The thing snatched Mary by her hair and pulled, dragging her into the water, plunging back below, her small legs kicking, thrashing, spraying murky water in my face. I toppled in after her, crying, reaching for her. . . . But she was gone. I stared helplessly into the surface, but it only reflected my face and the stars.
I heard her voice from deep, down below.
Don’t cry, Louisa, I’m only going home.
Chapter Nineteen
The first crack of thunder jolted me out of sleep.
One crash and then another. Nature’s horrible fury shook the barn. I nearly leapt up off the hay bale, the book on my chest clattering to the floor as more thunder rumbled overhead. My dreams had been full of dark, swirling entities and someone crying far away, obscured by a misty curtain I could not penetrate. It was my mother’s voice in the dream, calling to me, begging for something, but the words were pulled apart like tufts of yarn before they reached my ears.
Fell winds pounded the barn walls, and below I heard the horses stamping their feet in alarm. The thunder rattled in my bones, and my hands shook as I retrieved the book. It had fallen open on the last page I’d read before sleep took me—page ninety-eight: “The Enduring Mystery of the Lost Order.”
The Lost Order would have to wait. Just below the howling winds and thunder, I heard voices outside. That didn’t make any sense, not unless Chijioke was gathering up the last of his gardening materials before the storm struck in earnest. But it was not his voice I heard moaning in between blasts of lightning, and it seemed too late an hour for cleaning up the yard tools. Peering out the window, I saw the moon at its highest point, glittering behind storm clouds. Midnight.
At first I thought perhaps someone had become lost and wandered onto the property, calling for aid. But when I crossed to the opposite window and pressed myself close to the cold glass, I saw instead that a solitary figure stood with arms raised in the space between the house and the back gardens. She had a woman’s slender build and small hands, and she seemed not to mind at all that a tempest raged around her.
Her words carried to the barn but I could not make them out. And so I bundled Mr. Morningside’s book back into my skirts and climbed down the hayloft, stepping lightly as I rushed past the pawing, snorting horses. Here it was again, my damned curiosity. I could climb back up into the hayloft and try to shut out the storm and sleep, but instead I was throwing open the barn doors, plunging out into the swirling winds, and shielding my eyes from the bits of grass and dust swept up into the atmosphere. It felt like the full weight of heaven was bearing down upon me, more than just the elements, more than just icy air and thunder.
I tumbled forward at once, foot caught in one of the yard’s many holes. Sprawled out on the grass, palms wet and skinned, I squinted into the storm, crawling onto my knees and then rising to my feet, stumbling ever closer to the figure in the clearing. Who was this person, facing down the will of the sky itself, hands raised fearlessly, feet planted sturdy and strong? It felt private, like I was intruding on her intimate conversation with the clouds. Her voice rose and fell in a kind of chant, and fragments of it sped toward me on the chill fins of the winds.
Furain an t-aoigh a thig, greas an t-aoigh tha falbh . . .
It was Mary. The hood on her dark green cloak had fallen back, and her brown, curling hair tossed like wild bramble, framing her pale face. Now more than ever the cluster of freckles over her nose looked like a smear of blood. I recognized the Gaelic language but not the meaning of the words. Still, their strangeness did not diminish the haunting beauty of her voice. A lullaby and warrior’s chant all in one. The refrain repeated, louder now, for I was limping closer as her song reached its crescendo.
Furain an t-aoigh a thig, greas an t-aoigh tha falbh!
The rain began not as a trickle but as one drenching downpour. I was soaked in an instant, and I wrapped the book more carefully in my skirts, desperate to keep it safe from the sudden rain. A crack of lightning struck so close to the manse’s property that I was temporarily blinded. When the shock wore off, I reeled back a little, gasping, the house illuminated as if it stood in broad daylight. I saw shadows moving among the windows, their silhouettes blinking from one floor to the next, great, grasping bodies lurking wherever I looked.
Mary’s voice broke through to me again, and I forced my way through the rain, watching, gasping once more as I realized the raindrops avoided her altogether. Not a speck of water darkened her cloak. It was as if a beam from heaven protected her, keeping her dry and safe.
I stumbled in one of the holes and swore, and she whipped around to face me. Never could I have imagined a less kind expression, but it softened as soon as she recognized me. One of her raised hands dropped, reaching, gesturing . . . I regained my balance and pushed through the mud, taking her hand as the sheltering force around her blasted back the rain.
“Don’t let go,” she whispered. “Don’t let go, Louisa, it will be all right.”
But I jumped, startled by another silver spike of lightning cracking open the sky. Shadows stood in every window now, and it occurred to me that perhaps they were not up to any business inside but were in fact staring out. Watching Mary. Watching us.
And then I remembered—tonight was to be the night of Mrs. Eames’s demise.
Mary squeezed my hand tightly just as the scream ripped through the house. No, not the scream—two of them, though they tore at me simultaneously. One was real and raw and present, shorter than the other, which sounded oddly muted, as if my ears had been suddenly dunked in water and the liquid still sloshed around in my head, dulling everything.
It gave me a jolt, a headache that came and went before I could even make sense of the pain.
And as both screams died, the wind rose harder and faster, and I huddled against Mary, anchoring myself to her, afraid then that we would be lifted into the air and dashed against the walls. But the rain eased, and with it the winds, and though I still shivered with the cold and wet, the storm was no longer a danger to us.
Mary squeezed my hand again, her sweet, familiar face back to smiling shyly.
“What was that?” I whispered breathlessly.
“Only a bit of shielding,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Poppy’s scream could kill us all, the little scamp. She never did learn how to rein herself in.”
“Then Mrs. Eames is dead.” It was less shocking than I expected. Less affecting. I didn’t know if I believed the stories about her, but I did know that there was no longer anything I could do about it.
“Oh aye,” Mary replied, taking my arm. She tugged me gently back toward the house. “But she went real quick-like. No suffering but what was already eating away at her heart.”
“No.” I pulled my arm out of her grasp. “I won’t go back in there.”
“Well, you can’t sleep out here,” Mary said with a frown. “You’ll catch your death.”
Grimacing, I nodded toward the barn. “It’s warm enough in the hayloft. Those shadow things . . . I’ll never rest knowing they’re prowling about.”
“It does take some getting used to,” she admitted. “Can I at least bring you tea in the morning? You have to eat eventually, you know.”
She looked so sad, so . . . offended. And I suppose in a way that made perfect sense. I was rejecting her as much as I was rejecting the rest of the madhouse she lived in. Her cloak settled in the lessening wind, falling more tightly to her body, and she hugged herself, waiting for my reply.
I couldn’t meet her warm green eyes. Green eyes that had peered back at me for years and years of my childhood, eyes that had sparkled to hear my jokes and shed tears when I shed tears. But this was not Maggie, it was Mary, and Mary had just helped a little girl kill someone. I would not allow myself to be deceived, even if her eyes said: Trust me, and her smile said: I mean well.
“I can manage on my own,” I said, turning back toward the barn. “I don’t need your help, and I don’t want it.”
r /> Chapter Twenty
Ainsprid Choimhdeachta: Guardian Angels
or Guardian Devils? A Journey
In the spring of 1798, I brought a handful of gifts to Kilmurrin Cove, following a rumor of a spring sacred to the Dark Fae. There is the better known Holy Well, which is easy enough to find, but this particular spring was a long-held secret of Waterford. Mentioning the secret spring in pubs and taverns resulted in grunts and dismissals and suspiciously high bills. These inquiries were not wanted, and thus, I was not wanted.
It was on an unseasonably warm evening, after another failed campaign of casual suggestions in a pub, that a young man approached me as I left. He was stout and round-faced, with ruddy hair and a knowing cat’s grin. The name he gave me, Alec, was surely not his own.
“If a spring’s your thing, I ken one fit even for a king.”
Charming though his rhyming was, I was not in the mood for games. It did, however, spark my interest, considering nobody else in the Irish town seemed willing to entertain my questions. And so I indulged him, answering in kind.
“If you know the place, I have a coin for your trouble; lead on, young friend, to the place where dark secrets bubble.”
“Aye, to the spring we will go, but not without tribute. The Fae are greedy, as you and I both know.”
The redheaded boy began to walk a spiraling route through the shadow-draped town, avoiding the alleys where stray cats called and dogs barked. Wood smoke filled the summer air. Whiffs of heather from the surrounding valleys tricked one into the mindset of a bright, hot day. Alec must have walked for twenty minutes with me close on his heel, taking me to the edge of Waterford and to the cove proper. The harbor air was thick with the scent of fish, making my nose twitch from the power of it. Here the winds blew harder, and I breathed deep, filling my lungs with the air fresh off the river currents.
We cut along the top of the cove, the drop down to the water stomach-churningly steep. One false step would plunge a man to his death among the jagged rocks waiting below. Alec moved swiftly, and in my mind, unnaturally, a fact that made me more certain of our destination. We moved inland for a half mile or so, to a place where the grass grew thin and the stones rose in a kind of uneven circle. This was the spring; I could hear the water bubbling nearby, and a curiously neat ring of mushrooms grew around the rocks.
“The spring is yon, but you must pay the price. For you, strange one, an answered riddle and a trinket will suffice.”
I nodded and told him to continue.
Alec’s smile glittered under the stars. The mushrooms sprinkled around the spring were bright red, the spots on their caps shining like a dusting of crushed diamonds. “An open-ended barrel, I am shaped like a hive. I am filled with the flesh, and the flesh is alive.” He cackled, throwing his head back. “What am I?”
It was a simple riddle, one I puzzled out quickly enough. “A thimble.”
Pouting, Alec seemed disappointed in my quick response. But then he smiled again and clapped his hands and pointed to the pocket on the right side of my coat. “The price is inside; now toss it in the spring. Who knows what manner of blessing the thimble will bring . . .”
I reached into my pocket, and sure enough, my hand closed around a small, cool thimble. The spring bubbled more fervently as I moved into position, and I gazed down into the roiling waters, wondering just what might come of doing as the odd boy said. But I did, closing my eyes, casting the trinket into the spring.
Alec had disappeared when I opened my eyes.
This was how I came to find the Spring of the Ainsprid Choimhdeachta, so-called Guardian Devils. The words were chiseled in half-legible script on a stone to the side of the spring. I had heard whispers of these beings before, guardian spirits of a female persuasion that could be summoned to perform all manner of spells, shielding of the spirit and the flesh principle among those skills. Curiouser still, they were said to be summoned by dark thoughts or prayers, which led many demonologists to suppose they are not guardian angels but more of a curse, a weight ’round the neck of their summoner. I’ve yet to find evidence of such a curse, and I participated in Alec’s game with the hope of creating just such a Choimhdeachta of my own.
Alas, no amount of wishing, praying, or cursing produced a spirit. Either the legend is wrong or a soul in greater need managed to pray her out from under my nose. Regardless, I did feel a great deal of Fae energy surrounding the spring; it filled me with dread and wonder, and I sat beside the waters and the fairy ring for a long time, fancying I could feel invisible spirits dancing merrily around me in the darkness.
Rare Myths and Legends: The Collected Findings of H. I. Morningside, page 210
I had only ever seen one dead body in my life.
When my mother and I still lived in Dublin, we watched them pull a man from the river Liffey on market day. He was gray and bloated, draped in a shroud of plants and muck, nothing like the body I was looking at now. Nothing like the still-beautiful Mrs. Eames, who, with her head down on her dressing table, might have been sleeping. She was still clutching her rosary, but the emerald on her hand did not glisten, shadowed as it was by her dead body.
A single trickle of blood ran out of her ear and down her cheek, underlining the eyes that stared out at me in mute surprise.
I stood in the door staring—at her, at the many open traveling trunks heaped with luxurious gowns, at the shoes lined up neatly by her dressing table, at the lacy frill of her robe, at all the trappings of a once-living person—and bile rose in my throat. It smelled like dried roses in the room, sweet enough to remind me of rot.
Nobody had yet found her even though it was midmorning the next day. I had come inside to scrounge up a bit of breakfast, and then found myself drifting up the stairs, wondering if it all was really true—if Mrs. Eames would be dead, killed by a child and abetted by gentle Mary. Perhaps I had also meant to see if there were any unlocked rooms and trinkets in them to steal, but that was all forgotten now. Here I was, the taste of toast souring on my dry tongue. It was all true. Her door had been open just a crack, and when I’d peered inside, I’d felt at once that this tableau had been left for me to find.
But maybe that was selfish. Maybe the answer was far simpler: this was not an occurrence of any urgency or rarity. If this were the first guest to be killed on the property then there ought to be some kind of commotion, but in this peace, in this silence, it felt as if this was business as usual at Coldthistle House.
Yet it was not usual for me. I took a careful step into the room, aware that my mere presence would look suspicious to outside eyes, but I had spotted something under her head on the table. A pot of ink lay open next to her, and a quill pen had tangled in her skirts as it fell. The parchment under her cheek was smudged. I dared not touch it, but I held my breath, leaning over her, scanning the letter with a growing sense of disgust . . .
My dear Enzo: The men here are so delightfully gullible—morbido come pane caldo—one or both will empty their pockets for us soon. I linger here only until their hearts are fully ensnared. Wait for me in San Gimignano, you know the spot, I will
It ended there, abruptly, with a giant ink splotch.
Good God, it was true. Everything Mr. Morningside had said about her and everything he’d threatened to do. It was all true.
My disgust deepened to nausea. Something must be done, but what? I turned straight around and marched out of the room, smashing headlong into George Bremerton.
He had taken everything in already, I could see from the bloodless shock on his face.
“Help,” I murmured, blinking up at him, feeling just as bloodless but not nearly as shocked. “Something terrible has happened.”
Moments later I sat staring at the wall in the Red Room as a man I didn’t know took my pulse.
I was well and truly caught now, caught between these two groups—that of the rich male guests left staying in the house, and that of the odd creatures determined to annihilate them—and I belonged in neither
. The venerable old clock on the far wall tick-tocked, tick-tocked, marking the excruciating seconds. Listening to it was better than the alternative: Colonel Mayweather paced the carpet, speechifying endlessly, hands akimbo as he enumerated the horrors of not only the widow’s death but my apparent part in it.
You see, George Bremerton had not kept quiet about finding me in her room, and now two old men and one slightly younger one stared at me as if I might at any moment grow a second head and try to swallow them whole.
The doctor’s hand on my wrist was steady, but I could feel my blood and sinew trembling, the ticking clock growing louder and louder in my brain until it was the only thing I could hear.
“It’s suspicious, I say! Damned suspicious! If this were India, I can tell you what I’d do, oh yes, I can tell you how we handled things in the company.”
No. The clock was less aggravating.
“The girl is already in distress,” the man holding my wrist said. He had a soft, melodic voice, one he quite obviously used to great effect on nervous patients. Dr. Rory Merriman, that was his name. Now I remembered him introducing himself before he sat down to take my pulse. The time between finding Mrs. Eames and now had gone blurry. There’d been commotion, yelling, accusations flung in every direction, but most aimed at me.
“You will only fluster her further,” the doctor continued.
Colonel Mayweather thumped down on a divan with a harrumph. “That’s warranted, wouldn’t you say? She was found in poor Cosima’s room! Practically . . . Practically leering over her!”
“If I recall, Mr. Bremerton did not say leering,” the doctor corrected.
“Oh ho! Cosima, is it?” And now George Bremerton sprang to his feet, crossing his arms. “Awfully familiar with the dead, aren’t we? I had no idea the two of you were so well acquainted, Colonel.”