“He came back today. He went into Colchester.” A small smile touched her lips. “Hopefully we’ll be able to read the journal in peace. Tarron is my dearest friend, but there is nothing calm about the man.”
Peyton pulled out her house key. Alistar took it from her and fitted it into the lock, highly conscious of the fluttering leaves on the trees. Peyton’s shudder arced across the busy air to him. A telling sign he was certain she couldn’t possibly ignore, he thought glumly.
He pushed the door open and ushered her in, then quickly shut out the noisy air. Nothing got by her, however. “After some of those passages we’ve read, and hearing the trees rattle that sound as loud as a baby’s toy, I’m inclined to believe you when you say you are cursed.”
There was nothing he could add to that declaration.
“Would you care for coffee?”
“I thought you didn’t know—”
“This was one of Mrs. Handel’s regular days to clean. I begged her to show me how to work the pot. If you don’t want coffee, we could have tea.”
He opened his mouth, but she put her hand up, staying his response.
“She was as”—she lifted her fingers and curled them into quotes—“as ‘appalled’ as you when she saw the tea selection and made a special trip to the supermarket.”
“Tea would be lovely.”
Within twenty minutes, they were ensconced in the library before a fire blazing in the hearth. Alistar didn’t take the chair across from her tonight. He wanted to sit next to her. Feel the warmth of her shoulder against his. Smell the floral scent of her hair.
He reached for the journal. It felt alive beneath his fingertips. He opened the binder, and the two of them started reading together.
23 June 1832
Winslow Spears, the sixth Earl of Griston, is the most divine, yet saddest person I’ve ever met. A cloud of gloom seems to hang over his glorious head. And the oddest thing was… Well, I shall start from the beginning.
I was lying beneath a tree at my favorite pond, shoes and stockings off, of course—I blush, thinking what a hoyden I must have appeared—with the latest Minerva Press novel face down across my middle, practically napping. Napping, I tell you. When I heard a shy voice say, “Hello.”
I sat up so quickly, I banged my head on a low branch.
“So sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. Oh, dear. You’re bleeding.”
“No. No. I’m fine, truly,” I told him. But he pressed a starched white kerchief against my head. Then we talked. About music, and his love of Mendelssohn, Handel, Beethoven.
30 June 1832
It appears James was right. Winslow told me the most remarkable thing. He definitely feels he’s cursed. He said he first noticed it after a house party his father and grandmother hosted many years ago. He was eight at the time. He’s a year behind Irene’s age of ten and nine. He refuses to go into society. I admit to shaking my head at such a notion.
2 July 1832
Each day I grow fonder and fonder of Winslow. He’s a gentle soul, truly. He’s quiet and thoughtful and shy, I think. My complete opposite. He seems to adore that about me. My gregariousness. (’Tis not bragging, is it, if I write it in my journal?) The trees do indeed tend to rattle more when he is about, but I find that a joyful sign. It alerts me to his oncoming visit.
7 July 1832
Today I asked Winslow what he thought the trees were saying. He didn’t know. He worried that I thought he was mad. He’s consumed by fear. He believes he may be headed for the same fate as his father. Of course, such fears are unfounded, and I told him as much. He also said his father was short of temper. I cannot picture Winslow in a temper. I, of course, am infamous for my own.
“She’s falling in love with him, isn’t she?” Peyton snuggled next to him as if he could protect her from what was sure to be a disastrous ending. “What is the curse exactly, Alistar?” She spoke thoughtfully.
He swallowed hard, trying to find a way to put into words what he knew would send her from the house screaming. “I’m not sure of all the particulars,” he told her slowly.
She rose to sitting and pierced him with eyes that had taken on the color of the blue chairs across from them. “Tell me what you do know.”
“All right.” He folded the journal closed. “I know that the fifth Earl of Griston went insane in his thirty-third year.”
“And the sixth Earl of Griston?” she asked softly.
“The same. And the same after that.”
