Shadows of the Night

by Lydia Joyce

  “Mmm,” Colin replied, thinking, I sincerely doubt that you did. Still, that small recognition of what had passed between them loosened a knot deep in his gut that he hadn’t realized was there, and he relaxed into the dusty pillows. The only sound was the rain washing down the walls of the house and pattering more sharply against the open windowpane.

  “What is your favorite color?” Fern’s question roused him from semisomnolence.

  “What?” he asked.

  “What is your favorite color? I just realized that I don’t know.”

  He paused. “I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it.”

  “Mine is red. I almost never wear it because I am afraid it isn’t a good color for young girls, and I haven’t got the kind of dramatic coloring that makes it look right, but I still like it.”

  “I shall buy you a dress of scarlet velvet, then,” Colin said. “You aren’t a girl any longer, so you should wear what you like.”

  “What if it caused talk?” Fern asked. “I’ve never been one to wear bright colors before. Wouldn’t that matter to you?”

  That made Colin think. A few days ago, the answer would have been a firm, Of course. But now things didn’t seem as simple as they once had. He … cared. It was not enough simply to follow the path of expectations. He found that he had his own opinions, coming from a part of himself that had atrophied with disuse. “I believe that I like red, too,” was all he said.

  He felt Fern move before her hand snaking through the covers found his. “How will you know that it is time to return to society?”

  “I don’t know, Fern,” he said. “Just have a little faith.”

  “And you shall keep me here with you until then?” Her voice was even softer, but the hand that held his grew tight.

  “You are no prisoner,” he replied.

  “I am your wife.” She said those words as if they explained everything.

  “Abide for a few days, a few weeks, Fern,” Colin said wearily. “Just abide.”

  She gave a hiccoughing kind of laugh. “I don’t know where else I would go.”

  Her words were not exactly a declaration of unconditional devotion, and yet Colin felt his heart unaccountably lightened. She wanted to stay. Given a choice, she would choose him.

  Colin stared at the invisible canopy somewhere above his head, listening to the thunder rumble over the tors. After a while, Fern’s hand went limp.

  A while later, his did, too.

  Chapter Twelve

  Fern jerked awake to darkness, sitting up so quickly that she sent a cloud of dust into the room. Instantly, she began fighting a sneeze as Colin surged into a sitting position beside her, coughing violently.

  “What was that?” he demanded between wracking coughs.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, scrubbing at her nose with a corner of her nightdress. “I thought I heard something.”

  “So did I,” Colin said. “The crash—what was that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, hugging herself. She didn’t want to know.

  “I will go see.” Colin pushed out of bed and, after many muttered imprecations, struck a match and put it to the lamp wick. The oil burned sluggishly, casting a dull orange glow. “I think it came from out there.” He nodded at the door, holding the lamp out in front of him as he headed for it.

  He was going to leave her alone. Fern’s heart jumped, and she untangled herself from the bedclothes and scrambled out of bed behind him. He turned at the noise and gave her an inquisitive look, but she just stared at him, making no declaration that he might be able to contradict. He shrugged and turned away.

  He opened the door to the hallway and stepped through, Fern close on his heels. At first, she did not see anything amiss in the dull and guttering light of the lamp. But then she realized that a portion of the floor was catching the light wrong. She frowned. It looked as if it was wet …

  Colin advanced, and Fern followed. In the lamplight, the puddle glowed like mercury. Another peal of thunder rolled distantly, and almost in answer came a deep, house-shaking groan from directly above their heads.

  Fern bunched her fingers into fists to keep from seizing Colin’s arm in fear. He raised the lamp higher and looked up, and, dreading what she would see, Fern followed his gaze. The ceiling above was dark with moisture, and part of the plaster had fallen away. There was something black in the center of the wettest part, but between dimness and the unsteadiness of the light, Fern’s eyes could make no sense of it.

  “Upstairs,” Colin said tersely, turning back toward the staircase. The tension in his voice made Fern’s heart beat even faster. She followed him up the stairs, spiraling up into the darkness, and emerged on the attic level.

  Colin froze, and she looked around him and blinked. She couldn’t seem to see anything. A drop of water fell on her cheek, and then another. The floorboards were wet beneath her feet. She peered into the gloom as her brain tried to decipher the tangled shapes that her eyes were reporting.

  A distant flash of lightning gilded the boiling clouds and cast everything into sudden silvery illumination before plunging it into darkness again. It was all the time that Fern needed, for what she had seen in that instant had etched itself upon her eyeballs.

  The roof was gone. Just half a dozen feet in front of them, the timbers had given way, dropping the ceiling onto the floor in a pile of mangled slate and timber and opening the rooms to the sky and wind. One of those beams had even been driven by the power of its own weight through the floorboards, and the confused object on the ceiling below suddenly made horrible sense.

  A gust of wind crossed the fractured gable. The beams groaned again, low and menacing. Fern’s breath froze in her chest as she mentally saw the half timbered tracery of the old walls, how each timber fit so snugly into the next, how they leaned on one another to keep the house upright. How a dozen of those timbers were now lying rotten and shattered on the attic floor.

  “Go downstairs.” Colin’s voice was eerily calm. “Down to the ground floor. Quickly.”

  Fern gulped, nodding mutely, and spun on her heel to flee down the stairs. Her bare feet slid on the slick, wet wood, and Colin’s lamplight was lost after the first turn, but she didn’t dare slow until she had passed the first floor and emerged, gasping, in the corridor that led between the parlor and the dining room.

  She could see nothing, and the only sounds in the darkness were the wind-driven rain against the windows and the harsh panting of her own breath. Her heart thundering in her chest, she turned back toward the staircase.

  Nothing. Where was Colin? A choking panic began to rise in her throat. Perhaps he had fallen, or perhaps the collapsing house had shifted to trap him. What was she going to do?

  I have to find him, she thought, staring at the black, blind hole of the stair in dismay. I must. She groped her way forward and swallowed a cry of pain as she stubbed her toe on the first riser.

  A light appeared in the stairwell, no more than a faint glimmer, but enough to make her pause. It grew stronger, sending shadows dancing across the wainscoting. Then Colin came around the corner, laden with their hand luggage and the lamp.

  “I thought you’d been hurt!” Fern blurted.

  “It took me a moment to find our shoes and your corset,” Colin said. He looked at her askance. “Were you coming back upstairs to rescue me?”

  “I didn’t know what had happened,” Fern said, glad that the darkness could not betray her blush as she delivered the nonanswer.

  Colin didn’t seem to notice. “We should go to the keep. If the rest of the house hasn’t collapsed by tomorrow, I’ll get our trunks then.”

  “I’ll take the lamp,” Fern offered, determined not to be separated from a light source again.

  Mutely, Colin handed it over. Its cool cut-glass base felt good in Fern’s hands. She led the way through the dining room and the hole in the thick, ancient stone wall into the kitchens on the ground floor of the keep.

  “There should be a great
hall and perhaps some bedrooms above,” Colin said.

  Fern’s bare feet were silent on the wide flags, but even her breath seemed to echo in the dim, vaulted recesses of the cavernous room. She held out the lamp like a talisman as she passed between the fat square pillars that supported the upper floors, dividing the great space into a series of artificially foreshortened views.

  The stairs finally came into view, and Fern kept her eyes firmly averted from the door behind which the hateful message lay. She could not shake the feeling that the house itself was chasing her into these rooms, where the cold stone walls could close in and swallow them both.

  Don’t be silly, she told herself, mounting the stairs. The wooden treads creaked under her feet, and Fern climbed with mincing gingerness, nightmares of dry rot clamoring through her brain. She glanced behind and caught Colin’s eye. His expression did not change, but somehow, she felt better.

  They reached the first floor. Fern’s lamp revealed only more blackness ahead of them, and she advanced cautiously.

  “The great hall,” Colin said.

  “It must be,” Fern agreed. She could make out high stone walls as she penetrated farther into the room, tattered tapestries flapping in the draft like slow, leathery wings.

  “This room is sound, at least,” Colin said. “If it weren’t, the tapestries would have disintegrated long ago.”

  “I don’t like this place,” Fern said.

  Colin made a grunting noise. Fern kept going.

  Slowly, a group of shadowy forms took shape in front of her, their outlines growing clearer with every step. It was a tight grouping of furniture, huddled under the shelter of an enormous fireplace hood on the farthest wall as if someone had risen from dinner two hundred years ago and never returned. There, near them, was the angular shape of another flight of stairs leading up into darkness.

  Fern led the way to the foot of the staircase, which was cut from the same stone as the walls. Her stomach clenched. It was dizzyingly steep and narrow, the precipitous drop over the edge unguarded by any balustrade.

  “There should be bedchambers above,” Colin said, the calm normality of his voice doing nothing to mitigate the fear that welled up in Fern’s belly to make her head light and her legs wobbly.

  Fern took a deep breath and began to climb, holding the hem of her nightdress up with her free hand and pressing her shoulder against the wall. Each stair looked like the next, and Fern tried to trick herself into imagining that she was not progressing at all, that each step was no higher than the one before. It didn’t work, for her imagination was only too eager to supply her with images of the depths of the black void to her right. The hand that held the lamp trembled, making the shadows jump and dance on the stairs.

  Finally, the last stair approached. Fern kept her eyes fixed upon the edge of the riser until she stepped upon the second floor. Only then did she look around, moving aside so that Colin could join her.

  There was scarcely room at the stair’s terminus for both Fern and Colin to stand together, just a small landing as a new staircase, turning the corner, continued into the upper reaches of the keep. A single iron-banded oak door barred the way into the rooms of the second floor.

  Fern’s constitution could not take leading the way any longer. She tightened her grip on the lamp and invited Colin to open the door with a nod. “Go ahead.”

  Colin lifted the latch and pushed, and the door swung wide. Fern braced herself, but there was only a perfectly ordinary if ancient bedroom, its furniture sparse and massive, covered with dark, heavy carvings that were scaled with age. A wave of stale air met them, thick with the stench of rotting feathers. A second door stood opposite the first, and Colin opened it.

  “Another bedroom,” he reported tersely, standing to the side so that the lamplight could pass within. He should have looked foolish or at least a little weak, standing there in his nightshirt with sleep-tousled hair and bare feet. But his sheer physicality was in no way diminished by his attire; if anything, the lack of extraneous accoutrements drew attention to the long, hard lines of his physique. He looked very real—more real even than the stone walls around him, laden as they were with the ghosts of memory.

  Now that the rush of adrenaline was beginning to wear off, Fern realized how exhausted she was. The lamp began to shake again in her hands, her muscles struggling to hold it steady, and a wave of dizziness overtook her, making the room swim threateningly. Colin was a still point in the center of it, and Fern drew strength from the sight of him as she forced herself to speak in normal tones.

  “I think the stink is coming from the mattress,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t want to sleep in the other room, either,” Colin reported. “Let’s look above.”

  Colin led the way upward this time. The next flight of stairs passed between two reassuringly thick stone walls, but Fern’s neck still prickled at the memory of the previous climb even as she kept her eyes fixed upon Colin’s broad, strong back, his shoulders slightly tensed with the weight of their hand luggage.

  The stairs ended at another landing, and this time, only an ancient, rickety ladder continued up. Fern held up the lamp, and the orange light revealed a dark trapdoor above, the ancient planks dark with seeping rainwater.

  Another door confronted them, and Colin stepped through without hesitation before Fern had lowered the lamp again. The bedroom was almost a mirror of the one below, including another door in the opposite wall leading to a fourth and final bedroom.

  “These beds are no better,” Colin observed, a detachment in his voice that reminded Fern, chillingly, of the man of her wedding night. A quick look confirmed that he was right, and the discovery sent a sense of despair through her sleep-deprived body that was completely out of proportion to its import.

  “Perhaps we can sleep in a chair,” Fern offered without much hope. There were only two chairs, pulled up to a table before the cold fireplace, and they were stiff, thronelike affairs. “Or if I can find some better blankets, perhaps on the floor.”

  She set the lamp on the table and opened the massive press at the foot of the bed, hoping to run into the same luck with bed linens that she had earlier in the Tudor wing. Instead, there were only a few pieces of clothing, brittle with age, and a packet of documents secured with a ribbon. Fern picked up the papers automatically before shutting the lid again.

  “It is either one of these beds or nothing,” she reported unhappily. “And I don’t think I could sleep in any of the beds no matter how tired I was.”

  “Then I suppose we might as well sit,” Colin said, nodding at the chairs. “First, though—your dressing gown. This place is clammy. You’ll catch a chill.”

  Fern had forgotten that she was wearing nothing but a nightdress, which offered no protection against the damp air that had penetrated it. Now that Colin called attention to it, she realized that she was shivering slightly, in short bursts. Gratefully, she set down the bundle of papers and allowed him to drape the folds of her dressing gown over her. “The night is not cold, but I am,” she admitted as she buttoned the front of the garment, sitting in one of the stiff, high chairs.

  Colin found his own dressing gown and threw it swiftly across his shoulders, tying it with a quick tug of the tasseled sash. He took the chair opposite her.

  She stared at him numbly. “I want you to promise me something,” she said, the words slow and heavy with weariness.

  “What is that?” His face, tired though unnaturally handsome still, drew into cautious lines.

  “When we leave here, promise me that we shall never come back.”

  Colin cocked an eyebrow. “Is it really as bad as all that?”

  “Bad?” Fern gaped at him. “The place is filthy and moldy, there are no servants, it is the former abode of a madman or madmen unknown, and the roof tried to fall on our heads!”

  “But it missed,” Colin pointed out.

  Fern opened her mouth to retort, then shut it, biting her lip. “You’re teasing me,�
� she accused.

  “I am,” he agreed. “You are such a curious woman. You bear up with remarkable stoicism under a dozen novel travails, and then when you make an explicit request for the first time, it is merely that I do not inflict any of them upon you again. Rest assured, mon ange, that none of this is part of a diabolical plan to drive you to insanity. If you wish to see no more of this place, then you may have that request, and welcome, in return for the forbearance that you have demonstrated thus far.”

  Fern sighed. “Thank you.” Her shoulders slumped slightly, and she rubbed her forehead, where a pounding headache was beginning to form. “I am so tired that my vision is blurring, but I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep in these chairs.”

  Colin nodded at the bundle on the center of the table, where she had dropped it several minutes before. “What did you find?”

  Fern pulled the ribbon off and spread the documents across the table. The sheepskin was brittle, but the sheets did not crumble. “They look like letters,” she said. She examined half a dozen cursorily—to her relief, the handwriting looked nothing like the spidery scrawl in the room downstairs. “All to the same person and from the same person.”

  “They should distract you well enough. Are they love letters?” Colin speculated, his mouth quirking wearily.

  “No. Not love letters,” she said, slowing down to read a few of the passages. “A friend, perhaps? ‘I entreat thee to keep constant mind on the service I have done thee, and to always maintain th’ affection between ourselvs that thy mother and I once shared.’ They are dated, but the signatures are all initials. From E to JR.” She looked up. “Do you think that these may have been written by one of your ancestors?”

  “More likely to one,” he said, “seeing as they were found here.”

  A rumble of thunder shook the windows in their frames. The old, angular script blurred before her eyes. Fern rubbed her face. Her headache had increased to a dull throb. “I am so tired that I am dizzy. Do you think I would catch something dreadful if I slept in the bed?” The words were wistful but hopeless.