Page 23 of House of Salt and Sorrows
“Then who?”
Again, she looked meaningfully at Elizabeth’s room.
“No one is in there.”
“You don’t know that.”
I sank down onto the floor next to her. “What do you mean? Who would be in Elizabeth’s room?”
Verity studied me for a long moment. I could see her thoughts grinding. Finally, she opened the sketchbook back up and flipped the pages till she found the right picture.
It was a portrait of Elizabeth. I noticed the date scrawled in a shadowed corner. Verity had drawn this recently.
“Are you having nightmares again? Have you been dreaming of Elizabeth?”
Verity often suffered from horrible night terrors. She’d scream so loudly, even Papa would rush up from his study in the East Wing. When pressed, she could never remember what they were about.
“This isn’t a dream,” she whispered.
I brushed aside the chill that had settled over me. “No one is in there. Come and see.”
Verity shook her head, her chestnut curls springing like snakes.
I pushed up off the floor with a frustrated swish of skirts. “I’ll go, then.”
The footprints were almost gone, fading out of the carpet. If I’dcome upstairs only a minute later, I never would have seen them. My fingers closed around the door handle—a burnished seahorse poking out from the dark walnut—and there was a rustle behind me. Verity paused on her threshold, eyes wide andpleading.
“Don’t go in.”
Something about the way her tiny hand dug into the jamb sent a streak of cold racing through my chest. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled, rising in defense against an unseen horror. It was ridiculous, but I couldn’t shake the look of fear in Verity’s eyes.
I pushed open the door with resolve but did not step inside.
The air felt thin and dusty. After Elizabeth’s funeral, maids stripped the bedding and covered the furniture with thin, gauzy cloths. They never returned to clean it.
After a cursory sweep of the room, I turned to Verity. “There’s no one in here.”
Her dark green eyes drifted up to the ceiling. “Sometimes she visits Octavia.”
Octavia’s room, another shrouded, untouched shrine, was on the fourth floor between Papa’s suite and Morella’s sitting room.
An involuntary shiver snapped me from the eerie trance Verity wove. “Who does, Verity? I want you to say it and see how absurd it sounds.”
She pressed her eyebrows together, wounded. “Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth is dead. Octavia is dead. They can’t visit each other, because they’re dead and the dead don’t visit.”
“You’re wrong!” She raced into her room, snatched up the sketchbook, and held it out, unwilling to enter the hallway.
I flipped the pages, searching for whatever proof she thought these drawings would offer.
“What am I meant to be looking at?”
She flipped to a scene in black and gray pastels. In it, Verity cowered into her pillows as a shadowy Eulalie ripped the bedsheets from her. Her head was snapped back unnaturally far. I couldn’t tell whether she was supposed to be laughing manically or the odd angle was the result of her fall from the cliffs.
I drew a sharp breath, horrified. “You drew this?”
She nodded.
