Foxglove (Belladonna, #2)(9)
Blythe tore her gaze away, breathing so heavily that the maid took Blythe’s hands to steady her. Every inch of Blythe’s body went cold.
“Miss?” Elaine whispered. “Miss Hawthorne, are you well?”
This time Blythe did scream, her heart lodged in her throat as she spun away from the woman’s skeletal touch. Except… there was nothing skeletal about it. The Elaine who stood before her was the one Blythe had always known. Even when Blythe glanced from the maid to the mirror once more, the reflected Elaine was full-bodied and—aside from the red-rimmed and glossy eyes—appeared to be in perfect health.
Blythe swallowed. If she wasn’t dreaming, then perhaps she was delirious from lack of sleep? She looked pointedly away from Elaine, trying to settle her stomach before her sickness spilled onto the floor and she gave Elaine a reason to remain in her room even a second longer.
“A break would do you some good.” Blythe’s voice trembled with every forced word as she tried to cast away the oddity of what she’d just witnessed. “You ought to take the day off.”
The last time Blythe had seen hallucinations… No. She couldn’t be getting poisoned again. She refused to even consider it.
“That’s kind of you, but I wouldn’t dream of it,” Elaine said. “What kind of person would I be if I were to leave you and your cousin now?” As Blythe sat down, Elaine crouched to help work off her long white gloves. It took everything in Blythe not to flinch as Elaine’s fingers grazed her bare skin.
Cold. Elaine’s fingers were so, so cold.
Elaine, fortunately, made quick work of the task and rose to her feet. “I’m not much of a fan of idle time anyways. Especially these days.” She spoke those last words so ominously that Blythe understood at once that she was referring to all that had happened within Thorn Grove as of late. The rumors of spirits or ghosts or whatever one wanted to call them, and the strange string of murders.
Only… after what she’d just seen in the mirror, Blythe hesitated to call them rumors. She looked to Elaine once more, squinting. No longer could she see a sickly pallor, or the stirrings of a blight. Elaine’s voice, too, was back to normal. It was as though Blythe had imagined the whole thing.
“Thank you for your help,” Blythe said in a tone of sharp dismissal. She turned away and tapped her fingers against one hip just to have something else to focus on. Surely, her mind was playing tricks on her. She’d had champagne at the party, and the day had been long and exhausting. That had to be all it was. “I’ll see you at breakfast.”
Elaine curtsied before seeing herself out, and the moment the door shut behind her, a deep fatigue settled into Blythe’s bones.
Perhaps the party had been too much too soon after her illness. She couldn’t make it to the bed, but instead reached for her tea and a cranberry scone, too sweet for her liking, to shove into her mouth. As she chewed, she hoped that by the time she rose for breakfast, her father would be safely back at Thorn Grove, all would be well, and the unfortunate day would forever be a thing of the past.
FOUR
SIGNA HAD LITTLE IDEA HOW MANY PEOPLE WERE LEFT AT THORN Grove these days. Elijah had culled the majority of the staff after Blythe’s illness, leaving only those he trusted most and those the girls vouched for personally, like Elaine. A few new staff had been hired, of course, as they still needed help to tend to the horses and to clean the sprawling manor. But as Signa walked the dreary halls in the still-gray hours of the morning, passing looming portraits of long-deceased Hawthornes, she couldn’t help but think that the manor felt eerily similar to a graveyard with so many memories of its past residents imbued into the walls and not a single living soul in sight. Signa wouldn’t have been surprised if, after Lord Wakefield’s death, the staff had packed their belongings and headed elsewhere to find new employment.
There was at least one silver lining—whatever illness Signa had succumbed to the night prior seemed to have passed quickly. She’d buried her bloodied gloves in the yard and cast them from her mind. She couldn’t die, after all, and had been under insurmountable stress lately. Perhaps it was a passing illness. Perhaps it was poison. Or perhaps it was something that would require more thought than she was ready to give it.
As Signa made her way down the stairs for breakfast, she was relieved to see that the table had been set for her, meaning that someone else was, in fact, still at the manor. Perhaps alerted by the noise of her chair sliding against the wood as she took her seat, Warwick emerged from the kitchen wearing spectacles low on the bridge of his nose. Behind them were haunted, bloodshot eyes. Signa was certain the only reason her own eyes did not mirror his heavily shadowed ones was because, for her, none of the recent events felt new or surprising. She might not have anticipated Fate’s arrival, but she should have known her life would never be easy. Perhaps she should change her way of thinking to instead always anticipate the worst, and to be pleasantly surprised if nothing horrible happened.
“Good morning, Miss Farrow.” When the words came out in a croak, Warwick cleared his throat and tried again. “Shall I fetch your breakfast?”
Signa glanced around at the empty chairs, unsettled by the unnerving quiet. “Why don’t you eat with me, Warwick?” she asked despite knowing there were probably more than a hundred silly societal rules about the inappropriateness of such a suggestion. “Has there been word of Byron or Elijah?”