I leaned forward, needing to hear him say it out loud again. “You…you heard it too?”
“They usually roost quietly in the trees, but there’s something about a full moon… They wail all night long. I’m so sorry no one thought to warn you.”
“But I saw…I mean, I thought I saw…” I stopped short before I mentioned women in white dresses roaming the grounds. “You said they roost in trees?”
* * *
“They’re white!” I exclaimed as we entered the side garden.
In front of us, two peacocks strutted across the lawn, dragging trains of dotted feathers behind them, six feet long.
“Mother insists upon it,” Alexander said.
“Albino peacocks,” I murmured in wonder.
Yes. In the dark, under a full moon, I could have easily mistaken them for women. They were enormously tall, coming well past my waist. And their feathers…they trailed the birds as easily as a silk dress would.
“Not albinos,” he corrected. “They’re actually blue peafowl but a mutation drains their color away. See their eyes? Blue, not red. Our entire ostentation is made up of the leucistic whites. Though occasionally, a chick grows up and sprouts traces of blue or green mottled throughout their plumage. It’s called a pied.”
“What happens then?” I asked, glancing about the garden, hoping to catch a glimpse of such an unusual bird.
“We eat them,” Alex said, his voice deadpan.
I waited for him to laugh at the joke.
He didn’t.
I swallowed. “So…the noises last night…it was them?”
He nodded and as if on cue, one of the males tilted back his head and released a guttural shriek. Instantly, the hairs on my arms rose.
I let out a short laugh of relief. “You have no idea how good it is to hear that!”
“Is it?” Alexander asked, covering his ears.
“I’d pictured so many horrible things last night. I’d thought…” I hesitated, then pushed forward, ready to admit my fears. “I thought I was going mad.”
“If listening to that for half the night doesn’t drive you mad, nothing will,” he assured me as the other peacock responded to the first. He charged, shaking his body as the long train rose up into an impressive fan. Strange cream-colored eyes dotted the tips of each feather, staring with an unsettling blindness.
I watched the peacocks square off against one another, already mentally balling up my letter to Camille.
“It’s a beautiful morning,” Alex said, glancing up at the trail of cirrus clouds breaking up an otherwise perfect blue sky. “Should we take the long way back around the house before starting our session?”
“Please,” I agreed, following after him.
We rounded a corner, coming to the far side of the house. Another garden greeted us, full of pink and yellow blooms. Bees and hummingbirds danced in the early sunlight.
“What is that?” I asked, squinting past the low hedges bordering the area.
Alex peered in the direction I was staring. “Oh. That.” He angled his chair and took off down the path that would lead us closer to the strange shapes.
In the field past the garden, great mounds of earth rose up, softly rounded and covered in wild grasses. Some were long, spanning several yards, while others were broken into series of segments. There was no discernable pattern that I could see, but it was obvious that the mounds were meant to be something, a project half started before becoming abandoned and forgotten.
“That’s one of Father’s ideas that never quite took root.” Alex didn’t seem to notice the pun.
“What was it meant to be?”
“Roses. Father wanted to create a garden maze, made up entirely of roses. The mounds are supposed to help anchor the walls. Or something,” he said with a little shrug.
“That would be beautiful,” I said, picturing how Gerard must have envisioned it would become.
“He never could seem to make it work. The soil is never the right balance. Too much sun, not enough shade.” Alex shook his head. “It’s the one thing he’s never been able to grow properly, but every so often, a new mound will show up and he’ll start talking about trying to make the maze work again.”
I approached the mound closest to us, circling all the way around its mass. “They look oddly ominous, don’t they? Not flat enough to be a swell in the meadow, but not tall enough to be a proper hill.”
Alex began backing his chair down the path, expedition over. “My bedroom window faces this garden,” he said, pointing up toward the manor. “They gave me such nightmares as a child.”
I gave the mounds one final glance before trailing after him. “Nightmares?”
“Oh yes,” he laughed. “I often would stay up far too late, reading ghoulish tales by candlelight, long after Mother had tucked me into bed. My imagination was always running away from me.”
“What would you dream about?”
“I thought the mounds were full of bones,” he said, a wicked grin crossing his face. “I imagined them sprouting up out of the black earth and growing like the roses Father so badly wanted.” He raised his hands, twining his fingers together in a twisted knot.
“What an unsettling idea,” I murmured. Goose bumps rose across my arms despite the morning’s warmth.
“I was full of them as a boy,” he agreed, breaking the tangle apart before continuing to push himself toward the house.
A giant white form glided down from out of the trees and landed before us. The peacock rose to his full height, cocked his head, and let out a lingering cry.
* * *
“Leucistic,” I tried again from behind my easel, sketching out the base for a practice painting. After being chased from the gardens by the unhappy peacock, we’d moved to a small library on the second floor to begin our session.
“Leucistic,” Alexander repeated, drawing out the middle syllable.
“Leucissssssstic.”
“Better.”
“Such a strange thing.” I set my pencil aside and pulled free one of my wooden palettes.
“The word?” he asked, stretching his arms out before him and flexing his wrists.
“The concept. White birds that are meant to be blue…or are they blue birds that turned white?”
“Either, I suppose.”
I squeezed a series of paints in the center of the palette. Together they’d create the right shade of warmth for Alex’s skin.
“Why white? Aren’t the blues meant to be dazzling?”
“Mother had a leucistic as a girl. It was her favorite pet. When she became mistress over Chauntilalie, she thought they’d better fit the manor’s aesthetic. Father agreed. They’ve spent years refining the group. Only the birds with the mutation are allowed to grow to reproductive maturity.”
I started blending the colors together. “So they’ve weeded out an entire line of…of genetic material,” I stammered, the words and concepts feeling foreign on my tongue, “just for decoration?”
Alex’s face shifted, showing everything he thought of the practice in one distasteful grimace. “Indeed. Can you see now why I’m so keen to add the alyssum to my crest?”