Shadows of the Night

by Lydia Joyce

  “What happened here?” she asked.

  “Enclosure, most likely, probably before the property came into my family.” Colin’s tone was indifferent. “On land like this, it was better for the lord to have half a dozen shepherds than one hundred farmers. We should have been ruined in a few more generations if we hadn’t come into Radcliffe proper, for all that it was only a barony when the title came to our line.”

  “Oh,” Fern said. She and her sisters often stayed at their uncle’s estate, and though her father had acquired enough wealth through his investments to make him a rich man despite his status as a second son, Fern was deeply aware that one generation was enough to separate her from the history that the land gave the true nobility. The skeletons of the houses were forlorn, Colin’s dry facts an insult to their desolation.

  In the village, nothing moved, and Fern wondered how many of the houses that remained were occupied. As they passed by the moss-rimed church, the bell rang slowly twice, the tolls shuddering the still air and making the silence afterward even more profound. The coach rattled, the horses’ harnesses jingled, but beyond their little globe of life and heat, the world seemed dead.

  “There could not be more than a dozen habitable houses there,” Fern said.

  “I don’t know,” Colin replied. “The tenant’s cottages are in New Wrexmere, about half a mile distant, and they should be in much better repair. No Radcliffe property would be allowed to fall into such a state.”

  Fern continued to stare until the village passed out of sight. No one responded to the church bell. No one came out to look at the coach. The village maintained a breathless stillness.

  The driver tapped on the sliding conversation door, and Colin reached behind his head to slide it open.

  “There it is, sir,” the driver’s voice came. “Wrexmere Manor. I promised to get you there before nightfall, sir.”

  Colin nodded out the opposite window, and Fern followed his gaze. Ahead and in the distance, a sudden granite tor pushed out of the boggy land to form a dome that seemed to bear down upon the surrounding countryside. At the top, an ancient, crumbling keep speared bluntly into the sky.

  “That?” Fern said.

  Colin slid the door closed. His expression was remote. “It could be.”

  “We can’t stay there!” she protested.

  “The caretakers will be there,” Colin reminded her.

  “We can’t stay,” she repeated.

  “I can’t go!” Colin shot back, displaying the first trace of emotion that she had seen from him since they had left the inn. “I need to come here.”

  “There must be a hotel—”

  “No,” he said firmly. “No hotel. We are going there.” He pointed to the bleak gray structure.

  Fern sat back against the squabs, her trepidation mounting. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

  As they mounted the hill, Fern felt a wash of relief as she realized that there was more to the manor house than the old gray keep. A half-timbered hall butted up against it, its many-paned windows flat and dark. Even its somber bulk, with its skeletal timbers and damp, pallid walls, seemed more welcoming than the mass of rock beside it. In its shadow was a smaller structure, an old plaster and limestone cottage. No smoke rose from the chimney, and its small windows were tightly shuttered.

  “Does the caretaker live there?” Fern asked, pointing to the cottage.

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” Colin said. “We will see when we arrive.”

  Just as he spoke, the muffled sound of the wheels on the too-soft dirt track changed to the sharp clatter of stone, and the coach jolted and rocked from side to side. Fern looked at the ground outside the window—between the weeds, she could make out the faint, irregular shapes of an old cobblestone drive that had sunk into the damp earth unevenly, throwing the cobbles up in strange angles.

  The coach stopped, and for a moment, Fern just sat white-knuckled in the silence, looking at her expressionless husband. The coach swayed as the driver swung down, and after a pause, the door was opened.

  Colin stepped down and offered his arm to Fern. She recoiled before she could stop herself. Compared to these bleak surroundings, the familiarity of the coach seemed like a refuge. Suddenly, passionately, what she wanted more than anything else was to travel straight to her parents’ town house and pretend that none of this had ever happened, that she was still the blithe girl she had been only a few days before.

  But she could not do that. There was no going back. As Colin held his hand out to her silently, patiently, part of her stirred and yearned to join him, no matter how foolish the endeavor. No matter what secrets he was keeping about this place.

  Fern took his hand and stepped down.

  She had hesitated long enough that the driver had already had time to lower the first trunk to the ground. Colin paid the man and then strode purposefully up to the cottage door. He rapped upon it, the sharp sound cracking in the silence. Fern approached and hovered, not knowing what else to do, a few feet behind him. The house was in worse condition than it had looked from a distance. The plaster was coming away from the wall in chunks, and slimy green algae had advanced several feet up the facade. If the residents of this hovel were maintaining the rest of the property, it did not bode well for the conditions inside the manor house itself.

  There was no response. Colin waited for half a minute, and then he knocked again, louder this time. Fern suppressed the urge to say that she supposed that no one was home; the comment was one of the inane noises she always felt the need to make when she was nervous. Instead, she bit her lip to keep her silence, wrapping her hands hard around her middle.

  Colin rattled the lock, and his glove came away covered with rust. “No one has lived here for some time,” he said. Fern could hear the frown in his voice. After examining his hand for a moment, he snorted and turned on his heel, avoiding colliding into Fern only because she dodged to the side. He strode across the short, weedy turf to the broad door of the Tudor wing of the manor house. He rapped again, harder.

  The sound reverberated within, and then … nothing.

  Colin rattled this lock, and this time the door came open. “Perhaps they can’t hear me,” he said, but his tone contained a cold note that sent a chill through Fern. He stepped inside.

  Casting a wistful look at the carriage, Fern followed and plunged into stifling darkness. In the dim light from the doorway, she peered at the walls. Thick curtains muffled the windows and strangled the light. Stumbling in the blackness, she went to the nearest one, groping under the heavy velvet for the drapery pull. She found it, and a shower of dust flew from the curtains as she opened them, gilding the pale, foggy light with silver motes.

  Fern began to cough, and Colin turned around.

  “It doesn’t seem that the caretakers have done much caretaking,” he said, his expression stony.

  Fern wiped her streaming eyes and looked around the cavernous Tudor hall. The oak wainscot had darkened to black, and the white plaster above was grimed to gray. Under the oppressive coffered ceiling huddled a vast jumble of furniture, thick with dust and festooned with silken sheets of cobwebs. Colin frowned at a grotesquely ornate Louis XIV settee.

  “I think I recognize this from Norwood,” he said.

  “My grandmother set up house there after my grandfather passed away. I suppose the old furniture was sent here.” He swept the room with a glance. “Not only from there, I would say.”

  “Where do you suppose the steward is?” Fern asked tentatively, though any hope of his existence had been dashed at the sight of the room.

  “I don’t know,” Colin said shortly. His jaw tightened, and Fern had to consciously force herself not to quail before his reaction. I have power, too, she reminded herself.

  “I am going to look around.” Colin put action to words and disappeared through the single interior doorway.

  Fern cast one last look at the coach. The driver was lowering Colin’s trunk to the frost-heaved cobb
les. She tore her gaze away and hurried after Colin, into the interior of the house.

  There was not much more of the ground floor to see. A short hallway led past the stairs to the dining room, equally dingy, crowded, and forlorn. There was a door at either end of that room, one to a small square room that Colin curtly identified as a cabinet, and the other to the kitchens, which occupied the ground floor of the old keep. Fern could not shake the sense that she was being watched—a nonsensical sensation, to be sure, since she would have sworn that no one had disturbed the dust there for years.

  In grim silence, Colin led the way upstairs. Fern followed, his behavior frightening her less than the house did. The four bedrooms on the first floor were filthy, crowded, and pervaded with a dank, unused smell that seemed to creep under her skin and make her bones itch. Above, the servants’ rooms under the eaves were entirely bare, and large chunks of plaster lay on the floors, loosened from the ceiling by leaks in the roof.

  “I don’t think there is a steward anymore,” Fern said softly.

  Colin stood at the highest point of the last attic room, half stooping under the slope of the roof. His face was set in an expression of deep incredulity and disapproval, as if such a disappointment were foreign to his experience and intolerable. “I believe you are right, but it would be of deep interest to me to meet the man whom I have been paying two hundred pounds a year for the maintenance of this property.” Though the words were mild, she could hear the steel beneath.

  “Embezzlement,” Fern breathed.

  “Outright theft,” Colin retorted, his face dark.

  “We can’t stay here,” Fern said, voicing what she had been thinking since she stepped into the hall. “It’s filthy, and the servants are gone.”

  Colin gave a short laugh. “We don’t have much of a choice for tonight, at least.” He nodded to the narrow window, set into a dormer in the roof.

  Fern’s stomach sank as she peered through the grimy glass to see the coach already rattling down the long drive, away from the house. “You couldn’t catch it?” The question was almost a plea.

  Colin’s eyes narrowed. “No. I am afraid, my dear wife, that we are stuck here for the moment. And, since I sent my valet away at your request, without a single servant.”

  Panic welled up in Fern’s throat. They had no candles, no servants, no clean place to sleep, no transportation, and no food. “Whatever shall we do?”

  Colin’s smile was chilly. “Make do, my dear; make do.”

  *

  Colin went downstairs to fetch their luggage. He brought in the wicker hamper that contained the remains of their lunch first. There was enough left to make a light dinner, but if they wanted breakfast, he would have to go down to the village the next morning to find it.

  With luck—and for the first time in his life, that phrase carried some doubt—he’d be able to get more than food: He and Fern both needed servants, and he needed a damned good explanation not only for those ridiculous letters but also for what had been done with the money that was meant to maintain the property.

  He returned to the first floor and found Fern moving between the four bedrooms with a preoccupied expression. He left her to whatever she was doing until he had brought all their luggage in, stacking it in the corridor. The first two bedrooms he looked into contained pulled-back bedclothes but no Fern. He found her in the third, scowling down at the bed. She looked rumpled, tired, and dissatisfied, and Colin couldn’t stifle another pang of guilt. Fern wasn’t a woman raised for adversity. She was made for an orderly, predictable life. And yet everything between them had been anything but predictable, and she was rising to the challenge despite every aspect of her upbringing being calculated to make her helpless.

  “This is the only bed we can sleep in. The rest have gone moldy,” she said.

  “Aren’t you supposed to sun them or beat them … or something?” Colin said, a vague recollection of the activities of maids rising in his mind.

  “Sun them for damp, beat them for dust,” Fern agreed. “But it would take more than that to get these beds really clean, and there isn’t any sun today, anyhow.” She pulled off the sheets and blankets with a single jerk, then looked at him. Something glinted deep in her gray eyes, a sudden intense flash of emotion that he had seen several times before it was just as quickly smothered.

  But this time, it didn’t instantly disappear. “If you want to make do, then don’t just stand there—help me with the doing,” she said.

  The unexpected asperity of her demand surprised a chuckle out of him, and he stepped forward to help.

  “The ground is wet, too. We can go into another bedroom and try to beat the dust out of it in there,” she said.

  “How is that done exactly?” he asked.

  “With a beater.” She paused. “Or, if we can’t find that, a broom. If you will take this into another bedroom, I’ll look for a broom …” Her voice trailed off, her certainty sliding.

  Abruptly, he pitied her. She had not asked for this, and she was bearing up remarkably well, considering. She hadn’t yet blamed him for making a decision that was looking increasingly disastrous, and since Colin himself wasn’t sure why he had become so fixated upon staying at Wrexmere, he took her lack of accusations with an unfamiliar sense of gratefulness. He could hardly blame her for not wanting to search through the darkening rooms of the manor alone—there was something about the house that lifted the hairs on the back of his neck, too.

  “Fern,” Colin said.

  She looked up, and he noticed a smudge of dirt on her nose that was, quite incongruously, incredibly alluring. He wanted to pull her into his arms, to kiss her into forgetting her fears, and then into forgetting everything else. But he knew that would not help anything, however attractive that solution was.

  “Devil take it,” he muttered. “It would help me.”

  “What?” Fern asked. Colin circled the chaise that separated them and grasped her shoulders. She looked up at him, and for once, he knew that he was not the cause of the fear in her eyes.

  How had he ever thought this woman conventional? Her soft face, yes, that might fool a man by its prettiness, but those eyes, which shone with a hundred depths and gradations of feeling, were nothing short of extraordinary.

  He bent his head slowly toward hers, watching her expression change to expectation, feeling her breath hitch through his hands. Their lips met, scarcely brushing, and she trembled. Anticipation lanced into his groin, and he let his mouth take hers, covering it, her uncertainty and need tangling in the desperation in her lips, her teeth, her tongue. Her mouth was hot with her fears and her desire, the slickness of it begging him for more, the hard nip of her teeth demanding it.

  Finally, he pulled away, and she leaned against his body, panting slightly as her eyes glittered darkly.

  “You can do it,” he said softly. “We can do it.”

  She let her forehead rest against his chest, as if she were drawing certainty from him. Certainty!

  There was nothing that he possessed less of. He didn’t know what was going on in this strange, neglected place, didn’t know what was going on between him and his wife. But he did know, with a swiftness that dizzied him, that some things were worth fighting for.

  He spoke reluctantly. “Come help me here, and then we will find a beater together.”

  She pushed off him. “Of course,” she said with palpable relief.

  Together, they wrestled the mattress into an adjoining bedroom. Fern pushed the casement open, then retreated hurriedly. “It’s beginning to drizzle,” she said in a tone of dismay. She rubbed her arms briskly. “It’s so clammy.”

  “Indeed.” It was still warm enough that the dampness was stifling rather than chilly; Fern’s reaction was one of pure unease. “We should find that beater now, and perhaps some candles or oil for the lamps.”

  “In the kitchens, I suppose,” Fern said, her voice laced with doubt.

  “Let’s go, then,” Colin said, before her unease
could overtake her common sense. He headed toward the stairs, Fern following so close behind that the edge of her skirts sometimes brushed the back of his legs.

  They went through the dining room and toward the kitchens, passing through the entryway to the ground floor of the keep.

  “I don’t like this place,” Fern said. Colin offered his arm, and she clung to it as they advanced.

  Colin couldn’t help but agree. Light filtered in from arrow slits high around the perimeter of the room, and a draft fluttered the cobwebs in the great groin vaults that supported the floor above, the thick supporting pillars obscuring their view more than half a dozen paces in any direction. As they penetrated more deeply into the room, Colin caught glimpses of two enormous stone fireplaces that dominated one wall, with pots and utensils hung from dozens of hooks between, a sight that seemed as forlorn as it was encouraging to their quest for a beater or broom. Trestles, thick with dust and bleached and scarred with centuries of scouring, lurked between the pillars.

  “The floor plan must never have been changed since the keep was built,” Colin said as they crossed the room, looking for anything that might promise a beater.

  “What do you mean?”

  Colin didn’t know whether Fern was truly curious or simply filling up the silence. He answered anyway. “In the Dark Ages, the kitchen and storage rooms were on the ground floor of a keep, with the great hall above. There weren’t any doors to the kitchen from the outside—you had to climb up an exterior wooden staircase to the first floor to get in. When the keep was attacked, the stairs were burned.”

  “Oh,” Fern said. “Was this ever attacked?”

  “In the days of Margaret of France, and now and then during the Wars of the Roses.”

  She looked around the room, and her haunted expression told him that she was imagining the air shaken by the clash of arms and the cry of men. Now the empty room reverberated with nothing more than their footsteps, caught in the high vaults above.