“He bought you,” she said again, more firmly, to the ceiling. “Remember that.”
The ceiling offered no useful counsel.
She squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself to stop thinking about her husband and his threat that felt more like a promise.
Suddenly, a sound split the silence.
Juliana went rigid.
What was that?
It was not the settling of old timbers, nor the wind finding its way through a poorly fitted casement. She knew those sounds now, had catalogued them over days of lying awake in exactly this fashion. This was different. This sounded almost… human.
A scream rose from somewhere above and to her left, then collapsed into silence so abrupt it was almost worse than the sound itself.
Her heart hammered against her ribs. She waited, counting her own breaths, telling herself she had imagined it, that Gothic novels and penny dreadfuls had done exactly what her grandmama had accused them of doing to her imagination.
Then it came again.
She was out of bed before she had made a conscious decision to move. Her feet found her slippers. Her hands found the candlestick on the nightstand, not because she thought to bring light, she realized, but because her fingers had closed around it like a weapon, and she had not corrected the instinct.
The corridor outside her chamber was long and dim; the wall sconces burned low for the night. Juliana moved quickly, her nightgown whispering against the floorboards. The sound had come from the west wing; she was certain of it now. The West Tower.
‘You are forbidden from the West Tower.’
She slowed, her candle guttering in the draft that snaked along the floor.
‘That part of the house does not concern you.’
He had not given her a clear reason. As if she were a child to be managed rather than a woman living under the same roof,breathing the same cold air, lying awake listening to screams that he would tell her, she was quite sure, were nothing more than the wind.
But she knew the difference between the wind and a human voice. She had grown up in a house where the walls groaned and shrieked in winter, and not once had any of it sounded like that. Not once had the timbers produced something so raw, so jagged, as if wrenched from a throat that could not help itself.
Her fingers tightened around the candlestick.
She thought of everything she did not know about her husband. She was told that he had fought in the war, and men came back from wars with things she could not name. She thought of the finality with which he had told her not to test him. She thought of the money he had handed over without blinking to purchase a woman he claimed to hold in contempt. What manner of man did such things? What manner of man had rooms in his house that his own wife was not permitted to enter?
And what, precisely, was kept inside them?
The candle flame bent sideways. A cold breath moved through the corridor, and Juliana felt it on the back of her neck like a hand.
What if there is someone in that tower? What if he is dangerous? What if I have been a fool, and the only person who could have warned me was the brother I am forbidden to speak of?
She pressed her back to the wall, breathing carefully through her nose. The darkness at the far end of the corridor was absolute. She could see nothing beyond the weak halo of her candle.
Go back to your room, said the sensible part of her.You are in a strange house, it is the dead of night, and you do not know what lives behind that door.
Her feet did not move.
Because there had been a sound. A real one. And somewhere in this house, behind a door she had been expressly forbidden to approach, someone had screamed.
The shadows at the far end of the corridor shifted.
Every hair on her body stood upright. For one suspended, terrible moment, she could not breathe, could not think, could only stare at the darkness moving toward her, and every Gothic novel she had ever read collapsed into a single blinding certainty:something is very wrong in this house, and I am alone in it in the dark.
She did not think.
She spun, raised the candlestick in both hands, and collided with something large and solid and very much alive.
