Shadows of the Night Read online

  Fern hesitated, as if afraid to seem rude, before choosing another chair and perching on the edge. “I hope it doesn’t take him too long. This entire day has been as strange in its way as last night.”

  No sooner had she said those words than an interior door opened and a man stepped through. He wore rough woolen trousers, a matching jacket, and a cap pulled low over his forehead. His face was weathered but not old, and when he saw Colin and Fern, his creased eyes widened in surprise.

  “Mr. Radcliffe. Mrs. Radcliffe.” His tone was neither welcoming nor hostile. “Our boy came and told me ye were here. I didn’t credit it.”

  “I hope that now you do,” Colin said, leaning back in the man’s chair. The action was a veiled insult in the man’s own home, but at this point, he was too irritated to care—the only thing keeping him from sacking the steward on the spot was the knowledge that he needed local cooperation if their stay in the manor was to be bearable. “Your son likely failed to tell you that the rotted ridgepole in the manor house collapsed last night and nearly killed us.”

  An expression flickered across Mr. Reston’s face, almost like a grimace. It was gone too fast for Colin to identify it, but it disturbed him.

  “I were going to vix it next week,” the man said. “I keep my end of the bargain, ye know. I have papers.”

  Colin looked disapprovingly at the man. “Yes, your wife mentioned that. You shall find some men and fix it tonight, before it brings the rest of the wing down.”

  The man nodded curtly. “I can start on it today, sir, but seeing as it’s already past noon, it will probably be two, three days before the slate’s ready to be put back on.”

  “As long as the work is started immediately and with enough laborers, I will be satisfied,” Colin said. It would have been more accurate to say, I will be less angry with you, but he could see nothing productive in that. “Your wife has already gone to find women to help clean the place for our visit. If you can gather the men to work on the roof, my wife and I would like to return to the house.”

  “Yes, sir,” the man muttered, and with that, he pivoted abruptly and pushed through the front door and out of the house.

  “Now they have both run away,” Fern observed, standing.

  Colin rose, too. “Let us hope that they will be true to their word this time,” he said darkly. “Each of these pretty little trinkets represents several shillings of my money that did not go toward the manor house. Our presence and my disapproval should be enough to keep them from shirking their duties for the time that we are here. I will send them notice as soon as we leave. Surely there is someone in the village who would be better suited—with proper supervision—to caring for the manor house.”

  Colin opened the front door for Fern, then offered her his elbow. She took it, holding on a little more tightly than was necessary for politeness’ sake.

  “We have company,” Colin murmured. The village was no longer deserted. A heavyset woman hoed dully at the patch of weeds in front of her house as she watched them, and a youth lounged in the doorway of a house across the street. A small gaggle of dirty little children hung, wide-eyed, on a fence rail.

  Fern gripped his arm more tightly. “Why are they all staring at us?”

  “They’re here to see the circus.”

  “Circus!” Fern objected.

  “The closest that they will ever come to it, if they stay here,” Colin replied.

  The villagers stared mutely at their future lord, and he felt their steady gazes changing him, shaping him back into the insensible mold of a viscount’s heir. He put a gloved hand over Fern’s, and the warmth in it reassured him, thawing the coldness that he felt creeping through him.

  “What is it?” she asked, her face thrown into lines of concern.

  “I am a viscount’s son again,” he said.

  She frowned. “You are always a viscount’s son.”

  “Not for the past two days. Then I’ve been … someone else. Someone real.”

  Colin knew the words were inadequate, but he saw understanding in her eyes. “Can’t you stay real and be a viscount’s son, as well?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I do not yet know.”

  She put on a tremulous smile. “I am glad that you are trying, at least.”

  The side of Colin’s mouth tilted upward. “It is good to know that it matters to you.”

  By the time they reached the manor house, there was already a hum of activity in the pump yard as women crossed to and from the keep kitchen, carrying buckets sloshing with suds.

  Colin slowed as they neared the back door, not wanting to plunge so soon into the dim, dank keep. But he followed the damp trail inside and up the stairs to the great hall, Fern at his side. Dorcas Reston stood in the center of the vast room, directing several other women as they scrubbed the table and dusted the chairs clustered at one end of the hall. Two women were already mopping the floor. Someone had tried to move one of the great tapestries, for it dangled in tatters from its rod high upon the wall down to form a pile of disintegrating cloth on the floor.

  “Abby vound your bags on the third floor, sir,” Mrs. Reston said with her tight little smile as they approached. “We’ll be cleaning those rooms next.”

  “Thank you,” Colin said. “Tell your husband that our trunks are still on the first floor of the Tudor wing and need to be brought up.”

  “I’ll do that. Be careful on your way up,” Mrs. Reston added as they moved toward the foot of the staircase. “They say the first John Radcliffe fell from the top step and split his head like a melon.” She nodded toward a spot on the limestone, a wide blotch that was darker than the rest. Next to him, Fern recoiled, and Mrs. Reston’s hard little smile widened slightly.

  Colin paused at the foot of the stairs to allow Fern to start up first. She did, setting one foot carefully in front of the next.

  “I do not like Mrs. Reston,” Fern said with feeling when they were halfway up, suspended a queasy dozen feet above the cold stone floor.

  “She seems a bit … tetched, as my nurse used to call it,” Colin said.

  “Tetched,” Fern repeated. “Yes, I think so.”

  They emerged onto the third floor, and Fern opened the door to the bedroom in which they had spent the night. The familiarity of it was almost welcoming to her, as inhospitable as it was. She sat in one of the chairs before the table, picking up a letter at random and leafing through it. The angular writing seemed almost to crawl across the page, filled with Elizabeth Fitzhugh’s bile and cunning. Fern shivered, setting it down. Elizabeth had written to her nephew John Radcliffe to warn him of Jane Reston’s brood and to … what? To bind him to her? How and for what purpose? Her letters flattered him one minute and made dark hints of extortion the next. What did she want, and what could a married aunt who didn’t even live in the manor house have possibly known?

  Colin walked over to one of the windows and looked out over the gray bog. “This must have been the lord’s solar once,” he said. “The other room would have been the bedroom.”

  “And what about downstairs?” Fern asked, more to distract herself than because she cared.

  “The second floor?” Colin said. “One room was probably for the ladies-in-waiting and the daughters of the house. The other, perhaps for the seneschal and his wife, or maybe the knights and the sons of the family. Or it could have been a cabinet or an armory, any number of things.”

  “I don’t like this place,” Fern said. “Last night, it seemed sad to me, all neglected and forgotten. Today, though, it just seems angry.”

  “It’s only your meeting with the Restons that has changed the way you look at it,” Colin said. “You should forget them.”

  “I can’t. I don’t know why I feel this way, and I don’t particularly care,” Fern retorted, her nerves fraying. “I just don’t like it.”

  Colin did not reply to that, merely looking at her expressionlessly. After a moment, Fern sighed and pushed to her feet.

  “P
erhaps I just need an occupation. Or a nap,” she added, looking longingly at the musty bed. “I truly ought to be a good housemistress and direct the work, but the thought of being so near Dorcas Reston makes my stomach turn.” She rubbed her temples, trying to regain her frayed composure. “I’ll pull off these bed linens, at least—perhaps that shall add a little more speed to the process of cleaning.”

  Fern went to the head of the bed and flipped the heavily quilted coverlet down, taking one of the pillows and pulling off its case. Her fingers went through the linen, and she tossed it aside. Colin watched her for a moment, then reached and took the other. Something crinkled, and as the case came free, a package fell out and dropped to the floor with a light thud. Colin stooped. When he straightened, he was holding a bundle of papers in his hands.

  “It looks like more letters,” he said, extending it to Fern.

  She was strangely loath to accept it, wanting suddenly to distance herself from the ancient Radcliffes and Gorsings, the current Restons, and everything to do with the lichenous manor. But telling herself that she was being silly, she forced herself to walk around the bed and accept the package. She looked at the top letter. The handwriting was the same as the ones on the table. She slipped the packet into her pocket, where it hung heavily against her thigh. “Thank you,” she said belatedly.

  She went back to the head of the bed, and, taking hold of the counterpane, she pulled it off briskly and dropped it in a pile for the laundry, in the unlikely case it survived a scrubbing. She began pulling off the quilts beneath, one at a time. Reaching for the fourth and final quilt, Fern paused. All of the other bedcoverings had been dusty and half rotted with the damp, yet they had been otherwise unmarked. But this one had a large black circle in the center of it, as if someone had spilled a glass of dark molasses and had simply covered it up.

  “What is it?” Colin asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. Frowning, Fern reached out to brush at the cloth. The substance crackled at her touch, some of it rising in a fine dust. The faint coppery smell of it triggered a distant recognition in Fern’s mind. Puzzled, she raised her dust-covered fingertips to her nose and sniffed.

  Realization and horror dawned simultaneously. Her stomach lurching, Fern scrubbed her hand against her skirts and backed away.

  “What is it?” Colin repeated again.

  “It’s blood,” Fern said, barely managing to say the words without her gut rebelling. “It’s blood, Colin. We sat here all night next to a bed that was covered in blood!” Exhaustion, fear, and disgust threatened to overwhelm her, and she shoved them down mercilessly to keep the tears at bay. “I cannot stay in this place. Not one more second!” And with that, the floodgates burst.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Fern whirled away from Colin so he would not see her weakness and threw herself blindly through the door and onto the stair landing. But that was only an instant’s reprieve. He would follow her—she knew he would—and she couldn’t talk to him now, not with tears turning her face blotchy and her nose running and her mind racing in circles and not making any sense. The massive stone walls seemed to close in, crushing her, and Fern had the urge simply to run away from everything. But she quashed it firmly and took the stairs with jerky care, slowing still further when she reached the unguarded flight that ran from the second floor down to the first.

  With her eyes fixed determinedly on the path in front of her, she nearly barreled into Dorcas Reston as she took the final step down to the flagstones of the hall. Mrs. Reston’s expression moved swiftly from surprise to smugness as she took in Fern’s tearstained face, and her reaction sparked a sudden ire in Fern. She shouldered the woman aside and dashed for the stairs to the kitchens, ignoring the woman’s outraged gasp. Fern hurried down the stairs and to the door to the pump yard—and out into the clammy air. A girl looked up from filling her bucket at the pump, her eyes widening with alarm as she took in Fern’s condition. Fern ignored her and cast about for a direction to take. She wouldn’t take the road—that led right back toward the village and more people, which was exactly what she wanted to avoid. She knew better than to try to walk straight across the boggy moor. But there—there was a path that wandered off from the corner of the overgrown courtyard, moving away from the village. A sheep track.

  Sniffing now, Fern headed toward it. She felt ridiculous and ashamed for crying, but she still wanted nothing better than to curl up into a ball and sob and hide until the world went away. The low bracken caught at her hem as she moved farther from the keep, but she ignored it. Around her, the land sloped down into a boggy maze, stretching out toward a gray horizon that was foreshortened by the dull humps of a ridge of low tors, the moor’s granite skeleton thrusting through at their crests. The path took the highest way, dry and firm despite the rains the night before. Hiccoughing now, her brief fit of exhausted tears subsiding as quickly as it had overcome her, Fern walked until the keep was out of sight and hearing. She found a hillock in a small, sheltered curve in the path, where three boulders cut the wind. Disregarding her silk skirts, she sat.

  From such a vantage, the moors seemed to grow smaller, drawing tight to wrap her in a nest of heather and tangled grasses. It was almost comforting, the rustling of the undergrowth in the faint wind, the gray sky low overhead like a ceiling. She sank the fingers of the hand that still had blood stench on it into the thick, tannin-rich earth until all trace was gone.

  What am I doing here? Fern thought, but she pushed that thought from her, closed her mind, and tried to find that internal balance point that she had maintained automatically for most of her life and that only now seemed to elude her.

  Gradually, she came to realize that the rustle in the heather was more than the wind. She opened her eyes reluctantly to see Colin striding toward her, his face hard.

  “Are you hurt?” he demanded.

  “No,” Fern said, brushing the last traces of tears from her cheeks—and realizing too late that this would leave smudges of dirt instead. She wiped her hand on her skirt; it was surely ruined now, anyway. “I was resting.”

  The tenseness in his face shifted, darkening. “What were you thinking?” he demanded. “You might have stumbled into a mire and been sucked under. Or you might have fallen into a pond that was obscured by weeds and scum and drowned.”

  Fern looked at him calmly. “I was following a sheep track. Unless entire herds have plunged repeatedly into a boggy pit and died, I should be perfectly safe.”

  Colin stood over her, still fulminating but mute, the perfect lines of his face cast into a hard expression. He was so beautiful that he made her heart squeeze.

  “Why are you really angry?” Fern asked softly.

  He froze, surprise flickering across his face. “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said,” she responded. “Why are you really angry? It isn’t because I ran, is it? You knew that I was in no danger as soon as you began following the track.”

  Colin sighed, and all the pent-up tension seemed to go out of him at once. He sat on the grass beside her, folding up his lean form. His presence warmed her; she could sense the heat of the spirit that flamed inside him, and she was glad for it.

  “I am not used to this, you know,” he said. “This … feeling, all the time. Sometimes, I feel like my nerves will burn through my skin.”

  “I know,” said Fern. “So do I.”

  “How do you live with it, day after day?” he demanded.

  “I am not sure,” she said, dropping her eyes to a tiny orchid that was growing beside her booted heel. “It isn’t always like this, you know. It isn’t usually like this. But since our wedding night …” She trailed off. “I suppose I shall have to wait and find out, just as you shall.”

  That silenced him for a long moment. “I thought this would work,” he said finally. “I thought that we would come here and I would discover … something … and everything would fall into place.”

  “Something certainly fell,” Fern said, giving
him a tentative smile. “Though I doubt you meant the roof.”

  Colin snorted, but softly, his green eyes remaining intent. “I thought I had begun to discover something, at least, but then we went out among people, and nothing was as I had expected it to be. Everything had changed, yet nothing had changed. And I am not used to anything being contrary to my expectations.”

  “What did you discover?” Fern asked.

  Colin shrugged. “What I’d had all along. I found you, and I found myself, but I still don’t know what to do with either one of us. The world here seems wrong, out of key, out of step, out of tune.”

  “Out of time,” Fern said, more vehemently than she intended. “It’s the detritus of other people’s lives. Worn-out furniture, a house that no one wants anymore, old, bitter letters, and mad ravings from another age. I don’t like it here, Colin. There’s no room for me among all these memories. Time is all used up—there’s none left to make anything new.”

  “But where is our place right now, Fern?” Colin asked, frowning. “Give me—give us—a little more time. A week, no more.”

  “A week,” she repeated. “This is not how I imagined spending my honeymoon. But then again, I never imagined myself married to a man with whom I would talk.” She spread her hands, indicating everything she meant in that word. “Certainly not you. I never imagined that it was important. Which now seems quite odd to me, that I would not care if I could talk to the man with whom I would spend the rest of my life. When I did realize that it was important, I was afraid that it was too late, that our choice was an impossible one for such a simple exchange.” She shook her head. “But it seems that what we really needed was something to talk about.”

  Colin’s lips quirked upward, and a hint of a smile crept into his eyes. “What would you like to talk about now, then?”

  “I still think we should get to know each other better,” Fern said gravely.

  “And how do we go about doing that?” he asked.

  “Well,” she said, taking his teasing question in earnest, “usually, two people first get to know things about each other, before they can really know each other.”