He’s giving up most of his collection for me, so I don’t protest. “The gardener may have been a piece of shit, but he was a magnificent artist.”
“An artist, yes, but a bad man.” Beresford winces. “You know that incense I burn at the orgies, to lower inhibitions and suppress fertility? I learned how to make it from the gardener’s memories—except his original version was a far more potent kind. He and the former Beresford would sometimes use it on the captives. He also produced the sleeping potions they used to drug women and bring them to the estate.”
I shudder, feeling even less inclined to be sorry about the fate of the old man’s corpse.
To pass the time, Beresford and I play dice in the game room. At midnight, we return to our room and don cloaks and boots. Once we’re protected against the cold of the night, we walk, hand in hand, to the room with the blue door.
“If I unlocked it, would the key show bloodstains again?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“And it resets if you do it?”
He nods.
“What a clever piece of magic.”
“Designed, I’m afraid, by someone who was also complicit in a great many terrible things.”
“Says the man who ate himself.”
Beresford chuckles. “Fair enough. And yet I believe there are some things that are unforgivable in any realm. Personally, the imprisonment and repeated torture of a living, thinking creature is among them.” He kisses my forehead and enters the room.
I step inside after him, holding the lamp high and casting a sidelong glance at the symbols on the door. “These symbols… you placed them here and cast the charm on this room?”
“Yes. It’s old magic, passed down through generations of my kind.” He trudges out of the darkness, carrying a body over each shoulder.
I follow him down the hallway of the south wing. “Can you do other magic?”
“No. Our powers have a very limited scope, directly related to our way of life. You already know all the powers I possess, except one.” He reaches the bottom of the stairs and pauses to shift the bodies on his shoulders. “A matagot has the power to transfer a single soul they have swallowed into an empty body, once in a lifetime.”
I precede him into the kitchen and open the back door for him. “And have you ever done that?”
“No.”
“So you still could.”
He casts me a sidelong look. “Is there someone in particular on your mind? Grandmother Riquet, perhaps?”
I chew my lip as I walk alongside him across the dark yard, toward the back fields. My breath creates wispy ghosts in the cold air. The night overhead is frosty with stars, and the forest lies like a black scarf along the edge of the world.
“She was at the end of her days,” I say at last. “Her mind was fracturing and her body was giving out. Even if you could return her soul to her body, I don’t think that’s what she would want.”
“I thought of restoring her to her body, so her protective influence could continue,” he admits. “But for all the reasons you listed, I did not. Even if I had, I believe she would have died soon after.”
“We should let her rest. But I don’t want to bury her with the others. She needs her own separate grave. A place of honor.We fought many times, and she wasn’t the kindest soul, but I have respect for her, especially now that I know her presence kept us safe.”
“It shall be done exactly as you wish,” my husband replies.
I walk with him, back and forth, carrying the lamp and holding the doors, until all the bodies except for the gardener and the thief have been transported to the back field. Most of the corpses lie naked in a pile of limbs and torsos, but Grandmother Riquet is laid neatly nearby, on her own, wrapped in a blanket.
Last of all, Beresford fetches the skeleton of his other self from the berry bushes and tumbles the bones onto the heap of corpses.
“Step back, wife. I need to shift.” He glances around, as if he’s checking for any observers. There’s no one out here, and despite our proximity to the edge of Wormsloe, I don’t sense the Barrow-Man’s malevolent presence. Perhaps he has given up and withdrawn back into his lair.
Beresford strips naked in the faint moonlight. Arousal flutters between my legs at the sight of him. Will he always affect me this way, I wonder?
“Will you age?” I say suddenly.
