Page 51

“Will you join us, Uncle Anthony?” Alice had already scooted over on the rug to make room, apparently assuming the answer before anyone else present could properly give it.

There was a chair set at the head of their small circle, angled to face all three of them equally, clearly meant for him from the moment the room had been arranged. He glanced at it, considered it for a moment, and then crossed the room instead and settled himself on the sofa beside Leonora, close enough that his sleeve very nearly brushed hers.

She told herself it meant nothing whatsoever. The sofa simply happened to put him facing Marian and Alice more directly, which the chair, at its particular angle, did not quite manage to do. That was the only reason, and a perfectly sensible one. She repeated this to herself twice, with some force, but did not entirely believe it either time.

“Carry on, Grandmother,” Anthony said, settling in. “I am given to understand I am interrupting something of great importance.”

“You arrived in good time for my.” Marian settled Alice more securely against her side and let the silence stretch a moment, a theatrical pause she held for the best effect. “This is the one about the bride.”

“The bride?” Leonora asked curiously.

“What is the difference between a bride, and a fiancee, and a wife? Is she a bride only on the day of the wedding, or she’s a bride after the wedding. Right before she becomes a wife?” Alice asked.

“An excellent question...” Marian considered it. “A fiancee is a woman who has agreed to marry a man, but has not yet gone through with it. A bride is that same woman on the one particular day she actually does the thing, in her finest dress, in front of everyone she has ever met and several people she has not. A wife, my darling girl, is what she becomes directly afterward, once the dress has come off and she is left to manage the man himself for the rest of her natural life.”

That earned a startled laugh from Leonora, and even Anthony, beside her, made a low sound that was very nearly amusement. She turned to him while Marian continued to explain to Alice.

“Did you have many evenings such as this, growing up? With Her Grace telling stories by the fire?”

Anthony turned to her, the corner of his lips curving slightly. “Not as often as I might have liked, no. My parents kept a very full house, but rarely a quiet one. Grandmother did what she could when she visited, but she did not visit nearly often enough to suit me.” He glanced toward Marian and Alice. “I find I do not mind making up for it now, whatever the delay.”

Leonora held that answer for a moment longer than she probably ought to have, before Marian’s voice drew her attention properly back to the fire.

“Now, it is a wedding story,” Marian said, her voice already dropping. “Which is worse, somehow, than an ordinary ghost tale. There was a young bride, on her own wedding night, with the whole house still full of guests and laughter below her. In a fit of high spirits, she decided she would play at hide and seek with her new husband’s family before the night was through.” She paused, letting the fire crack once in the silence she had made. “She climbed into an old oak chest, in an attic nobody used, laughing to herself the entire time as she pulled the lid shut over her own head. Only that chest had a spring lock fitted to it, the sort that catches the instant it closes, and will not be forced open again from the inside, no matter how hard a person struggles against it.”

“Oh my goodness. She will be trapped.” Alice gasped.

“Nobody found her unfortunately. Not that night, and not the next morning, nor the day after that either. The searching went on for a week, and then for several more, and then it simply stopped altogether. Who could blame them? There was nothing left anywhere to find, and everyone involved had quietly begun to accept it.” Marian’s gaze moved slowly from Alice to Leonora and back again, drawing the moment out. “It was years, a great many years, before anyone thought to open that particular chest again for any reason at all. And when at last they did, there she still was. In her wedding dress. In exactly the attitude in which she had hidden herself away to be found.”

Leonora swallowed, trying not to imagine it.

“They say…” Marian went on, leaning in close enough now that the firelight threw strange, shifting shapes across her face. “…that if you listen very closely in an old house late at night, on your own wedding night especially, you can still hear her laughing softly from wherever she is hidden away, right up until the very moment she realizes, all at once, that no one at all is coming for her.”

She snapped her fingers directly in front of Leonora’s face precisely on the word moment, a sharp, sudden crack of sound out of nowhere, and Leonora jumped so violently she very nearly came off the sofa entirely, a small, humiliating gasp escaping her before she had any chance whatsoever to stop it.

“I thought you told me you did not care for horror stories,” he said, and she could pick up amusement in his tone.

“I do not care for them. There is a considerable difference between not caring for something and finding it terrifying.” She said it sharply, mostly to cover the fact that her heart had not yet settled back into its proper rhythm. “That is precisely why I do not care for them in the first place. I see no reason anyone ought to go out of their way to frighten another person further, when the world does quite enough of that on its own without any help.”

“A fair point... put rather more fiercely than it needed to be.” He leaned in then, close enough that his breath stirred against the edge of her ear. “It is only my grandmother being dramatic,” he murmured, low enough that it was meant for her alone while Marian went on about her story. “There is nothing at all in this room but the four of us, I promise you that much.”

“I know that,” she whispered back.

She turned her head to drive her point home when she felt a hand come over hers on the sofa. He buried her fingers in his palm firmly before she had any chance to recover her composure on her own.

To make matters even worse, she found that his face was closer than she had accounted for, close enough that for one long, suspended second neither of them moved at all, his gaze moving from her left eye, to her right. Then he drew his head back, just slightly, and the moment passed as quickly and as completely as it had arrived. It was dark enough in the room, she told herself firmly, that no one else present could possibly have seen any of it.

He did not let go of her hand.

His thumb moved instead, a slow, absent drag across her knuckles, almost like he did not notice he was making the movement at all.

It was nothing. It was certainly meant as nothing more than a small comfort offered after a small fright, the very same comfort he might just as easily have offered Alice had she been the one startled instead. Yet it sent warmth sliding the entire length of her spine regardless, settling in her stomach.

She could only think about the fact that his palm was large and warm against her own in the dark. It felt good, very comforting.

She sat very still, afraid that if she moved even slightly she would give away how much of it she felt.

It was in that stillness, with his thumb still tracing idle lines across the back of her hand and Marian already moving on to describe the exact house where the whole business was supposed to have happened, that the thought arrived in full and refused, however hard she tried, to be argued back out of her head again.