Shana Abe (30 page)

Her attempts at befriending the scattering of noblewomen residing at Wolfhaven had not gone well, and although it was most likely her fault, Solange couldn’t help but feel annoyed at the entire scenario.

She had maintained a casual contact with at least their maids, since many of the ladies had been kind enough to send over a selection of their gowns to their lord’s new wife. No one had said one word to her face about traveling to Wolfhaven with nothing more than the clothing on her back. It made her remotely anxious to clear herself, to show them she was not so odd as her arrival must have seemed.

She had found the sewing circle one lazy afternoon, a cluster of quietly chatting women working on a tapestry together in a corner room of the main tower. To Solange, hesitating by the doorway, they appeared to be a group of delicately nodding flowers, dressed all in genteel pale colors, blondes and brunettes and a redhead with flashing needles and comet tails of thread floating between them.

Instantly she was back at Du Clar, seeing the group of women there who had betrayed her, who had never looked her quite in the eyes yet followed her relentlessly with their own, a spying party paid by Redmond, who wanted to control her even a continent away.
Sweet-voiced, false-faced women who feigned care for her even though they locked her up at night.

But that was ridiculous. This was Wolfhaven, and the ladies here were now looking up at her in polite inquiry. She saw no wicked designs among them, and they greeted her with murmured welcome.

However, to her dismay, Solange discovered she couldn’t judge their sincerity. It was her own judgment that was impaired, she realized. She found she couldn’t sift through the intricate layers of meaning around her in the room, the steadfastness of their gazes, the width of their smiles, the subtle tones in their voices.

In response to her uncertain inquiry, all of them denied with gentle bewilderment any knowledge of the identities of the two women who had brought the white gown to her, whom Solange had wished to thank. Were they telling the truth? Why should they wish to lie to her?

She pretended the matter was insignificant, though she felt the heat in her face from her own sense of confusion.

She sat with them awkwardly, having been given a golden needle and an edge of the tapestry to mend, and listened to the silence that had settled around her. They had been talking before she arrived, she knew. What were those sly looks they exchanged now? Were they laughing at her, at the less than neat stitches she attempted? Or worse, far worse, were they laughing at something else about her, her history, her shame? Did they know about her scars?

She bent over the needle and pretended not to notice until she thought she had stayed long enough to
escape without rudeness. And although she searched the faces of each of them—a Mildred, a Stephanie, a Jenafer, Gwendolyn, Jacqueline and Julianna, who were sisters, even a Mairi—she still couldn’t read the depth of truth around her. It was more than disconcerting, it was frightening.

Still, she smiled and bade them well as she left, and they echoed it back to her with identical inflections, inviting her to come again if she wished.

She did not wish. Not until she had some measure of calm infusing her, or until she was able to understand better the people now around her. For although the castle itself was a balm to her, the folk that lived in it had, so far, treated her with varying degrees of respect and distance. It was a watchful situation, but that was not new to her. After all, she had spent a good many years of her life learning to ignore prying eyes and finding ways to make herself invisible to them.

The secret passages at Du Clar, for example, had been a discovery almost too good to be true. She had stumbled upon the first one not quite by accident, for she spent much of her time in the chamber they called hers, and had many a long hour to study the pattern of carved vines in the woodwork by the fireplace, to trace the dark corners with her fingers, pushing, pulling. She was someone who still believed in fairies and miracles; it had only been a matter of time before she managed the right combination of flowers and vines that unlocked the old hinges leading to her eventual freedom.

In any case, it had literally opened up a whole new world to her. During her stay at Du Clar, they had allowed her rides through the woods, allowed her to exercise
her mounts with a closely monitored gallop in a group of people. It had been her only treat, the daily rides in the fresh air, but it was never freedom. She was never more than a few paces from any of her guards.

Nevertheless, she had used every occasion to improve herself: practicing her riding skills, testing her memory of the forest paths. She had no plans to stay forever. She was just waiting for the right opportunity to come to her.

Eventually it did. After she found the passageways she became a nocturnal creature, going out at night via the hollow walls of the keep, all clogged with cobwebs and dust. The only footprints she ever saw back there were her own, but she was always cautious.

At night, with the retainers and the serfs and those hated women fast asleep, she would leave Du Clar, wending her way through the woods on foot, memorizing paths and markers for her final run. It was a slow process, and she was determined not to make a mistake that might lead to failure.

The woods offered her another gift, humble and scorned by farmers and shepherds: a ragged clump of common henbane. The sticky, toothy leaves would act as a sedative if she used them sparingly. How often had she seen Damon take it to his patients, sometimes brewing it, sometimes having it smoked to relieve pain? Solange had gathered a handful of the leaves, then another, uncertain of how much it would take to douse the entire population of the keep. Three nights before she planned to flee she chopped the leaves into very fine pieces, crept into the buttery, and emptied all of it into the large barrels of mulled wine served
nightly. The spiced flavor of the alcohol was strong enough to cover the faintly bitter taste of the henbane, and the tiny broken leaves would appear to be just another herb to the uncaring eye. It might just give her an added advantage when she fled.

And so it had. No one had awakened to hail her as she left with Damon. No soldiers followed them that night certainly, though that had proved not to last.

She had to take a sudden gamble that Damon himself would not partake of too much of the drugged wine with his dinner, but could hardly have ordered it not to be sent to his rooms without arousing suspicion. It was fortunate that his drinking habits had not changed over the years.…

“My lady? My lady, have you seen enough?”

Godwin was facing her, solicitously patting her hand to gain her attention. “Have you seen enough of the storeroom yet? We can go on.”

They were standing in a cold stone room hung with slabs of meats and strings of sausages. Braids of peppers, garlics, onions, and other dried plants crept in rows down the walls.

“Yes. I have seen enough.”

But as they were walking out to the bailey, a soldier intercepted them, saying that the steward was needed down in the soldiers’ quarters to settle a fight between a local tavern keeper and a soldier accused of not paying for his drink, and that it was looking “a mite ugly” when he had left to fetch him. Godwin excused himself with all evidence of sincere regret, adding that he hoped to finish their tour sometime in the next millennium.

Damon was gone for the day, out in the village visiting the field workers, he had said, to find out firsthand about the harvest. Solange wandered about aimlessly, examining some of the rooms she knew already, avoiding those with people in them. The second time she passed the darkened archway set far back from the main hall, she paused to peer inside curiously, but she could see nothing but a spiral of stairs fading up into the darkness.

The young maid whom Solange cornered to ask about it shook her head fearfully, declaring, “Oh, no, my lady, you don’t want to go up there!”

“Why not?” Solange asked, thinking perhaps the floor was rotted or the roof was missing.

The maid looked around, then lowered her voice dramatically. “Because, mistress, up theres be haunted!”

“Really?” That certainly sounded interesting. “Haunted by what?”

“Nasty ghosts, mistress, gibbering things what cry at night, or else laugh like the madness, and shift things around!”

“Is it locked?”

“I dunno, milady. I nevers been up there to see. No one goes up there, milady, not even his lordship.”

“I see. Thank you.”

The maid bobbed a quick curtsy and hurried off, late to whatever duties she performed. Solange walked back to her room to fetch a candle, a beautiful beeswax candle, she saw, not the smoky, smelly tallow ones she had been given at Du Clar.

She wondered, on her way up the darkened, lonely stairs, if Damon kept bees.

There was a door at the top of the stairs, and it was not locked, although if anyone had been past it in years, she would have been surprised. The hinges protested loudly at their use, and Solange opened it only enough to steal through the crack, leading with the arm that held the candle, then wedging her body past the ancient wooden frame. Although the candle flame flickered and dipped, it did not die.

She was in another storeroom, but not one built for food. In fact, she suspected it had not been intended for storage at all, but rather as a sitting room of sorts. She was at the top of one of the towers. High above was the inverted cone of the ceiling, lanced with blackened oak beams. Strange that the room would be so neglected; she wouldn’t have thought Damon a man to let a few ghosts stop him from anything.

Battered trunks lay at every angle across the bare floor, three-legged chairs tipped drunkenly aside, chipped tables bore the weight of moth-eaten rolled rugs and tapestries, broken crockery, what might have even been petrified remnants of food. Set deep into the wall was a narrow window of grimy glass that allowed in enough sunlight to cast an eerie brownish glow upon everything.

“It looks likely enough for a haunting,” she said under her breath. She walked forward carefully, picking her way around the broken furniture, inspecting a clay pot here, a faded sash there.

There was a noise behind her, a tiny scratching sound. She whirled, raising the candle high, but saw nothing, not even a mouse. However, right beside her was one of the dusty trunks filling the room.

This one looked no different from the rest, with dark, stained leather over wood that had seen better years before time and a menagerie of rodents had gotten to it. But it had no lock upon it, and the thick, stiff leather straps securing it had been unbuckled.

She knelt, wedging the candle upright in the narrow neck of a cracked vase. The lid was heavy, much heavier than it looked, so that when she managed to push it open all the way it fell back abruptly, releasing a cloud smelling of musty, dry lavender which made her sneeze and cough.

She waved a hand in front of her face to clear the air, blinking down at the contents of the trunk.

First, of course, she saw the dried purple flowers on their spindled stems, laid daintily across the folded cloth as if the owner might return at any moment to refresh her wardrobe. Solange removed them delicately and placed them to the side.

The bliaut on top was of finely spun wool dyed a rich royal blue, with tiny, perfect embroidered flowers of white around the neck and sleeves. Beneath that was the undertunic, thin wool bleached to pristine white. After that, more dried lavender, and after that, a black bliaut with silver stitching, a silver wolf on the shoulder, similar to the one Damon had worn for the wedding, but without the moon. A black undertunic to go with that, then a rose bliaut, a mauve undertunic, an emerald bliaut, a teal undertunic …

Each piece she lifted out held on to the faded lavender scent, rustling with clean folds as she shifted them to the inside of the lid, where there was no dust. At the
bottom of the trunk she found what she had been searching for without knowing she had been searching.

It was a miniature, exquisitely done, of a black-haired woman with laughing dark eyes, and even though it was a tiny painting that fit into the palm of her hand, Solange had no trouble recognizing the subject.

It wasn’t so much that her son resembled her, although he did to a great degree. But her recognition was based more on the fact that she had seen this woman not so long ago, and in the flesh.

Or she had thought it to be flesh at the time. And the woman’s eyes had been laughing then too, not unkindly, as she presented Solange with the gown of white, and the other woman had been smiling as well, the pale-skinned beauty who spoke to her in French. She had not remarked upon it then. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world to respond to their warmth in the blurred mixture of languages that they had all understood.

The most natural thing in the world.

With sudden insight she recalled the voices that had comforted her after Damon discovered her scars, remembered the familiar cadence of them from long ago, in fact, so long ago she had almost forgotten.…

The solitude of her sickness had driven her further into the fever that had taken her at Wellburn, further from the nightmare that had been her reality then and into the soothing darkness of someplace she had no name for. It had been apart from anything she had known, and yes, Damon had been there, too, talking to her, guiding her, but now she remembered these other voices, feminine reassurance in that darkness. The
French and the English had been mingled then too, but not confusing. Just loving. Just the solid consolation of a sort of love that she had never known in her life, but that was not unfamiliar to her, nevertheless. It had been instinctive, maternal.…

Jazel had died long ago, but it seemed she had never truly left her daughter after all. No wonder none of the women at Wolfhaven had known of the two mysterious women with the gown. Perhaps no one but she believed in ghosts.

Solange lifted a branch of the lavender and inhaled it, catching a hint of summer warmth again. She stared down at the portrait.