Page 22 of Spellbound
“I have no quarrel with Mrs. Hollander and no wish to hurt her. You will come with me, Belladonna Goodwynne, and face the consequences for your actions… for your pact with the devil,” Stalker said, all but spitting the last word.
“Do not do it!” Edwina cried. “He will kill me anyway because I am a witness to his madness.”
“He murdered Thomas,” Belladonna said. She reached into her pocket and retrieved the stickpin. “I found this in a drawer and meant to bring it to you. But when I picked it up, I saw… well, I saw everything. Reverend Stalker followed him from the church after a confrontation and he murdered him in cold blood.”
“Shut your mouth!” Stalker all but shrieked.
“He killed him because Thomas threatened to have him removed from his position at the church due to his hatefulness and his obvious bias towards me. It was becoming clear to you husband, Edwina, that the reverend was quite mad.”
Stalker pulled the knife from Edwina’s throat and pointed at Belladonna. “You spread the devil’s lies!”
“Do you deny killing him?” Belladonna challenged. “Cutting him down in cold blood? Which of us, Reverend Stalker, is doing the devil’s work?”
“The pair of you,” he said, gesturing from one to the other of them with the knife, “Will come with me.”
“No,” Belladonna said. “I will not. I refuse. It’s clear you mean to kill us. I’ll not make it easier for you to conceal the crime!”
Desmond staredat the woman before him in confusion. In her hand she held a bundle of cloth that she slowly began to unravel. Wrapped inside those layers of fabric was a stone, still dark with blood. A stone that he knew, that he recognized. “Why is that in your possession?”
“I knew, when he came home that evening, that he’d done something horrible,” she said. “So rather than disposing of the evidence for him, as he wished for me to do, I hid it… My husband, Mr. Crane, is not a kind man. I married him because I simply had no other choice. My own father was a poor vicar in a distant parish who had no means to support a grown daughter. When Lynden proposed it had seemed like a Godsend. But it was less than a week after our wedding that he beat me so soundly I could not even get out of bed.”
“So you thought to blackmail him?”
“No. I thought to see him hanged if possible. I do not wish to stay his hand in my direction, Mr. Crane. I have lone recognized that only death will spare me further violence. Whether that death is mine or his remains to be seen.”
Desmond frowned deeply. He’d never known a person quite so resolute. It seemed as though she truly did not care which one of them lived or died so long as they not occupying either of those states together. “Where is your husband now?”
She sighed wearily. “I could not say with any certainty. Before I tell you my theory on the matter, there are other things you must know, Mr. Crane… Your brother-in-law came here to this house to speak with my husband the day of his murder. Indeed, he had been gone from here only for no more than anhour and a half when news reached us that he received a likely fatal injury.”
A terrible suspicion built within him. “What did your husband do when Thomas left here?”
“He followed him,” she said. “He followed him and he came home bloodied.”
“And you said nothing because no one would have believed you or done anything about it… and then Stalker would have killed you,” he surmised.
“Precisely,” she answered. “You’ll have no help from the local magistrate. He is a toadying sycophant who will do whatever is necessary to curry favor with those whom he perceives to have power. If Lynden is eliminated, the power reverts to those who hav wealth and land. In short, it will be you.”
“Where can I find him?”
She shook her head. “If I tell you, and he comes home, he will kill me.”
“I will not let that happen. I offer you whatever aid and protection it is within my power to provide.”
She was thoughtful, considering, weighing. “So long as he lives, that will be limited.”
“So it will, Mrs. Stalker. I cannot tell you that I will see him dead, but I can tell you that if a choice must be made between his life and the lives of those whom I love—” Desmond stopped. Those whom he loved. Did he love Belladonna? It was so fast. Instantaneous in fact. All her talk of curses and spells was not something that he could so easily dismiss under the circumstances. Because he’d never experienced that depth of emotion for a mother human, much less to have fallen headlong into the swirling abyss that was love within only a matter of days. “I’ll do what I must, Mrs. Stalker, regardless of what that may be.” …And
She was quiet for a moment and then nodded. “I believe, sir, that he has gone wherever your bride is. He is quite obsessed with her. He has been since our arrival in this village. I confess to feeling some degree of guilt because I saw his obsession with her, dangerous as I knew it was, as a relief for me. It diverted his attention from me and allowed me a respite. That is my shame to bear.”
He would have offered her comfort, some reassurance perhaps. But he was already running. Back to Highwood Abbey. Possibly straight into the doom that Belladonna had insisted was their fate.Because of a curse.
TWENTY-ONE
Belladonna walked ahead of them. Stalker was bringing up the rear his blade pressed into Edwina’s spine. He’d threatened to sever it, to let her die slowly, while Belladonna looked on. She’d thought him mad. She hadn’t truly thought him evil though. Now she had to consider that those things were not mutually exclusive. He was both of them simultaneously.
As she walked, she began to chant low and soft under her breath. So softly that he would not hear her, but she knew that Edwina had. The woman’s steps faltered, slowing both her and Stalker so that Belladonna could put a few more steps between them.
The chant was an ancient spell, one for protection. One that called on her ancestors for aid. It was a powerful incantation. And while it had been taught to her, emblazoned into her memory for all time by Amarantha, she had never uttered the words aloud. Now, as she did so, she could feel the force of it swirling within her.
