Charles died five years before his wife, so there wasn’t a catastrophic event that took them both. I stride back to Austin’s stone to better scry his death year.
“If only I could just dig my fingernail in and remove this one bit of moss,” I say.
I close my eyes in frustration. There was a period of time, all too brief, when Phoebe and Miles could’ve come here and scraped the moss away, giving us all sorts of information. Yet they squandered it. They drank of the Sangreçu vials, whether sacred or unholy, and explored each other’s bodies like lust-driven peasants in a hayloft. The good that they could’ve done while their bodies worked! We might be so much closer to understanding our mission, so much closer to the peace that these tombstones promise.
“It doesn’t matter,” says Phoebe. “Don’t worry—it’s still helpful anyway. We know at least someone thought that Austin was—”
“It does matter,” I say, interrupting her. “Austin may be the key to everything, and we can’t even read the bloody words on his tombstone!”
I blush, luckily with my face unseen by all but the inscrutable words on the stone, deeply ashamed of my foul language.
I also want to recall the foolhardy nature of my words. Austin isn’t the key to anything except my own broken heart. He’s not here centuries later like I am. He was a regular man who died and decayed like the world expects us to.
“I’m sorry,” whispers Phoebe.
I stand up, head whirling, ready to retreat. I want to leave Phoebe and Miles to themselves, to their love they got to have, lucky fools, and return to the meadow where I’ve spent much of the time since my death. I love the calm of a wind lightly moving the grasses, the tree gaining height each season.
“I’m going to go,” I say quietly. “This is all just a bit much for me, isn’t it. I’ll just . . .”
Miles gently puts his hands on my shoulders. “There’s one other way to look,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“We could look at Austin. Or you could.”
He’s wincing as he says it, and Phoebe reaches from the side to push his hands off me. “No!” she says fiercely. “How could you ever suggest such a thing?”
“What is he suggesting?” I ask.
As of one accord, they both look down. It’s not just shame: they’re looking between their feet at the plot where Austin lies.
Oh dear.
They mean for me to intention down and look at Austin in his coffin.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
“I know you can’t,” says Phoebe comfortingly.
But they’re right. What if Austin was buried with a clue? We should look. Leave no gravestone unturned.
“I can do it for you,” says Miles.
With relief, I’m about to accept, but it seems wrong. Austin is mine. It would be like asking a stranger to wash his body after death. I shake my head to release that thought: it must’ve been Austin’s wife who performed that duty. Although. . .
“He didn’t marry, did he?” I ask wildly. “There’s no stone for a wife?” I trot to look at all the nearby tombs. “They would’ve marked it on his gravestone, and they didn’t! There’s no word of anyone else!”
I sink to my knees in exult. Austin kept himself apart, in my memory! He chose no other!
Phoebe joins me on her knees as well. It strikes me that we hold the posture of mourning, and exult quickly turns to sadness, the enduring emotion of all my centuries.
“It’s my job to do,” I say.
“If you’re sure,” says Phoebe.
We both rise. “We’ll be right here,” says Miles.
“Of course we’ll be right here. What a stupid thing to say!” snaps Phoebe. “As if we’re going to wander off and leave her.”
“I love your loyalty,” I say to her, and the words attain a certain darkness in the air between us. There was a time she was not loyal to me. She betrayed me in such a profound way, maybe when we borrowed other bodies, when we were other living creatures with different names. Her betrayal, I privately believe, is one of the reasons we yet walk this earth without substance. We need to unwind her treachery.
I walk back to Austin’s grave. I know it will change much, to see the stark bones he has disintegrated into. I remember him lively, sweet, funny, with ruddy cheeks and a warm, fast mouth that made kindling out of me. Large hands, a gentle voice for the horses, but a good, low, strong one for me and . . . oh my Lord, the things he used to say to me, while the chair plinked out its plaintive air . . .
“We can come back later when you’re more prepared,” says Phoebe. “Nothing says we have to do it today.”
I smile at her. “Centuries have passed, my dear Phoebe,” I say. “I need to be stout of heart.”
I cross my hands before me, as if penitent, and bow my head. I think of Austin’s coffin and intention myself there.
* * *
There’s no light down here and I can’t see a thing.
I’m aware of an old smell—not disgusting, but unpleasant. Austin’s bones have long ago shed tissue, muscle, skin. He is dry and long abandoned by the worms as a meal well picked over.
I reach out to where his body should be within the confines of his wooden coffin, but again touch eludes me. My heart feels heavy. I hadn’t expected fireworks down here, but it’s a dismal truth that Austin truly is dust, and we will likely never reunite.
“I miss you,” I whisper to the man I can’t see. “You should’ve married someone else. It wouldn’t have been a betrayal. And yet . . . I’m so glad you didn’t.”
No response in this claustrophobic, dark space.
“Well, good-bye, then,” I say. I linger just in case he was rallying forces, rousing himself after all this slumber, but he remains silent.
I don’t shed any tears. He’s been dead so long he’s really just a lovely illustration in a book I’ve kept on a shelf, unread despite its once being a favorite.
I rise back up to join Miles and Phoebe.
“Anything?” asks Miles.
“Nothing,” I say, not without some bitterness. “It’s pitch-black down there, and I don’t have the power of touch.”
“We noticed something,” says Phoebe. She beckons me around to the back of Austin’s stone. Just above the line of wild grass, a round engraving has been cut into his tombstone. It’s the dragon emblem we’ve seen before, including carved into Austin’s own door.
“My God,” I breathe.
* * *
The symbol shows a dragon trapped in a cell, his wings pressing against the ceiling and both sides. His mouth is open in an enraged roar, and between his splayed claws is a sword he’s dropped.
A sword.
“One of the swords at the manor,” I blurt, “could well be the dragon’s!”
“Yes!” says Phoebe. “There has to be a connection.”
“Please,” says Miles. “You don’t seriously believe in dragons?”
“Maybe a dragon as metaphor,” I say. “A valiant warrior so fierce he seems to breathe fire.”
“And that was Austin?” Phoebe asks. “He’s trapped here in the grave like the dragon’s trapped in the cell?”
I shake my head. “Austin was nothing like a warrior. He could calm a horse just by a few words to it. He never fought, not even with his fists, let alone a sword.”
“So maybe someone Austin once was, the same way we seem to be enacting older lives,” says Miles.
“Maybe,” I say, but even I hear the dubiousness in my voice. I’d love it if Austin was part of this and I’d see him again . . . but his story seems to be long over.
CHAPTER THREE
A knight’s arming sword would be passed down from father to son, on through many generations, with repairs and ornamentation added to keep the sword distinctive and sharp.
—www.swordlore.com
Phoebe insists that we check in on Tabby, so we do. She’s stacking alphabet blocks on the kitchen floor as her mother cooks. The stack is nea
rly as high as Tabby. I study the letters as they ascend, to see if she’s accidentally spelled something. No such luck.
“You took a shower at this hour?” Phoebe’s mum says to Steven as he comes into the kitchen, touching his wet hair.
I reel at the difference between the cemetery we’ve just vacated and the doughy freshness of Tabby’s skin. She’s unmolded, unshaped. Even her sister’s death hasn’t changed her basic brightness. Her mum lifts her up to place another block, as she can no longer reach.
I wince at the clatter of blocks hitting the linoleum, and without even thinking about it intention back to the graveyard. It turns out I’m not the only one with this self-preservative instinct.
Miles, Phoebe, and I stand silently looking at the time-blasted stones of the church in the distance, listening to a cold wind rattling what’s left of the dried leaves still clinging to branches and peremptorily shuffling the ones on the ground to a new place.
“So the elephant in the room . . .” says Phoebe. “You two must be buried here, right?”
“I guess so,” says Miles. “I’ve been trying not to think about it.”
“Maybe you have a symbol on your stone, too,” she says.
Unspoken among all of us is an idea that sprawls until it is a vast ocean of black, turbulent water. If I sank down to look at Austin’s bones, should Miles sink down to look at his? And would I do the same? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
“The archeologist excavates his own bones,” says Miles in a hollow voice.
“It’ll take just a moment,” I say to Miles. “We should do it. And maybe Phoebe should even intention back to the United States to look at hers. You can’t see anything; it’s black down there.”
Miles looks relieved. “If we can’t see anything, what’s the point of checking? Until we have access to a light source . . . that we can, you know, hold . . .”
I pause to consider. Phoebe can touch Arnaud family items, original old things in the manor, but I don’t think there is a portable light source she could bring into the grave with her. She could bring a candle but has no way to light it.
“So that makes it easier,” I say. “A quick down-and-back to make sure there isn’t something that grabs at us.”
“Poor choice of words, don’t you think?” he asks.
“My mom says I forget to dot my i’s and cross my t’s,” says Phoebe. “Just in case our graves offer information, we should check. Should we all intention and report back here in thirty seconds?”
Miles turns his back on us and seems to be scanning the churchyard. “The problem for me,” he says, “is I’m not sure where my stone is. Intention only works when we can picture where we’re going or who we’re going to.”
Phoebe sighs. “We sure spend a lot of time combing through cemeteries.”
She’s right. Cemeteries have been a big part of our lives now. Behind the Arnaud Manor is a large plot where generations of Arnauds lie, guarded over by epic statues of grief-stricken angels. Then behind that is the horror of the Arnaud family, a second hidden cemetery for the child victims of Madame Arnaud. I wonder if Reginald Boswick’s protests about renovations at the manor are really about that secret being discovered. Other teens our age are glued to their mobile screens, and we seem to be glued to collections of dead people arranged in rows.
We walk back to the area where newer graves have been dug. I try to keep a positive demeanor as we look for Miles’s final resting place, a strategy that served me well as I performed so many thankless tasks during my life as a maid. Scraping cinders out of a cold fireplace each day, carrying heavy trays up narrow stairs while trying not to trip on my own skirts, wielding a broom until my palms adopted the shape of the handle . . . and throughout all of it I tried to sing a song inside my head to keep myself cheerful through all the drudgery. Often, the song was “The Lady Cries for Her Love.” Because there is no angry mistress now to object, I hum the song openly, something that previously I could do only in the kitchens and back passageways of the manor where the mistress couldn’t hear.
“That’s a pretty song,” says Phoebe, looking over at me.
I smile back. “It’s the song the chair played. My song with Austin.”
“It’s a . . . haunting tune,” says Miles, and Phoebe thrusts her hip sideways at his, hard enough to knock him off course until he catches his balance back.
“Sorry, Eleanor!” he says with a grin.
“Cheeky lot, you!” I say.
This is one thing Miles and Phoebe have taught me: how to rise up out of anger or despair by playfulness. I don’t tell them much about my life, but I was never as light of heart as they are, easily, without effort. The way she can jokingly shove him is so profoundly far from how I would’ve been able to treat Austin . . . I remember the first time we touched, I thought I was going to break into a million glass pieces. Which is not to say that Austin and I were always deadly serious with each other. Far from it. We both felt giddy with the risk we took, kissing in the chair and open to being discovered. We each would’ve lost our place instantly had we been found by the wrong people. Yet the ease with which Miles and Phoebe swing their arms around each other’s shoulders is foreign to me. Maybe it’s their generation and not just their personalities. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t had access to normal, living people for . . . I don’t want to do this math again. It’s too sad.
Miles’s grave proves easy to find. It’s one of the few festooned with fresh flowers. Grenshire isn’t a large village, so a death and burial is, I presume, a big event. It seems the entire town has left flowers for him, riotous colors, blooms that clash with each other colorwise.
“Oh shite,” he says.
“Just do it quickly,” Phoebe urges. “We’ll wait here for you. Go!”
He groans and is gone.
I look at Phoebe, but she won’t meet my glance. I take her hand, though, and she squeezes it.
In another second, he’s back.
“You all right?” she asks.
He walks rapidly away from us, his hand rubbing at his face.
“Oh no,” says Phoebe.
Many paces away, he pauses and waits for us to catch up. “You’re not going to do that,” he says grimly to Phoebe. “I died too recently,” he says. “It’s awful in there. And there’s nothing to see anyway, like Eleanor says.”
I clap my hand to my mouth. Poor Miles. He’s decomposing still, and it must’ve smelled horrific. Austin’s body was long ago decayed to nothing but dry bones.
“I get it,” says Phoebe. “I’m sorry.”
“Kind of gets you off the hook, doesn’t it?” he laughs, but a little too loudly, too forced.
“But you . . .” he says, pointing to me with one eyebrow raised.
“Where are you, Eleanor?” asks Phoebe.
Such an odd question. I’m here, but my body is somewhere else.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I had thought I’d be near Austin, maybe, but there was no true connection between us as we never wed.”
“Well, then, surely you’re buried near your parents and the rest of your family,” says Miles.
“All right, yes,” I say. I vaguely recall placing flowers on my grandmother’s grave while my mother wept openly, kneeling before the stone. “Over here, perhaps?” I start heading back toward the older part of the cemetery, where Austin is.
But an hour later, we’ve walked every path in this churchyard, stared at stones under which my parents and siblings lie, scoured the words on every hard-to-read stone, and have concluded I’m just not here.
“I’m somewhere else,” I say simply.
“Okay,” says Phoebe.
“I just don’t know . . . where.”
* * *
We return to look at the swords in the ground. What else can we do? I’ve tried to find where my family put me, but my mind isn’t cooperating.
Once again I feel a pull from the ancient metal pulsing under the ground. Curious, I look at Miles.
&
nbsp; “Are you drawn to a particular one?” I ask.
“These are other people’s swords,” he says decisively.
“Wouldn’t each warrior’s family have kept the sword? Why are they all here?” asks Phoebe.
Suddenly, someone’s at my shoulder. “Oh my God!” he yells into my ear. I bolt backward, startled. “You can hear me!” he shouts.
“Of course she can hear you; you’re screaming in her face!” says Miles. “Back off!”
“But you can hear me! No one has been able to hear me!” He jumps in front of Phoebe, waving his arms wildly.
“I see you,” she says drily, yet she looks at me with a bit of compassion. This young man is a ghost who hasn’t realized yet that he’s a ghost.
He’s dressed much like Miles or the people we saw in France, wearing the casual blue trousers I’ve learned are called jeans, a black shirt, and a baseball hat placed backward on his head. What I glean from his appearance is that he died very recently. He’s not an old worn-out ghost; he’s new. And with newness comes panic.
“No one’s been able to see me!” he says in a tone of complete disbelief and anger. His eyes roll around as if the heavens could offer him an explanation. “This is the most crazy shite—you noticed it?”
“It’s crazy, all right,” comments Phoebe. “What’s your name?”
“You’re American!” he says. And then to me, “Why are you dressed like that?”
I’m the last holdout of the Arnaud Manor servant ghosts, hundreds of us at one time, but they were released from their otherworldly duties a few months ago. As of now, I’m the only one in a long black gown covered by a white apron. “Halloween’s over! But where’s the party? I’m totally in!” He takes a few steps to get closer to me, a big smile lighting up his face. At this closer range, I can see strange cuts all over his face marked by a thin line of blood. He looks like he’s been ritually cut. Curious, I step closer to see the markings better, and his hands clamp down on my shoulders.
Avenged Page 3
