Page 65 of The Curse of Penryth Hall
He paused and spun around, slicking his rain-wet hair back from his brow, both hands resting futilely atop his head. There was a pain in his expression. A forlorn exhaustion that was unmistakable. The woman’s words had broken something in him. And I hated her doubly so. “What is it, Ruby?”
I hesitated for a moment. “Could… could she be the White Witch of Launceton?”
He started to deny it out of hand, but then his eyes metmine and I saw it on his face. The emotions rifled through him like the pages of a book. The denial. The possibility. Then the panicked acknowledgment of truth. “Look to the heir,” he whispered with a shake of his head. “Gods, I’ve been a fool.” He swore loudly before taking me firmly by the shoulders. “Get to Penryth, quick as you can. I’ll go for Enys and then find the witch.”
“Jori. It’s after Jori,” I breathed out, understanding the warning. The dream had told me, if only I’d believed in it. Believed in the unbelievable.
Look to the heir, Pellar.
“Go, Ruby. Run!” he shouted, and we both darted off in the rain in opposite directions. He to the village, and I to Penryth Hall. Where I prayed the bells did not toll.
CHAPTERTWENTY-EIGHTAs It Might Have Been
Iwas soaked to the bone by the time I reached the estate grounds, huffing and puffing, my side aching. I no longer felt the cold, the wet—any of it. My sole focus, sole thought was to reach Jori. To not be too late.
I was always too late.
But it was quiet when I burst through the front doors of the house. “Tamsyn!” I shouted, racing through the halls. “Tamsyn!” I called out again, until I finally came upon her in the morning room with Dr. Heinrich. She set her teacup down on the saucer.
Alive. Safe. The information barely registered into my mind.
“Ruby, you look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
I wasn’t quite sure I hadn’t.
She shot up from her seat, coming to me. Taking my face in her hands. The ridges between her brows grew deeper. “What’s happened? Dr. Heinrich…” She turned to him.
The doctor hurried over, cosseting me as I tried to spit out what had occurred at the crossroads, but all I could get out was a feeble, “Where’s Jori?”
Tamsyn placed her palm on my clammy brow. “You need abath, and a hot bottle. Jori’s fine. He’s with Mrs. Penrose, what has happened?”
“Let me see him. The boy. Let me see him.”
Tamsyn nodded uncertainly, taking me by the hand and leading me to the kitchens, where Jori was standing on a bench, drawing shapes with his finger in flour. He looked up at his mother and beamed. “Mama!”
“Satisfied?” Tamsyn asked me.
I gave an unsteady nod, and let her lead me up to my room to change. They were safe. For now. But I could only guess how long that would remain true.
RUAN MUST HAVElocated Enys quickly, because not long after I’d taken a cursory cloth to the mud that splattered my body and put on a dry frock, the men arrived from the village—only a handful, but heavily armed. As the hours passed and I received no further word from Ruan, I began to try to reason away my worries. It was absurd to think I would harm him, and that woman—whoever she was—was a liar. A charlatan as Mr. Owen warned. He said they would come, and come they did—never mind the fact she’d been in town before the newspapermen. Likely before Sir Edward was even killed.
Two cups of tea—and a considerable amount of brooding—later, I had managed to convince myself that it was simply my exhaustion causing me to leap to conclusions. It was far more likely that the woman at the crossroads was somehow involved in the killings and just trying to frighten us off, and not actually the White Witch. Though that hypothesis didn’t bode well for Ruan hunting her down, but he was a grown man who’d been to war and back—and was beyond able to take care of himself. My focus needed to remain at Penryth. It was a better use of my time to be hunting through Sir Edward’s things forclues, than it was fretting that somehow I was going to kill Ruan Kivell. The idea was preposterous.
Constable Enys had performed a cursory sweep of the estate in the hours after Edward’s death, but no one had looked terribly closely into his personal affairs—believing in the killer’s tricks. A faint glimmer of hope dwelled in my chest, the idea that somewhere among Sir Edward’s nightshirts and handkerchiefs would be some tiny bit of ephemera linking him to his dead uncle, or even to George Martin. The missing piece of one of those jigsaw picture puzzles that would make everything clear to me. Then again, it was always more than one lost piece needed to figure out a puzzle. And so far, I was short an entire box.
After supper I passed the guards that Enys had stationed by the doors. They were hearty-enough-looking fellows, and I couldn’t help but feel a bit safer with their presence here. I started down the darkened hallway for my room.
“Ruby!” Tamsyn cried out from behind me. I spun on my heels. She was standing in the doorway by the library, a flood of warm light washing out onto the dark wood halls casting deep shadows across the floor.
“Is everything well?” My eyes searched her face, looking for some clue. But she simply smiled and shook her head. Her hand rose up to her cheek and then she dropped it again. She’d changed her clothes after supper, now dressed in a fine green silk robe over a white nightdress.
“Where’s Jori?”
She tilted her chin to the floor above. “With his nurse. Enys put a pair of guards outside his room and another inside. I suspect he’s better tended than the Prince of Wales.”
Despite my conviction that the killer was mortal, I couldn’t shake my dream. I’d seen someone—something—try to takehim. Tamsyn retreated deeper into the library and I followed along, linked by our shared past and our present troubles.
She refilled her sherry from the sideboard, and then poured a second for me, pressing it into my palm. A jolt of awareness shot through my fingers as hers brushed my own. I swallowed down the confused emotion and took a drink from my glass. But instead of assuaging the sensation, it only made it worse. I’d had lovers since and I most certainly would have lovers after, but what I shared with Tamsyn was legions beyond all of that. There was a closeness between us, an intimacy that surpassed the physical. But seeing the changes in her since the war, the secrets she’d carried alone, and the newfound shadows in her eyes muddled my thoughts—as if I could only make her out through frosted glass. I thought I’d understood her once, known her as well as I’d known myself. But the way she spoke to me now, the things she said, I realized that perhaps I never had understood her. She was a stranger, perhaps she’d always been and I was too foolish to notice.
