Minutes tick by before I move. Dropping the cloth, I turn to face the window and cross my arms over my chest. I try to picture what he speaks of: the dangerous S-curve of the lane wrapping around the cliffside. A shortcut to Fairbanks Manor,the seat of Gabriel’s family home. Beneath it, Blackwell Wash churns day and night, a ravenous maw that swallowed a couple just last Easter.
“His father will want abody, Edmund,” I insist.
Edmund sighs, and momentarily, he looks like the exhausted man I’ve pulled from sleep. “His grief will have to settle for a wreckage. Those waters don’t give back the dead. I’ll ensure there’s a car, tyre tracks—everything. And in a month, the man will bankroll a golf scholarship in his son’s name. They won’t look for you. I won’t allow it.”
His voice is muted to my ears because they’re too busy listening for the sound of wind whipping through the woods. Storm clouds roll in, and I wait for that familiar screeching. For the branches striking one another like rattling bones. But none comes. The woods are silent because I’ve fed it tonight.
I hate that I’ve fed it.
My tongue swells in my mouth, and I can’t bring myself to speak Lord Samuel’s name. “His father?—”
“Families like ours have been burying their mistakes before the concept of a kingdom was even invented. We’re very skilled at telling the right sort of lies, Chess. You don’t have to worry about anything. I’ll have it all sorted out.”
It should scare me how unmoved he seems by all of this. His assurance is a physical force crashing into me, yet my body refuses the safety net being tossed. Heaviness clings where relief should rest, and Icannotbring myself to fully believe Edmund.
Even with Gabriel gone and the curse’s demand met, I remain unclean. My hands beg for an absolution that might never come, and I want to unburden myself to the man before me. Maybe it would make the heaviness less suffocating to force the curse into daylight and let him see the truth of this murder. Of what I’ve had to live with and what any daughter of mine will too.
Tradition grabs hold of my pain and chains it to duty. Heiress to heiress, this burden is my inheritance. Sons of Sheffolk are blind to their history, and that ignorance is a shield. So I stand there, an overflowing sink of existential dread, remorse and grief, unable to do anything but accept the flood while Redford’s ghosts remain forever unaware of the tap they left running.
“You should wash off while I burn the dress,” he speaks again, gesturing towards the silk I’m wearing. That pulls another mindless nod from me. “Wewillget through this, Chess.”
“We,” I echo, clinging to it like a lifeline.
For emphasis, he repeats it, and I’m breathing again. Obediently, I make my way to the bathroom where I strip out of my clothes and toss them into the hamper for Edmund to find. I’m moving on puppet strings I don’t fully know who controls. Is it my guilt? Edmund’s resolve? Or the deep sense ofknowingattempting to come alive, to reach my mind and reiterate what I’ve known since the letter opener sank into Gabriel’s chest.
That this didn’t matter. Murder didn’t matter here in his family.The Sheffolks have buried worse.
I just never imagined myself planting the same seeds in these graves.
2
WHEN ONE FORGETS THE G-SPOT
FRANCESCA
Present
Silk, I realise, clings uncomfortably when you’re sweating at midnight in a graveyard. Should’ve read the care instructions better because I’m literally sweating everywhere—under my breasts, between my thighs and down my back. Champagne fabric clings indecently as though in protest each time I manage to stain it with dirt. The lace gloves are also ruined, ripped down the centre by the shovel’s rough wooden handle. I would’ve taken them off ages ago, but there’s some grim satisfaction in touching death with something soft still on me.
If the press were to snap a picture of me right now, I’d be the cover image for their next issue ofDebutante turned Undertaker. And if Victoria from the ‘Sheffolk Renewal Society’ were to see me…Oof.She’d probably livestream it and claim it as proof that my family deals in the sacrilegious. Should probably stop proving her and her cronies right. Not now, but maybe later.
Right now, I could do with less of the panting, though; I can hear my lungs wheezing their last. Shovel. Dirt. Pant. Shovel. The routine repeats in that same brutal rhythm that has me questioning who decided on six feet. Grave robbing apparently requires core strength I simply don’t have.
From behind me, Percy’s amused voice breaks my train of thought. “With every shovel swing, that dress flosses your ass. The ghosts watching are probably jerking off.”
“The only ghost I care about is Cillian, and if a show helps him exhume himself, then so be it.”Clunk. The shovel hits wood before Percy can respond with something even filthier. “Help me with this.”
She’s already beside me, on her knees in that ridiculous emerald gown her mother shoved her into. Her smirk makes me snort, as if she’s already excited about how Aunt Edith will react to the state of her beloved outfit.
“You’re the only psycho I know who’d end the night by digging up a medieval bastard,” she speaks through gritted teeth.
We feather what’s left of the dirt with rushed hands, working beneath nothing but a solitary lantern and a full moon. Crows caw in the distance, and I flinch. Even years later, the auguring of Godwyn’s murder still haunts me.
Clearing it entirely and dragging the coffin to the surface takes twenty minutes. Percy complains about her glass spine as if I haven’t been shovelling for half an hour. Can’t even be pissed about it, honestly. She’s going to need her strength if Cillian’s memories are particularly violent. Whilst my cousin picks a splinter from her hand, I stare in vague annoyance down at the worm-rotted oak still bound in iron. The hinges have rusted to orange, and the lid is half collapsed. The stench that emerges when we swing it open is unfathomable. It’s not rot, not really.No living thing remains to decay, not after five centuries have gone by.
What lay inside is only the faint suggestion of what once was a man. A well-respected man, if the page from Nanna’s journal is to be believed. Not much thread is left wrapped around him, and his skull has fallen in. Whatever rich cloth he’d been buried in had fucked off. His teeth shine in the darkness like individual stars, and a worm peeks out of one eye socket.
Percy catches what’s grabbed my attention and groans. “Please tell me you’re not taking his teeth.”
