It wasn’t long after the beast escaped into the night that Mrs. Foster came careening down the stairs, her silver hair bound in a loose braid and a shawl across her shoulders. Without her uniform or her chatelaine, she appeared so frail, and the fear that aged her as she gaped at the blood and broken wood littering the house turned her pallor sickly. A hand was pressed against her open mouth when she looked at Jane.
Jane refused to lower the rifle as she offered a sideways glower.
“How long have you known about this thing?” She asked, curling her lip into a sneer as she turned to look back outside.
Mrs. Foster was silent for a long time as she watched Jane before at last retreating with quiet steps.
Jane expected her to have gone back to bed, returning to her quiet ignorance and turning her head to look the other way from the beast’s destruction. But then she returned to the sittingroom with two cups of tea, setting one on the desk beside Jane. The desk no longer held the fossils, most of them lying on the floor in broken pieces of stone and ancient bone.
Mrs. Foster sighed as she took a seat in Terence’s armchair. She nudged aside a large splinter of wood with the toe of her slipper.
“I’m very sorry that you have been… dragged into this hell, Miss Sterling. My family has been employed by the Hayes since the days of Terence’s grandfather, as have Georgianna’s and Ruben’s families. Secrecy was something bred into our very blood. Not even my husband knew the true extent of my duties here. But even then, rumors of the Wolf’s Run Beast have always been associated with the Hayes name, as villagers like to rumor that Grandfather Hayes made a deal with the Devil for wealth and a nice little house on the hill that’d be impervious to the marsh’s flooding.”
Deals with the Devil… Jane’s eyes flickered to the idol that watched the two women from where she knocked it to the floor.How many of Old Man Hayes’ wards were truly wards or signatures of hellish agreements?
Her attention was brought back to Mrs. Foster when she took hold of the end of one of her gown’s oversized sleeves and peeled it back to show the rest of her hand.
Jane winced at what she saw.
The woman’s hands, wrists, and forearms were riddled with scars. Small, and arched, in the shape of hungering, fanged mouths, others the long rake of beastly pups’ claws. It gnarled the skin, and the pinky finger of her right hand was missing entirely.
“I had a hand in raising the boys. Terence was most often my charge,” Mrs. Foster continued as she ran a thumb over the nub of her missing pinky. “Every night I would witness the sweet boy I helped dress in the morning become a monster as the sun dippedbeneath the horizon, and not once had I ever had an explanation for it. It just… was. It was their nature, and all we ever knew was that it was a secret we were never to speak outside the house or to anybody that wasn’t ourselves or our employers.”
Covering her hands, Mrs. Foster closed her eyes as she took a sip from her tea, and Jane was almost offended at how calmly she spoke about the beast that’d nearly killed her on several occasions, and left its mark on a young Mrs. Foster.
At the same time, she imagined Terence as a boy, as gentle and kind and wide-eyed as he was as a grown man, if not more so. Then she thought of that child being torn apart each night, replaced by an abomination hellbent on tearing flesh asunder, and swallowed down the lump forming in her throat. The ache in her leg stuttered her growing sympathy.
“How can you speak so… sweetly about that thing?” Jane muttered, words wavering.
“Because I pity it, Miss Sterling. I pityhim,” Mrs. Foster nodded to the windows. A distant howl rang out across the night. “He’s tried to be different from them, his father, brothers, grandfather. They weren’t bad men, but they were…men,” she said with a grimace of indifference. “Their afflictions let them give into their isolation and the coldness and lovelessness that tends to accompany manhood. Love, in every sense of the word, was a thing they dejected.”
Jane found herself thinking back to the visit to the university gardens in Cambridge, how Terence allowed her to ramble without ever interrupting her with his own thoughts on the matter until she was finished and seemed attracted to her company, the kindness he had shown to both her and her mother by what must have been a natural goodwill that’d resided in his spirit. He’d shown himself as a man with the capacity to love,seemed so desperately eagertolove, and yet the beastliness of his bloodline—the beastliness of their day’s expectations of his sex—kept him restrained.
“I think I pity him, too,” she said, her hold on the Winchester losing its security.
After finishing the rest of her tea, Mrs. Foster sighed. “Well, best of luck to you with this hunt, Miss Sterling. I think I shall return to bed for a little while more before trying to clean this mess.”
Mrs. Foster left both her and Jane’s cups when she left the room, and Jane didn’t release a breath until the sound of footsteps faded up the stairs and she heard the shut of a bedroom door.
The grim, pink-hued grayness of dawn leaked across the yard, turning the fog into a silvery mist that both hurt and soothed Jane’s eyes if she stared into its depths for too long.
From upstairs she heard movement as the rest of the house roused for the day, and she wondered if Ms. Hudson and Ruben heard the upheaval of last night.
Jane scoffed. How could they not have heard a rifle firing in their house? And why did neither of them even bother to see if she was alive or if she needed any help? She tried not to hold too much anger, for she didn’t know if she would be so chivalrous herself in a similar situation. She, too, would wish to hide rather than risk the beast turning on her.
There was a groan that echoed from deep within the mistthat jolted Jane back awake and her grip on the rifle suddenly tightened, prepared to fire at any shape that even vaguely resembled that of the beast. Her heart was thrumming and her tongue swiped across her chapped lips as she awaited for the thing to emerge.
A silhouette did come into view, but it was staggering and wheezing. The beast seemed completely disinterested in its previous hunt from the evening as blood leaked thickly like mud from its mouth. Its throat was still stained red and Jane wondered if it were just now suffering the effects of the wound and at last breathing its final breaths.
She only grew more confident in her suspicions as the thing began to mindlessly pace in the yard mere yards away from the front door. She wrinkled her nose as the distant, rosy hue of dawn began to wash across its form.
It was truly an ugly animal. Something bent and broken that ought to be dead. The longer she stared at it, the more it started to adopt the shape of a prehistoric beast she could at last understand, even if only a little. Agorgonopsid, perhaps, or some other creature that was too much of a reptile to be classed a proper mammal and too much of a mammal to be classed a proper reptile. The thing doggedly pacing the yard had her imagining those beasts caught between identities and worlds.
She thought of Terence and the beast held within him. It was everything he couldn’t let himself become: ravenous, violent, wrathful, soaked in blood, simmering with frustration of barely contained grief and being unable to secure his own identity in the world, just as Jane had been when vanquishing Mary in her youth. He was a powder keg that burst every night as the sun set, only to have the cycle repeat again, and again, and again, never once finding peace or healing, for men were expected to bear theirwounds and carry on.
With a huff, Jane lowered the rifle.
At last, the beast raised its head in a wounded, piercing whine that made Jane clamp her hands over her ears. A pealing, hollow shriek of the dying. A sound seeking some savior or some other companion to join it in death—only to be met by silence as plumes of mist feathered from jaws stained with carrion. Traitorous pity stitched at Jane’s heart.
