Shadows of the Night Read online

  “I doubt you’d sleep at all, even if you didn’t catch anything.” Colin’s face was haggard in the lamplight. “They all smelled foul to me.”

  Fern sighed. “You are right, of course.” For want of any better occupation, she went back to scanning through the letters as Colin watched her broodingly from across the table. She tried to ignore the prickling of her neck under his attention, the slow stirring deep in her center that seemed oblivious to her body’s exhaustion.

  “I apologize, Fern.”

  The words came from nowhere, taking Fern by surprise. “You do?” she blurted.

  “I did not imagine that our arrival would be anything like this,” he continued, his voice subdued. “I had pictured a neat, modest old manor with a steward and warm food prepared by his wife.”

  “Food,” Fern echoed. “I hope we will be able to find breakfast in the morning. I hope it will be morning soon,” she added.

  “Any normal woman would be filling my ears with blame and complaints right now,” Colin said. “And I cannot say that I do not deserve it.”

  Fern sighed. “Would it do any good?”

  “Not in the least. But that rarely stops complaints,” he said with a trace of humor.

  Fern shook her head. “I am not pleased that we left Brighton for this place, and I am even less pleased that we might have been crushed by a collapsing roof, but I understand your motivations even if I do not agree with your decisions.” She cocked her head to the side slightly. “I can forgive decisions I do not agree with. If I did not, how could I hope that you would extend the same courtesy to me?”

  Colin looked at her steadily in the lamplight. “I am not used to people making decisions that I do not agree with. I do not know how I would react. I can only hope that it would be with as much restraint as you have shown.”

  “Consider yourself indebted to me, if it will help,” she said lightly. “I do understand that there is a great difference in expectations between being an eldest son and a middle daughter. But as we must be married to each other, you shall have to learn to yield a little, too, if we are to hope for harmony.”

  “Yield.” Colin’s expression was wry. “Marriage is not what I imagined it to be.”

  Fern looked around the grim, shadowed room and laughed without humor. “I should hope not, or your imagination should be morbid enough to quite frighten me.”

  At that, he gave her one of his rare sincere smiles, and Fern warmed in response. “There is that,” he agreed.

  They lapsed into silence. The rain was soundless on the thick stone walls, but short bursts of it would patter against the narrow windows as gusts of wind caught the falling drops and dashed them against the side of the keep.

  Finally, Colin spoke again. “Why don’t you read the letters, for as long as the oil lasts?”

  “It would certainly be easier than trying to talk to each other.” Fern regretted her words instantly, but it was too late to take them back.

  “What do you wish to speak about?” Colin’s response was coolly measured.

  “Nothing,” Fern said. “I am just tired. It makes me waspish, and I am sorry for that. I will read.” She fanned the letters out on the table. They were jumbled, the dates confused. She deciphered the Roman numerals on one of them: 1604. More than two and a half centuries ago. She picked one of the letters up at random. ” ‘I write again to thee, to vouchsafe the news of my safe delivery from child-bed. I have been delivered of a boy child, and my lord is pleased with me. He is not the only one with an heir. Thou also hast one to follow after thee anon. Keep this little one in thy heart, and think not ill of him, for as he is of my blood, so is he of yours.’ ” Fern paused, rubbing her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. If the writer and the recipient are related, and the writer is a woman, how can she produce the recipient’s heir? Unless she and her husband were cousins …”

  “There are a few titles in England that could be passed down through the distaff line,” Colin said. “This manor, though, wasn’t one of them, because there is no title attached. It was a fiefdom controlled by a baron who chose the wrong side when Margaret of France invaded, and he lost his life and cost his heirs much of their lands. The warden of Wrexmere, who had betrayed his master to Margaret’s forces, became a landholder in his own right. As he had no sons and no brothers, he requested and was granted a fee tail that was not restricted to the male line.”

  Fern digested this. She had heard often enough the stories told by her parents of their respective families, but they tended to be tales of heroism in battle or amusing anecdotes, divorced from real history. “You seem to know a great deal about this place, for never having been here,” she said.

  “Only the most salient points relevant to the inheritance,” Colin said dryly. “And, of course, as much about its current state as my solicitor has been able to wrestle from the ledgers. I know the story of the initial granting of the fief, its independence and the granting of distaff inheritance, the marriage of a Radcliffe to an eldest daughter and mistress, and the reversion of the Radcliffe barony to my own cadet branch of the family.” He paused. “JR would probably be John Radcliffe. All the Radcliffe masters of Wrexmere were named John.”

  “So then the author, E, must have been writing to the current master, or perhaps his heir,” Fern said. “She could have been his sister, or his cousin, or his aunt.” She picked up another letter. ” ‘Be thou not swayed by any soft words. Jane Reston’s brat is a snake in the garden, which will bite thee when she can. She knows all, and will not forgive her bastardy.’ How queer. I should sort them …” She put actions to her words, arranging the letters in chronological order. She frowned as she scanned over the first ones. Jane Reston. The name sounded familiar, but she could not remember why. “It starts in the middle. I am afraid that none of this makes any sense.”

  “An ancient mystery,” Colin supplied, settling back in his chair. “If you can’t rest, trying to put it together shall give you something to do until morning.”

  “What are you going to do?” Fern asked.

  “Sleep, if at all possible.” And with that, he closed his eyes.

  Fern looked at him for a long moment, but he did not move, and after a while, she concluded that he truly was asleep. They had eaten an inadequate dinner, they might have died in the roof collapse, and now they were sitting in hard and uncomfortable chairs. Yet he could simply close his eyes, shut it all away, and go somewhere else. Perhaps that somewhere else was where he usually was, though: a place where there was neither fear nor passion, a great, bright, empty plain that stretched from horizon to horizon in his brain.

  So he had come here—to escape the nothingness or to regain it? He had never said for certain, and the thought chilled Fern. Whatever he would become, she hoped it would not be the cold, polite mannequin she had been joined with on her wedding day. It would be exactly what she deserved, exactly the path she had chosen, so wrongly, to take. But the thought of living with such emptiness forever was now more than she could bear. He had changed too much to go back now, she reassured herself. And so, she realized, had she.

  Determinedly, Fern shoved those thoughts from her mind and began to read through the letters. Their tone was strange—veering from beseeching to dark hints at blackmail, from friendly confidence to portentous warnings. Their content was even stranger, for the writer scarcely ever said anything in a straightforward manner, writing in convoluted allusions and strange riddles that made Fern wonder if she were entirely sane.

  Fern studied the pages until the words swam in front of her exhausted eyes. But she learned very little. E was certainly JR’s aunt; there was a woman named Jane Reston who had a son and daughter who were a great danger to him, the son also, confusingly, named John, making three separate JRs in the correspondence; the recipient’s mother had died at some point in the letters; and there was another woman named Lettice who knew something important, as well. Other than that, Fern could make out nothing but a vague sense that the da
nger was related to the property of Wrexmere itself.

  The more she stared at the words on the page, the more they seemed to multiply, dancing like motes of light before her eyes. She seemed to hear the writer’s voice, worried and querulous one moment, hissing with threat the next, and as her eyes began to sag, a woman’s hard and bitter face rose before her in a foggy vision. Fern slipped into confused dreams in which she was stumbling through the darkness, searching for something—sometimes Colin, sometimes the unknown answer to everything—while a woman’s voice droned on and on in her head.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sunlight on his face brought Colin awake. He stood—and winced as his muscles and joints simultaneously protested. He was not as limber as he had been when he used to sneak into the library as a small boy after his bedtime to fall asleep with a book in one of the chairs.

  Working out the crick in his neck, he looked down at his wife. She was slumped over the table, a little crease between her eyebrows as she slept. Her usually rosy cheeks had a wan cast, and Colin shuddered a little inside to remember their precipitous flight from the Tudor wing the night before. Whenever he looked at her now, he had that same strange stirring of life inside him, and it seemed to have a lingering effect on his perception of the world. Colors seemed brighter, scents stronger, and he was beginning to feel that this was the way the world should be.

  He stood and went to the window. He could not make out the position of the sun behind the even gray blanket of clouds, which diffused the light into a flat, pale uniformity, but he sensed that it was late in the morning. The narrowness of the windows had restricted the light so that the gradual change from blackness to dim shadow had not awoken him until the sun had reached an angle behind the clouds to cast a slightly lighter bar across his face as he slept.

  Colin looked around the room. In daylight, it was perhaps less eerie than it had been the night before, but it was more forlorn, the musty bed hangings dangling limp and faded from the canopy and the chest riddled with beetle holes.

  He pulled off his dressing gown and nightclothes and dug in his hand luggage for the clothes he had worn the day before. Wadded inside his valise, they were now a mass of wrinkles. Surveying the mess of his shirt, he thought for a moment about venturing into the Tudor wing to find fresh clothing, but he decided that he’d much rather be clothed and have a hearty meal in him when he faced a half-collapsed building. A coat might not provide much protection, but at least he’d die with some dignity.

  He was pulling on his boots when Fern stirred. Scraping her hair out of her face, she sat up and blinked at him with an expression of profound confusion. Then memory spread across her face, and she blanched.

  “I can’t believe …” She paused. “I can’t believe that any of this happened.”

  “I can assure you that it has,” Colin said dryly, stepping toward the door.

  Fern stood up swiftly. “Don’t leave without me!”

  He paused. “I was going to try to find breakfast for us in the village.”

  “Looking like that?” Fern’s expression was appalled.

  “Perhaps they shall think me an ogre, and I can loot their larders with impunity,” Colin said, shrugging.

  “But you have never looked like that. Never …” She searched his face, as if expecting to discover that he had been possessed.

  Colin considered her statement for a moment. “I suppose you are right. It is not that the thought of looking shabby disgusted me; it is simply that it is not done, and so I had no reason to do it. However, now I find myself without a valet or a clean change of clothing within easy reach, and so I have ample reason to break with custom. I am also hungry enough that I have no desire to wait half an hour to lay and light a fire to heat water so that I can shave.”

  “I hope my clothes aren’t as wrinkled as yours,” Fern said, without displaying much hope. “Please help me get dressed. If I can just brush my hair, I will be ready to go soon.”

  “You are not ashamed to be seen with me like this?” he asked with some amusement.

  “Right now, I should not mind if you were a real ogre. I don’t want to stay here alone,” she said firmly, her small jaw setting. “Besides, I greatly fear that I shall not look much better.”

  He raised no further protest, helping her into her corset. There was a small, erogenous thrill in reforming Fern’s waist to its circumference, but any libidinous thoughts were overruled by the increasingly insistent demands of his belly.

  “I did not retrieve your crinoline,” he admitted as he held out her first petticoat.

  “I wouldn’t dare try to wear it on those stairs,” Fern said. “My small one is five feet wide, and the stairs can be no broader than two and a half. We’re in a rustic lodge of sorts anyhow, aren’t we? I don’t need a crinoline for country sports.”

  Once her dress was buttoned, she bent and fiddled with some ties on her skirts. When she straightened, they were no longer dragging the ground but were hiked up several inches above the colored silk hem of her uppermost petticoat.

  “Clever,” Colin said.

  “It’s my country walking dress,” she explained gravely. “It lifts so that the dew can’t stain it.”

  Her arranging of her hair was less swift. She appeared to decide upon a simple twisted braid, but her plait kept coming out off center and her twist crooked. Finally, red-faced with irritation, she stabbed it ruthlessly with a dozen hairpins as Colin watched.

  “I want a maid,” she said flatly, turning to look at him as she finished.

  Something similar to his own transformation was occurring to Fern, he realized, for he could not have imagined that the meek little thing he had wooed in her mama’s parlor would state her desires—almost demands—so flatly.

  “Of course,” Colin said. He had deprived her out of thoughtlessness, not design. He was simply unaccustomed to thinking of the needs of another person. Tenants and servants were provided for automatically, without particular accommodation for their individual wants and needs. A wife, though, was different, he was coming to discover—not an appurtenance like a carriage or a housekeeper but something else, something far more intimate that lay uneasily in his mind and that demanded special care.

  With that disturbing thought, he led the way out of the door and down the narrow stairs. When they reached the unguarded staircase leading from the second floor to the first, Colin slowed, turning slightly so that his back was angled toward the wall, his empty stomach clenching.

  The flagstones of the floor below looked very distant and very hard. How long a fall was it? Twenty feet? More? The next inevitable question rose unstoppably in his mind: How far would it have to be to kill him? He had never given heights a second thought before, but he had never experienced them so directly, either. He was preternaturally conscious of the texture of the stairs through the soles of his boots as he stared down at the clutch of furniture below.

  He made the last step to the floor with a palpable sense of relief. He turned as Fern joined him, her normally rosy face pallid and drawn.

  “I do not like that,” she said distinctly.

  “I couldn’t imagine that anyone would.”

  She nodded toward a pair of vast double doors, centered on the long wall. They had been invisible in the darkness the night before. “Can’t we get out there?”

  “No,” Colin said. “I saw them when we arrived. There would have been a staircase that led up to them from the ground level at some point, but it’s long gone. The doors open up over thin air.”

  Fern shuddered. “I’ve had enough thin air for a long while.”

  They took the back stairs down into the kitchens, and Colin led Fern to a small, battered door hidden in the shadow of one of the columns. It had been cut through the wall of the keep several centuries after it had been built, the stone that formed the frame and lintel a slightly different color than the rest.

  He pushed it open and stood aside to let Fern pass into the pump yard that he had discovere
d the night before.

  “It’s on the far side of the keep from the village, so it’s a longer walk than through the front, but this way, we won’t have to go through the Tudor wing,” Colin said in answer to Fern’s questioning look. “Speaking of which, I wonder how it held up in the night.” He backed away from the keep’s wall and squinted up at the adjoining wing. “From this angle, one can’t even see that half the roof is gone. At least the outer walls are still standing.”

  “I will gladly take a longer walk rather than risking a house falling on my head,” Fern said fervently. “Even if it seems sound now.”

  “I think the village is no more than a mile away,” Colin said, extending his arm toward her.

  She took it. “All this land is yours? A square mile is three hundred sixty acres.”

  “Around a thousand acres are ours, perhaps a little more,” he answered. “Though nothing in the old village proper belongs to my family.”

  Fern frowned. “That is a great deal of land to be so neglected.”

  Colin looked around the boggy terrain consideringly. “I had thought so, too, though how much more can be done with this without extensive—and expensive—modifications, I can’t say. I had begun with the intention of introducing some better sheep strains and breeding practices, but when I asked my solicitor to look into the fiscal situation in preparation for such investments, he met nothing but confusion in the records and got no help from the steward. When I reached my majority, Father simply handed the books and the small profit to me. After the two hundred pounds per annum that I spend on maintenance, such as it is, there is usually scarcely any surplus to be had. I assume that the probable lack of return is the reason it was allowed to fall into such a state. Father is usually contentious about his landholdings to the point of fussiness, but he has always avoided this place.”

  As they circled to the front of the manor house, the track that the coach had taken came into sight, overgrown and frost-heaved cobbles giving way to a slight double depression in the turf that wound down the long slope of the tor toward the village.