Come to Castlemoor

by Wilde, Jennifer;

  “They—they don’t like strangers,” the girl said. The incident seemed to have affected her even more strongly than it had affected me. Her cheekbones looked chalky, and the corners of her mouth quivered. Her enormous black eyes were cloudy with anguish, and I could tell she was on the verge of tears. I managed a weak smile of reassurance.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “At least—I think so.”

  “Your dress!” the girl exclaimed, as though my torn skirt represented a tragedy of epic proportions.

  “It’s not a bad tear. It can easily be mended.”

  “Duke! You bad dog!”

  The animal at my side crouched down and whined, his large eyes filled with humiliation. He looked perfectly harmless now, even beautiful, with the sleek silver coat and distinct lines. I reached down and stroked his head, the bravest thing I had ever done in my life, and Duke responded by slurping his long pink tongue over my fingers. I felt as though I had been given a medal for bravery above and beyond the call of duty. The other dog came over to me, sniffed my feet, and whined, demanding similar attention. When I stroked its head it gurgled in ecstasy. The girl watched, her eyes still dark with tragedy, but she seemed to be recovering.

  “They like you,” she said, amazed. “They never do that, particularly Duchess. She’s afraid of strangers and doesn’t let anyone touch her. I don’t understand it—”

  “Neither do I,” I retorted, “but I’m relieved.”

  “They must have frightened you to death,” the girl said.

  “Not really,” I replied glibly, “though I wouldn’t be surprised if my hair has turned white. It hasn’t, by any chance?”

  The girl shook her head, still solemn. I shrugged my shoulders. She seemed to relax a little and watched with great interest as I examined the tear in my skirt.

  “You’re Katherine Hunt,” she said.

  “As a matter of fact, I am.”

  “I knew that. You couldn’t very well be anyone else.”

  “Not in this life. Perhaps in the next.”

  “You’re—you’re teasing me,” she said.

  “Just mildly, Nicola.”

  “You know my name?”

  “You couldn’t very well be anyone else, now, could you?”

  The girl smiled. All traces of the tragic heroine vanished, and she became an incredibly beautiful young girl. Her skin was dark, her jet-black curls fell in a rich cascade to her shoulders, and her features were exquisitely molded. The pink mouth looked vulnerable, the nose was classic, and the enormous black eyes were surrounded by sootblack lashes that swept her cheek. She reminded me of a gypsy, and I sensed a gypsylike abandon in her nature that had been carefully repressed by years of enforced decorum. She was probably not even aware of this streak in her makeup, yet it was clearly there. I thought of a wild colt captured and trained, forced to go through thoroughbred paces while longing instinctively to leap the fence and return to the wildlands.

  The beauty was natural, yet the girl did not seem to be aware of it. She had none of the vanity, none of the little affectations that so often mar such beauty. She wore a white dress with clusters-of vivid yellow daisies printed on the full, billowing skirt. It fit tightly at the waist and bosom, emphasizing a figure both beautiful and startlingly mature. She was like some earthy, Mediterranean flower mistakenly transplanted on English soil. Her childlike charm, her girlish gestures, and her obvious innocence only made this other quality all the more disturbing. In her native Italy, Nicola would have already been married, with a home, children, and a fund of worldly wisdom. Instead she had the charming naïveté of a proper young English girl carefully schooled and sheltered from all but the most inane aspects of life.

  “I so wanted to meet you,” Nicola said enthusiastically. “I knew you had come.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. Your trunks arrived a few days ago, and everyone was surprised at that. They thought you’d probably sell the house. Then Buck saw you in town yesterday, and he told us about it.”

  “Buck?”

  She nodded. “He works for Burton. He was walking down the street, and you and your maid passed him.” She smiled. “I made him describe you, but he couldn’t remember what you were wearing. I wanted to know everything—” She sighed, looking at her feet. “Not too much happens around here. When someone new comes, it’s an event.”

  I sat down on the low rock. Duke came and put his head in my lap, but Duchess cavorted around her mistress, leaping up and down, wanting to play.

  Nicola stroked the dog’s head. Her eyes were sad. “I hoped maybe I’d have a friend,” she said with disarming simplicity. “I—I haven’t had many.”

  “I could use a friend myself,” I said lightly. “I don’t know anyone here.”

  Nicola came and perched on a rock slightly higher than the one I sat on. She spread her skirts out and folded her hands primly in her lap. The rocks protected us from the wind, but there was still enough to ruffle her curls and blow wisps of hair about her temples.

  “I haven’t been very lucky with friends,” she said. “There was your brother—”

  “You knew him?”

  “Oh, yes! He came to Castlemoor once to talk with Edward. I listened to them, and when your brother noticed me, he asked me to join them. Edward didn’t like that much, but I sat on the sofa, and your brother talked to me and treated me like—like a person, not a child.”

  “Donald liked people,” I said. “He knew how to make them feel important.”

  “I wasn’t important,” Nicola continued, “but he always had time for me. I used to slip out of the castle and visit him at the ruins. He told me all about the history of the rocks, and—and when I told him about my nightmares, he didn’t laugh.”

  “Nightmares?”

  She seemed to stiffen, grow wary. “I—I imagine things. At night I hear noises, and once I saw—” She hesitated, her brow creased. “I saw a ghost—I thought I saw a ghost, all in white, slipping down the hall.” She looked up at me, studying my reaction. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she added quickly. “I don’t want you to think that! I—just imagine things sometimes. Dorothea says I read too many novels, and Burton is very stern and says I have to get hold of myself.” She paused, frowning. “I don’t tell them about my nightmares anymore.”

  “You still have them?”

  “Sometimes,” the girl said, bowing her head as though ashamed. “But I try not to.” She was uneasy, glancing around as though someone might be eavesdropping on us. “They’re so real,” she whispered.

  She jumped off the rock and darted over to the oak tree. Both the dogs followed her. Nicola seemed to forget I was present. She snapped her fingers at the dogs. They leaped in the air about her. She clapped her hands at them, and they ran merrily. She laughed, a lovely, tinkling laugh like wind blowing through the crystal prisms of a Japanese wind chime. There was something desperate about this childish conduct, as though it were her defense against something darker, something that threatened her.

  She finally came to rest beside me, out of breath, her cheeks flushed a vivid pink. What a strange girl, I thought. She was like an instrument upon which emotions played—sadness, gaiety, affection, fear. One never knew which chord would be plucked next. She caught her breath and smiled and looked at me with lustrous black eyes that seemed to beg me to like her. I was strangely moved, and bewildered, too.

  “I—I don’t like to talk about sad things,” she said simply, “but I was desolate when they told me about your brother’s accident. It was just after they’d sent Jamie away, and I had no one. I stayed in my room alone and cried and cried.”

  “Who was Jamie?” I asked, hoping to change the subject. I didn’t want to discuss my brother’s death.

  “He was a boy,” Nicola said. “He worked in the stables. He taught me to ride when I was a little girl, and when I grew up he—he would talk to me. The doctor said I needed lots of exercise, so Dorothea let me go out riding. Jamie would go with me, my es
cort. I loved those days. We’d ride over the moors and laugh, and it was like Castle-moor didn’t exist. He was my only friend at the castle.” Her eyes grew cloudy, and she seemed to be remembering something very lovely. “He was tall and strong, with blond hair like dark honey, and the kindest brown eyes I’ve ever seen. Dorothea thought I was spending too much time with him—I’d slip out to the stables to talk to him. She didn’t like that. Burton sent him away.” She looked up at me, suddenly intense. “He’d worked at the castle for seven years, and they sent him away! Jamie hadn’t done anything. He was just a friend—just a friend! They couldn’t understand that—”

  I thought she was going to cry, but she mastered her emotion. She clasped her hands in her lap and stared down at them. When she continued to speak, her voice was level, carefully controlled. “I don’t know what happened to him. There was no way I could contact him. I—I wanted him to know how sorry I was. But—he just vanished. He stayed in Darkmead for three or four days, then—just left. No one knows where he went. I think about Jamie a lot.”

  There was a rumble of thunder in the distance. The clouds were moving slowly across the sky, and dark shadows moved across the moors at the same pace. Duchess whined, burrowing her head in Nicola’s lap. Duke stood before us with his silver-gray body stiff, his eyes alert. Nicola seemed to be lost in thought. She crooned softly to Duchess, stroking the dog’s head and rubbing its ears.

  “Tell me about yourself,” she said abruptly.

  “What would you like to hear?”

  “About you—your life.”

  I gave her a brief résumé of my life. I told her about the years with Aunt Clarice, about the apartment Donald had found for us, about the work I had helped him with. I talked about the excitement of London—the streets, the theaters, the parties. She listened with her elbow on her knee, her chin propped in her palm, her eyes filled with longing.

  “How I’d like that,” she said quietly. “Being free, being able to do just what I liked.”

  “I always thought it would be rather nice to live in a castle,” I said airily. “Do you sleep in a tower?”

  “My room’s downstairs,” she said. “Near the stairs that lead down to the dungeons.”

  “That sounds exciting,” I replied. “Imagine having real dungeons! I would love to explore them.”

  Nicola looked grim, unresponsive to my humoring. “They’re horrible,” she said. “Dark and damp and—I don’t go down there. I did, and I heard something—” She drew herself up, fighting back the tremulous emotion in her voice. “It was another nightmare. Buck found me. He told me I hadn’t heard anything. Dorothea gave me a sedative and sent for the doctor. They put me to bed and thought I was asleep—and they talked about me. I’m not sick—”

  “Everyone has nightmares—” I began.

  “I’m not sick,” she continued, “but I let them think so. It’s easier that way.”

  “What—what do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said.”

  She looked at me with eyes that were perfectly lucid. There was a hard set to her mouth, and I felt for the first time that she was actually communicating with me. The skittish, nervous girl had gone. The Nicola who stared at me now was intelligent, alert, almost formidable. I felt a cold chill pass over me, and I was afraid. What had she seen? What could possibly have happened to give a seventeen-year-old girl that hard, defensive look? I started to reach for her hand, but she drew away from me, standing up and brushing her yellow-white skirt. I felt she had been on the verge of telling me something of paramount importance, but the moment had passed, and she was lost to me again. I stood up too, frowning.

  “I’d better go,” the girl said quietly.

  “I—I hope you’ll come to visit me at the house. Nicola.”

  She shook her head. “I won’t be able to do that,” she said, her eyes averted. “They don’t like for me to—to talk to people. I’ve talked too much. I shouldn’t have talked—” She looked at me, and there was a pleading quality in her voice. “Don’t pay any attention to me. I—I just wanted to meet you. I didn’t mean—”

  “Nicola—”

  “I have to go back now. Buck’ll be furious when he finds I’ve run off again.”

  “You ran off?”

  “You might say so. I merely eluded my keeper. That’s what Buck is, my keeper. If I go for a walk, he goes with me. For my protection. There are so many—accidents, you see. I—I just had to get away for a little while today. I told Dorothea I was going to my room to rest, but I slipped down the back stairs and got the dogs and left. Buck’ll be livid.”

  “Nicola, tell me—”

  The dogs barked. Nicola froze. A man came down the slope toward us. He was tall and slender, with thin hips, a large chest, and huge, bony shoulders. He wore tall brown boots, tight beige doeskin trousers, and a leather jerkin over a coarse-cloth white shirt with long, gathered sleeves. He had bronze-blond hair that clung to his skull in small tight curls, and a broad, bony face. His nose was long, his mouth was wide, and his blue-gray eyes were flat, expressionless. He came toward us slowly, swinging his long arms.

  “Buck,” she told me in a low voice. “He’s come for me.”

  “What will he do?” I whispered.

  “Nothing,” the girl said firmly.

  He stopped a few feet from us. He stared at Nicola, not even glancing at me.

  “You followed me,” she said.

  “Soon as I seen you was missin’.”

  “Do—do they know?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Are you going to tell them?”

  “I might. I might just do that. The master’ll be plenty mad—”

  “He’ll be mad at you, too, Buck.”

  “I think not,” the man said.

  “He’ll be mad at you for letting me run away.”

  Buck Crabbe glared at the girl. He loomed there in front of us like a giant. He must have been at least six-foot-five, but the sharp, bony physique made him seem even taller. The ugly, belligerent face had a kind of harsh, male attractiveness, a coarse strength that made the ugliness seem almost like an asset. The man was crude, with crude emotions and crude instincts. I shuddered at the thought of the authority he evidently had over the girl.

  He frowned, curling his large hands into fists. Nicola smiled a wry, triumphant little smile.

  “I’ll tell Burton myself,” she said crisply. “We’ll see what he has to say to you.”

  “You shut up,” he said, his voice flat.

  “What are you going to do, Buck?” she taunted.

  “You’ll find out.”

  “Aren’t you smart enough to watch after me?”

  “Come along!” he said sharply.

  “Why don’t you tell?” Nicola said sweetly. “And I’ll tell about last Wednesday—”

  “What’re you talkin’ about?”

  “What was her name? Sally? I wasn’t supposed to see you slipping out to meet her, was I? Come to think of it, you were supposed to be with me while I practiced my piano—”

  “You little devil!”

  Nicola’s laughter rose in the air in silver peals, and it did, indeed, have a demonic quality. It ceased as abruptly as it had begun, and Nicola stared at Buck with flashing eyes. I knew then that she was more than a match for this gigantic, ignorant peasant.

  “Come now,” he said. “They’ll miss us.”

  “But you were with me, Buck, weren’t you?”

  He turned and started walking back up the slope. Nicola looked at me, her brow creased. She made a futile little gesture and then hurrried up the slope after Buck Crabbe. The dogs danced along beside her. At the top of the slope she turned around and looked down at me. For a moment she was silhouetted against the gray sky, her hair tossing in the wind, her yellow-white skirt billowing, and then she was gone.

  I sat quietly for several minutes. The moors seemed to close in on me. The wind died down, and everything was still, silent. I thought about the girl. Her
e, on the moors, with their strange, mystic spell, it would be easy to convince myself she had been merely an apparition, not real at all. She was clearly disturbed—she had mentioned a “doctor” and called Buck her “keeper”—but somehow I couldn’t pass it all off that easily. She had seemed to be silently pleading for some kind of help, and there had been that moment when she was as clear, as intelligent as anyone could be at that age. I was deeply puzzled by Nicola and upset by the veiled hints she seemed to make about Castle-moor.

  The air stirred around me. It was damp. The clouds looked swollen and ready to burst. I started back toward the house. Almost all the light had gone, but there was a faint greenish glow, as though the air were stained with the eerie color. I moved hurriedly, avoiding the tar-black patches of peat. The first drops of rain pelted down as I came up over the slope behind the house. Alan’s wagon was in front of the house, and he and Bella were outside, looking frantic. When she saw me, Bella gave a cry of relief. The rain began to fall in earnest as I ran toward them.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Alan put the last packages in the back of his wagon, heaving a sigh of relief. He looked thoroughly exhausted after trailing around after us all afternoon as we shopped. He had been awkward and embarrassed in the dry-goods store while Bella selected material for her new curtains and then devilishly examined corsets and asked his opinion of them. He had blushed furiously when she held one up in front of her and asked him what he thought about the blue-ribbon trim. Like a loyal and devoted puppy, he had followed us, obeying Bella’s orders without hesitation, but now he was slightly sullen, ready to rebel. He stood beside the wagon with his hands in his pockets, a scowl on his face. The wagon was sparkling clean and still smelled of the new coat of paint he had applied, and Alan himself wore tight black pants and a loosely fitting blue shirt that bagged at the waist, the sleeves full, gathered at the wrist. His tall black boots were gleaming, and he smelled of strong soap. His hair was as unruly as ever, thick locks tumbling over his forehead.