CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“What?” Reed stared at her in astonishment. “What are you saying?”
“It didn’t happen outside. It happened here,” Anna said.
“The murder?” Reed asked. “You’re saying Estelle was murdered here, in this room? How could that be?”
“No. Not Estelle. It is something much older than that.”
Reed continued to gape at her, speechless. Anna turned away and walked around the room. “It isn’t as strong, but I can feel it.” She stopped, her eyes blank and vague, looking at something that Reed could not see.
“There was furniture here, and a rug—a blue-and-gold Persian rug. And it’s—it’s covered with blood,” she told him. She raised her hands to her temples. Her breath came more quickly in her throat; her heart began to pound. “The Winterset maid—Susan Emmett. This is where she was killed! Not Weller’s Point.” Anna whirled and looked at him, her eyes focused now, and blazing with emotion. “I am certain of it!”
“My God.” Reed stared at her in consternation, then took Anna’s arm and led her from the room.
She was trembling, her face paper white, and he thought she might faint. He slipped an arm around her waist and guided her over to a green velvet bench with rolled arms. He pulled her down onto the padded bench with him and took both her hands in his. They were cold as ice, and he chafed them gently.
Anna shuddered and closed her eyes. “Oh, Reed! That poor girl. There was so much blood.”
He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tightly against his side. “It’s all right. Don’t think about it.” He pressed his lips to the top of her head.
“I can’t keep from thinking about it,” Anna murmured. She realized that they should not be sitting this way, where any servant might come upon them in such a far too intimate pose. Worse, it felt much too good to be in his arms, and soon, she knew, the soothing comfort of his embrace would turn into something dangerously exciting. It was foolhardy to put herself in the way of temptation.
With a small inward sigh at the loss, Anna sat up, pulling away from his arm. “I think we should go see the maid again.”
“Mrs. Parmer?”
“Yes. I thought she was holding something back yesterday, and now I am certain of it.”
“All right. I’ll have our horses brought round.”
They started walking back down the hall to another room with a bell pull, so that Reed could summon a servant.
“I noticed something about the housekeeper’s house and Mrs. Parmer’s, too—they were very nice, weren’t they? Not large, but well built and pleasant. And each of the women had a servant. Do you think it is common for a retired housemaid to live that well?”
“The housekeeper did have a stipend from your uncle. And Mrs. Parmer married. Perhaps her husband was able to afford it.”
“Perhaps.”
Reed looked at her. “But I agree. It is odd. Do you think someone…bribed them?”
Anna gave him a level look. “Something happened here. I am certain of it. And Mrs. Parmer did not tell us everything she knew.”
“What makes you think she will now?” Reed inquired.
“We shall just have to make her,” Anna replied.
* * *
Mrs. Parmer looked somewhat disconcerted to see Anna and Reed on her doorstep again. “My lord. Miss Holcomb.” She looked from one of them to the other. “What can I do for you?”
“You can start by telling us the truth,” Anna told her crisply.
Mrs. Parmer blinked, surprised, and took a step back. They seized the opportunity to step inside the house, even though she had not invited them.
“I—I’m sorry. I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the old woman said warily.
“Mrs. Parmer, I fear that you were less than open with us yesterday,” Reed said. “I am hoping that you will change your mind and tell us the truth now.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she repeated.
“I know what happened in the room off the gallery,” Anna said flatly, watching the other woman’s face.
Mrs. Parmer’s eyes widened, and one hand fluttered up to her throat. “How could you—”
“Susan Emmett was killed there, wasn’t she?” Anna asked.
The old woman’s mouth worked a little, but she did not say anything; instead her gaze darted from Anna to Reed, then back.
“Mrs. Parmer…” Reed took her hand gently, gazing down into the woman’s face. “Don’t you think it’s time for Susan’s death to be explained? You worked with her. You knew her. Do you think it is right that she should have been sent to her death, yet it was never avenged, never atoned for?”
The woman looked uncertain. “Dead is dead. What difference does it make?”
“I should think it would make some difference with your conscience,” Reed suggested gently. “’Tis a harsh thing to have on your soul….”
“I had nothing to do with killing her!” Mrs. Parmer gasped, jerking her hand from his grasp. She hesitated, then said, “All right. I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.” She glanced at Anna. “And seeing as how you’re his granddaughter…”
She turned, nodding her head for them to follow her, and led them back into the parlor where they had sat the day before. Anna’s heart sank at the old woman’s words. It was what she had been fearing from the moment she had stood in the room off the gallery.
“Then…it was my grandfather who did it? Lord de Winter?” Anna asked stiffly when they were seated in the parlor, the door closed.
Reed, without saying anything, reached over and curled his hand around hers.
“Aye,” Mrs. Parmer responded. “The old lord.” Her mouth tightened. “He was always a hard one, that one. Never treated Lady de Winter right, I always said. Cold, he was. And odd. But, then—” She shrugged. “He was gentry, wasn’t he, and they’re often odd.”
“What happened in that room, Mrs. Parmer?” Reed asked.
“I don’t know exactly,” she replied. “I wasn’t there when it happened. It was only afterward—the housekeeper woke me up in the middle of the night, and she dragged me downstairs to that room.” Even now, the woman blanched a little at the memory. “There was blood everywhere. It was horrible. Mrs. Hartwell told me to clean it up and keep my mouth shut, so I did. I washed up all the blood, and she and I rolled up the rug—it had blood all over it, you couldn’t ever get that clean—and had it put in the attic. Mrs. Hartwell told me that I would be taken care of, as long as I didn’t talk, so I didn’t. They gave me money, a nest egg, so after a few years I could leave there and marry, and we were able to build this house.”
She lifted her chin a little defiantly. “You’re thinking I’m wicked, aren’t you, miss, not to tell and to take the money for it? But I wanted out of that life—forever taking orders and cleaning up after folks, my hands red and raw all winter—and when they offered me that money, I saw it was my chance to get away. So I took it. Besides, who’d have believed me, even if I had told? The lord and lady would have sworn it wasn’t true, and Mrs. Hartwell, too, and I’d ’ve been turned off without a reference.”
“You were in a difficult situation,” Reed told her sympathetically.
Anna let out a soft groan and brought her hands to her head. “Oh, God, he was mad, wasn’t he?”
Mrs. Parmer nodded. “I’m sorry, miss. But he wasn’t right in the head. And he got worse.”
“But no one told you that it was Lord de Winter who killed Susan?” Reed asked. “Did they?”
“Who else could it have been?” Mrs. Parmer retorted. “One of the servants, they wouldn’t have done all that to cover it up, now would they? And Master Charles was only a lad. Who else would have been in that room with her? Then, after Will Dawson was killed, too, her ladyship locked Lord Roger up. In the nursery, see, where the windows had bars on them. They added a good stout door with a lock on it, and only Mrs. Hartwell had the key. He had several rooms there to walk around in, and his valet did for him, you see.”
“So was his madness common knowledge?” Anna asked.
“Oh, no, miss, the other servants weren’t told. Nobody saw him except when he would go walking in the gallery with his valet or her ladyship. They put out the story that he was ill, weak. His valet always took his meals up to him. The servants knew he was odd, and there were whispers, of course. But her ladyship was a sweet woman—kind, she was, and nobody wanted to hurt her. And the pay was good. Nobody wanted to get dismissed. So no one talked much outside the house. The doctor knew, of course. He used to come and check on him, bandage him up when he hurt himself, give him something to make him quiet. You know.”
Anna thought of the missing pages in the doctor’s journal. Had they referred to his visits to the mad Lord de Winter?
“The solicitor knew, too, I guess—the old one before Mr. Norton, I mean. Oh, and Perkins. He used to come by, regular-like. He’d help the valet sometimes, when the old lord was too wild. There was another servant, too, one they hired to help the valet. He was a big, strong fellow, but he never talked much with any of the rest of the servants.”
“What was Lord de Winter like?” Anna asked her.
The old woman shrugged. “He never talked much to me. Whenever I went in to clean his room, the valet would take him out to walk in the garden or somewhere. Sometimes they’d go down to the summerhouse—he liked the summerhouse. But he looked at you, and his eyes…” She gave an exaggerated shudder. “They weren’t like normal eyes. I can’t explain it, but there was this look in them I never saw in anyone else, and I hope never to see again. Just being in his rooms was bad enough, what with all the masks and writings and such.”
“Excuse me?” Reed interrupted her. “Masks? Writings? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh. No, I guess, they would all ’ve been taken down. He liked to collect masks, Lord de Winter did. Strange looking things from all over the world. They looked like animals, some of them. And others were like something I’ve never seen—demons, maybe. Wicked-looking things, they were. He’d always collected them, see, and he was that fond of them. So they hung them all around in the nursery, so he could have them around. Whenever I was cleaning the rooms, it always felt like someone was watching me, ’cause of all those masks.”
“You mentioned writings,” Anna prodded when the woman fell silent.
Mrs. Parmer nodded. “Sometimes, when the spells took him, he would write on the walls. They painted them over now and then, but he’d always go back to writing on them.” She shook her head. “Couldn’t make heads nor tails of it, I couldn’t. Some if it didn’t even look like English.”
Anna thought of the symbols her uncle drew, and her stomach constricted. Was her uncle like his father? Was his madness, too, the kind that drove a man to kill?
“What was Lord de Winter like before he descended into madness?” Anna asked. “You said he was hard.”
“Oh, my, yes. Everything had to be just so, and woe betide anyone who put things out of place or wasn’t quick enough. And servants weren’t the only ones. Her ladyship could never please him, except for giving him a son. I heard him take her to task something terrible. He even hit her sometimes. But she and Nurse were good about keeping Master Charles out of his way. A child could never be neat enough for that one.”
Her uncle, too, wanted things done just a certain way—utensils in the correct order, the stones lined up according to his plan—and he did not like anything changed. But he had never been one to erupt into violence, or even shouting, if things were not done exactly to his plan. He simply worried and stewed about it. Charles’ personality was mild, and surely, Anna thought, that made all the difference between him and his father.
They left not long after that. Anna was reeling from the information that they had received.
“My own grandfather!” she exclaimed as they rode back toward Winterset. “No wonder Nick was reluctant to tell me about the murders. He must have known the truth, and he could not bear to tell me that my grandfather was a murderer.”
“It explains a great deal,” Reed agreed. “It is little wonder that the murders went unsolved. There was obviously a conspiracy of silence to protect Lord de Winter.”
“The doctor must have known,” Anna said. “Or at least suspected that Lord de Winter was the culprit. He knew he was insane. He knew that they locked him up after the murders. And after that the murders stopped.”
“Yes, I would think he must have wondered about it. Perhaps those pages torn out of the doctor’s journal were about Lord de Winter.”
Anna nodded. “That is exactly what I was thinking.”
“I would like to look at that nursery myself,” Reed commented. “Obviously I should have trusted more in what Grimsley said. Lord de Winter did live in the nursery.”
“That poor woman,” Anna said, shaking her head. “Lady de Winter, I mean. Think of being married to a monster like that. Knowing what he was, what he had done—yet she must have felt she had to shield him from the law because of her children. She would not have wanted them branded as mad, too. The scandal would have tarnished their name beyond repair. I can understand why she covered up for him. But to continue to live with him in the house, to see him…Why, Mrs. Parmer even said sometimes Lady de Winter walked with him in the gallery. She was with him in the summerhouse when they had the fire.”
Reed looked at Anna. “That is where they both died, isn’t it?”
Anna nodded, her expression changing. “Are you thinking—that he killed her, too?”
Reed shrugged. “One has to wonder what they were doing there alone, if he had been locked up for the past several years in the nursery. What started the fire? Given his history, I would be suspicious.”
“Yes, no doubt you are right.” Anna could not help but think with horror of what ran in her family, lurking in her own flesh and blood.
When they reached Winterset, they went straight up the stairs to the nursery. The door to the nursery was indeed a sturdy door with a lock. Fortunately it was not locked, so they did not have to search for the key. Reed opened the door, and they stepped inside.
The rooms were dark, the curtains drawn, and Reed strode over to push aside the curtain and let in some light. Anna looked at the bars crisscrossing the window, and she could not suppress a shiver. Reed looked at her in some concern.
“Are you all right?”
Anna nodded. “Yes. It is just…a little unsettling.” She rubbed her arms, feeling cold despite the fact that it was summer. She wasn’t sure why she felt unnerved here—whether she actually sensed something abnormal, or whether her emotions were simply colored by what Mrs. Parmer had told them about the place.
They walked through the rooms—three small bedrooms and a larger schoolroom. The rooms were clean, the shelves empty. There was no sign that anyone had ever lived here, including children. What furniture there was, was all adult-size. A large humpbacked trunk stood against one wall in the schoolroom, and Reed crossed over to open it.
“Well,” he said, looking down into the trunk. “Here are the lord’s masks.”
Anna went quickly to his side and peered into the trunk. The inside was filled with masks, some metal, others wooden, and still others made of clay or cloth or—Anna reached down and touched one—of animal hide. Reed began to pull them out and line them up on the floor. Some were amazingly realistic renditions of animals—there were a few that even had protruding snouts. Others were more like stylized drawings of animals, and others seemed to be mythical beasts or more human-looking beings that were what Anna supposed Mrs. Parmer had termed “demons.” Teeth were painted on some; others had actual animals’ teeth glued to them.
Even laid out here on the floor, the masks looked eerie and bizarre. She could well imagine how frightening they would appear hanging all over the walls, teeth bared.
“Lord de Winter seemed to favor wolves,” Reed commented.
Anna nodded, glancing over the masks. There was, indeed, a preponderance resembling wolves.
Reed lifted out the last mask and laid it down, saying, “There are books on the bottom of the trunk.”
“His journals?” Anna looked in at the rows of identical brown books.
“I presume.” He reached in, took one out and began to glance through it.
Anna did the same. The pages were filled with words in a small, cramped hand. She glanced through them. Though at first glance they appeared to be sentences, with periods and commas, the strings of words made little or no sense.
“Gibberish,” Reed said, flipping through the pages.
“I can make out a few things. This looks like king, maybe. Oh, and here, I think this says Wolf People.” She could make out little else. Some of the words were written, as Mrs. Parmer had noted, in something that was definitely not English—nor any other language Anna had ever seen.
She laid the book aside and picked up another one. It was much the same. As she went down through the stack, she noticed, however, that there were more and more words that made sense and even sentences that were understandable, although wildly irrational.
“Reed, look—here it says, ‘We are the descendants of the Beast.’ And here, ‘not cursed, but blessed.’”
Reed moved closer, reading over her shoulder, “‘At night I roam with my…’ What is that?”
Anna peered at where he pointed. “‘Brethren?’”
Reed nodded. “‘At night I roam with my brethren. None can see us. None know the power we hold. We walk between the worlds, and all is dark.’”
“His mind was clearer at this time,” Anna mused. “Perhaps they are earlier books, or maybe he went through more lucid periods. Didn’t Mrs. Parmer say that he had ‘spells,’ or something like that?”
Anna flipped through more pages. “Here—wolves again. ‘We are the Children of the Wolf. The power is in us. None can reach us, none can stop us.’ Who is this ‘we’?” she asked.
“God knows. The wolves? People that only he saw?”
“Oh, look. ‘When I was fifteen, the King of the Wolves spoke to me.’ But this makes no sense—‘Come down from the mountain and bury beneath my skin.’” She turned the page. “Here is some more about the King of the Wolves talking to him.”
Reed picked up another journal and paged through it. “This one is gibberish again.” He searched through the others remaining in the trunk, glancing through them and setting them aside until he found one that was more intelligible.
“All right,” he said, his eyes scanning down the page. “Here he says something about being superior, part wolf, part man. Apparently he thought he had the sense of smell of a wolf and their acute hearing. ‘I walk upright, but I have the heart of my brothers. At night I walk in the woods and converse with them. But none hear, for we speak without words.’”
Anna shuddered. “Ugh. This is all horrid. I cannot bear it.”
She set the journal back in the trunk and glanced around the room. “It is so cold in here.” She rubbed her arms again. “I want to leave this place.”
“Of course.” Reed took off his jacket and draped it around her shoulders. They had been kneeling on the floor beside the trunk, and he stood up, reaching down to offer his hand to her.
Her hand was ice cold. Reed looked down into her face. It was pale, her eyes huge and haunted. He put his arm around her shoulders, sweeping her out of the room and down the stairs to his study.
“Here. Sit down.” He led her to the sofa that sat at one end of the room, then turned and walked across the room to the liquor cabinet, where he poured whisky from the decanter into two cut crystal glasses. He returned to Anna and handed her one. “Drink this.”
Anna looked doubtfully down at the strong-smelling liquid, then back at Reed.
“Trust me. It’ll put some color back into your cheeks,” he told her, taking a sip of his own drink.
Anna took a sip, and the whisky roared back through her throat and down into her stomach like liquid fire. She coughed, her eyes beginning to water. “How do you stand that?”
“You get used to it.” Reed smiled. “Take another drink. You’ll feel better.”
Obediently, Anna had another swallow before she set her glass on the table beside her. “I don’t know if I will ever feel better.”
“Did you feel something from the room?” Reed asked. “The way you did in the room off the gallery?”
“Not at first—or, at least, only a little. It wasn’t the same as the feelings I’ve had before. It just made me…uneasy, I guess, is the word for it. But the longer we stayed there, as we looked through his journals, I felt more…a kind of dark anger and…something that was like pleasure, but sick and repulsive. It was so cold, down-to-the-bone cold. I thought I might start shivering and never stop.”
“Cold. Like he was,” Reed commented.
“Oh, Reed, I cannot bear to think that that man was my grandfather!” Anna exclaimed. “He was evil through and through.” She turned to look at Reed, her blue eyes shining with tears. “I feel so ashamed, so sick, that I am related to him. His mania, his illness, runs through us. It is bred in me.”
“No, no!” Reed quickly set his drink aside and reached out to Anna, pulling her into his arms. “You are not mad. Whatever was wrong with Lord Roger de Winter, it is not in you. There is no evil in you—of that, I am sure.”
“But these things I see…” Anna cried out softly. “My feelings, my visions, whatever you want to call them. Don’t you see? He saw things, heard things. My uncle sees things, too. The Angel Gabriel speaks to him.”
“That doesn’t make you mad,” Reed retorted. “The things that your uncle sees, that the old Lord de Winter saw—those were figments of their imagination. The things you have sensed, or ‘seen,’ were things that had actually happened or were about to happen. They were very real things. Besides, you did not believe that they were playing out in front of you. You knew they were visions, that they had happened at some other time or in some other place.”
“Yes…”
“But your uncle believes that the angel is standing right there talking to him.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“So what you see is different. You are not like your uncle, and certainly you are not like your grandfather.”
“I wish I could truly believe that,” Anna sighed.
“Believe it. Listen, I have a large number of relatives whom I would rather not possess. We all do. My grandmother was the terror of the family. And my great-aunt, Lady Rochester, has a tongue that would blister paint. Great-Uncle Ballard lives in fear of her still. And you think they aren’t peculiar? My grandmother swore that she talked to her dead husband—and he answered. Lady Rochester has a vast array of wigs, all of them quite atrocious, which she switches as if they were hats, believing, apparently, that none of us notice that her hair is red one day and black the next. And my cousin Albert is an utter nodcock.”
“But none of them have murdered people.”
“Not that we know of, though, frankly, I would not put it past my grandmother. My point is that we cannot choose our relatives. We are simply stuck with them. But their actions, their lives, do not determine ours. I am not like my grandmother. You are not like your grandfather. I know you regret what he did. I do, too. But you are no more responsible for his actions than I am. You must not blame yourself. It took place almost fifty years ago. You cannot change what happened. You cannot put it right. And the man who did it has nothing to do with you. Whatever he was, you are a wonderful, kind, beautiful human being. That is what is important, not your grandfather.”
“Oh, Reed…” Anna let out a breathy little sigh. “It is so easy to believe that when I hear you say it. When I am with you, nothing seems to be so bad.”
“There is nothing bad. Not in you.” He kissed the top of her head. Her hair was like silk beneath his lips; her perfume teased at his nostrils. He raised a hand to her cheek, gently running his finger along it. “You are so beautiful.”
Anna’s heart seemed to skip a beat. The whisky she had drunk had turned her warm inside, making the cold recede. At the touch of Reed’s finger upon her cheek, the heat spread out through her body. She turned her face up toward his, and she was caught in his gaze.
“Anna…” His voice was barely more than a whisper, and the sound of it sent a tremor through her.
For a long moment, they did not move. Indeed, they scarcely seemed to breathe, as though the slightest movement might break the moment.
Then, knowing that she should not, Anna stretched up toward him. She wanted to feel the touch of his lips upon hers. She wanted to have his hands on her body. Everything inside her yearned for him.
His lips brushed hers, caressing first her top lip, then the bottom. His hands came up, cupping her face and sliding back, his fingers tangling in her hair. His skin was faintly rough against the soft flesh of her face as his thumbs stroked over her cheekbones.
Anna’s eyes fluttered closed, and her skin flared with heat. Her breasts felt swollen and heavy, the nipples prickling as desire flooded her loins. She remembered his fingers upon her breasts, caressing and arousing her, his hands sliding up her legs, seeking the hot, moist center of her. She ached there, her whole body alive and tingling with need, trembling with desire.
He kissed her, his lips soft and supple on hers, enticing and seducing her. Anna quivered, lost in his taste, his scent. His hands slipped down her neck and over her chest, coming to rest on her breasts. A soft moan escaped her as he caressed her, and she wanted to be free of her clothes, to feel his skin upon her naked flesh.
Her hands went to his chest, sliding up across his shirt. She could feel the musculature of his chest beneath the material, firm and strong. She wanted to slip her hands beneath his shirt and caress his bare skin, to know the texture of him. She thought of tasting him with her mouth, of sending the tip of her tongue lazily gliding over his skin.
Reed’s kiss deepened, and his hands dug in at her waist. He turned, bearing her back against the sofa. In another moment, Anna knew, she would be lost, unable to stop the hurtling force of their passion.
“No!” she gasped out, twisting away. “No. We cannot.”
Her hands came up to her face. She could not bear to look at him, knowing that even a glance might break her resolve. Anna jumped to her feet. She heard him rise behind her, and she whirled, one hand out.
“Please…no.” She looked at him, wanting with all her heart to throw herself back into his arms.
Color flamed along Reed’s cheekbones, and his chest rose and fell in uneven rhythm. He had never looked so handsome to her, so desirable, as he did in that moment, and Anna clenched her hands at her sides, fighting her own treacherous instincts.
For a long moment they stood like that, caught in the tangle of their desire, and then, with an almost physical wrenching, Anna whirled and ran from the room.