A Haunting at Havenwood
Seasons of Change, Book Six
Sally Britton
A Haunting at Havenwood © 2020 by Sally Britton. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Cover design by Blue Water Books
Image by Arcangel
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Sally Britton
www.authorsallybritton.com
First Printing: September 2020
To Josephine Leslie, who wrote the most romantic story with a ghost that anyone will ever read.
And to my mother, who watched The Ghost and Mrs. Muir with me the first dozen times.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Notes and Acknowledgements
The Seasons of Change Series*
Also by Sally Britton
About the Author
Chapter 1
October 1st, 1814
“It is no use crying, Louisa. You will only ruin your complexion.” Mrs. Banner’s words, delivered with a frosty glare, made her daughter gulp air in an attempt to calm herself.
Louisa had buried her face in the sofa’s arm in her mother’s room, her salty tears soaking the fabric. Her head had begun to ache, too. She lifted her gaze to look at her mother; the woman sat stiff in her chair, the black velvet gown she wore making her appear more like a shadow than a creature of warmth. She wore a stiff white cap over her chestnut hair, the curls artfully peeping out the same color as Louisa’s.
Her mother was still a handsome woman, despite being twice her daughter’s age.
“Mother, I did not know.” Louisa’s lungs constricted as she spoke. “What will become of us?”
“How dramatic you are.” Mrs. Banner reached calmly for her teacup. “You must have known for some time that our funds were dwindling, yet I never saw you hesitate to purchase a new frippery.”
Nor had her mother stopped her. Or warned against unnecessary expenses, but Louisa did not say so out loud. How had she not realized their finances were so close to ruin? True, some of their belongings had disappeared off walls and the best set of silver had been sent away. But Mrs. Banner had said they were merely out-of-date and wanted replacing.
It had been Mrs. Banner who had insisted Louisa obtain a new gown for the assembly ball a month ago, and wear fresh gloves and slippers, and paid for fresh flowers to adorn Louisa’s hair. All for what? They lived in Scarborough, not London. There was a dearth of men looking for wives, considering the social season was well underway in the largest city in England, drawing the most eligible bachelors there instead.
Yet Mrs. Banner had been disappointed, and she had spoken to Louisa with more harshness than usual when no callers came after the ball.
Louisa’s tears had stopped while her mind churned through the past several months of expenditures and missing household items. There had also been a lack of visitors over the past fortnight. Her mother’s cronies had not, as per usual, come to spend a quarter of an hour gossiping. Louisa had not missed them. Her mother’s friends were spiteful cats or else simpering biddies only looking for Mrs. Banner’s approval.
Louisa grasped at the past, reaching back to memories of her father. He had always treated her fondly, if indulgently, until his passing three years before. “I thought Papa left us a fortune.”
“He left us a pittance. Most of his money was tied to that trading company.” Mrs. Banner put her cup and saucer upon the table at her elbow, then folded her hands in her lap. “His partner ruined the business a year ago. I had hoped to find you a husband with money enough he could enjoy your beauty without wanting a fortune with it. It seems I overestimated the value of your looks.”
The verbal slap cracked upon Louisa’s heart and her pride. She might not have been a diamond of the first waters, as her mother had been at the same age, but she knew herself to be pleasant-enough to look at. There were gentlemen who had said as much, admiring her lively brown eyes or rose-pink cheeks. Surely gentlemen did not say such things unless they meant them.
“Mother.” Louisa pulled her legs beneath her on the couch and wrapped her arms around one of the embroidered cushions, seeking comfort by holding on to whatever she could. She had long since given up hoping for an embrace of any kind from her remaining parent. “If we are to lose the townhouse, where will we go?”
News of the need to sell the house had been Mrs. Banner’s start to the whole conversation regarding their downfall. Their worldly belongings were to be packed up and sold in lots; the furniture would stay with the house, and the money for it all would go to debts, according to Mrs. Banner. What debts they two could have that would necessitate selling the entirety of their possessions Louisa could not fathom. They did not live expensively, did they? And they only had a few servants.
“I intend to go to Mrs. Shirley. We have been friends since our youth, and she has been lonely since widowhood.”
Mrs. Shirley had a sharp tongue and a fondness for fat little dogs. Louisa hugged the cushion tighter as she admitted the thing she knew best about Mrs. Shirley. “Your friend does not like me. Not since I was a child.”
“No. Her invitation to stay did not extend to you.” Mrs. Banner sighed, for the first time showing a sign of something other than irritation. But Louisa knew well enough whatever emotion her mother felt had more to do with the inconvenience of having a daughter than with her friend not much liking that daughter. “I have made other arrangements. You are to go to Northumberland.”
Louisa’s fingertips went numb with cold, and her heart shriveled within her breast. “Northumberland?” she whispered. Scarborough was a place of little consequence, but near enough Manchester that they had made the journey to the larger town many times in Louisa’s lifetime. They had always traveled southward, and Louisa dreamed of going to London.
But going northward?
“Your father’s aunt lives in Harbottle, a village south of the border. Not by much, from what I remember.” Mrs. Banner flicked her fingers dismissively. “I will send you with the mail coach and a maid. Perhaps, while you are there, you might endear yourself to her. She has no children, and her husband left all he owned to her.”
Louisa tucked herself deeper into the corner of the sofa; with her throat so hot and closed, she barely managed a whisper. “I do not even know her. Why does she—does she want me?” Louisa hated herself for sounding small.
If Louisa’s own mother did not want her daughter about, why would an aunt Louisa had never heard of until that day?
“I wrote to her.” Mrs. Banner averted her gaze to her lap, where she smoothed an imaginary wrinkle. “Weeks ago. Her reply arrived this morning. I offered your services to her as a comp
anion, and Mrs. Penrith agreed to let you come. The woman is over sixty years old, and Harbottle is not likely to provide much in the way of companionship to her.”
“Harbottle.” Louisa said the word with confusion.
“The village where your great-aunt lives.” Mrs. Banner stood with her usual grace, but Louisa remained still upon the couch. She should not have felt so cold with a fire burning in the hearth and a shawl around her shoulders. Yet she could not help but shiver when her mother looked down upon her.
“When will I go?” Louisa asked. It did not occur to her to argue. Her mother had that look about her—the one that made Louisa think her mother formidable enough to face down a lion if she chose. Louisa never argued with Mother.
“Tomorrow. You have little to pack and less to manage.”
Louisa had always suspected she rather disappointed her mother with how she’d turned out. But as Louisa did her best in her studies, minded her manners, and always obeyed without question, it was difficult to understand why her mother never precisely approved of her only child.
Louisa began to comment, but Mrs. Banner continued speaking, denying her the opportunity. “It is a lengthy journey, and it will take you several days. I have gone to some expense to secure you a seat inside the coach. Make the most of your time in Harbottle, child. I will check your trunk before dinner.” Without another word, her mother left the room, the black of her gown fading from Louisa’s sight.
If Mother had already arranged everything… How long had she known she would send her only child away?
Louisa waited, counting the seconds as they passed, then rose and fled the sitting room for her father’s study. The room was unused, and the maid had stopped dusting it, too. But when Louisa slipped inside, closing the door quietly behind her, she was transported back in time. Back to when her papa sat at the desk, smiling at her over his spectacles.
She went to the windows and opened the curtains, pulling them back to allow the sunlight to stream inside.
Most of her father’s books were gone. Now, Louisa knew why. Her mother likely had taken to selling them.
She approached the shelves slowly, her eyes searching for a long book bound in red leather. Hoping it was still there. When she found it, laying on its side beneath a stack of folded papers and rolled maps, she exhaled slowly. Her father’s treasured copy of the Counties of England remained. With deft fingers, Louisa slid the book from its place. It was a slim volume, for all that it was tall, and she knew it well. Before her father’s death, they had examined the different counties and towns together.
“Here is Dover,” her father had said. “The place closest to France, and Calais. And here is Cambridge, where I studied in my youth.” Kent and Cambridgeshire were not what she was after at the moment. She turned the pages of the illustrated maps until she found Northumberland.
Harbottle was in the north, her mother had said.
The lettering was small, and Harbottle must not be a large village, for she did not immediately find it. After a few moments of looking, Louisa opened the top drawer of her father’s desk and found his old magnifying glass. The glass was slightly yellow with age, its wooden handle well-worn and starting to split at the base. She held the glass over the map, tracing the northern border of England with her eyes.
There was Alnwick, the county seat, on the eastern coast. And Newcastle at the southern border. Her eyes skimmed over names that made her hopes sink. They all sounded dismal. Low Bleakhope, Deadwater, Falstone, and finally, just beside the River Coquet, she found it on the western border.
The name on the map, small and insignificant, told her nothing about the place she must go. But there it was. It was real. Harbottle existed, and so too must the great-aunt she had never heard mentioned before that afternoon. What had her mother called her? Mrs. Penrith.
Louisa collapsed in her father’s old chair, the scent of leather and dust mixing together to make her eyes water and nose itch.
“Oh, Papa,” she whispered, eyes upon the map. “What will become of me?”
The room remained silent, and the shadows grew longer.
Chapter 2
There were many ways in which a man might be cursed. One way was the curse of an unfortunate name, such as Erasmus Grey. The desire to write fictional accounts of a fantastical nature was also a curse, enough of one that he used a nom de plume to avoid Society’s censure. But the man bearing both that name and that desire had yet more difficulties—he heard voices.
Voices of people who were not actually alive.
Lying in bed at an inn north of Bellingham, which was itself twenty miles south of his destination, Ras questioned his sanity. Again.
As a gentleman of eight and twenty, he ought to be well enough grounded in reality to ignore imaginary voices. And he had tried to ignore them. For a fortnight.
Then the voices started trying to get his attention during the day, when he sat quietly at his desk. He intended to write, but instead sat and listened as a masculine and feminine voice discussed him with great determination.
The voices were a recent occurrence. They had slipped into his unconscious mind first, in his dreams. Then he heard them while awake. They told him to return to Havenwood.
So there he was, staring at the ceiling above him, in a bed not-quite-comfortable enough for sleep. Since deciding to undertake the journey to his family’s ancestral home, the voices had fallen silent.
Of course, his mother had been anything but silent when he’d told her his plans.
“What do you mean, you are going to that horrid lodge?” she cried, fanning herself. “It will take you a week to get there, and the lodge is not even fully-staffed. Erasmus, you promised me you would make an effort in London this Season—”
Ras had pointed out the Season was yet months away, but his mother had been inclined to believe he meant to hide in Harbottle for the rest of autumn and all the winter. Given that he had run away to Ipswich the previous year, on purpose that time, her fears were well-founded.
“I promise I will return to London no later than February,” he had said. Surely, the voices would have left him alone by then.
Voices.
Ras sat up in the creaking bed, rubbing at his forehead. The sun would rise soon, and the first stirrings in the inn’s courtyard drifted through the walls and windows. It was time to rise if he wanted to be on the first coach northward. There was a long day of travel ahead, though he would be in Alwinton by the end of the evening if the roads were in good condition.
He dressed without the aid of a servant. He’d left his valet behind—the manservant had nearly swooned at the idea of traveling to the tiny village of Harbottle, a place that barely warranted a mark on the map.
Havenwood Lodge was not even in Harbottle proper. It sat in the woods between Alwinton and Harbottle. Alwinton held nothing of note, except an old church and perhaps a hundred people. Harbottle was not much better. Harbottle boasted nothing but a single lane of buildings for a town, and the ruins of a medieval castle. As a boy, he had climbed all over the ruins every summer. But after he went away to school, his family had moved to more permanent holdings nearer London. His mother had his two sisters to think of, after all.
When Ras started down the stairs of the inn to go to the common dining hall, he saw a woman standing at the foot of the stairs and looking out the window. He had not seen her at dinner the night before in the common room. He would have remembered someone like her.
She had round cheeks and a narrow chin, and her skin was pale as though she were worried or had been ill. Dark hair peeped out from beneath her bonnet, and her eyes were large and troubled.
Though Ras knew Society would not call the woman pretty, not in the traditional sense of the word, he found her quite striking—someone he could not help but notice.
She did not see him, and she turned away without glancing even once in his direction. Then she went through the doorway and was gone.
Ras sighed, though his disappoint
ment made little sense. He could not have spoken to her, not without an introduction. What was more, his skills with the fairer sex were sorely lacking. When he opened his mouth to speak to a woman, he never knew if the largest curse he bore would appear. His stammer.
The stammer that had kept him from speaking more than a few words to any young lady his mother threw in his path. Never mind that he had spent years overcoming that difficulty. Years of speaking around pebbles, of holding a silver plate in his mouth and reciting passages from the Bible in an attempt to cure himself. Years and years of whatever ridiculous treatment different doctors had attempted.
But that was all beside the point.
He was far too busy to give his attention to a lady at present. He had to get to Havenwood, to the family’s old lodgings. Perhaps once he was there, he could get to work on his next book.
A bell sounded in the courtyard, alerting everyone inside the inn who wished to know that the first coach would be on its way in five minutes. He had missed his chance for breakfast, unless the innkeeper would part with a sandwich or rolls.
In the flurry of activity preceding the first departure of the morning, Ras managed no more than a meat pastie wrapped in greasy paper before he had to get outside. The coach door snapped closed behind the last passenger of the interior, and it was left to Ras to either climb atop the vehicle or wait for the next.
A Haunting at Havenwood (Seasons of Change Book 6) Page 1
