I look up at him through ringlets of white hair, loose from their ribbons. “You summoned me, as I recall. Not my father.”
His brows quirk at this. “Rightly so, Ms. Thorn. Follow me.”
We leave the ring of candles blistering behind, each drop from the ceiling causing them to spit and hiss like witches’ cats. My eyes trace the darkening stone while we move into a corridor, the smell here turning to something like smoking herbs. Sage, thyme, the delicate bloom of rosemary. The boards creak beneath our weight, and I follow the flickering light of Ransom’s candelabra, burying my nose in the folds of my cloak.
He stops before a dark door, a bundle of keys jangling from his pocket. My heart thuds. He flicks through them and fits one to the lock. The aged door swings out into the night with gentle ease.
Ransom was right to say the smell of the place was better outside. Soon, the stench of mold, must, and ruined paint gives way to wet soil, winter wind, and the hint of cracking ice. The storm has ceased, merely the light creaking of tree branches reaching my ears. I shiver and only notice our shoulders are brushing when he turns to me, offers me his arm.
A high lord caught with a vicar’s daughter? Tongues will wag. I have no right to take it, so I study the creases in his wool coat, as though he has been bent over something, working for a long time. Part of me wants to reach out and touch them, ask him what keeps him up in his tower. Things of his own making? Or the sins of a father?
To hell with wagging tongues.
I slip my arm through his as easy as scooping water. We move silently through the gardens, the moonlight hounding our heels, until we finally stop in the middle of a desolate parterre.
There are many cold places in this world. Places where love has been sapped straight from the very bones, sucked out by brittle teeth like marrow. The gardens of Blackbourne Castle is one such place. The air swims with the smell of things better left buried.
Shrubs are cut to strange shapes. A raven, a skull, three-spiked stars, those swallowing-tail snakes—my breath catches—and a bell. Dead roses trail along stone boundary walls, and a faceless statue glows alabaster in the moonlight, cracks like lines of ink along its surface. It should be a cozy place, full of life, inviting and bright. Instead, I only feel hunger. It seeps up from the ground, trails from the darkened flower beds, to whisper across my skin and bore holes in the back of my skull. My lungs rattle with shaky breath.
“Impressive, is it not?” Ransom asks. He slips from my grasp, coming around one side of the statue, his hands moving along the figure’s waist like those of a lover.
My stomach twitches. “Of course,” I say, even though the words taste false.
He smiles. “I know when I’m being lied to, Ms. Thorn.”
I don’t trust myself to reply. Instead, I follow a thin stream of moonlight to a bed filled with nothing but the weedy remains of oleander hedges. I crouch to inspect the plants, their ashen stems smarmed with fungus. A faded bloom brushes against my sleeve, and I pull away, careful not to touch it with my bare hands. Even half dead, the thing is still capable of carrying a bite.
A cloud shifts above us, and moonlight catches on something white and half-buried in the soil. My guts scream at me to look away, but I reach forward, fingers wrapping around the solidity of the thing. I draw it from the earth like a sword, breath coming hot and fast.
It’s a bone.
Long, lithe, and straight, smooth as carved marble. I dare a glance over my shoulder, but Ransom is busy with something in his pocket. My gaze drops back to the bone in my hands.
It must be an animal’s. Surely, a large one. Perhaps a deer or even a wolf. My stomach churns, and I lay it back in its tomb. Press it from my mind.
When I turn back, curiosity flashes in Ransom’s eyes and something akin to hunger. The same feeling flowing from the vines, the stones, the very soil itself. As if the whole place wants to swallow me in one gulp. Spit back my bones. I glance at the ruined oleander, trying to come up with something clever to say to distract myself.
“Do you grow many poisons?” It is a stupid question but the only one I can think of with his eyes on me.
The scar through Ransom’s brow twitches in amusement, and he glances at the tangles of dead stems. “Is that plant poisonous?”
I stand. “You’ve brought me here for a reason. I’d like to hear it.”
He leans against the empty fountain and sighs. “Very well. Take a seat, Thorn.”
I would rather stand and put my back to a wall, where the stone runs solid beneath my palms and nothing can jump out and devour me. And then I remember the walls of Blackbourne Castle are rotting, are mouths themselves, and so I sit. The stone at the fountain’s edge is cold despite my many layers, and I gather my skirts about me, shivering.
“Did you ever meet my father?” Ransom sits beside me and plants his feet to the white gravel path. Black sludge swills at the bottom of his boots.
“No, I did not.”
Ransom’s family hardly came into Rixton. I still remember his mother, Lady Miriam Black, always in shades of elderberry and wine. She was the one who brought Ransom to church until the news broke that she had fallen from her horse and died alone out on the moors.
The funeral had been a quick thing. No showing of the body, only a sleek black casket and violet roses crushed beneath dirt. The church bell hadn’t even been rung.
All the better if less people know, Lord Black told my father.
I study Ransom in the moonlight and see myself reflected in the pain of his eyes, the cold outer shell. Just another soul who has lost so much and knows so little of love. My fingers release their grip on the folds of my skirt.
