“Yes, of course.” Agnes’s smile faded. She wrung her hands.“A tad under the weather, I’m afraid. If you wouldn’t mind taking a look...”
The area over Charlotte’s left eye throbbed with a threatening migraine, but she was a healer before she was anything else. “Of course.”
Her brother bit his lip, but she attempted a smile. Her facial muscles felt stiff. She hadn’t smiled much in the last six months.
“I won’t be long, I’m sure. You go on home with the children.”
“Well,” he said helplessly, but Agnes said, “As it happens, I’d like to talk to your brother, too, on another matter. The children are welcome. You know how I adore children.”
Charlotte would’ve really smiled at that, if not for that throbbing over her left eye. Agnes had spent hours playing games with her when she was a child, or lying on the floor of her drawing room, pretending to see shapes in the clouds painted on the ceiling. Arthur said she still asked after Charlotte whenever he visited.
Agnes hurried toward the Livingstons’ manor. Charlotte lagged, fatigued from her muzzy-headedness during Mass and the headache now.
“Are you all right?” Arthur asked.
She gritted her teeth. “Yes. Of course.”
Luckily, the manor wasn’t far. At the sight of its magnificent wooden door, carved with the family coat of arms, Charlotte froze. It made her feel five years old, walking up to that door hand in hand with her frightened but determined older brother.
The door had seemed magical then, a harbor in the sudden storm their lives had become. Arthur had spun such stories about the wondrous things they’d find inside. Reality had fallen short, as it often did; the manor was, even then, staid and prissy. Agnes’s husband hadn’t wanted them to touch anything, thoughArthur had washed their faces and clumsily darned their clothes before they’d come.
“Come in, come in,” Agnes said, with uncharacteristic impatience.
Charlotte tore her eyes from the door. The old woman’s brow was furrowed.
“Mrs. Livingston,” Charlotte said, “what’s going on?”
Agnes’s mouth twisted. “It’s the sickness.”
Charlotte’s heart sank. If it was wood sickness, she could do nothing. She didn’t know why Gracie Buchanan should even have it. In recent years, an increasing number of villagers had entered Shiftleaf, despite their suspicion of it, for firewood or meat. But Agnes had more than enough money to buy such things, or to send someone else for them. A wealthy woman had no need to risk the forest’s dangers.
Agnes pushed the door open. Inside, the manor was shabbier than Charlotte’s childhood memories of it, and less lived in. Sheets covered half the furniture. An entire wing was unlit and closed off.
“The housemaid left us some time ago,” Agnes said.
She offered no explanation as to where any of her other servants might have gone. Charlotte suspected they had fled the sickness. She’d never seen it spread from person to person, but that didn’t stop the villagers from staying far from any house with a black rag on the door.
Automatically, Charlotte turned toward the spare bedchamber in which Agnes had sometimes laid out old clothes, tutting over how out of fashion they were but promising to have them resized for Charlotte or Arthur. Charlotte had barely opened the door, however, and glimpsed a bedchamber long out of use, when Agnes said, “This way. She’s in my room.”
Charlotte’s skin prickled.
“Well, gosh,” Arthur said. “That’s awfully kind of her, letting her cousin stay in her own room when she’s ill.”
Charlotte flushed, grateful for her own sake that Arthur didn’t have the suspicions she suddenly did about the nature of the women’s relationship. If he didn’t suspect anything amiss about them, likely he didn’t suspect anything about his sister’s proclivities, either.
At the door to Agnes’s bedchamber, Charlotte fumbled in her pocket for the masks she always carried in case of unexpected house calls like this. While the sickness didn’t seem to spread between people, she still knew so little about it that she preferred not to take the risk. She put a mask over her nose and mouth and offered one to Arthur, but he said, “I’ll take the children and wait in the drawing room, shall I?”
“Can I come with you, Mama?” Jonas asked.
“Of course, dearest.” Charlotte turned to her brother. “You’ll be all right with Sasha?”
Arthur smiled, grasping his niece’s hand. “Of course. We have great fun together, don’t we, duck?”
“Can we play pirate?” Sasha asked.
“Not in Mrs. Livingston’s drawing room.”
“When we get home, then.”
