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But even on the hard days like this, she relished her role as owner and editor of the magazine, and wouldn’t give it up for anything. All the work could be done from her desk in the parlor, and then Garrett would take her packets of papers and notes and mail them to the office in Portland. It gave her a sense of fulfillment, like maybe her solitary life on the hill wasn’t completely fruitless and without merit.
She had worked hard to achieve success as the magazine’s owner. There were half a dozen editors and businessmen who would have been only too happy to see her stripped of her position. So what if her ownership was the result of a technicality? Nathaniel had thought that, should anything happen to him, the magazine would be safest in her name, somewhere competitors couldn’t get at it. She suppressed a grim laugh. If he’d had any idea when he would die, and in the manner he had, no less, he never would have taken the liberty.
“Duchess, you may have cost us the next Shelley or Byron,” Sophronia muttered as she tried to peel the inky pages apart in vain. Duchess gave her an unapologetic glare from the windowsill.
Crouching down, she set all the salvageable pages in front of the grate to dry, and rocked back on her heels. Her vision began to swim as she stared down at her hands, and for a moment they were not stained in black ink, but crimson blood. So much blood...beneath her nails, crusted into her cuticles, smeared across her face. Just like on that fateful night.
The smell of damp earth filled her nostrils, and she could feel the unforgiving wind biting at her cheeks, though the fire was licking away in the grate. Clean, clean... She had to wash her hands, scrub them until they were pink and innocent again before anyone saw and realized what she had done. Heart racing, she rushed to the kitchen sink, pouring scalding water out from the kettle and mercilessly scouring the offending flesh.
The waking nightmare didn’t break until her hands were raw and burned, the skin singing with pain. She jumped back from the sink, trembling with how quickly the chimera had come on. A nervous laugh threatened to erupt, but she held it in. God, what a foolish creature she could be.
A breath of fresh air would revive her and clear away the bad memories. She gave her hands one last harsh wipe on a towel, and then went and fetched her cloak and bonnet and steeled herself to face the outside world.
She pushed the door open. The first few steps outside the house were always the hardest, but if she could just get a little momentum, then by the time she was out the door she could keep going, at least a little ways.
If it wasn’t for the quiver of movement from the breeze, she would have completely missed the sliver of black marking the door. Slowly, she took a step back into the foyer, her gaze trained on the door and the alien object attached to it.
Below the elaborate brass knocker, a long, black feather hung from a nail.
With a trembling hand, Sophronia slowly reached out and touched it, half-hoping that it would be as fleeting and insubstantial as the delusion that had just gripped her in the kitchen. But the soft bristles met her fingers with heart-sinking solidity.
Sophronia’s blood ran cold as she jerked her hand back. It had been still and quiet in the house all morning. How had someone managed to hammer in the nail without her hearing anything?
It was as if whoever had left the ravens had read the doubts in her mind and wanted to make certain that she understood none of this was coincidence or an accident. This was as bold a statement as Martin Luther nailing his theses to the church door. This was a declaration, but of what?
In a fit of panic, Sophronia tried to pry the nail from the door. When it wouldn’t budge, she snatched at the feather, sending torn black filaments floating to the ground. But the quill would not budge.
“Blast it.” She would have to ask Garrett to pry out the nail and patch the hole. At least it could be easily fixed, and Garrett was nothing if not discreet.
But that was little comfort to Sophronia, who felt as if the world were pressing in around her. Felt as if eyes watched her every movement, even through the walls of the house. If she had thought that the change she had felt coming to Pale Harbor was to be positive, then it seemed she was sorely mistaken. Now it was a growing sense of dread that hung over her, as if a predator was circling just beyond her line of sight, slowly closing in on her.
With a letter in his pocket, Gabriel wandered down toward the harbor, looking for the post. It was a small town, with most of the homes and buildings rising up from the edges of the water, clinging to the salty lifeblood that provided its food and industry. His walk took him past the same run-down houses he had seen the previous week, now benevolently gilded in gentle sunlight. He had been in Pale Harbor for a week now, meeting with the townspeople, cleaning out the church and generally gathering his bearings. But it still felt wrong, and he no more felt that he belonged in Pale Harbor than he had in Concord without Anna.
Restless and a little homesick, the night before he had written to the only person in Concord he considered a friend, Tom Ellroy. Tom, who he had known since they were both boys running wild through the Massachusetts countryside, had stuck by him through thick and thin, and there had been plenty of thin, especially when they’d both joined the navy on a boyish whim. Gabriel had four older sisters, and Tom was the brother he’d never had. Tom alone was privy to Gabriel’s reasons for coming to Pale Harbor and the deception he had practiced in getting here.
The morning dawned dry and warm, a crystal-clear September day. Dirt mingled with sand, and every breath carried with it the faint promise of the great ocean beyond. Gabriel was small and inconsequential, a drop of salt water among many in the seaside town, and how liberating it was. In the light of day, the dark discovery in the church seemed far away, and his awkward dinner with the Marshalls insignificant. Maybe he would not be a success as a minister, but he had come this far, and if nothing else, it would be the fresh start he so desperately needed.
Despite the fair weather, the waterfront was quiet, subdued. Only a few small boats bobbed in the placid water, and a handful of dockworkers leisurely unloaded nets full of fish. Mr. Marshall had told Gabriel that twenty-five years ago, Pale Harbor would have been a bustling port, with all sorts of languages being spoken as ships unloaded their goods from lands as far away as China. But the war with the British in 1812 and the subsequent closing of trade routes had strangled the cosmopolitan breath from the town, leaving it choked and withered.
Gabriel ambled down to the water, watching seagulls squabble over a dropped fish. Despite his pledge to take all the rain as a penance, he was enjoying the early autumn sun on his face.
He found two young men taking a rest from unloading crates on the dock, their shirts stuck to their backs with perspiration, their sleeves rolled to the elbows. When he asked them where he could post a letter, they directed him to the dry goods store on the other side of town.
He thanked them and was about to turn to leave. He knew he should introduce himself, tell them about the new church. That’s what a minister was supposed to do. But the idea of proselytizing made him shrink into his skin, and despite days of practicing in front of the mirror, he still tripped over his words and came across as a fool. They would probably scoff at him, just as the Marshalls surely had as soon as Gabriel had left their home, and he couldn’t bear to hear Anna’s dearest beliefs disparaged.
“Not from around here, are you?”
Stopping in his tracks, Gabriel reluctantly turned back. He took a fortifying breath. “No, not from around here.”
The man who spoke had light brown skin and a musical voice with an island lilt. “Thought you might not be local,” he said. “Not with that accent.”
Gabriel hadn’t bothered trying to disguise the brusqueness of his lower-class voice; he felt comfortable here on the docks in a way he hadn’t in the Marshalls’ dining room. But apparently he had been found out as an outsider anyway.
“Might as well be from Dixie,” rejoined the other man.
“Concord,” Gabriel told them, and then added, “Massachusetts. My name is Gabriel Stone.”
“Well, Gabriel Stone from Concord, I’m Manuel,” said the man with the lilting voice. “And this useless lug is Jasper.”
Jasper nodded his introduction. He was young, red-haired and pale, with a smattering of freckles. “You’re the one taking over the old church, then?” he asked Gabriel without preamble.
“That’s right.” Gabriel hoped that his curt response would be the end of it, but Jasper was giving him an assessing look, and both of the men’s curiosity seemed to be piqued.
Manuel raised a brow. “What is it you’ll be preaching?”
Damn it. Gabriel had memorized his little speech, which he had given some dozen or so times in the past week. Unsurprisingly, it came out mechanical and dry.
“Transcendentalism. It’s the belief that God is in nature, and that the answers of the universe can be found within man instead of without. The spirit comes from nature and so knows more than our minds. It’s, uh...” He paused, trying to remember all the correct words. “It’s very popular in Concord,” he finished lamely.
There was painful silence until Manuel finally said, “Meaning no disrespect, but you don’t do much in the way of putting a polish on your creed. If Saint Peter had been as ho-hum in his preaching, then I doubt Jesus would have had a church to name him the rock of.”
The man was right, of course. Without conviction in his words, Gabriel came off as a charlatan. “Well, if you change your minds, you’re always welcome.” He was just about to turn to leave when Jasper stopped him again.
“Seeing as you’re new here, you wouldn’t happen to be looking for some help around the house, would you? A cook, maybe?”
“I might. Why?” Gabriel had imagined that he would keep his own council, moving about an empty house as a monk might a cell, reveling in the solitude. But the mundane day-to-day tasks of keeping a house were proving a drudgery, and the night crept in so close and thick that he longed for some sound other than the groaning of the wind. A light footstep around the house would be welcome, and that was to say nothing of a hot meal. For the past week, he’d been subsisting entirely on bread and molasses and the charity of the townsfolk, the latter of which he was eager to stop using.
“My sister, Fanny, she needs a new position.”
“Does she have references?”
Jasper’s sharp green eyes darkened. “She works up at the castle for that woman,” he said, barely able to choke out the last word.
Gabriel looked between the two men, brow raised. “Woman?”
Manuel gave a jerk of his head toward the hill. “Mrs. Carver,” he said. “The widow.”
Her name had now made its way to his ears several times over the course of the past week, usually in conjunction with the shaking of heads and disdainful grimaces. The people here spoke as if the devil himself was in their midst, and Gabriel was growing more and more curious about this almost mythical figure.
“It’s not a fit place for a young lady of her birth to work,” Jasper continued, his jaw tight. “Me and my sister might be fallen on hard times, but we’re of good stock, and it’s beneath her to be scrubbing away and laundering for the likes of her.”
Mr. Marshall’s warning came back to him. “People here really believe she killed her husband, then?”
Manuel spat in the dirt and went back to unloading crates without a word.
“She’s as guilty as sin,” Jasper said, his gaze still trained somewhere past the hill. “She’s the worst sort of fraud, living in her grand house like a lady, as if she’s better than the rest of us. Meanwhile, her hands are stained with blood.”
“I see,” Gabriel said, surprised at the force of the young man’s words.
“She doesn’t leave her grounds, thinks she’s too good to mix with the likes of us. But she’s not too good to work Fanny like a slave.”
Gabriel rubbed at his jaw, considering the proposition. “Send your sister to the church cottage tomorrow, and I’ll see what I can do.”
The distant, steely look in Jasper’s eyes softened into genuine relief and gratitude, and he took Gabriel’s hand, shaking it heartily. “I will. Thank you, sir.”
Gabriel said goodbye to the men and left them to their work. But instead of continuing to the post, he looped the long way around from the docks so Jasper wouldn’t see where he was going.
He wasn’t sure why he found himself drawn to the house on the hill, but his feet carried him there as if they knew the answer. For the first time in months, Gabriel’s mind was preoccupied with something other than his loss, his restless heart. He wanted to know why everyone here seemed so very determined to keep him away from the widow who lived on the hill. And if the people of Pale Harbor would give him only fairy stories and gossip about the notorious Mrs. Carver, then he would get the real story himself.
The trees hid what a grand house it really was, with its two-story facade of glass windows facing the harbor, flanked with ostentatious turrets in the Gothic style. The confusion of architectural styles and additions gave it a certain vernacular charm, but it was far from the secluded, ramshackle estate he had envisioned. The grounds teemed with activity: a squirrel chittered nervously in a tree, the grass had been raked free of fallen leaves, and the garden beds were mulched and fresh. From somewhere around back came the rhythmic pounding of an ax. For a house that had created such unease in the town, it was remarkably benign in all appearances.
A movement flickered above him from the windows, and Gabriel stopped short, craning his head up. The curtain in the window stirred, and then fell back into place, but not before he’d glimpsed the sliver of a face.
If Gabriel had thought the Marshalls wealthy and above him, their home was nothing compared to the scale of Castle Carver. What in the hell was he thinking? What would he possibly say to this woman? But he had come this far, and his curiosity had reached a peak. Gabriel took the five shallow brick steps that led up to the front door and knocked.
There was no answer. He stepped back to crane his head up to the windows again, but it was still, and no one peered back down at him. Perhaps it was true what they said: not that she was a witch, of course, but that she was a recluse, a madwoman.
The sound of the ax splitting wood had stopped, and just as Gabriel was reluctantly going back down the steps, he ran into a weathered old man, clutching an ax in his meaty hands.
“Excuse me. I’m looking for—”
“Mrs. Carver don’t take callers,” the man said. “You’re wasting your time knocking.”
Everything in the man’s posture indicated that he didn’t want Gabriel to linger for a second longer on the grounds. But Gabriel wasn’t in a hurry. He crossed his arms and squinted up into the cloudless sky. “Unnaturally warm weather, isn’t it?”
“Don’t bother me,” the man said with a scowl.
Ignoring the man’s contempt, Gabriel asked, “So you work for Mrs. Carver, then?”
The man tilted his bristled chin up defiantly. “That’s right. And she wouldn’t want some busybody skulking ’bout her property.”
There was something about the imposing house that tugged at Gabriel, beckoned him. “A bandage,” he said, lifting his hand and showing off a miniscule scrape on the palm. He had gotten it while hauling debris from the church and had all but forgotten about it. “I cut myself and need a bandage.” He was sure that if he could just get inside that he would see her, that he could put his curiosity to rest.
The man stared at him with incredulous scorn. “This ain’t a hospital!”
This was maddening. He was a minister trying to call on an old widow, not a thief walking up to a jewel vault in broad daylight. But before Gabriel could let his temper get the better of him, there was a rattle at the door, and then it opened, revealing the widow herself.
Now here was a woman who might have been the picture of widowhood in an illustrated encyclopedia. From her high-necked black dress to the tightly pulled-back hair to the disapproving pucker in her brow, she radiated severity. Though at about forty, she was younger than the white-haired and bent-backed old woman that he had been imagining.
“What do you want?” she snapped, her voice husky and brittle with irritation.
Clearing his throat, Gabriel stepped forward. “Mrs. Carver, my name is Gabriel Stone. I’m the new minister and—”
She said something that he couldn’t hear, and Gabriel stopped. “What?”
The lines around her mouth tightened. “I said, I’m not Mrs. Carver.”
“I...” Gabriel looked around at the vast, rolling grounds of the estate, the unmistakable cupola atop the great house. This was Castle Carver, he was sure of it. If this stern woman in dark dress wasn’t the infamous widow, who was she?
“Do you know where I might find her?”
“She doesn’t take callers,” the woman said, echoing the groundskeeper’s pronouncement, and moving to close the door. “Now be off with you.”
Too stunned to say anything, Gabriel just stood there as the door started to swing shut. Perhaps everything he had heard about Mrs. Carver was an exaggeration. She wasn’t a murderous witch, but was probably old and infirm, cared for by this brusque nurse. In the absence of regular sightings, the townspeople must have built up a legend around her.
Coming to Castle Carver had been a distraction, but now it was over and he would have to go back to his cottage and sit alone with his memories. Gabriel was just about to leave when a voice stopped him. It was light and feminine, musical.
“All right, Helen, that’s enough,” the voice said as the door swung back open. “I’ll not have a man collapse on my front step for want of a bandage.”
5
“I... Excuse me, but I was looking for a Mrs. Carver?”
The man was huge: tall, with broad shoulders, a gently squared jaw and a low, gravelly voice. She had only hesitated a moment before deciding to go to the door; if whoever had been leaving her the nasty surprises had decided to show up on her doorstep, they certainly wouldn’t have announced themselves. Beyond that, only one other kind of person would call on her, and that was someone who wasn’t from Pale Harbor. And that had to be the new minister that Helen said everyone was talking about. But with a dusting of light brown beard and shadowed eyes, he looked as if he had just lumbered off the docks, not come from a church. Suppressing her own surprise at the man who looked more like a sailor than a minister, Sophronia raised a brow.
“And you have found her,” she said with a gracious smile.
The man opened and closed his mouth a few times, and then looked behind him, as if checking to make sure that he had indeed come to the right house.
“I... My name is Gabriel Stone. The new minister.” He paused, and she let him stew in his confusion for another moment. “I’m sorry, but I thought that you...” He trailed off.
“Oh, don’t tell me,” she said with a sigh, “that you’ve been to dine with the Marshalls or the Wigginses already.”
Reddening, he started to explain himself, but she gave an airy wave. “No, no, you mustn’t apologize. They’re all well-meaning, but they haven’t the highest opinion of me. I suppose that goes for most of the town, as well. Please, come in.”
He was rather handsome in a rough sort of way, but when he passed her in the doorway, she couldn’t help her instinct to shrink back. He was so tall, so...big. Life with Nathaniel had taught her that men were dangerous creatures, and here she was, inviting a giant specimen inside her house. Closing the door behind him, she took a breath and drew herself up to her full height. Garrett was chopping wood in the yard, and Helen was nearby. She had nothing to fear. Besides, he was a man of the church.
“You’ll have to forgive Garrett and Helen their manners,” Sophronia said, giving him an apologetic smile. “We don’t do much entertaining nowadays.”
That was an understatement. They had never done much entertaining, even when Nathaniel was alive. But ever since learning that the town was to have a new minister, she had felt her heart lightening, a flicker of hope growing in her chest. People left Pale Harbor, but few came, and even fewer of those were anybody other than a poor fisherman down on his luck. Here was a man who hailed from Concord, the epicenter of all the exciting new schools of thought. If anyone could bring fresh ideas to Pale Harbor and persuade the townspeople to leave off in their superstitious ways, it would be him.
The minister followed her mutely, obediently. It was a strange sensation to feel the presence of a body behind her, in her space. Strange, yet not altogether unpleasant.
She led him to the parlor, her favorite room, with its circular walls studded with paintings and plush furniture upholstered in golds and greens. The parlor was also the Safest room in the house, thanks to the charms Helen insisted on hiding around the threshold, and the salt she was always sprinkling. It occupied the ground floor of the turret, so it was cozy and had only one door leading in and out to the hall. Cozy, beautiful, Safe.
“Please, have a seat.” She turned to clear some papers she had been reading off the sofa. When she turned around, the minister was lowering himself into the large armchair. Nathaniel’s old chair.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Not that one!”
He shot up like a bullet. “Oh... I didn’t... I’m so sorry.”
His cheeks flamed red and he looked genuinely distressed. What was wrong with her? He couldn’t possibly know the rules, and here she was proving the townspeople right in their belief that she was a madwoman. She took a deep breath.
“No, I’m sorry. It’s just...that was my husband’s chair.” She paused, twining her fingers together. “No one sits there anymore.”
“Oh.” He flicked his gaze to the chair behind him and then cleared his throat. “I didn’t realize.”
She forced a tight smile. “Of course not. Here,” she said, pulling up another chair and patting the back. “This one is more comfortable.”
Sophronia seated herself on the sofa, compulsively smoothing out her skirts. It had been so long since anyone besides Helen or Fanny had sat in the parlor, let alone an attractive man around her own age. Her pulse fluttered like a butterfly, but she was determined to be cool and composed. He might be a great thinker, but she had always been an excellent conversationalist, given the chance.
But the minister was silent, clasping his hands on his knees and looking exceedingly uncomfortable. Goodness, she knew the townspeople would have painted her in an unfavorable light, but what exactly had they told him to make the poor man look as if he were about to have a leg amputated?
She would just have to draw him out. “I heard you were making the rounds through Pale Harbor,” she said. “I wondered when I would find you at my door.”
He had been looking at her with unmasked curiosity, but at this he dipped his head and dropped his gaze under the fringe of his golden-brown hair. “I should have called sooner, but—”
With a wave of the hand she stopped him from having to make some paper-thin excuse. “No matter. I am very glad to meet you now.” And then, because she couldn’t help herself, she gave him a conspiratorial smile. “I’m not what you were expecting, am I?”
His gaze shot back up to meet hers, his lips parting as if in surprise at her frankness. He had full, sensual lips. They softened some of the roughness of his demeanor, and Sophronia had to force herself not to stare. She rushed on before he had a chance to respond.