Castle & Key, page 17
“Oh,” Janet said, and her pointed little jaw firmed. “Do you think it’s the curse playing with us?”
“Probably,” Susan said. “Or there have been more bodies lately than Mrs. Carmichael and Mr. Oswald were admitting to. Did you notice his boots?”
Janet’s brows twitched together, and Susan was sure that her lips pressed together for a brief moment as well—was that irritation or rue? “No,” she said. “I suppose they were black with green piping.”
“Exactly so,” said Susan.
Nine
Susan didn’t realise that she was so very on edge about seeing Emmett for the first time since their escape from the butler’s pantry until she entered the kitchen later that morning and found only Regan. Mingled disappointment and relief stirred in her chest and made her too restless to do more than make a quick breakfast of the last of the porridge that was rapidly congealing on the table. It was ridiculous to be so discomposed at the thought of seeing Emmett when she had just felt for the pulse of a dead man in the hallway above-stairs a bare hour or two earlier.
She asked Regan, who was still looking faintly tearstained, “Are you all right?”
Regan shrugged—a miserable, half-hearted thing. “I hate finding the ones that have got lost. They’re always so starey and limp and bloodless!”
Susan had a sudden, inescapable memory of blood seeping down the walls and into the carpet, and had to clear her throat before she could ask properly, “Have there been a lot of those?”
“More than enough,” Regan said, and added with a sudden burst of energetic asperity, “And they’re always left there for me to find! No one else is expected to find bodies before breakfast!”
“I suppose Mrs. Carmichael and Mr. Oswald just clean them up,” Susan said bracingly.
“That’ll be the gardeners,” Regan said bitterly. “Can you see Mrs. C picking up a dead man? No fear!”
If it came to that, Susan couldn’t really picture Mr. Oswald picking up a dead body with his delicate hands and shuddering looks. So the gardeners would make it into the house after all? Susan felt that she wasn’t quite sure she appreciated that. It was one thing to know that the gardeners hadn’t been burning the body she’d thought they’d been burning. It was quite another to trust that they hadn’t been burning a body at all—especially when they’d spent a significant amount of time over the last few days and nights peering through the windows of the manor without moving.
“Isn’t there anyone else who can do it? Someone from the town, for example.”
It wasn’t that she thought there might be—it was more that Susan wanted to know how much connection the manor had with the town below, apart from pillaging it periodically for women of a marriageable age or servants willing to bet their lives for a very decent amount of money.
To her surprise, Regan said, echoing what the master had said last night, “They can’t get in once everything starts. No one can. No one comes in, and no one goes out. We have to make up for any lack by changing positions.”
“How very practical!” said Susan, hoping for more.
Unfortunately, Regan seemed to have remembered that she wasn’t supposed to talk about any of the things she had just talked about, and her eyes dropped. “Never mind that,” she said. “I shouldn’t be talking about things like this. You’ll find out soon enough on your own without me telling you things, and I don’t want to end up like the master’s valet.”
“No,” agreed Susan. “We wouldn’t want anything like that to happen.”
But she couldn’t help thinking about the fact that Regan, by withholding information that was obviously dangerous to speak, but equally dangerous to live in the manor without, was condemning Susan to the very danger she refused to encounter by speaking of it.
It was, she considered, as she paced down the hallway and past the breakfast room, whence she could hear the murmur of voices, an unhealthy sort of way to live: the options were to either speak up and help someone while putting your own life at risk, or to keep quiet and just wait for the inevitable drop over the balcony when that person did something a little too risky or outside the Perfect Result.
She said as much to Brennan, after scanning the room for servants and the windows alike for gardeners, and found him as lackadaisical about it as she had expected.
“Can’t talk to anyone m’self, old girl,” he said. “Not much use wondering if I’d do something I can’t do.”
“Yes, but you could,” pointed out Susan. “You’d run the risk of the person thinking they were mad—although I’m inclined to think they’re used to that sort of thing in this place—or of someone having you carted off to the furnace outside because they thought you were possessed, but you could do it.”
“Don’t want to be carted off to the furnace, old thing.”
“Exactly,” said Susan. “And that’s the problem: no one wants to be carted off to the furnace, so they keep quiet—or even do a little silencing of their own, I suspect.”
“Cut-throat place, this,” Brennan said gloomily.
“Yes,” said Susan. “And I’d give a great deal to know how much of that the curse is responsible for. It certainly alters people’s perceptions and their natural desires, but I don’t know how far that goes.”
She was thinking particularly of Mr. Oswald—delicate Mr. Oswald, who washed women’s clothes secretively and was offended at people speculating that he might have kissed women in the butler’s pantry—and it occurred to her that as little as she knew what happened to Helfer and Regan of a night, did she know where Mr. Oswald and Mrs. Carmichael slept.
That was certainly something to be thinking about. She was still leaning against Brennan’s conveniently sturdy frame and thinking about it, in fact, when Emmett’s voice said in her ear, “There you are!” and for the first time in her life with the horselords, Susan startled utterly and comprehensively, without any artifice.
“Good heavens, lummox!” she said, gasping. “You might give me some warning before you do that!”
There was amusement in his eyes, Susan was well aware; she couldn’t tell if it was from the fact that he had at last made her jump, or if he knew how fast her heart beat as he stood so close to her.
Susan turned a little so that she was facing him directly, with the hall stand at her back. Anyone observing them from this position could have assumed Emmett to be closing in for a kiss; Susan welcoming it. She wasn’t quite sure, for a moment of madness—or perhaps the curse meddling with her mind—that it wasn’t so.
Emmett, considering her, asked unexpectedly, “Are you avoiding me?”
“Good heavens, why would I be?” Susan asked, happy to have a question she could answer so unexceptionally.
When Emmett stared at one with that considering, faintly puzzled look, one could usually depend upon him asking uncomfortable, unfortunate, or downright inconvenient questions. Since Susan liked to be strictly truthful—especially with her friends—this habit of his had sometimes led to some inconvenience—especially since Emmett was terrifyingly good at following tricky things to their end instead of being decently befuddled like others.
This time, however, he seemed disinclined to follow any line of questioning. He merely rubbed the back of his neck as though he didn’t quite know how to proceed and said, “I don’t know. I didn’t see you last night or at breakfast this morning.”
“Last night, I was with the master,” Susan said. “And this morning, I was looking at a body in the hall.”
“Kill the fellow, did you?” asked Brennan, blithely unaware of Emmett’s deeper frown.
“Of course not!” Susan said indignantly. “So there’s no need to glare at me, lummox!”
“I didn’t think you had,” Emmett said, his colour just slightly heightened; and for the first time since he had startled her, he moved back a little.
Oh dear! thought Susan, caught between dismay and the intoxicating thought that she had been right last night when she spoke with the master, and that if she wanted to—and she really did want to at that moment—she could cheat just as effectively as the curse was cheating by tickling up Janet’s feelings to interest her in Emmett. Emmett was certainly as unhappy as Janet had been about Susan meeting with the master.
Playing on that wouldn’t do any good to either herself or Emmett in the long run, but it was tempting for the heart-beating now, when Susan would very much have liked to make sure that Emmett didn’t look in Janet’s direction again.
She said, “It was the master’s previous valet, which I think makes a problem.”
“Who did you see the gardeners burning,” said Emmett, grasping the problem at once. “Or were they actually not burning a body at all?”
“Yes,” said Susan. “I would have sworn to what I saw, but that was before I knew we were dealing with a story curse, amongst other things. Do you think you’ll be going outside with the master today?”
“I can’t go poking around in the ashes while he’s with me,” pointed out Emmett.
“I have to say, I find that very disappointing,” Susan said. “It shows a lack of enterprise.”
“I used up all of my enterprise yesterday,” said Emmett, his brown eyes deliberately meeting hers with what Susan felt to be a distinct fizz. “In one shot.”
She tried desperately not to cough on her own intake of breath, and hoped that her cheeks weren’t as red as they felt. Oh well; as Belle said, no way forward but to attack. She said indignantly, “I told you that I wouldn’t make it unpleasant for you! You can’t tell me that it was unpleasant!”
“In my experience, it’s always unpleasant,” interposed Brennan.
Emmett, with even greater deliberation, said, “I didn’t say it was unpleasant.”
Susan had a startled, faint moment to grasp that he seemed to be teasing her before she rallied with, “Then what are you saying?”
It took him much longer to reply to that. His eyes dropped, and he thought for a few moments before he seemed to smile and said, “I don’t know.”
* * *
Later, Susan couldn’t decide if the smile or the teasing had been more disturbing. She spent quite some time that day trying not to wonder about it, and quite some sleepless time that night in the same useless endeavour.
It wasn’t as though she’d never kissed Emmett before, thought Susan rather wildly, as she lay sleepless and exasperated, staring at shadows that moved a bit too much on the ceiling. She had kissed him on the first day that they met. Granted, that kiss had been a very different thing: she had done it, as a girl barely twenty years old, in the absolute assurance that the years-older Emmett, who had captured her fairly in a fight, would immediately release her in horror. She hadn’t looked her twenty years, and the act had been spectacularly effective. It was entirely another thing to have demanded for Emmett to kiss her in an act of subterfuge and to find that, when a willing party to the kiss, he was thoroughly consummate in the act.
Susan had been aware for quite some days now that it bothered her immensely that Janet seemed to be wavering between the man she was married to—and had obviously forged a connection with—and the man who had helped to rescue her from almost certain death. Until she knew how much of Janet’s interest was the curse’s doing and how much was genuinely from Janet herself, it was worse than useless to pursue any of her own bothersome feelings with regards to Emmett. For all she knew, Emmett had no more real interest in Susan than Brennan did, and by taking advantage of a situation where the curse would be likely to try to convince him that he was in love with her, just to gratify her own—perhaps momentary—feelings, she would be utterly unfair to Emmett. For her own part, it would be absolutely gut-wrenching to find out that she had fooled herself into thinking that Emmett really cared about her once the confusion of feelings was obliterated at their escape from the curse.
And perhaps, thought Susan hopefully, there would be no lingering feelings that remained at all, on either side.
No, far better to let the curse weave its toils and go along with it carefully and quietly, playing the part as far as she needed to and no further. As for the prickly, anxious, delicious little feelings that insisted on wrapping themselves around her heart—well, there was no harm in experiencing what it was like to be in love for the first time, was there? It was just a matter of making sure that those feelings didn’t prompt her into doing anything to hurt Emmett.
Janet showed no sign of stirring, so Susan eventually gave in to the inevitable and got herself out of bed and out of the suite to touch base with Emmett and have a brief reconnoitre through the top half of the manor. She didn’t particularly want to visit the bottom half of the manor, uninterested in seeing any more bloody walls; but when she left the suite and found the night far less advanced than she’d thought, she wavered. She could still hear vague noises from the lower level of the house, so when she heard Regan’s voice from the general direction of the ballroom, it was no real surprise.
“Helfer! Come back here!”
“Do as you please, Miss Regan,” said Helfer’s voice softly. “I’m not taking the long way around just to please Mrs. Carmichael! I’ve been cleaning the ballroom for the last four hours, and it’s not even my job; I’m taking the short road to bed.”
“It’s all of our jobs,” said Regan, annoyance plain in her voice.
Susan—who had a very good idea that Helfer was about to pass down the main staircase and into the lower hall, as she had seen him do the night previous—darted forward and across the hall into the shadows on the other side, then skirted closely by the wall to duck down the servants’ staircase before either of the younger servants could see her. Although she would much prefer not to encounter bloody walls again, it would have been a great shame to give up the chance to see where Helfer went when he was ostensibly going home.
She took the stairs three at a time, as silently as she could, then bounded lightly into the lower half of the manor and darted down the hallway to the plant-topped stand roughly halfway down. If she was very lucky, the place where Helfer had disappeared last night would be before he got to her hiding place. If she was not, well—there were a great many shadows in the hallway, and Susan would just have to hope that she looked enough like another of those shadows to pass notice.
She was, as it turned out, entirely correct. No Regan came up behind her to give away her hiding place, but the double doors that opened into the hallway from the front of the manor fluttered briefly and admitted Helfer, who strode up the carpet toward her, outlined in the slightly brighter room he had come from before the doors closed behind him. He walked quickly, but not quite steadily, and Susan had the impression that he walked more and more slowly as he came, until at last he stopped and turned to face the wall with his face turned up to gaze at it almost blankly.
Susan allowed herself to lean out further from cover than was strictly wise—and was repaid for that risk by the sight of the wall in front of which Helfer stood slowly collapsing from top to bottom, in an inward-turning scroll of vanishment.
The breath hissed silently between her teeth. Helfer hadn’t pressed anything or activated anything, Susan was quite certain. He had simply stood there, swaying and gazing at the wall as if drunk, and the wall itself had rolled inward to allow him to enter. And Helfer did enter, myriad threads of magic tangling from within the new hallway that seemed to writhe and withdraw at the touch of neutral air that was in the original hallway.
Susan hesitated, but only for a moment. She knew, suddenly and coldly, exactly how someone had been alive and out of sight in the manor for so long; she also knew in that moment that this was an opportunity that might not be offered to her again.
She darted out from behind the plant stand and followed Helfer softly into the darkness of that hallway that ran with magic, and it felt as though the darkness closed around until there was only soft, woolly night behind her instead of an open hallway. She didn’t dare to look back because she had a rather nasty idea that she would only see darkness behind, anyway. Now that she had ventured into suspended reality, there was no way out but to follow the person who had led her here.
Luckily for her, Helfer no longer seemed as if he was in full control of his body, let alone his mental processes; he walked slowly, stumblingly, and even though Susan let him draw further ahead, just in case, she was certain he wouldn’t be capable of hearing her footsteps behind him.
As she walked, the hallway grew longer and wider; it never changed fast enough for her to notice it changing, but it was gradually so wide that it was hard to see the walls on either side in the indistinctness of darkness. A chill breeze swept along the hall, whispering around her ankles and her ears, and Susan thought she heard Brennan creak uneasily, although that was impossible.
She would have considered turning around and going back if she’d thought there was anything still behind her into which she could retreat. A glance over her shoulder showed only more shifting indistinctness—a swirling nothingness of empty space that was somehow as closed off as it was empty.
Ahead were shadows that still moved in Helfer’s now-clumsy long-legged stride; Susan hurried onward again, then slowed down as the shadow of the footman seemed to stop and turn to face the wall to his left, once more swaying.
Susan stopped likewise. Then, frozen with horror in the darkness, saw a byplay of shadows that almost defied her imagination: Helfer in shadow, long-legged and fluid, swallowed up into the wall and dangling.
She didn’t think she breathed. She didn’t quite dare. Susan stole out of cover and approached the muddle of black, red, and green shadows, and saw that it was indeed Helfer suspended within the wall, his chin dropped down onto his chest and his arms and legs hanging bonelessly into the darkness.
He looked utterly white, as if there was no blood in him at all.
Susan, dazed and sick, had only a moment to take in the sight before something hit her on the head from behind, and she sank onto her knees on the carpet, and thence into a fuzzy blackness.
