Winterset

by Candace Camp

  “No. It is just that I am done with stupidity. I have spent the past few days with you. We have talked and laughed just as we did before. I have seen you smile at me. I have felt your lips on mine. You want me, just as I want you.”

  “It was a mistake!” Anna cried, desperation rising in her. “It was just a mistake! I shouldn’t have—”

  “You shouldn’t have what?” he exclaimed, closing the gap between them and grabbing her arms. “You shouldn’t have slipped? Shouldn’t have let me see what really lies within you? Bloody hell, woman, what is wrong with you? Why won’t you tell me the truth? Why do you run from me?” His fingers bit into her arms. “Why did you refuse to marry me?”

  “Stop! Please. Let go of me!” Anna could no longer hold back the tears.

  “Tell me why you sent me away, dammit,” he growled.

  “I can’t!” Anna cried, sobbing.

  “Can’t?” he repeated, and suddenly the anger seemed to drain out of him. He dropped her arms. “You won’t, is more like it. Sweet Jesus, Anna, I loved you with all my heart. I would have given you anything, done anything for you. And you won’t even give me an honest answer.” He turned and started to walk away.

  Anna’s heart squeezed within her chest. She hated herself for what she had done to him, hated him for putting her through this, for forcing her to look at the depths of her own cowardice.

  Reed stopped and looked back at her. His face was drawn, his eyes dark with emotion. “Did you never love me, Anna? Am I a fool to even suspect you did?”

  “I loved you.” Her voice was hoarse, as if the words had been ripped from her, and tears streamed down her face. “I loved you to the very depths of my being. I couldn’t marry you. I couldn’t.”

  “Why?” He came quickly back to her. “What on earth kept you from it?”

  “Please…”

  “Tell me.” His voice was harsh. “You lied to me. You ripped my heart from me. Surely I at least deserve the truth. Why could you not marry me?”

  Anna looked away from him, unable to meet his eyes. “Because my blood is tainted. I—my family is mad.”

  There was a long silence. Reed stared at her, astonished.

  “What?” he asked finally.

  Anna drew herself up, forcing herself to meet his gaze. “There is insanity in my family.”

  “Insanity,” Reed repeated blankly. He shook his head. “Anna…every family has a few eccentrics. Why, my own family is known far and wide as the ‘mad Morelands.’ Surely—”

  “No.” Anna stepped back, crossing her arms across her chest. “I am not talking about a harmless eccentric or two. There is madness in the de Winters. It has been passed down to Kit and me.” She drew a long breath. “A few days before you asked me to marry you, my father took me into his study and told me the truth. He had wanted to spare me, but when he saw how—how things were between the two of us, he grew frightened. He knew he had to tell me. That is why I pretended to be sick those days when you came to call. I could not bear to face you. Finally I realized that I had to send you away. I hadn’t expected you to propose that day, but, clearly, when you did, I could not accept.”

  Stunned, Reed passed his hand across his face. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Of course I am sure,” Anna retorted. “Do you think I would cut myself off from love, from ever marrying, if I were not sure?”

  “No. I just—”

  “What my father told me that day was that there had always been rumors of…oddities…within the de Winters. Obviously the de Winter who built Winterset was, at the least, peculiar. But my mother, raised as she was from an early age by her maternal aunt, was unaware of the possibility. And it—the madness comes upon them late. She did not know about it, not for sure, until after she had married my father. It was only then that her brother, my uncle, began to exhibit symptoms of his madness.”

  “Your uncle? The one who left Winterset?”

  Anna nodded her head. “Kit and I had thought, like everyone else, that my uncle had moved to Barbados. But what my father told me that day was that my uncle’s madness, which began with episodes of bizarre behavior in his late twenties, had become increasingly worse in character, and more and more frequent. In one of his few rational periods, he realized that he had to do something, and so he and my father concocted this scheme to—to allow my uncle to live as his…illness dictated and also to spare the family embarrassment. Uncle Charles did not want Kit and me to know. He didn’t want us to be shamed by his behavior.”

  Her voice wavered, close to tears, and Reed took a step toward her, saying, “Oh, Anna…”

  She shook her head sharply, moving back. “No. Please. I don’t want your pity. I don’t want you to feel anything for me. Just let me finish.”

  Reed stiffened, color flaring on his cheeks, but he only gave her a formal nod of the head. “Go on.”

  She sent him a searching look. “If I tell you this, you must promise me that you will never breathe a word of it.”

  “Of course.”

  “My uncle did not leave. He moved into a small house deep in the woods, by Craydon Tor. He lives there with his valet. No one else knows of this besides Kit and me and our gamekeeper, who takes them food. Even Norton, who drew up the power of attorney, believes that Uncle Charles moved far away. Uncle Charles has elaborate delusions. He believes that—” She sighed, then continued. “He thinks that he is somehow the legitimate descendant of the Stuart kings. I don’t understand it, though he is able to draw a long chart showing one how the line comes down to him. He is quite certain that the Queen wants to get rid of him, because he is really the one who should be sitting on the throne.”

  “Good Lord.”

  She gave him a long look. “That is perhaps the sanest of his beliefs. He thinks that the Queen sends spies and assassins after him. He also believes that the angel Gabriel comes to him and tells him how to protect himself from the Queen’s assassins. He has laid out circles of rocks around his house in a certain pattern that is intended to somehow thwart the Queen’s men. He paints strange symbols on his skin and sleeps between two wooden slats painted with the same symbols, because he thinks this makes him invisible to the assassins—or something like that. I have trouble following his logic sometimes. He cannot bear to live indoors. He spends very little time in the hut where he lives, and he will accept it only because it is so hidden against the rock, with trees and shrubs all around it.

  “The Queen’s men come mostly at night, he says, and so he does not sleep at night, but roams about the area outside the house, looking for enemies. Sometimes he watches from up in the trees. Other times he slips around, hiding behind rocks and bushes and trees. He sleeps outdoors, but only during the daytime, when his valet can keep watch for him. He is certain that cutting his hair or nails will sap his strength, or that letting his hair and beard grow conceals his true identity—I’m not sure which. He looks…In recent years, when people have sworn that they have seen the Beast of Craydon Tor, I have wondered if they actually saw my uncle. He looks like a wild creature.” She stopped and looked at Reed.

  He gazed back at her, his face still stunned. “Anna…I—this is so difficult to take in.” He frowned. “Maybe your uncle’s condition is an aberration, something peculiar to him, and would not affect you.”

  She shook her head. “No. There have been others. My father said that after my mother found out about Charles, she talked to her aunt, Margaret. Margaret was the sister of my mother’s mother, Lady Phillippa, who married Lord de Winter. After Lord and Lady de Winter died in a fire in the summerhouse, Great-Aunt Margaret took my mother and raised her in London. My mother forced her aunt to tell her what she knew, and Great-Aunt Margaret said that their parents had some suspicions about the de Winters. There were rumors. But they were so eager for their daughter to marry well that they ignored the rumors. My aunt said that my grandmother Philippa told her that her husband had described a great-uncle of his who heard voices and saw visions. He was
kept out of everyone’s sight.”

  Reed ran his hands back through his hair. “But that’s not you. You aren’t mad.”

  “No. Not yet. But I could become so. What if my visions are a precursor of madness? Besides, do you really think that I would risk passing it on to our children? That I would contaminate your family’s blood? I would have had to be without honor to do something like that! Is that what you think of me?”

  “No. No, of course not.” He paused, then said, “Why did you not tell me this three years ago? Why did you just turn me away?”

  “I could not tell you! I didn’t want you to know. I couldn’t bear to have you think of me with pity and shame. To know that about my family.”

  “But I loved you. And you let me think that I meant nothing to you. Less than nothing. You didn’t trust me enough, didn’t love me enough—”

  “How can you say that?” Anna flared. “If I had loved you less, I would have married you and said to hell with all the consequences. What would I have cared about your family and its reputation? What would I have cared about burdening you with a wife who might turn mad in a few years?”

  “Oh, yes, it was noble of you, all right,” Reed snapped. “But you gave me no say-so in the matter. You shut me out, gave me no opportunity to say or do anything. You arranged my life for me, without even the courtesy of asking what I wanted.”

  “It didn’t matter what you wanted. Or what I wanted!” Anna cried. “There was only one course of action. We could not marry.”

  “It didn’t have to work out the way you envisioned. We could have talked about it, decided what to do. Perhaps we could have done something.”

  “What?” Anna flung her arms wide. “It doesn’t matter how rich or powerful you are, or how clever. There was nothing to be done. Nothing could take away the madness in my family. Nothing could have changed the terrifying possibility that lies within my body. How could anything have been any different? There was no way that we could be together. You had to build a life without me. I had to build a life without you.”

  “An empty life,” Reed retorted. “A life without love.”

  Anna drew herself up. “Whatever you call it, it is my life. I worked very hard at driving you out of my heart. I cannot allow myself to love. Never again.”

  “I marvel at your ability to turn your feelings on and off at will,” Reed told her. “I, unfortunately, was never able to.”

  Anna looked at him for a long moment, then said tightly, “I did what I had to do.”

  She turned and strode away. Reed stood, looking after her. This time, he did not follow her.

  * * *

  The following days passed in a haze of misery for Anna. She did not see or hear from Reed. She presumed that before long she would hear that he was moving back to London. She had driven him off, just as she had done three years ago. It would have seemed, she thought, that once would have provided all the pain she should have to endure.

  She went about her daily tasks, searching out every little thing that she could do to busy herself, and though she did them somewhat numbly, at least they kept her mind from returning again and again to the thought of Reed. The nights were much worse, for when she went to bed and extinguished her candle, there was nothing to stave off her thoughts, and soon she would turn her face into her pillow and cry.

  Anna wanted to continue to look into the killings, but she was unsure how to go about it. Obviously, she could not go back to Winterset and help Reed look through the records there for former servants. Beyond that, she was not sure what to do. Frankly, she could not tell that their investigation into the killings almost fifty years ago had any relevance to the two killings that had taken place recently.

  However, she had no idea how else to proceed. She had talked to Estelle’s roommate and to her family, and she had come no closer to discovering the identity of the mysterious man Estelle had been meeting. Nor could she think of any way to discover who had killed the young farmer a few days later. Had the killer specifically meant to kill Frank Johnson? Had he seen him at the tavern and followed him home? Or had he lain in wait at the footbridge and simply killed the first person who happened by?

  It seemed to her that he must have intended to kill a farmer in order to make the murders like the ones that had occurred in the past. Therefore, he must have known that Johnson worked the fields with his father and brothers.

  Anna experienced a shiver down her back at the thought. For the killer to have known that Frank Johnson was a farmer would indicate that he must be someone local, not, as she had hoped, someone from another village who had ridden over to see Estelle. The second killing, she thought, also made it more unlikely that it was Estelle’s lover who had killed her—unless, of course, he had set out to kill a maidservant and had taken up with Estelle with the intention of killing her.

  That idea brought another shiver. It all seemed too horrible to contemplate. Whether the killer was cold and meticulous, choosing his victims—taking up with Estelle, following the Johnson boy home—or someone who prowled the area at night, killing whoever happened to cross his path, Anna could not imagine how anyone could do what he had done. He must be mad, she thought.

  That idea brought her back to her uncle. Anna could not bear to think that he had done it. He was her flesh and blood; she loved him even though he no longer was the man she had known and loved as a child.

  There was no wickedness in him, of that she was certain. But she was less certain that he was incapable of killing someone if he was in the grip of one of his delusions. He heard and saw things that other people did not, but they were as real to him as the events in Anna’s life were to her. If the “Angel Gabriel” told him he must kill Estelle, wouldn’t he do it? If he thought the Johnson lad was one of the Queen’s assassins, might he not fight him?

  On the other hand, the fact that the killings so closely mirrored the original killings seemed to Anna to indicate that Uncle Charles could not be responsible. How could his fogged brain have been up to the task of planning murders to resemble the old ones?

  Anna prayed that she was right, that the killer could not be her uncle. If he was, then she and her family were ultimately responsible for those poor people dying, for they had hidden and sheltered her uncle, and allowed him to live freely instead of locked up in an asylum.

  As she was pondering these matters one morning, it occurred to her suddenly that she knew a person of very sound mind who had been alive at the time of the original killings—Nick Perkins. So that afternoon, taking a meat pie from the cook, she drove the long way around to his house—she still could not face walking over the footbridge on the way there.

  He was working in his garden, as he usually was, and he stood up with a smile when he saw her. “Miss Anna. What a pleasure to see you.”

  “Thank you.” She smiled, climbing down from the trap, and handed him the pie. “A little something for your table from Cook.”

  “Your presence is gift enough,” he told her with a twinkle in his blue eyes. “But I’ll take the pie, anyway.”

  “I cannot imagine how you never came to marry,” Anna said teasingly. “A charmer such as yourself.”

  “Ah, now, Miss Anna, mayhap I was just too crafty for the matchmakers.”

  In fact, Anna had wondered more than once why the old man had not married and grown old with children and grandchildren around him. Even in old age, his was a handsome face, and Anna could well imagine that when he was young, he had had the local lasses swooning over him. When she was younger, she had dreamed up several romantic tragedies to account for his single state. In more recent years, it had seemed to her less romantic and more sad that the man had grown old alone.

  Leading her inside, Perkins put the pie away and brewed a pot of tea for them. “How are those two young rascals? Bright as tacks, they were, and good with their hands, too. I didn’t worry about letting them have the dog.”

  “I haven’t heard from them. They have gone back to London, you kno
w. Their sister did not feel it was safe to have the children around here with all that has happened.”

  Nick shook his head somberly as he brought the teapot to the table and poured the golden-brown liquid into their cups. “Bad business, that.”

  “Yes, it was. Very bad.” Anna took a sip of tea, then said, “Nick…”

  “Yes, miss?”

  “You were here, were you not, forty-eight years ago? When the first murders happened?”

  He glanced over at her. “Aye, I was.”

  “What do you remember about them?” Anna asked.

  “What do you want to know about those for? They’re long past. It’s better to leave the dead buried.”

  “But someone won’t let them,” Anna countered. “Have you heard the details of the current murders? The first was one of our maids, and the last was the son of a farmer. They were slashed with what looked like claws. Just like the murders forty-eight years ago.”

  “It couldn’t be the same person,” Nick said flatly.

  “No. I think it’s clear that someone is imitating him. But perhaps the answer to these murders lies in those old ones.”

  “I don’t see how,” he said with a shrug.

  “Did you know the people who were killed back then?” Anna asked.

  “I knew Will Dawson. He was an old man. He didn’t deserve for his life to end that way.” Perkins’ usually cheerful face was grim.

  “No one does. So you didn’t know the servant at Winterset?”

  He shook his head. “No. Oh, I’d seen her once or twice, I suppose, but I didn’t know her.”

  “Who do you think killed them?” Anna asked.

  “Everyone said it was the Beast,” he replied.

  Anna cocked an eyebrow at him. “Surely you don’t believe that.”

  “It would take a beast to do those things.” His eyes slid away from her.

  “Was there no one they suspected?” Anna persisted. It seemed to her that Nick, usually such an open, even talkative person, was being peculiarly vague with his answers.