Languish (2 page)

“I'm being romantic,” he muttered. “Fat lot of good it's doing me.”

I was still giggling at him when he turned and reached for the gate. Frost bloomed suddenly over the iron scrollwork, curling like vines until it reached the handle and froze the lock in place. Colin snatched his hand back with a curse. “Got salt in your pocket?” he asked tightly, knowing that kind of ice on a warm summer night could mean only one thing.

Spirits.

I turned slowly, staring into the summer twilight. The shadows glittered blue, and ice crept through the long grass, dragging skeletal fingers over the headstones. It clung to oak leaves and daisies. It filled buttercups and roses and startled quiet birds off yew branches. It was soft at first, then grew complicated tendrils as winter blew its cold breath. Only this wasn't winter. It was a late summer evening, full of heat and drowsy crickets and frogs singing in the ponds. This should have been impossible.

I knew full well that the distance between the possible and the impossible was so much smaller than one imagined that it barely filled the space between beating moth wings.

“What's going on?” Colin asked quietly. “Can you see anything?”

I stared into the gloaming as hard as I could, trying to pick out movement between shadows, crooked light, transparent stones, anything. I squinted until my head hurt and my eyes watered.

“Nothing,” I said, frustrated. “No one.”

The ice hardened all at once, as if a giant had closed its frozen fist around the graveyard. It tightened over everything, encasing it in a frigid bell jar. Even the leaves froze, no longer trembling in the cold.

I took a small step forward, even as Colin tried to grab my arm to stop me.

The ice broke under my boot, cracking the silence like a hazelnut. Colin tossed his handful of salt over my shoulder. He'd been the one to tell me about its protective qualities. I'd thought he was mad at the time.

The salt landed like sparks out of a drafty hearth, burning tiny pinpricks of light through the hoarfrost. The giant's fist clenched too tight and the ice shattered like glass, jagged and sharp. I felt a shard slice through my cheek before Colin knocked me down, covering me with his body. I gasped. He put his hands on the ground on either side of me, lifting up slightly. I tried to peer through my hair, which had come loose from its pins. A summer breeze wafted the perfume of wild-flowers toward us.

“Are you all right?” I asked as I squirmed out from under him. I brushed my hands over him, dislodging glittering ice
dust.

“Never mind me,” he said. “You're bleeding.” He was scowling but his fingers were gentle under my cheekbone.

“It's nothing,” I said. “I'm more interested in what the devil is going on in this cemetery.”

“You would be.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Most girls would be swooning or weeping about disfiguring scars right about now.”

I rolled my eyes. “Don't be ridiculous. How would that help matters?” I wiped the blood off my face. “Anyway, I think I'd look rather dashing with a scar. Like a pirate queen.” My mother was the one obsessed with beauty, not me.

“You would at that.” His smile was crooked. “But I don't think it will leave a mark.”

“Pity.” A small part of me truly wouldn't have minded a scar. I'd seen what a pretty face could do. It made my mother vain; it blinded Xavier when he looked at me so that he concocted a sugar-spun confection in my place. It made people assume I was decorative and witless.

I looked around the churchyard, determined to be more than violet eyes and a delicate profile. “I don't feel anything, do you?” Colin shook his head and I touched the nearest gravestone, wondering if it would freeze my fingertips. It was still warm from a long day of sunshine. I rubbed my forehead, as if that would dislodge the pebble weighing down my third eye. The sooner it healed, the sooner I could see who was flinging spears and arrows of ice at us.

“Perhaps it was a warning?” I ventured. “But from whom? And why?”

“Let's get back to the manor,” he suggested. “I know you want to go straight to Jasper's library to riffle through his books.”

I beamed at him. He'd always seen what others couldn't, or wouldn't. “That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me.”

The walk back to Rosefield was uneventful.

The arrival wasn't.

The manor gleamed white, surrounded by its moat of roses. It looked like something out of a storybook, and I could still scarcely credit that I was living within its walls. Colin paused at the end of the lane. “Go on, love.”

As the gardener's apprentice, Colin used the servants' entrance out back when he came in for meals. Other than that he spent his time with the flowers or in the cottage on the edge of the oak grove. The front door was for family and guests, looming impressively large with decorative hinges and ivy curling around the edges. I scowled at it. “I'm coming around back with you.”

Colin shook his head, his black hair falling down into his eye. “Violet, you have to get used to it. You're one of them now.”

“Now you're just being mean.”

“Practical,” he corrected. “Which is usually your job, I might add.”

I wrinkled my nose at him. “Come on then.” I tugged on his sleeve until he let himself be dragged. “I'm still the practical one. I can't exactly traipse through the front door in your old trousers. Mrs. Harris would swallow her face.” The housekeeper had a way of pursing her lips that was downright frightening.

Colin gave a mock shudder. “I left mud on the mat last week. She didn't say a word, but I swear my soul shriveled right up.”

We were heading toward the mews when Lord Jasper cantered by on his horse. His white hair was tied neatly back, and he sat straight in the saddle in his best coat. I had no idea where he was returning from or why he wasn't in the carriage. Colin quirked an eyebrow at me. “Think he's been courting?”

“Lord Jasper?” I blinked. He was a wealthy, titled widower, and, more important, he was patient and kind. But he was rather
old.

The horse reared without warning, as if a bee had suddenly got caught under the saddle. The stableboy was too far away to be of any help. Lord Jasper clutched at the reins, his face ashen. I wasn't entirely certain he could survive such a fall, never mind the possibility of being trampled. I broke into a run.

Colin was already ahead of me. “I'll leave the ghosts to you,” he tossed back over his shoulder. “If you leave the horses to me.”

“Be careful!” I yelled, still trying to catch up.

Colin darted into the fray, powerful horse legs slamming down beside him. It happened so fast, my breath strangled in
my throat. Lord Jasper began to slide out of the saddle. Colin managed to shove him back up, even as he grabbed for the reins.

The horse snapped its teeth, grazing Colin's shoulder. He'd have a wicked bruise by morning, but he didn't flinch. He only leaned into the horse instead of away, pulling down on the reins. He murmured in Gaelic, his voice soothing and husky.

The horses rolled his eye, snorting. His breath fogged, as if the temperature had dropped dramatically. Colin didn't budge, and his soft lullaby words didn't transform into curses, even when the horse cracked his jaw into Colin's already mauled shoulder. He pawed the ground, as if his hooves were in pain. That's when I noticed the horseshoes.

They were covered in ice.

I glanced around wildly, half expecting more ghostly hands to be reaching out of the ground. The cobblestones were slick with half-frozen water, but other than that, I still couldn't see what the horse saw. As Colin continued to calm him, I dumped the salt out of my pockets, scattering it under the horse's twitching legs. Powerful muscles rippled under his bristling hide.

By the time the stableboy, two of his companions, and the stable master himself reached us, the horse had stopped rearing. The stable master was nearly the same gray shade as Lord Jasper as he helped the earl out of the saddle. “My lord!” He glowered at Colin. “What are you about, spooking the horses, boy?”

I opened my mouth on a hot retort even as Colin's expression
turned to unreadable stone.

“The boy saved my life, Jensen,” Lord Jasper said mildly.

Jensen blinked. “My lord?”

“Colin!” I stared at him as the stable master sputtered apologies. I knew my eyes must be wide as teacups because I couldn't stop seeing how close the horse had come to trampling Colin.

“I was a street sweeper before your mother took me in, mind,” he said calmly though his chest heaved with rough breaths. “I know my way around horses.”

“But your shoulder …”

He shrugged, wincing slightly. “He just glanced it.”

Lord Jasper gingerly stepped forward as the horse was led away. He stopped, wincing. “I'm too old for this kind of excitement,” he said with a dry smile. I dashed ahead and fumbled to release his cane from the ties at the front of his saddle. He leaned weakly on it when I returned and handed it to him. Colin slipped his arm under the earl's shoulder to assist him and I hovered on his other side, ready to catch him if he crumpled. The ice in the laneway trickled into water, soaking into my boots.

No one else noticed.

“Violet.”

Blast.

I was caught. Lord Jasper had recovered and during the night he'd remembered that I'd been sneaking back into the manor wearing boys' clothes. I'd be sent back home to London
even though I no longer had a home there. Colin would follow me even though he hated town. I'd only been at Rosefield a few weeks, and I'd already ruined everything.

“You know you don't have to use the servant stairs.”

Relief was so sudden and palpable it swayed me like a hot tropical wind. I clutched the banister. Truth be told, I hadn't even noticed I'd used the servant stairs. When I'd first arrived with my mother, back when Lord Jasper still thought her a credible medium able to contact the dead, I'd been so careful to use the main staircase and never remind anyone that we weren't gentry. I was painfully aware of what we could and could not do. I'd memorized ladies' etiquette manuals until I wanted to scream. Mother was certain that if I added milk and sugar to my tea in the wrong order I'd bring ruin to the family. But apparently she could drink as much sherry as she liked, so long as it was concealed in her dainty teacup. I had to stop thinking about my beautiful and broken mother. I was well rid of her and I probably ought to feel guilty for not missing her.

Lord Jasper looked up at me patiently from the second-floor hallway.

I smiled sheepishly. “I'm sorry, Lord Jasper.” The irony was, I was beginning to feel comfortable and safe in the manor house and so I'd taken to the servant stairs out of habit. Until my mother had set herself up as a spirit medium, the servant stairs and servant entrance had been our domain in any house, never mind one so grand as Rosefield.

“And Mrs. Harris told me that you're giving yourself headaches trying to read by moonlight.” I had no idea how she knew
I spent most nights contorted on the window seat trying to read novels by the faint light coming through the glass. “For heaven's sake, child, use as many candles as you'd like. And I'll have a maid bring up another oil lamp for your bedroom.”

“Thank you, your lordship.” Candles were expensive. The last time I'd read too long and burned the family candle down to a nub, my mother had pinched my arm in anger until I bruised. Back then, she'd taken care to make marks only where no one would see them. It was like carrying thunderstorms under my dress, indigo blue and then fading to green, the way the sky does before a particularly violent windstorm. This time, I was the one who pinched my own arm to stop the spiral of memories.

“I've left some new books in the library, for your studies,” he continued. “How are you recovering?”

I rubbed my brow. “I went to the cemetery,” I said in a rush, hoping he wouldn't think I'd been stealing the silver and fencing it in my disguise as a boy. I'd done it before, when Colin and I were too hungry to think straight, but I'd eat the pages of my favorite novel before I stole from Lord Jasper. “Everything got cold.”

He nodded. “Interesting. Graveyards are usually peculiarly empty of spirit activity.”

“Why's that?” I asked, descending the rest of the steps. “I'd think it would be the opposite. I'd heard stories about a haunting.”

“Ah, yes, the Lonely Lord.”

“I didn't see him.”

“I'm not surprised. Cemeteries are for the living. Spirits tend to get stuck where they died, not where they are buried. Though they do sometimes return when asked. Young girls have been petitioning the Lonely Lord for luck with their sweethearts for years now. “

“Why, if he's still lingering alone?”

“Who knows how these folk customs start? One assumes he wishes to reunite lovers as he himself was not reunited.”

I frowned. “I thought I saw ice on your horse's hooves,” I said. “Has anyone ever died in the laneway?”

“Not that I'm aware of,” he replied. He leaned on his silver, swan-headed cane, white eyebrows beetling. “What else did you see?”

“Nothing,” I admitted. “I suppose it could have been a trick of the light,” I allowed, though I didn't believe it for one moment. “I only get flashes.”

“Are they painful?”

I nodded.

“Then don't push yourself,” he advised. “You could do yourself harm. Let the spirits come to you as they will.”

“But … you could be in danger.”

He patted my arm with a smile. “I'm an old man, Violet. The most danger I'm in is from Mrs. Harris if she thinks I'm not resting enough.” He lowered his voice. “Her temper is rather frightful.” He patted my hand again. “Go on and read those books,” he added. “I've business to take care of today, but we'll start training you up as soon as may be.”