“They planned to marry, especially once she became with child. But her power over Julian began to diminish, and one night he saw through her facade to the rotten core underneath. He intended to seek my help to extricate us all from her clutches.”
“But then he died,” Dawn whispered, already knowing the tragic end to the story.
“But then he died.” Lord Seton lifted his glass, drained the wine, and placed the empty glass on the table.
13
Silence fell over the room and the rest of the meal passed quietly, with both Dawn and Lord Seton lost in their own thoughts. She wondered that she had stumbled into a fairytale in the pages of a book that some evil force had taken hold of the family and estate. What role did young Elijah play – doomed princeling, perhaps?
After dinner, the earl once again walked her across a silent lawn. The moon washed everything in pale silver light, and Mouse looked as though he had turned to burnished metal. The raven was missing from his accustomed perch on the brick wall, but Dawn assumed even her silent watcher eventually went home to roost. The book on local fauna said they nested in the Ravensblood tree, and she wondered if she ever made the middle of the maze, how many of the large black birds would she find?
At the cottage door, the earl took her hand in his and placed a kiss on her knuckles. Her skin tingled and wriggled as the imaginary seedling writhed inside her. Did he do this to all his employees? She imagined all the staff, including the rough stable hands, lined up for a goodnight kiss from the earl and she bit her lip to stop from laughing.
“Would you kiss all your gardeners goodnight?” she asked.
He stared at her, but at least he didn’t frown. “Only those that intrigued me. Good night, Miss Uxbridge.”
“Good night, Lord Seton,” she said and stepped into the cottage. He had denounced her for being a woman when she first arrived at the estate, but now she intrigued him.
A shaft of moonlight swept through the window and illuminated her hand. Dawn held it up as the vine appeared and looped its way around her wrist and across her forearm. A single leaf burst from its stem before it puffed out of existence.
Dawn rubbed her hand down her arm and over her knuckles. “I’m going mad.”
Impossible ideas swirled in Dawn’s head as she undressed for bed and hung up her gown. The story of Julian and Ava seemed achingly like the diary entry dated 1840. The earl obsessed with a woman who poisoned family and estate. Everything circled back to this particular piece of land. Thinking of land, Dawn needed to investigate if the soil was affected. Certainly something allowed the suffocating black vine to thrive.
The history of the estate was unfolding like one of her mother’s fanciful tales. Was it possible that the family was cursed, with the current members of the family doomed to re-enact the same ill-fated choices as their parents?
She brushed out her hair while she waited for Mouse to return from his toilet stop. Then he settled on the rug and Dawn climbed into bed. She eased the tiny diary out from its spot between two larger books and then crawled under the blankets. A lantern on the shelf behind her head cast a faint light over her shoulder as she flicked through the brittle pages, looking for passages similar to what she heard that evening.
At last she found the paragraph that gnawed at her mind… Today I worked with Lettie in the garden. It is rewarding to see things flourish under her care.
The first read through, she assumed she misread the handwriting and the narrator meant they worked with lettuce. Now she studied the diary in detail for clues about what occurred to start the estate on the path of neglect.
The problem with old accounts referring to noble families is that the earl was simply the earl. No first names were ever given, for that would be terribly inappropriate. Even the more formal Lord Seton didn’t tell the reader which one the author meant. Did he mean Julian, his father, or grandfather? Could the Lettie from forty years ago be a relative of Jasper’s? Letitia didn’t seem a terribly common name, but it could be one passed down through the family.
Dawn’s forays around the estate uncovered decades of neglect, not just a few years. Forty years unattended was possible, if Elijah’s father had died four decades ago. However, his son appeared to be in his late teens, not early forties. That left her with only two options. Either history had repeated itself and two tragedies occurred at the estate, one in 1840 and the other just prior to Elijah’s birth. Or secondly, members of the Seton family were far older than they appeared.
Here was a puzzle for her to solve. Was there more to this family and estate than met the eye? And what happened to Ava, Elijah’s mother? No one had said she also died, so could she be the presence Dawn had sensed in the hermitage?
She needed to determine if the people now on the estate saw the beginning of the garden’s deterioration forty years ago, or if it were mere coincidence. As a first step, she was going to ask Elijah’s actual age, as opposed to the age he appeared. She was also curious as to Lord Seton’s age. Was he in his twenties, as he appeared, or was there also a discrepancy between his chronological age and appearance? Finding Julian’s gravestone inscribed with his date of death would be convenient, but there was no family cemetery on the map of the estate.
Trying to figure out a solution reminded her of an experience a few years before. She had a period of feeling particularly healthy, almost like a normal child, and her parents took her to an outing at a gallery. They had an exhibition of optical illusions, and her parents thought staring at the paintings wouldn’t be too taxing on her constitution.
Dawn found that if one stared directly at an optical illusion, then it resisted all attempts to reveal its secret. One had to glance to the side and pretend you weren’t looking at the middle of the picture at all. Only then, did the image appear. This mystery was the same; she needed to worry at the edges, not confront it face on. And she knew exactly where to begin.
Hector.
The night time screaming only briefly interrupted Dawn’s sleep. She roused enough to acknowledge the eerie sound, then rolled over and ignored it. Yet she woke with fatigue sinking into her bones.
“It must be the extra exercise, that is all,” she told herself as she took a mouthful of tonic to revive her tired constitution. After breakfast, she found her workforce waiting in the courtyard and gave them jobs to complete in the walled garden.
Dawn watched them head off and then struck out on a different course. She walked the length of the herbaceous border as she considered her course of action, both in tackling the mystery of the family and in restoring the grounds to their former glory. Mouse was a constant presence at her side.
The border was a double length of weeds, patches of bare earth, and scraggly hedges that would have given the original gardener nightmares. The black vine snaked through the hedge, spreading fingers that caused the yew to grow at odd angles as it tried to escape the grasp holding it tight. Large patches were dead where the vine suffocated a branch.
“What did you do, Ava?” Dawn wondered aloud.
The vine rustled and slithered, much like a snake through undergrowth. No, it must just be the wind, blowing the yew and making the vine appear to move. Dawn lifted the hem of her skirt and stepped over the weeds and grass to stand closer to the vine where it laced through the hedge.
Mouse whimpered and sat at the edge of the bed, but didn’t venture any closer. His ears were pricked and his large eyes tracked Dawn’s movement.
“Ava,” she whispered.
Mouse leapt to his feet and yapped as the vine slid along the hedge. Did it move, or did it grow on hearing that word? Or it might be a pure coincidence as the hedge bent and bowed under the vine’s weight.
“Brussel sprouts,” she said, to no reaction at all. Not even a splutter of horror from either plant or wolfhound.