Blackmoore

by Julianne Donaldson

  I had never truly appreciated either the restfulness of silence nor the entertainment of intelligent conversation as much as I did today. I sighed as I leaned my forehead against the window, wishing the rumble of the carriage wheels could drown out the clack and hum of Mrs. Pettigrew, wishing I had someone to talk to, wishing the long drive was already over. I shifted, trying to stretch my legs, without success. Mrs. Pettigrew glanced up from her knitting to smile briefly at me.

  “It tries one’s patience, doesn’t it? The waiting. But it is well worth it.”

  With her smile, I was reminded that Mrs. Pettigrew had accompanied the Delafield family on their trips to Blackmoore every summer. She had been such a part of the family that when the children grew up and George had inherited Delafield Manor, he kept Mrs. Pettigrew on to be nurse to his own children. Henry must have been very persuasive to convince George to let her come with us. She leaned forward to peer out the window.

  “Ah. It seems Master Henry has chosen the scenic route. This will be a treat for you.”

  “What is the scenic route?” I asked, eager to talk about anything after two days of humming.

  “You’ll see soon enough.” She sat back and click-clack went her knitting needles, and the low drone of her humming filled my ears once again.

  She could not know that “soon enough” had grown old years ago, that “at length” was sick and frail, that “finally” was a dying breath. Patience was not one of my virtues. Neither was endurance.

  The humming took on a high, keening quality that reverberated inside the carriage and within the bones of my skull. I thought I would go mad with the sound. The horses slowed, and I looked out the window and saw that they were pulling us up an incline.

  “You know, the horses are having a hard time with this hill,” I said, moving toward the door, “so I shall just get out and stretch my legs a little.”

  Mrs. Pettigrew looked up, startled, as I opened the carriage door. “Oh, no! You will break a leg! Ask the driver to stop.”

  The carriage was traveling no faster than I would on foot. “I will not break a leg, I assure you.” I jumped down lightly and swung the door shut behind me, breathing a sigh of relief to finally be free of that tuneless droning.

  Henry had been riding ahead of us, but he looked back and turned his horse to me.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked, drawing near.

  I shot him a look of accusation. “Mrs. Pettigrew hums.”

  He laughed as he dismounted, his smile bright in the sunshine. “The humming! I had forgotten about the humming!”

  “How could you forget about the humming? It is embedded in the very matter of my brain!” I imitated the high, droning, tuneless sound I had been enduring the past day and a half.

  He just grinned, with a devious look in his eyes that made me wonder if he really had forgotten the humming after all. Realizing I was making my headache worse, I stopped humming and rubbed my forehead for a moment. Henry drew near me, leading his horse by the reins.

  “So ... you stayed at a different inn last night,” I said.

  He nodded.

  I squinted up at him. “Was that really necessary?”

  He shrugged and looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t want to risk ... your reputation.”

  “Ah.” I looked away, my face hot. The memory of my sister Eleanor hung in the silence between us. I would not mention her name, though, and I breathed a sigh of relief when, after a moment, I realized that Henry was not going to mention her either.

  Gesturing at the land before us, Henry said, “There is something you will want to see at the top of that hill.”

  “What is it?”

  “The moors.” He said it as if the word itself was a gift, just as he had always talked about the moors—as if they were as important to his inheritance as the house or the living.

  Gripped with new excitement, I flashed him a grin and hurried to the top of the hill, Henry leading his horse and trailing behind me. A hearty wind blew my skirts, tangling them around my legs as I reached the top of the hill. I stopped at the crest and looked at a bleak valley of wasteland.

  Dark heather covered the ground like a bruise. The laurel-green and gold of the grass and the occasional yellow flower did little to brighten the scene. Not a tree lived here—only some twisted, stunted cousin of a tree that grew no taller than the horses. In all, it was a muted, somber scene, and I could see no beauty in it.

  “This is the moors,” I said, my voice flat with disbelief.

  Henry stood beside me, watching my face as I looked at the landscape before me. Not a blade of green grass soothed the eye here. There was nothing remotely close to civilization in this wilderness.

  “Yes. This is the moors,” Henry said.

  “But ... it is ugly,” I said, my voice distraught even to my own ears. “It is so very ugly, Henry.”

  He laughed.

  “No, truly, it is. You told me it was beautiful.”

  “It is beautiful. To me.” I looked at him without comprehension. He gestured to the scene before us. “Can you not find even one spark of beauty here?”

  I looked from him to the land, wondering for a moment if he had spent the last ten years lying to me or teasing me. But there was no deception in his eyes. There was only fondness and an excitement I could not understand. But I would try, for his sake. I walked a few steps away and bent down to feel the plants I was crunching beneath my boots. I wanted to know this land as beautiful, the way Henry did. The heather was an ugly, dark, brownish-purple color, like a ripe bruise. But these yellow flowers were bright as sunshine. Not bright like daffodils but deep yellow orange, like a drop of sun. I reached down to pluck a blossom and instead stabbed myself on a long, sharp thorn growing right beside its petals.

  “Ow!” I sucked the drop of blood from my finger.

  “I should have warned you. There is nothing soft here in the moors. Do not let the flowers deceive you. They are designed to withstand anything—even a flower-picking young lady.”

  My finger throbbed. “I suppose that’s admirable—to be so hardy,” I muttered, grasping for anything to admire in this land. A gust of wind suddenly tore across the moors, pulling my bonnet from my head and spinning it into the sky.

  Henry plucked it from the air as if it had been thrown to him, and moving in front of me, he put the bonnet back on my head. Holding it by the ribbons, he leaned down, and there was a spark of something in his granite eyes that was new. Some life, some light, was new there. The moors had awakened in him something I had never seen before. He tied the ribbon under my chin, his fingers brushing my neck, my collarbones. Heat rushed to my cheeks, and I held myself perfectly still.

  His gaze lifted from the ribbon to my face, and he said in a quiet voice, “I think the most profound beauty is found in what our hearts love. And I love this, Kate, more than I love anything else. It is beyond beautiful to me. It is home. It is ...” He paused, and squinted a little, as if looking into the sun, but his gaze stayed steady on me. “It is the sight I want to see every day, for the rest of my life.”

  I was taken aback. I had known that Henry loved Blackmoore. I had known all along that he would inherit this land, this estate, this life. But seeing him here, seeing him own it, seeing him proclaim it his own home, struck me deeply.

  In a flash of memory, I was hiding in a dim room in Delafield Manor with the smell of peonies so sharp and sweet I could taste it. And I felt once again, just as I had that night a year and a half ago, both deeply sorrowful and deeply lost.

  I spun around, pulling the ribbon of my bonnet out of Henry’s grasp, and pretended to study the view before me. But with my back to him, I reached up and rubbed my nose hard and breathed in sharply, telling myself to get control of my emotions. I felt Henry stand behind me, silent and waiting—waiting for me to love this place as he did.

  “I think it may grow on me,” I said, fighting hard to keep my voice steady. I breathed in again, willing my heart to slow. Clouds
the color of granite streaked across the sky, pushed toward us by the unrelenting wind. I retied the bow of my bonnet ribbon taut, pulling it hard, making myself proper again. I would not give way to the pull of this wilderness. Looking toward the road, I saw the carriage stopped and waiting for us.

  “Come,” I said. “Let us go see your Blackmoore.” I was happy to climb back inside the small, stuffy carriage. I was even happy to hear the mindless drone of Mrs. Pettigrew. This was proper. This was a place of rightness. Not that wild scene outside—not that wild land nor that dark-haired boy with the grey eyes who loved it more than he loved anything else.

  Chapter 6

  I sat back and watched the moors swallow us whole until there was no groomed green grass to break up the barrenness of this wasteland. And then, before I was prepared for it, the carriage turned south and the ocean suddenly became a part of the world.

  Mrs. Pettigrew, with a glance out the window, remarked, “We’re on the Whitby road. It won’t be long now.” I scooted over to the window on the left side of the carriage and watched the undulating coastline. The water looked grey-blue in the afternoon light and wide enough to swallow everything I knew about life. The sharp angles of birds in flight dropped and lifted and dropped again above the water. I knew nothing about birds that lived near the ocean. I would have something new to ask Henry about.

  I looked back and forth between the two windows, with the sea on one side and the moors on the other, both prospects overwhelming me with their vastness and their strangeness. The sun was beginning its slide over the horizon, the light fading when we came upon a town—the famed Robin Hood’s Bay, which I had heard about for as long as I had heard about Blackmoore.

  I looked with greater interest at the steep, cobbled streets and the red-roofed houses that flowed down the hill toward the ocean. “Did Robin Hood really live here, once?”

  “Legend says he did,” came Mrs. Pettigrew’s response. But legend and truth were two different things.

  “Don’t you know? For certain?”

  She glanced up briefly from her knitting. “Nobody knows for certain, my dear.”

  I remembered what Henry had hinted at—something about smuggling. “But are there still clandestine activities taking place here? Like smuggling?”

  She clucked her tongue in disapproval. “Of course not! What a fanciful imagination you have!”

  I sighed with disappointment. Leaning forward, I lowered the window and caught my breath as the salty cool air rushed over me. If I were an outlaw, this would be a place I would choose for a stronghold. The streets were narrow, the houses crowded together like a band of ragtag rebels, shoulders crammed together, elbows locked. The angled red roofs met and blended and tumbled down the hill to the water’s edge.

  A moment later, the carriage stopped, the door opened, and Henry climbed inside. His shoulders seemed to fill the small space, and he smelled like the salty wind and the moors. He grinned at my look of surprise and sat beside me. “I don’t want to miss this,” he said, then rapped on the carriage roof. It rolled on.

  The anticipation in his eyes made my heart quicken. Blackmoore must be near. I wished for speed, for flight, for “finally” to come.

  Henry leaned forward, looking out the window, and pointed, saying, “There. On the top of the cliff.”

  I leaned forward eagerly, and he moved back to allow me the full window’s view to see Blackmoore for the first time. I stared, then stared again. The light of day was fading, the sky painted navy. The building that stood between ocean and sky looked dead black. The house was misshapen, just as Henry had made it in the model, with one wing stretching much longer than the other. It hunched on the edge of the cliff like a deformed creature, and the candles that lit the windows from within made it look as if it had a dozen eyes, all turned toward the sea. As the daylight faded, I blinked while the image before me shifted and blurred. Whether it was my imagination or a trick of the light, I knew not, but for a moment the house looked to me like a hulking bird of prey, with wings unfolded, ready to drop from the precipice into the empty sky.

  I blinked again, shaking my head to fix the strange twist in my eyesight, and my heart pumped. But it was closer to excitement than fear—this energy that coursed through me. I had wanted this my whole life. Now I had it. I had my visit to Blackmoore, and come what may, it felt as if everything in my life had led me to this place at this time.

  I sat back, feeling breathless, and found Henry’s gaze on my face. “Well?”

  Shaking my head, I found myself speechless and could only smile. It seemed good enough for him, for he settled back with a contented smile on his face and watched me watch out the window as we approached his future home.

  Daylight had vanished completely when the carriage wheels struck the gravel of the courtyard. Blazing torches illuminated the area as a footman stepped forward and opened the carriage door, holding out a gloved hand for me to take. I took it and stepped down onto the gravel. Walking away from the carriage, I tipped my head back to take in the extent of the house. It was a great hulking thing, perched here on the edge of the world between ocean and moors, an anchor of dark stone and towering walls.

  Before this day, I had imagined the building—the dark stones, the peaked roof, the staggering line of chimneys—but I had imagined it in vacancy. Now I saw the bulk of it loom between a dark sky and a barren cliff that bore the brunt of endless crashes of ocean waves. The chill that ran down my spine reached beyond the cold wind and the fine salt spray. This building was born of an austere atmosphere made real. It was a haunting in stone.

  The ocean wet the air, flavoring each breath with salt and freedom and foreignness. The towering building loomed overhead, darker than the darkening sky. The moors stood like a stretch of barrier—an impenetrable wilderness hemming and shielding and pushing this building toward the ocean. It was wild and dark and grand and tall and fierce and haunting all at once. And it thrilled me to the core. It thrilled me and it frightened me, for it whipped at my carefully closeted heart, much as the wind had whipped at my hair and skirts and sent my bonnet tumbling.

  Such unfettering was possible within this sphere that I felt to shrink back with the power of what I felt here. I smelled the ocean and the peat. I tasted the salt in the air, and I heard the haunting cries of birds. The wind whipped at me still, with a cold blast from the ocean. This was a place where things came undone. This cliff would come undone by the crashing of waves. These stones would come undone by the wind. What power would it have in me? What in me might come undone here? So many things could be unfettered, could be loosed, could be thrown to the wind and the waves in this primal place of wilderness and natural power.

  Henry flashed me a look of excitement as he walked quickly toward the open doors. I followed him just as quickly, eager to breathe my “finally” when I crossed the threshold of Blackmoore for the first time.

  Henry waited for me at the door and watched as I walked into the great hall that I had first seen in miniature through a tiny wooden door. Here the details were the same as in the model—the white-and-black checkered floor, the ornately carved fireplace to the left, the arched opening at the opposite end—but the scale made everything feel new and foreign. I felt rather than saw the loftiness of its ceiling, which was swallowed up in darkness, despite the roaring fire in the fireplace and the candles lit all around. The cold ocean wind followed us through the door, chasing at our backs, causing the flames of the candles to flicker and cast strange shadows about the stone walls and floor. Despite the fire and candlelight, the room was losing the fight against darkness.

  An older servant with the regal bearing of a butler approached Henry, bowing and saying, “Welcome home, Mr. Delafield. I trust your travel was uneventful?”

  It was the word home that caught my attention. I looked at Henry’s face and recognized it in an instant. That excitement to be here—those hurried steps—the look of happiness and contentment and deep peace filling his features: this w
as home to Henry.

  “Thank you, Dawson. Yes, the journey was fine. And it is always good to be back.” Dawson helped Henry out of his cloak, taking his gloves and hat, while I handed my bonnet and coat to a waiting footman.

  Footsteps sounded, sharp on the tile, and then a familiar voice came from behind us. “Is that you, Henry? Have you finally arrived?” I turned around, forming my mouth into a polite smile for Mrs. Delafield, who looked more elegant than she had ever looked before. She must have benefited from the dressmakers in London, I assumed. But before I could greet her—before I could thank her for finally inviting me to Blackmoore, she froze mid-step and stared at me. Even in the flickering, dim light, I could see the surprise and dislike in her eyes.

  “Katherine.” Mrs. Delafield’s voice was as chilly as the ocean wind. “What are you doing here?”

  I looked in confusion from her to Henry, who stood close by my side.

  “Yes, Mother, we have come sooner than expected. I thought Kate would enjoy a day here with Sylvia before the rest of our guests arrived.”

  Her expression was set in a look of distaste, and before she could answer, more footsteps sounded, and Sylvia and a young lady I had never met appeared at her side, almost seeming to materialize out of the darkness. At the same instant, a gust of wind shook the doors and the candles flickered and threw their erratic shadows again. My heart jumped.

  “Kitty?” Sylvia asked, peering at me as if she did not recognize me. I smoothed down my hair, feeling self-conscious under the weight of Sylvia’s stare. But after a heartbeat’s awkward pause, she stepped forward and pulled me into an embrace. “I am so happy you’re here!” She squeezed me tightly.

  I relaxed with a sigh of relief. There was nothing amiss here. Mrs. Delafield had never favored me. That was nothing new. I had nothing to worry about.