlet smooth, its corners tucked with precise care.
Beneath the window was a small writing desk, its surface bare but for a closed book, an inkwell, and a quill left beside it, as though the writer had only just stepped away.
A mirror hung beside the window, its surface warped and dimmed with age.
As she stepped inside, the air within stirred, lifting a faint scent, sour and sharp.
Cold slid across the floor, creeping around her ankles, oozing up beneath her skirts.
The curtain shifted. With a shiver, she wrapped her arms around herself and moved to the window, surprised to find it firmly shut.
Outside, the fading light blurred sea and sky together so she could not tell where one ended and the other began.
She turned away and, for an instant, the room felt small and close, the space drawing tight around her.
Her chest constricted. Her breath came in a shallow gasp.
She looked to the mirror, to the warped reflection of the bed, the desk, the curtain, the door she had come through. She saw her own pale face.
And she saw someone standing behind her. A man.
She spun, heart pounding in her breast, panic rising, swift and sharp.
The room was empty.
Pressing her palm to her chest, she looked to the mirror once more. The room behind her was empty there, too.
The urge to flee gouged at her, leaving her bare and raw.
Almost did she obey. She stumbled back a single step before willing her feet to still.
If she let the talons of terror take hold, they would tunnel deeper and deeper until her will was not her own, until fear determined her every thought, her every breath.
She must stifle it. Master it. Lock it away.
Her fingers closed around the pendant at her throat, the metal too warm.
A flicker of recollection stirred: Mama’s drawing room in London. Candlelight and shadow. A woman’s voice, pitched low. She must be told.
Her mother’s reply, sharp as a snapped thread. Not yet.
The fragment of memory dissolved before she could grasp it.
A wave of fatigue pulled at her, mingling with her barely leashed fear. She closed her eyes and when she opened them once more the walls no longer felt close and suffocating. The air smelled of beeswax, not rot.
She stood for a moment and forced herself to think rationally. The mirror was warped, the glass old and imperfect; she had noticed that when she first entered. What she had seen was just a distortion of light in the flawed glass.
The room was merely a room.
She held that thought like a flame held against the night, cupped and fragile and necessary.
Below her, Kitty moved about the kitchen, humming softly, the sound reaching her like a hand finding hers in the dark.
Footsteps sounded in the hallway. She spun, heart lurching, and found only Thom crossing toward Kitty’s room with a trunk braced against his shoulder. He set it down, glanced up, and nodded.
“All done now, Miss. That were the last trunk.”
“Thank you, Thom,” Minerva said. She pulled the door of the third room closed behind her. The latch caught with a soft, deliberate click.
From behind the door, a floorboard creaked in the empty room, slow, measured.
Deliberately, she turned away.
She retrieved the bucket and descended the stairs with her spine straight, her free hand gripping the banister hard enough to whiten her knuckles.
The chill followed her, no longer twining around her ankles, but deeper, in her blood, in the marrow of her bones, in the cold taste of salt and iron that had settled on the back of her tongue.
At the bottom of the stairs, she stopped and stood very still, listening to the house.
Above her, nothing moved.
And yet—
She had the eerie feeling the house had not been empty when they entered, and that whatever lingered here had taken note of her now.
Minerva lay in the unfamiliar bed, staring into the darkness, floating in the space between wake and sleep.
She walked beneath a gray sky interrupted by the pointed peaks of rooftops.
She knew this street, had walked it all her life, and yet she felt certain she had never walked it before.
She turned the corner at the end and saw the house of her childhood, the brass knocker, the three stone steps.
But even as she thought, home, she knew it was not home, it was a place new and unfamiliar, seen now for the very first time.
She looked down at her feet, farther away than they should have been, then at her hands, the fingers not her own. In that instant, she realized that she was not Minerva, but someone else.
She climbed the steps. The brass knocker was cold beneath her fingers as she rapped three times, the knocks evenly spaced.
A maid opened the door, her face familiar, one Minerva had known a long time ago, and yet the woman Minerva inhabited did not know the maid at all. Behind her was the hallway Minerva knew well—the console table, the gilt-framed mirror, the black and white marble tiles.
“I would like to speak to Mrs. Ashworth,” she heard herself say in a voice that belonged to someone else, an older woman.
The maid went away and after a moment, a woman appeared at the end of the hall. Minerva could not see her face, but she knew her mother’s walk, the way she carried herself, the brooch pinned to her dress.
“Catherine,” Mama said, her tone careful and guarded.
“Eleanor.” Mama’s name came from her lips without her choosing to say it. “I have come to meet your daughter.”
Mama took a step forward. In the light from the hallway mirror, Minerva saw her face clearly. Eyes wide, lips parted, she looked young and afraid.
“She is a child,” Mama said quietly. “I will not have her frightened before she must be.”
“By the time you judge the moment right—”
“Not yet.”
Something moved in the shadows. A little girl with dark hair and green eyes and a face that was her own and yet not. Minerva’s face. The child did not know that the woman on the step had come here for her, to warn her, to teach her, to protect her.
Mama turned the woman away, but she returned the next day and the next until Mama let her in.
Minerva woke with a gasp, hand at her throat, fingers curled around the cool pendant, the dream already thinning at the edges, slipping away, the certainty that it had been more than a dream taking its place.
She reached for a rational explanation. The house, the bed, the sounds were all new and unfamiliar. Add to that the fatigue from lengthy travel and it was expected that she would have vivid and disturbing dreams. She had dreamed of Mama many times before; of course she had. This was no different.
Except…it was. This dream had felt purposeful, as though she were being shown something of great import.