The Rowanwood Curse (Hal Bishop Mysteries Book 1)

by Elizabeth O'Connell

  “What’s bothering you?” I said, not without some annoyance. I had been dragged along on this misadventure at Hal’s insistence, so it would not do for him to suddenly become disenchanted with it.

  He frowned at me around his pipe. “I am not bothered. I am preparing my mind.”

  “Preparing your mind?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes.” He closed his eyes, leaning back against his seat.

  I realized that the rest of the journey would be a silent one, so I left Hal to his musings and studied the countryside. As we neared the village, the land opened out into the wide wild moors of the north; great patches of grey and purple, now dusted over with a coating of winter snow, the mournful keening of the wind audible even within the carriage. It was a grim sort of day, grey and overcast, with clouds hanging overhead and threatening snow.

  I knew we were approaching the coal mine before I saw it; there was a shift in the air, a change in the feel and the smell of it. The odor of coal dust and smoke carried beneath it the peculiar feeling of industrial magic—that pounding, insistent, bracing feel of it, like blood singing through your veins after a cold swim. But there was something else underneath that, too; something I couldn’t identify, but which made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

  Soon after, the Hall itself came into sight. It was a massive structure, built from the native limestone of the moor that surrounded, looming over the village and the mine below from atop a fell. The feeling underneath the magic of the mine gained in intensity, and became a thrumming in my ears and a crawling feeling in my spine. I felt a headache coming up behind my eyes.

  We were greeted at the Hall by the butler, Reeves, a tall and nearly skeletal man, with eyes sunk deeply in his gaunt face. He instructed the footman to take our bags, and we followed him into the library. The inside of the Hall was almost as imposing as its exterior, all stone and heavy wooden doors, with rugs and tapestries scattered about as though in concession to petty human comfort.

  In the library, a fire was roaring in the great stone fireplace, though it did little to ease the chill that had settled into my bones. A bearskin rug, face permanently frozen in his last futile growl, stared up at me from the floor.

  “Are you ill?” Hal’s voice startled me from my thoughts. “You look rather pale.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “Only a headache. I suppose I must be tired. I was up rather late taking notes.”

  “Those notes were for your benefit.” He finished filling his pipe. “And it has nothing to do with being tired in any case.”

  “What then?”

  “It’s the magic.” He pulled deeply on his pipe and blew out a cloud of smoke. “It’s very thick here.”

  “Well, what shall I do about it?” I said irritably.

  He stood and went over to the fireplace, taking a packet out of his pocket and tossing it on the fire. The odor of sweetgrass and sage filled the room, and at once I felt warmer, and my headache eased.

  “What did you do?”

  Hal smiled. “Herbs for warding off evil spirits. I read about them in a book of folk magic. Very useful, some of that, even if the profession disagrees.”

  I watched the fire burning. In school they had taught us that the evil spirits of folk magic were nothing more than fairy tales; that the spirits were forces of nature, to be tamed and conquered with magic just as fire and steam had been. “How did you know—?”

  “Never mind,” Hal said brusquely. “I believe our host will arrive shortly.”

  As if on cue, the heavy door to the library slid open, and Reeves announced Sir Jasper’s arrival. Our employer strode into the room, his footsteps echoing on the stone floor. He made an imposing figure; over six feet tall and broad-shouldered, with big hands and feet. His black hair, streaked with grey, swept back from his forehead in a disheveled manner, as though he had run his hand through it. His eyes were his most striking feature—both an intensely bright shade of blue, but though the left eye was clear, the right was clouded over with a cataract. He looked from one to the other of us, as though weighing and measuring us. Hal returned his gaze impassively, but I felt myself fidgeting, like a small boy caught out in wrongdoing.

  He stopped in front of Hal and put out a hand. “Mr. Bishop, I presume?”

  Hal shook the offered hand, and briefly introduced me. Sir Jasper’s hand engulfed mine, and he shook it firmly, before taking a seat by the fire. “Now. What can you do for my daughter?”

  “Impossible to say at this point,” Hal said, blowing out a cloud of smoke. “It may be that I can do nothing.”

  Sir Jasper’s face clouded over, like the sky before a thunderstorm. “Then why are you here?”

  “To see what I can do, of course.” The corners of Hal’s mouth turned up in the sardonic half-smile that was his most common expression. “Surely you did not expect me to speak with certainty before I have even seen the girl. To say other than that I may be able to help her would be foolish puffery.”

  “Yes, of course.” Sir Jasper ran a hand through his hair, staring into the fireplace. “But you must understand—I am desperate. She is my only child. Since I lost my wife—well, I can’t lose Cissy. That’s all there is to it. And I have tried everything else—specialists from London, from France, from Switzerland—and all tell me there is nothing to be done. If it is a curse, and if I have left it too long . . . .” He buried his face in his hands.

  Hal looked at him uncomfortably and cleared his throat. “Well, perhaps if you could tell us how it began.”

  Sir Jasper gathered himself together with a visible effort and sat up in his chair. He kept his gaze fixed on the fireplace as he spoke, looking into the flames as though his memories were played out there in front of him. “It was in the spring. I think it must have been April—or even March—but it was a wet day. Cissy and I quarreled—I don’t remember why—and she went for a walk. When she returned, she had taken a chill. I didn’t think anything of it; she was never particularly delicate. But then she confined herself to her room; she doesn’t sleep, she doesn’t eat—all she does is sit at her window, staring and wasting away.”

  Hal sat back, drumming his fingers against the arm of the sofa. “Hm. But this tells me nothing. I need details.”

  “Details? Of what sort?”

  Hal stood, gesturing with his pipe. “First, let us say it is a given that there is a curse at work here. The dark magic is unmistakable. Then we must know how the spell was cast. For a curse to be cast upon your daughter, the caster must have had some item belonging to her—a lock of hair, a favorite piece of jewelry, something of that nature. So it stands to reason that he must have had access to your home. Let us begin there. Who had access to your home in the spring of this year?”

  Sir Jasper blinked at him. “Let me think—myself, of course; my private secretary, Peter Soames; my doctor; the staff, of course—there may have been others.”

  “I will need a list of their names and residences.”

  “But you can’t mean to suggest that someone in my own house—my own circle—has done this.” Sir Jasper frowned. “I trust these people implicitly.”

  “Then you will come to trust less freely, I fear,” Hal said. “For it is undoubtedly someone who has been in this house that has cast the curse. The next question must be the lawyer’s question: qui bono? Who stands to gain from cursing your daughter?”

  “No one.” Sir Jasper was emphatic. “I cannot imagine anyone who had the slightest acquaintance with her harming her.”

  Hal sighed, sitting back down on the sofa. “If you can’t entertain all possibilities, then I really cannot help you. Come, who might have cause to harm your daughter—perhaps someone who wished to harm you?”

  “Oh, if it is a question of doing me harm, that is much easier to answer.” Sir Jasper gave a bitter laugh. “Of late I have become rather persona non grata in the village. And there is my nephew, of course.”

  “Your nephew? Does he live here?”

  “No
t any longer, I’m afraid.” Sir Jasper sighed. “Marcus had grown up on the Continent with his mother, and came here with the intention of claiming his birthright, I suppose. He lived here a few months, but we quarreled, and he left like a thief in the night not long after Cissy became ill.”

  “But why should he wish to harm you?

  “Oh, he had a notion that I was cutting him out of his inheritance somehow. I’m holding it in trust, you know, until he turns twenty-one next month. But Marcus thought I had been embezzling from the estate.”

  “And had you?” Hal took a deep pull from his pipe. I stared at him a moment, fully expecting Sir Jasper to throw us from his home without ceremony.

  But Sir Jasper merely laughed. “What a question! No, of course not.”

  “Hm,” said Hal. “And what of the village? What is the problem there?”

  “They think the mine is poison—both the miners and the farmers. It is the one thing on which they are in total agreement—though the miners think that the mine is poisoning the air, and the farmers think it is poisoning the land.” He laughed again and ran a hand over his face. “I’m beginning to feel a bit like Job.”

  I thought the comparison was apt. In the light of the fireplace, Sir Jasper looked very tired. It seemed unfair that all these troubles should come upon him at once.

  Sir Jasper looked up from the fireplace. “But why the need for all these details? Can’t you simply cast a spell?”

  Hal shook his head. “It’s not so simple. A curse is a kind of spell; if I’m to break it, then I must understand it. Like any spell, it is a contract between the caster and the spirit—and to undo the contract, I must know who made it and why.”

  Sir Jasper sighed and looked away again. “There was a reason I sent for you, you know.”

  I looked at him in surprise, and Hal raised an eyebrow. “Then my coming here was not Mr. Bonham’s idea?”

  “No, not entirely.” Sir Jasper smiled. “Although he thought you would be more than willing to take it on. No, I sent for you because of your father.”

  “Father?” I was startled into speaking for the first time since Sir Jasper entered the room. “What could Father have to do with this?”

  “Nothing,” Sir Jasper said. “But I knew him—and whatever became of him at the end, he was a genius. If you are even half the magician he was, I know that you will save Cecilia.”

  Hal’s smile was bitter. “Well. Let us hope I can live up to him.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence after that, in which Sir Jasper seemed to realize that he had touched a raw nerve and Hal seemed to believe that he had shown his feelings too plainly. I waited a few moments, but I had never been one to let a silence linger, and it was beginning to make me fidget. “What next, then?”

  “I must see the girl.” Hal stood up. “If I am to break this curse, I must know precisely what I am dealing with.”

  Sir Jasper blinked and ran a hand over his face, as though he had just woken up. “Of course. I will take you to her.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  We followed Sir Jasper out of the library and up the great stone staircase. Lining the walls were portraits, presumably of Sir Jasper’s ancestors. The striking blue eyes were evidently a strong family trait—a dozen pairs of them stared down at me forbiddingly as I walked past. It gave me the creepy feeling that I was being watched, and I was quite glad when we reached the top of the staircase.

  Cecilia’s room lay at the end of a long passage. The moment I entered, I felt the chill in the air, and there was a horrible slithering sensation in my spine and a thrumming in my ears. The headache returned, worse than before, and I felt as though I might be sick. Hal looked at me, then went over to the fireplace, and dropped a packet of herbs over the fire as he done in the library. The odor of sweetgrass and sage washed over me and I took a deep breath; the effect was not as dramatic as it had been in the library, but it did help.

  “Perhaps you’d better wait downstairs,” Hal said.

  I shook my head. “I’m fine now.”

  Cecilia sat at the window, shawl draped over her thin shoulders. She turned, and I felt seized by a sudden terrible fear. It was not her appearance, though that was shocking enough; her face was terribly thin, skin stretched so tightly over bone that it was impossible to say where skull ended and face began. Her dark hair hung limply over her shoulders, dull and matted. The only color in her face was from her lips, which were cracked and red.

  But the worst of it was her eyes. They were the same piercing blue as her father’s—but they stared up at us now from the sunken face, burning with a strange energy. Her body was plainly dying, but those eyes were alive. Her cracked mouth twisted into a smirk, as her eyes burned with contempt.

  “Brought someone to help me, Father?” She laughed; the sound was sharp and fragile, like glass. “Don’t you know it isn’t any good?”

  “I have to try, Cissy.” He turned to my brother, a look of misery on his face. “You see what she has become.”

  Hal did not reply. For a long moment, he did nothing but stand there, puffing his pipe and looking at the girl. She stared back at him, a mocking little smile on her face, but he ignored her. Finally, he walked past her, to the little table that sat beside the chair. There was nothing particularly remarkable about it; it held a little serving dish, presumably containing some sort of porridge for the invalid, a bowl and spoon. The maid, a non-descript girl sitting on the other side of the table, watched Hal curiously, her eyes big in her pale face.

  He picked up the spoon, holding it up to the light, and turning it over. “She doesn’t like to eat?”

  “No, sir,” the maid said, looking down at her lap. “She says the food tastes like dirt and the spoon burns her mouth.”

  Hal frowned, setting the spoon back down, then went and crouched in front of Cecilia, still puffing at his pipe. He took one of her hands and turned it over; the palm was as cracked and red as her lips.

  She tugged at her hand, her eyes suddenly wide. “You’re not a doctor. What are you doing?”

  Hal ignored her; keeping a firm hold on her hand, he reached into his pocket and drew out a coin. This he pressed into her palm; the reaction was immediate and dramatic. She howled as though she had been burned, and a chill wind blasted through the room, fluttering the curtains and putting out the fire. The girl snatched her hand back from Hal, holding it to her chest and staring at him with undisguised hatred.

  “Wicked magician,” she said, breath hissing between clenched teeth. “Get out! You don’t belong here.”

  “No more do you, I think,” Hal said, stepping back. I thought it an odd thing to say, and looked at him questioningly, but he shook his head.

  Sir Jasper went over to his daughter and reached for her hand, but she shrank away from him, hissing like an angry cat.

  “You brought him here! That wicked man burned me, and you brought him here!” She twisted away from him, staring out the window once more.

  Sir Jasper rounded on my brother, a furious look in his eyes. “What have you done to her?”

  “I had a theory,” Hal said equably. “I tested it.”

  “And?” Sir Jasper bellowed, face reddening. “What have you accomplished, beyond upsetting my daughter?”

  “I have learned at least two things for certain.” Hal raised a finger. “First, that we are not dealing with an ordinary elemental spirit. This is undoubtedly one of the gentry—the fair folk, as the folklore calls them. Second, that whoever cast this spell must have hated you or your daughter very much—for this sort of spell requires a blood sacrifice to work. Whoever cast it has paid, or will pay, very dearly for it.”

  Sir Jasper took a deep breath, his face clearing. He turned to the little maid, whose eyes seemed to have doubled in size. “Jenny, the fire.”

  She scrambled up, evidently just as glad to be away from Cecilia, and went to poke at the coals. I wondered if she spent every day shut up in this room in the company of that creature. If so, I felt
very sorry for her.

  Sir Jasper turned back to my brother. “So, you know how to break the curse?”

  “You are very impatient.” Hal frowned around his pipe. “I have scarcely begun to understand the problem, let alone its solution.”

  I could not see that he had gone very far in determining the problem, though he seemed quite pleased with himself. Whatever he had intended to accomplish by his experiment, he must have succeeded in it. I looked over at the figure huddled by the window, now clasping her hand to her chest and muttering to herself. All at once, she seemed less frightening than pitiful to me—this creature trapped in pain and misery.

  “Poor thing,” I said. “Do you know what’s wrong with her then, Hal?”

  He gave me a rather annoyed look. “I have some idea. But to say more than that would be mere speculation, which I am not in the habit of doing. Let us say that I begin to understand the nature of the spell.”

  “That’s all very well.” Sir Jasper was looking at his daughter as he spoke, his voice a bit hoarse. “But what will you do about it?”

  “I will learn who has cursed her, and why, and how,” Hal said. “And thereby I will break the curse. But you must promise that you will let me work, and that if I ask you to do something, no matter how absurd it may seem, you will do it.”

  Sir Jasper nodded, eyes still on the girl at the window. “Of course. Whatever you need, you shall have.”

  Hal smiled thinly, as though he didn’t quite believe Sir Jasper. I did, for my part; the man was plainly tremendously attached to his daughter. There was no reason I could see that he would not give us all the help we needed, but perhaps Hal knew something I didn’t. I gave up the effort of thinking about it; my headache had returned when the fire went out, and I was suddenly quite tired. I rubbed at my forehead.

  Sir Jasper went to the fireplace and tugged on a bell pull. “I want to show you something, then Reeves will show you to your rooms. I expect you’re rather worn out after the journey.”

  Reeves arrived almost soundlessly, his skeletal form so absurdly suited to the atmosphere of the room that it was an effort not to laugh. He took a candle from the mantelpiece and led us out into the dark hallway.