Glancing back to the other graves, a sinking feeling weighed him down. His hands clutched the stone. Separated from your family, are you?
Just like he was.
No wonder the boy’s spirit clung to the house. He’d died young, so young, and hadn’t wanted to lose his family. He had so much more to give . . . and he must have gotten the full brunt of his ancestors’ magical abilities, given all the spells he could cast. Come to think of it, the mischief of Whimbrel House very much seemed like the workings of a twelve-year-old boy.
No wonder he’d been so miserable when Merritt arrived! He’d been alone for so long . . . he was likely depressed, hurt, and angry. God knew Merritt would have been. Even the surveyors had separated him from his family—if they’d known about him, he’d have been on that family tree Hulda had found.
Standing, Merritt crossed back to the line of sisters and gingerly set Owein’s marker beside Helen’s.
He didn’t leave. He sat there, crouched in the dirt, staring at that worn gravestone, smaller than all the rest. How long ago had it been misplaced? How long had it been facedown in the muck?
Owein was just an angry little boy trying his best. Trying to remember what it meant to be a part of something.
After some time, grass-crunching footsteps approached. “Mr. Fernsby?” Hulda asked. “Are you ill?”
“Found him.” His voice was barely louder than the sparrows’ distant calls. He gestured to the stone. “It was turned about, over there.”
Hulda gasped and crossed to him, crouching to read the stone for herself. “O . . . Owen?”
“Owein. Owein Mansel.”
“Brilliant!” she cried. “I knew it had to be one of the children. Fortunately, I have two more spell sheets. I can prepare—”
“Leave him.” Merritt rubbed his hands together, flaking off dried mud. Then he stood, blood rushing back into his legs, and started for the house.
After a moment, Hulda hurried after him. “Mr. Fernsby? Leave him?”
Merritt gestured toward . . . nothing in particular. “He’s just a boy.”
Hulda hesitated. “His spirit is centuries old.”
“True.” He stepped over a rotting log. “But I understand the lad.”
Several seconds passed before Hulda repeated, softer, “Understand?”
He nodded. “Why he’d want to stay . . . He went too soon. Maybe he got sick. Who knows?” He put his hands in his pockets. “But he was separated from his family before he was ready. If one can ever be ready for that. Just like me.”
Hulda stopped in her tracks. “Merritt . . . ,” she began.
He paused and turned around, leaving about three paces between them. Did she realize she’d used his first name? Any other time, he might have been pleased.
She’d asked after the story before, hadn’t she? Merritt was feeling oddly sentimental. He wasn’t himself, which was the only reason he said anything at all. “I was eighteen when my father wrote me off. Got a girl pregnant. Or I thought I did.”
Hulda’s eyes widened.
He rubbed the back of his head. A single, dry chuckle worked its way up his throat. “Goodness, I never tell this story. It sounds so strange out loud.”
She swallowed. “You don’t have to.”
“But you want to know, don’t you?” He peered past her to Owein’s grave, already hidden by the grass. “I loved her. Got carried away. My father was so wroth with me. He always was, more than my sisters. Never really understood why. He wrote me off there and then. Forbade me from coming home. From speaking to my mother . . .” He felt a lump forming in his throat and coughed to clear it.
“But I was going to make it right, with or without him.” He glanced to the eastern horizon. “I got myself a job, even a ring. Not a nice one, mind you, but she seemed happy enough to wear it. And then one morning she was gone. Left for music school, was all her parents told me. That, and she never was pregnant. Just a scare. Refused to tell me where she went. They never did like me.”
Hulda didn’t respond. He hadn’t expected her to. How does one react to that? To learning someone is so wretched that their adolescent sweetheart left him without word?
Without daring to look at her, Merritt added, “Owein stays,” and he ventured to the house alone, the wind teasing his hair, the whimbrels crying his arrival.
Chapter 19
September 20, 1846, Blaugdone Island, Rhode Island
Hulda should have been up and about by now. She always strove to be the first one to rise in any house she occupied. No sense in wasting daylight or being unavailable when needed. But her mattress felt very deep this morning, her blankets especially warm, her thoughts particularly insistent.