Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The candle had burned low, throwing more shadow than light across the kitchen walls. Kitty and Nessa had turned in an hour ago, the house settling into the quiet rhythms of night—the creak of the beams, the distant sound of the sea. Minerva sat with a cold cup of tea before her, still mostly full.
Tamsyn’s words from earlier in the day came back to her.
Mr. Todd walking about in the small room at the back of the house.
William Todd. Catherine’s husband. Had his spirit chosen to stay for Catherine or had he been trapped here in this house by the Occupant, just as the brothers were trapped on the cliff?
And if he had stayed for Catherine, why did he remain still, though she was gone?
Minerva turned the questions over in her thoughts but could find no answers.
As she rose, ready to seek her bed, the pendant grew warm at her throat.
Wary of that warmth and what it meant, she looked around the kitchen. The fire was banked low for the night, the embers orange-red behind the grate. The plates and cups from supper were washed and set on the shelf. Nessa’s apron hung from a peg by the scullery. Everything was as it should be.
Her gaze shifted to the cellar door.
The latch was dropped as it always was. She checked it each night before she retired because she had been in that cellar with whatever dark thing dwelt there and though it defied rationality and reason, she believed that if the door was closed and latched, that thing could not come through.
Perhaps a foolish belief, but she had held on to the ritual of checking since the day she and Kitty had gone down to the cellar.
She had not gone down since.
She crossed the kitchen to the cellar door, her fingers finding the cold iron latch. Colder than it should have been. She lifted the latch and opened the door.
The cold rose and brushed against her like an exhalation, smelling of minerals and must. Beyond the first step, the darkness was absolute. The small flame of the candle behind her on the table did not reach it.
The pendant had grown hot now, and she felt its heat acutely in the face of the frigid air rising from below.
Standing there in the open doorway, she looked down into the endless dark and felt it looking back. She was not ready to go down alone. That was not weakness; there was a difference between courage and foolishness.
“I know what you are,” she said softly.
Its answer was wordless, worming inside her, inhabiting the place her will should have been.
Come down.
She looked down at her feet to find she stood on the first stair at the very edge of the endless dark now, her palm pressed to the damp wall. And she could not remember stepping down or lifting her hand.
Come down.
“I will not,” she rasped past the knot of terror in her throat.
She yanked her hand from the wall and stumbled back up the single step to the kitchen where she stood with her heart hammering and her breath coming shallow and fast. Pressing both hands flat to her thighs, she inhaled, exhaled, counted the seconds.
One. Two. Three. Four.
The cold poured up the stairs.
Five. Six. Seven.
She grasped the edge of the door and pushed it closed. And she breathed.
Eight. Nine. Ten.
She dropped the latch and closed her fingers on the pendant. It burned for a long while, hot against her palm. When it finally cooled, she stumbled back from the door, trembling, panting.
Almost had she gone down. The Occupant had called her and a part of her had answered.
Staring at the door, her thoughts awhirl, she sorted them until certainty came to her. She needed to go down, but not alone. And not tonight.
Dashiell did not sleep well.
This was not unusual. Most nights, sleep was more a negotiation than a certainty.
When the clock struck two, he went to the telescope.
He worked methodically across the southern sky, naming what he found, locating each star and contextualizing it in relation to its mathematical relationship with its neighbors. The stars eased him as they always did.
At four, he returned to his bed and lay in the dark and thought that his room was vastly different than it had been before he had brought Minerva to his home.
An irrational thought, that. The stone was the same, the furniture the same dark wood, the curtains left open to reveal the same rectangle of Cornish sky. But everything was different.
Minerva had been in this room, in this bed. He had kissed her lips, tasted her skin, touched her in places secret and luscious. He had reveled in her response, the shudders that took her as she reached her peak, the soft cries that escaped her.
Rolling to his back, he stared at the ceiling.
The bare truth of it was that he had let her in.
After spending a lifetime maintaining a purposeful distance from the majority of humankind, he had found that distance eroded by increments since her arrival in Cornwall.
He could not identify the exact moment the distance had collapsed.
That was the thing about erosion, it often went unnoticed until it was complete.
He rose and lit a candle, the flame small and steady, casting a warm, uneven light. He donned his dressing gown, remembering the way she had looked wrapped in its oversized folds.
He went to his study, to the small side drawer.
The ring—his mother’s ring that had been her mother’s before that and her mother’s and so on back for generations—had been passed to him for lack of a daughter.
It had sat in this drawer for years and on the rare occasion that he gave it a thought, he had imagined it would sit in this drawer for decades more.
The candlelight found the central stone. Amethyst.
He had kept this ring. The pendant had found its way to Minerva. And both stones were the same deep purple, the same cut, surrounded by the same filigree.
I will never marry.
He did not doubt her words. And he was not going to ask her to marry him.
But the ring belonged to her. He knew it, felt it.
He would give it to her not as a proposal or a legal arrangement but as a gift, the one object he had in his possession that had survived his father and his childhood and the void in his memories and the years of not knowing exactly what he had done or what he was.
The day was fine and sunny, warmer than recent days, the wind more breeze than gale. Minerva was in the garden cutting back the camellias when Dashiell arrived.
She heard Cato before she saw either of them, the horse’s hooves even and unhurried on the path beyond the garden wall.
She straightened and turned as Dashiell came through the gate on foot.
The sight of him in the full morning sun made her belly flutter.
Butterflies in the belly, Kitty had called them. Minerva found the description apt.
He was dressed for riding, a dark coat and deep brown trousers, his tall boots dusty from the path. He wore no hat and his hair was disordered from the ride, the thick strands falling over his forehead.
At that moment Cato pushed through the open gate and shoved his nose into Dashiell’s coat pocket. Finding it empty, he expressed his disappointment by shoving Dashiell sideways with a force that was not even slightly apologetic.
Dashiell righted himself and removed Cato’s nose from his pocket with an air of resignation that suggested he had done this many times before and expected to do it many times more.
Minerva pressed her lips together against a smile. “Ungovernable,” she said, peeling off her gardening gloves and setting them on the wall.
“Occasionally,” Dashiell said, raking his hair back with his fingers.
She found she liked his disordered state very much; it reminded her of the way he had looked as he came over her—
A blush stained her cheeks as she cut off that thought.
He looked at her now with the copper-bright eyes that had unsettled her since first she had seen him in London.
His gaze landed on her throat, and she resisted the urge to lift her hand and hide the bruises.
There was no point. They were unmissable.
The marks defined the exact set of Teague’s fingers on her skin, brutal and lethal.
Neither of them spoke for a long moment.
“You have lost your hat,” she said at last, daring to reach out and smooth his hair back from his brow.
“The wind has my hat,” he said, catching her wrist as she made to drop her hand.
Gently, he turned her palm up and lowered his head.
She thought he meant to kiss her palm. He did not.
Instead, with his eyes locked on hers, he set his teeth to the fleshy mound at the base of her thumb and bit her.
Not hard. Just enough that she felt it like an arrow low in her belly. The sensation was heady and thrilling.
He nipped her again, sharper, a little harder.
With a gasp, she jerked her hand away.
He laughed, that low, beautiful sound, part whiskey, part gravel. She loved the sound of his laugh. She loved—
Oh. Oh, no. Was that what this feeling was, this feeling in her chest and mind and soul, this feeling that was too big to contain? She tore her gaze away and looked to the camellia.
“I was pruning,” she said.
“So I see. Catherine used to prune that in July.”
“It needed attention,” she said, still staring at the stems. “It had grown quite unruly.”
“Would you like to walk?” he asked.
“I would,” she said and took the arm he offered.
Again, they fell into silence until she gathered her thoughts and spoke once more.
“Yesterday, after you arrived, after you…” She hesitated, deciding on the correct word and settled on, “After you dispatched Teague…you saw the way he was, his arms and legs moving as though pulled by strings, like a marionette.”
“I saw,” Dashiell said, matching his pace to hers.