Page 1 of A Curse of Hope and Shadows: Part I
Chapter One: First Impressions
It did not look like the home of a monster, Adeline thought as she stood before the gate, admiring the way the stone of the manor seemed to glimmer in the dawn light, halfway between gold, sand and orange. The wide windows and fine gardens did not speak of horrors, the neatly-trimmed rose bushes teeming with nothing more than bees.
She rarely had cause to make this journey before, but when she had, she always thought Grenovick Manor, ancestral home of the illustrious Von Mortimers, looked like the setting of a fairytale. If it truly belonged to a creature of night, where was the grey stone, the wiry turrets, the dark, mist-covered graveyard?
Perhaps she’d read too many novels of late.
No, she shook her head,not lately. Not for a long time. She hadn’t had a scrap of a moment for reading.
But maybe that could change, if she got the job, and moved out of her family’s house. Perhaps she ought to feel guilty, but any feelings of abandonment were buried beneath the offerings of an income, the need for freedom, and the knowledge the family would certainly understand.
Adeline put her hand to the bell, and rang it.
The villagers said the Young Lord, Dimitri Von Mortimer, was a monster, that he had no human shape, that he devoured young women and that no one had looked upon his face and not fainted with fear.
Adeline did not believe such things. She’d seen enough of the world to know that magic still existed, so she was willing to believe in curses, but she felt for sure if hekilledyoung women, there would be more to it than rumours.
“Do you want to risk it?” her brother had urged. “He sounds… dangerous.”
“If it’s truly dangerous, I won’t do it,” she said. “But the pay is excellent. Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”
A guardsman escorted her through the blossoming gardens to the servants’ entrance and left her outside the housekeeper’s office. Two other girls sat outside in neat, well-worn dresses, their faces stark with nerves. One was perhaps in her late twenties, her fingers chafed with age and experience, the other a young slip of a thing who looked like she might take flight at any moment.
Adeline sat down beside them and waited, admiring the pristine hall, the rugs faded and scuffed from years of use, the tiny framed pictures of pressed flowers and still lifes. It was a place of work, but flashes of something warm and homely smiled down at her nonetheless.
Not a castle of terror. No screaming women, no bloody chambers, nary even a cobweb.
Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.
The housekeeper interviewed her last. Although nursemaids for the Young Lord seldom lasted long, the wages were so enticing that there were always applicants.
Adeline watched them as they entered and exited the room. Their chafed hands spoke of a lifetime of service, even in the young one. Adeline’s were worn, too, but she was no maid. She was certain to be underqualified.
The housekeeper, Mrs Minton, was a woman composed entirely of sharp edges, a grater forged into the shape of a human. She was thin and bony, with grey hair screwed up tightly in a severe bun. Her office was just as neat and precise, although the bookcases lining the back of the room housed an array of texts from curse-breaking to medicinal plants toJulia Fortescue’s Excellent Housekeeping.It looked like the sort of room to smell of lemon soap and bicarbonate of soda, but instead smelt of old paper and fresh coffee.
Adeline would have felt more comfortable being a bird in a butcher’s as the woman reviewed her application carefully.
“I see you were apprenticed to the village midwife,” she said, her voice crisp and tart.
Adeline nodded.
“Attend many births? You are only young.”
She had turned eighteen two months ago, but had been attending births since she was twelve. “Too many to count.”
“No wish to follow her into the profession?”
Adeline tensed. It had been a while now since the mention of her former role had summoned flashbacks. There were no visions now of sheets bathed in blood and a stark face once full of life turned paper-white, but sometimes there was the reaction nonetheless, the memory of pain, the way a burn victim might shrink from fire. “That path is not for me.”
“But you can deal with injury? Illness? Rage?”
She swallowed, keeping her face calm. If it was one thing she’d learned in the last few years, it was how to appear level-headed. “I can. I take it it’s true, then? What they say about the Young Lord?”
Mrs Minton tensed. “Yes. For the most part. He is afflicted with a curse that results in injury to himself, from time to time. Mostly during the full moon, if…”
If I last that long.The last one was only a couple of nights ago. Many maids, she’d heard, didn’t make it past the first week.
“So someone capable of dealing with minor wounds is indeed preferable,” Mrs Minton continued. “Do you sew?”
