Page 63 of Darkest at Dusk
“Thank you.” Isabella managed a smile though she felt as though her nerves were flayed after all the Burns sisters had revealed, and all they had held back. Questions slithered through her thoughts like eels.
Peg set down the ewer.
Isabella smelled roses and charred wood. Then a frigid breath swirled through the room. Ice bloomed across the surface of the water, crackling in the silence.
With a cry, Peg jumped back. “Miss?—”
The cold was swallowed in an instant by a blast of heat. The walls seemed to swell inward, the air pressing down, heavy and thick.
Peg. A whisper without sound, ricocheting through Isabella’s thoughts, oily and sly.
Peg’s eyes went wide, her freckles stark, her skin white. She flung an arm over her face, stumbling back, mouth open in a soundless cry.
Peg. The whisper came again.
The maid’s braid tugged taut as if an unseen hand had yanked it. With a cry, she grabbed her hair, her breath turning to frost before her lips. Whimpering, twisting, she tried to wrench free.
Isabella caught her by the wrist and pulled her close. Rage struck through her like flint to steel. How dare it touch this girl. Her pulse thundered, her throat raw as the heat seared her. The room shuddered around them.
“Iron to bind. Hearth to keep. Shadows hush. Spirits sleep,” Peg said, the words running together, her voice so low as to be barely audible. “Iron to bind. Hearth to keep. Shadows hush. Spirits sleep,” she said again, and then again, each repetition faster, thinner.
“Let her be,” Isabella snapped, her voice harsh, unsteady, but loud in the stifling room.
For a heartbeat, the weight deepened. Smoke curled low across the floor, veiling their skirts. Peg whimpered against Isabella’s shoulder. The whisper came again. Peg.
Isabella’s fury steadied her fear. “Enough!”
The air cracked, sudden as a whip and the smoke tore apart. The heat dropped away. The room was still.
Peg clung to her, shivering. “You felt it. You heard it,” she whispered, half-plea, half-certainty.
“I did.” The truth burned her tongue, begging to be spoken, to be told in full—the voices, the wraiths—but Papa’s warning clamped her mouth shut. She only pressed Peg’s hand and said, “I will ask Mrs. Abernathy to see about the flue. It must be blocked.”
Peg looked at her a long moment. “But the fire’s not lit, miss.”
Isabella held the girl’s gaze, willing her to hear all the things Isabella dared not say. “No, it isn’t.” She let a moment pass, just holding fast to Peg’s hands, then she said, “Your mam was right. Ghosts can’t hurt you. Only fear can.”
Peg nodded once, fierce despite the tears that brightened her eyes. Then she slipped out, leaving Isabella alone with the echo of the wraith.
She sat long in the quiet, the ewer beading on the washstand, the shadows restless at the edge of the glow from the candle she lit. Her limbs felt hollow, as though the wraith had drunk the marrow from her bones. She did not go to the library that night. She had no strength left for locked boxes and letters that painted only sorrow. They would wait for tomorrow.
Chapter Fifteen
Tomorrow came with a sky the color of tarnished silver and a wind that poked through every crack of Harrowgate’s stone. Isabella rose late, her sleep ragged with dreams of smoke and flame and a voice calling Peg’s name. The taste of ash still coated her tongue when she left her chamber
She passed the long gallery with its faces in oil, turned down a dim hallway, then another until she stood with her hand on the knob of the library door, her heartbeat thudding a dull rhythm.
She opened the door to the cavernous space. Her ledger waited with its blotter; the paste pot sat capped. The brass box gleamed on the corner of the desk. When she laid her palm on it, heat came up through the metal as though fire raged on the other side. She jerked her hand away at the burn.
From deep in the walls came a whisper, angry as wasps.
The hesitation she had felt when first she opened the box was absent now. She cared not for courtesy or Rhys’s privacy. The things she had learned in the village weighed heavy on her soul.
Coincidence could not be trusted. Dr. Hargreaves’s presence in Marlow could not be trusted. There were layers here she had not begun to fathom, and they frightened her, threatening to drag her down and bury her. But here in this box were answers laid down in ink, truths she could see with her own eyes, truth she would drag, hissing, into the light.
She turned Papa’s key in the lock then lifted the lid.
The letters lay where she had set them the last time, creamy wove and faded ink, tidy as knives in a surgeon’s roll. She ran a finger along the edges then gentled the letters free, setting aside the first two, for she had already read them. She unfolded the third.
