For the first time, I notice a crack in her veil, an eye beginning to open, watching the world.
When I finally speak again, my voice is thin. “Maybe I’m simply ignorant, as are many of the people who walked by and thought nothing of her.”
“In my experience, ignorance is loud, Lady Francesca,” he mutters, tilting his head just so, staring back at the hairline fracture. It widened in the last few seconds; I wonder if he’s noticed. “And you’re very silent.”
“Then tell me what you see.”
His small smirk transforms into a full-fledged smile, wicked with understanding. “You don’t think it’s strange? A statue of a veiled woman, tucked out of sight like a secret?”
“Everythinghere is tucked out of sight.” I don’t mean to say it, but I do. “How many of these are family graves, but we plant flowers so visitors call it a garden? You’d never know, unless I told you.”
His voice is gravelly. “How considerate. Perfume the decay to spare the sensibilities of others. What about you?” The question strikes like a match. “Do you perfume yours?”
The ghosts inside me coil tight, and the key in the statue’s hand appears to be pulsing. “I try. But that doesn’t stop the stink, though, now does it?”
His brow lifts, and he lets out a single laugh. “Stunning. Does that make you good at rot, then?”
My mouth twitches. “Runs in the family, Your Highness. Shall we move on?”
Eric doesn’t protest when I step away, and I don’t know how to explain that he has tempted something within that statue. Something that was slumbering all this while recognised him by scent alone. That fracture wasn’t there before. I know it wasn’t, and I remind myself to check in with Errol. He’s always watering the flowers on this side.
The gravel shifts beneath Eric’s boots as he follows. I restart my little presentation, pointing out useless things, like how old the stone benches are or the sundial that once started a war that lasted for a fortnight. I show him the old chapel with the stairway to the bell tower that’s sealed off. It hasn’t rung in overtwo hundred years, not until the morning they dragged Great-Granny Priscilla’s body from the cellar. There’s no rope to pull, I inform him, and it’s never rung again since that fateful day. He takes the information in such stride that I almost applaud him for it.
We pass through the gardens again, and the servant trimming the hedges waves at me and bows his head at Eric. The latter reacts nothing like how you’d expect a prince to. He looks awkward and uncomfortable but bows his head in greeting, too.
The path twists, and I speak when the air is breathable once more. “Why didn’t you let him join us? Kairos, that is.”
He stops walking so abruptly that I nearly stumble into his side. The look he gives me feels older than the country. “You saw what he put on the TV. Did you really wish to explain the origins of a statue whilst he’s in the background trying to climb it?”
“You think he’d climb it?”
“He’s done worse with less, believe me.”
His comment catches me off guard, and I let out a startled laugh, so real that it stings my throat. Eric glances sideways, the corner of his mouth twitching like he didn’t mean to make me laugh, but is pleased he did. We veer off the gravel path, where a narrow trail appears and the bramble closes in. Just ahead, my cottage crouches before the sprawling northern woods.
But I stop just a few feet away, closer to a massive tree where the grass was flattened by wind and time. Our final tourist destination. The soil here is darker, richer almost, as though blood has bled into it like ink.
A singular weathered stone juts out from it.
“Family marker,” I tell him. “They used to bury the dishonourable here. The thieves, lovers, rebels, that sort of thing. No ceremonies. No names. Just a patch of soil. Records call them ‘the inconveniently deceased’.”
Eric studies the area, remaining a respectful distance away. “You know that’s not normal, right?”
I give him a sardonic smile, almost tempted to tell him that this is where some of the traitors sleep. People who tried and failed to kill a duchess. I choose not to ruin the ambience and respond, “Neither is Sheffolk.”
There’s a hunger in the way he tries to absorb each grain of sand, begging it to tell him the story of each traitor laid to rest. I could tell him more about how the women would salt the bodies to keep the foxes off or how sometimes, when I step outside the cottage, I can hear them crying out in regret for a lovetheyturned poisonous.
Instead, I watch his profile and wonder if he smells the same sweet decay I do.
“Is this why outsiders call your family witches? Because you sow your dead like seeds?”
“Witches,” I murmur, lips quirking. “Is that what they say?”
The thought amuses me more than it should, not because it’s false but because it lacks imagination. If only they knew that Sheffolk women don’t bury their ghosts; we keep them. That we talk to portraits and listen for our names in the wind. Eric doesn’t flinch when I take too long to elaborate; he just listens in that way that men rarely do. I picture my sister’s locket and the lake-ghosts thrumming beneath my ribs.
He doesn’t speak again, but I note that the pace of his breathing has increased. Outwardly, nothing has changed, yet inside his head, cogs are turning, producing a question that plants its feet just behind his teeth. It’s funny how visible that question is and how stubbornly he refuses to voice it.
“Hesitation feeds the wrong things here,” I tell him, voice low enough to sink into the soil. “So ask your question before it festers.” His gaze stays fixed on the cradle-ground’s uneven swell. “You saw something… and I assume something saw you?”
