Alan wanted Jack so much his bones were on fire with it. He was ready for the pot to spill over. Anything at all could happen after this game was done.
After a full hour, they’d found one of the three feathers—tucked almost out of sight between floorboards in the attic—and had collected in their pockets a pile of items for the list’s prompts.
They were down in Cheetham Hall’s long, narrow wine cellars, Jack tugging bottles free to peer behind them and laughing at Alan’s explanation that Jack’s shadow was the perfect solution to Something taller than the tallest one of you. Alan glanced at his hand, watching for the list to glow red and vanish—the signal that the game had ended—and heard someone shouting, “Hawthorn!”
Both he and Jack looked up. Maud and Violet were at the entrance to the cellar and hurrying towards them, guidelights bouncing gently along.
“Could be an ambush,” Alan said. “You hit them with a stick, I’ll run away with our goods.”
“Where are those thieving instincts, Cesare?” said Jack. “I’ll hear them out, and you pick their pockets.”
“Deal.”
“Hawthorn, finally,” Maud said on arrival. She looked hectic and was clutching at her sides. “Oh, dear. Violet, I can’t. I—” And she dissolved into giggles, through which she gasped apologies.
“Maud found a ghost,” said Violet. In the dimness of the cellar, her guidelight rendered her hair the exact shade of the primrose wine. “We were around the side of the vegetable garden—there was a gate, and it wasn’t locked, so we went looking for a feather in there, and Maud’s voice changed—”
“Do you think a ghost would count as something useless?” Maud started giggling again. It had a breathless, hysterical edge now. “But we—she—”
“We think it’s Lady Elsie,” said Violet in a rush. “No. I—I’m sure of it. Hawthorn. Your sister is haunting your house.”
25
The bottle Jack was touching shattered.
It was not a loud shattering, or a violent one. The glass simply fell apart, as if along pre-carved lines of weakness. Its contents trickled down through the bottle’s shards, through the wooden grid and the many dusty bottles beneath, and began to seep onto the floor.
Jack looked at his fingertips. Two drops of red wine sat there as if someone had pricked him with a needle.
Violet’s words were falling through Jack like stones through water. He fumbled after them. His heart was steady in his chest, and he wanted it to explode. He wanted to laugh. He wanted to tear up all the trees on the grounds, expose their roots, and leave them naked and smarting.
Your sister.
“Hawthorn?” said Maud. “I’ll—if you want to speak to her, I can—”
“Be quiet,” said Jack savagely. He looked up. “I can’t deal with this tonight.”
Maud started to say something else. So did Violet. Alan was silent and still, his hand pressed over the pocket that held the feather they’d found. Something in Jack shuddered with absolute despair. Even then it was looser, lighter, than it should have been. He should have been feeling more.
“No,” he said. To all of them. To all of it. “Tomorrow.”
He walked out of the cellars alone, and up to his rooms alone, and undressed himself with numb fingers. The list on his hand glowed and died. His guidelight settled in its keeper and made shadows of the room, and Jack lay awake in his bed as his buoyant primrose happiness went to indescribable war with the rest of his emotions. The curtains shivered with his heartbeat. The air of the room pressed against his face. His ears rang with nothing.
Finally the wine’s effect seeped away from him, leaving the heavy exhaustion of stretching out beneath sunshine on soft grass after a lazy picnic lunch. Even the comedown was pleasant, with Polly’s treasured primrose wine.
Still Jack lay there, and lay there, and thought about his sister Elsie and the year before her death, and fell restlessly asleep only a scant few hours before dawn.
Nobody disturbed him. Nobody woke him for breakfast or knocked with a tray. By the time he stirred and called for Oliver, shaved and dressed, and made his way downstairs, Adelaide had gone—heading to London to deal with the ashes, physical and figurative, of Spinet House.
There were two days left before the equinox gala. All their existing problems were still there, despite those hours of brief and uncomplicated happiness that Polly had gifted to them.
And Jack’s dead sister might be a ghost. Might have been a ghost all these years. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t considered the possibility before.
You ran, hissed the voice of his shame. You ran from the house and the land, and from magic. You were running from her ghost all along, even before you knew it might be able to speak.
Jack gathered all the strength he had and went to talk to his mother.
“It’s your decision,” Lady Cheetham said at once.
Jack swallowed the howlingly unfair wish that she would take the decision away from him. He’d have resented her forever if she’d tried. “Even so,” he said. “Tell me what you want, Polly.”
Lady Cheetham was quiet. They were in the conservatory, which was gentle with light; it was a cloudy day, but not an oppressive one. No sign that any magicians would need to be summoned to keep away the rain.
“I would think,” she said eventually, “that a ghost cannot be secret-bound. Curses end with death, and a bind is a curse. I want to know what it is that you can’t tell me, Jack, about what my brother did to you both.” She had the tense steadiness of someone walking a tightrope and knowing the cost if they were to fall. “But I do not need to know. It will not change the past. It will not bring her back. And part of me is afraid to know precisely what I failed to protect my girl from.” She was wobbling by the end of it, tears thickening her voice.
“No,” said Jack harshly. “None of it had anything to do with you.”
“Nonsense. I was her mother,” said Lady Cheetham. She reached out and squeezed Jack’s hand, once. “Only you know what you want, and what you need. I leave it in your hands. I’m sorry.”
Jack could hear voices elsewhere in the house. He wasn’t ready for anyone else. He went out through the gamekeeper’s pantry, into the breeze of the day, and let his feet lead him to the latched gate in the grey stone wall, behind which his twin sister had leapt to her death.
He stood in front of the gate for nearly a minute, fighting to breathe.
Then he turned away and went instead to the beehives. He stood in front of them, eyes closed, swaying a little on the uneven lawn. The rise and fall of their buzzing was like small waves breaking on the pebbles of a beach, washing the worst of Jack’s fear away.
“I don’t know what to do,” Jack said aloud.
A twig broke behind him and he turned. Alan stood there, a dark shape against the green lawn, topped with wind-blown curls. Today he wore a dark red waistcoat that Jack had last fit into around age fourteen.
“You’re following me now?” Jack snapped.
“Yes,” said Alan. “I expect you’re in the mood to fight with anyone who comes near, and at least I might enjoy it.”