The Gilded Cage Page 8

  “I wouldn’t. Is he your beau, then?”

  “He’s my fiancé,” she says, marveling at the exotic word on her tongue. “We’ll be married someday, when he’s been promoted. Not that we assume a promotion! But we hope.”

  I feel a discrediting prickle of envy, coveting the simple, unbroken state of my dressing maid’s hopes. “I would that it happens just as you wish,” I say, smiling as best as I can.

  CHAPTER 10

  AS SOON AS Elsie is out of view, I dash from bed, button myself into the simplest of the new-smelling black mourning dresses Grace had made for me, and tiptoe into the hallway. My heart ticks uneasily when I reach for the doorknob, but it opens easily. Stella would most certainly whine if I left her behind, so I let her pad along beside me.

  Undetected, I walk to George’s chambers. I expect to be flooded with sadness when I open the door, but the room no longer holds any trace of him. It’s as flat and indifferent as a stranger’s lodgings, filled with the bright new things that he barely touched. Only the painting retains any trace of him, still sitting grimly on its easel in the center of the sitting room. I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for here, but when I study the painting afresh, I find it.

  There’s something within its painted surface that I didn’t see before: in the distance, on the left-hand side, the very edge of Walthingham’s walls intrudes into the image. The dried paint feels grainy under my fingertips. I imagine George bending his head to his work, sketching in Walthingham, painting layers of gray over ghostly white branches. Did an approaching shadow fall over his canvas? Did someone call his name? A stranger, or someone he knew, someone he trusted? Using a dull painting knife, I slice the canvas raggedly from its frame.

  Downstairs, now wrapped in my heavy cloak, I slip through a side door, clutching the rolled canvas and the painting knife—for protection or for luck, I’m not sure which. I hear the buzz of Grace and the housekeeper making their plans as I exit. “Please clear the flowers away, Mrs. Whiting,” says Grace in a tone of light regret. “We needn’t ask our guests to dwell on the family’s loss.”

  Her words cut me. The elaborate mourning customs of English society dictate that I wear black for half a year—yet my heart, hidden beneath dark crepe, is expected to be a forgetful thing. I try to forgive Grace, who barely knew my brother, but I feel a grudge nesting its claws into my chest. She is already moving on, and means to move the house with her.

  The air outside is silent but for occasional trills of birdsong, and I see neither John nor Henry. It’s for the best, as I’m in no mood to keep my opinions to myself. Unfurling the canvas, I try to imagine George’s last trek across Walthingham’s grounds. I begin to walk counterclockwise around the house, keeping it always to the left of me, as the painting dictates. I give the west wing a wide berth, unwilling to go near its strange topography of uncut stone. An inviting footpath angles into the forest, and I take it on a whim. Low-hanging branches clumped together with ice give the path the appearance of a cool white tunnel.

  Sure now that I’m beyond sight of prying eyes, I follow the path into the woods. My dog and I walk in silence, deeper into the trees. Black branches shudder against a nickel-colored sky, and my boots crunch on the ground. The cold is starting to seep through the soles already. Stella frisks at my heels, unbothered by the air; I envy her furry coat.

  If I turned left, I’d soon reach the overgrown track once used to carry stone from Walthingham’s quarry. To my right, the treacherous half-frozen lake is just visible through the trees. I continue down the path, passing through the sparser woods at the edge of the tree line. When I see in the distance a decrepit lodge hunched between two great oaks, it brings to mind the strange old gamekeeper—McAllister. I’m certain this must once have been his cabin, and I wonder why Henry never hired another to his post. If nothing else, it would serve to deter poachers.

  I trudge in my ruined boots deeper into the trees, until the lodge stands between myself and open ground. Its roof slumps with snow and lack of patching, and several windowpanes are shattered into sparkling spiderwebs. My skin prickles as the trees overhead encroach on open sky, folding me in with their whip-thin arms. A thaw is coming: The air is fresh with the scent of wet wood, and the air rings with the musical pops and shifts that mark the melting of ice on branches. This chorus was one of George’s favorite springtime sounds.

  The path stops at the lodge, so from there I trudge along uneven ground, over buried roots and half-submerged stumps. My breath is smoke on the air. The forest covers several hectares, and after five minutes I look back and realize I can no longer see the house’s wide lawn through the trees. The woods around me whisper with an icy wind, and a faraway branch cracks. My breath stops, ragged. Another crack, this one closer, and Stella speeds off toward the sound.

  “Stella!” I cry, but it comes out like a croak.

  I take a few steps after her, but she’s gone.

  “Dammit, Stella,” I growl.

  I listen for the patter of her paws, but hear nothing.

  Then, I feel the unmistakable weight of being watched, of somebody’s eyes on the goose-bumped skin of my exposed neck. I turn in a slow circle and see nothing but trees.

  I tug my coat tighter to my throat. It might just be the cold.

  “Stella?” I say again, my voice a near whisper.

  A crow caws in response, just behind me, and I nearly jump out of my cloak. It sits hunched on a low branch, its eyes black buttons. I wave my hands at it. “Stop watching me, you awful thing.”

  The crow flaps lazily through the trees. I walk toward the place where Stella disappeared, calling her name. When I see prints in a patch of snow, they look too deep to belong to such a little dog—perhaps they were left by a fox or a deer; I can’t tell. A voice in my mind, unbidden: Just torn up, as if in spite. “What nonsense,” I say aloud, and feel foolish. Then there’s a single, urgent bark, sounding terribly faraway. I yell out to my dog, but when she barks again, it’s muted by snow and seems to come from no particular direction at all.

  The trees look identical, and snow paints the ground an eerie shade of blue. The sky is flat gray where I can see it through the trees, and I find no shadows by which to navigate.

  Then I feel it again, the eyes on my neck. I hold myself perfectly still, counting to three, and then spin around.

  A flash of dark movement, something retreating into the wood some yards away. In my shock I stumble backward, stepping on the hem of my cloak and falling to the ground. My breath catches in my throat as I strain to see through the trees, ignoring the freeze spreading through my backside. I daren’t move. There’s something there, standing motionless behind a tree. I can sense its shape, rising and falling, rising and falling, with slow, deliberate breaths. Then it shifts again, detaching itself from a trunk and slipping away.

  Then I shriek as wet fingers graze my neck … until I realize that it’s only Stella’s cold nose. I let her snuff into my skin another moment, wondering what I just saw. If I saw anything at all.

  “You’re a menace,” I mutter to my dog, climbing to my feet and dusting off my cloak.

  I press on into the trees, picking up a broken branch to use as a walking stick. And a childish part of me mutters, just in case I need it. The woods are dark and I’m beginning to doubt my path when I see a small hill rising out of the trees just ahead, covered in frost-stiffened brambles. I know that George could not resist such a vantage point. When I scramble to the top of it, dropping my makeshift stick in the snow, I see that I’m right. I lift the painting into place before me, and it becomes a surreal window onto bare painted branches, imposed over the snowy landscape. Just as it appears in the painting, only the upper portion of the house is visible, and I realize I’ve come a considerable distance. I know, with absolute certainty, that I am standing on the place where my brother spent his last hours. Tracing the vast, lonely landscape with my eyes, I say a silent prayer that the white birches were still in his sight when he died. />
  Stella is sniffing along the ground at my feet; suddenly she goes taut, giving out a low growl that raises goose bumps on my neck. I cast a quick glance into the trees, but she’s worrying at the dirty snow.

  “What have you found, love?” I whisper. My heart seizes as I spy a paintbrush, half-submerged in muck. I fall to my knees and reach a tentative finger out to touch it. The handle is dotted with clots of dried red.

  Growing up on a farm, you instinctively know the look of blood, the close, metallic smell of it. Every animal we ate, my father first bled from the throat, and I’ve seen animals giving birth more times than I can count. This is not paint or dirt.

  I gaze at the terrible proof in my hands and in the snow at my feet, weak with a strange mix of relief and horror. Pain, too, knowing that George must have suffered here, alone and scared.

  Stella’s growl rises in intensity, and I move to calm her. Then I see the gaunt, dark figure watching me silently from the other side of the rise.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE OLD POACHER approaches steadily, his strange bright eyes on mine. He carries a crook before him, and I can’t tell whether he means it to threaten or to imply that he’s harmless. I feel like a fool for tossing my branch aside.

  I stand slowly, certain that a sudden move will bring him bearing down on me, crook or no. Stella hides behind my legs, and I decide to be brave on her behalf. “I know who you are, Mr. McAllister. What right do you have to walk on my land?” My voice is shrill in my ears.

  He laughs, a hard bark. “Well, well, the little lady of Walthingham. You call this your land, do you?”

  I bristle, my fist tight around the paintbrush. “It’s mine by law. I am the lady of Walthingham Hall, and you’ll explain your presence on my grounds at once.”

  “Or what, you’ll set your dog on me?” He laughs again, his eyes spinning toward Stella in a way that makes me wonder if he’s drunk. “It’s no good deed you’re doing, keeping that runt alive. Poor little thing, she’s good for naught but drowning.”

  The brutal twinkle in his eyes when he says the word “drowning” makes me dizzy. He must know the coroner marked that as George’s official cause of death—and now here he is, sniffing around the last place I know George to have been alive. I jab the paintbrush into the air before me. “Perhaps I’m not the only heir of Walthingham Hall to have met you here on this hill. Perhaps you have come back not to dishonor yourself with theft but to hide the proof of what you’ve done!” My voice shakes, unsure. But McAllister barely seems to hear my words, looking at the brush in my hand with a small frown.

  “What are you holding there?”

  I move the brush behind my back, defensive. “Did you not hear me? Have you nothing to say for yourself?”

  Again he ignores my words. “Is that all you’ve armed yourself with, out here in these woods? You think there’s nothing here that can harm you but the crows?”

  “What are you talking about? What do you know about these woods?”

  Leaning heavily on his stick, he moves closer. His gait is slow and dragging, and some of the fear goes out of me. “I was gamekeeper here since my own father died, when you weren’t even born. It was I who taught your father to fish. I know more of these woods and what they hold than you can imagine. And I know that you’re a silly chit meddling in affairs you don’t understand.” He moves closer to me, and my body goes rigid under the force of his gaze. “You’ll be better off going home to your velvets and your balls. This is no place for girls like you.”

  Stella has edged out from behind me and is sniffing submissively at his feet. He nudges her hard, making her yelp. “Or for a beast like this.”

  He turns and begins limping away as I scoop Stella into my arms.

  “Wait!” I cry. “I want to talk to you!”

  He looks back once, his eyes sharp on mine, then slips through a break in the trees.

  After standing a moment in the chill sunlight on the rise, I roll the canvas and stuff it inside my coat, then scoop up Stella and set a brisk pace down the hill, following my own tracks. I hug Stella so tightly to my chest that she lets out a strangled whimper, but I can’t seem to loosen my grip. Foolishly, I fear that the opening in the trees will never come, that I will be lost again in these malevolent woods. But the ground soon clears, and sunlight sifts through a thinning cover of branches. The wind carries the crackling scent of fire, and I see a smoke trail curling over the trees—John and Henry must be burning brush. I’m angry afresh at this reminder of the hunt.

  When I step back out onto Walthingham’s lawn, hunched miserably over the paintbrush and my poor dog, the two men are standing between the house and me. Their heads are tucked close into their chests, and they haven’t yet noticed my arrival. Lingering at the edge of the woods, I can see the dark look on Henry’s face; John’s is turned away from me. I stop short when Henry stabs a finger into the footman’s broad chest, speaking fierce words I cannot hear. At last he throws up his hands, turns heel, and stalks off toward the front of the house. I wonder if John is speaking on my behalf, against the hunt, but realize that no footman would dare contradict the wishes of the house in that way. John, then, must have done something wrong.

  I think I’ll wait until he’s disappeared to walk across open ground, but Stella wriggles in my arms and lets out a yap. John turns sharply, then, spying me, rushes toward us.

  He won’t meet my eyes as he pulls off his coat and wraps it around my shoulders, atop my own heavy cloak. “Lady Katherine, you should not be walking these woods. The cold alone is dangerous.”

  “Please,” I protest. “I’m warm enough without it, and you’ll freeze.”

  “No, you’re shivering,” he says, his expression lightening. “I won’t have you carried off by a chill before I’ve got my reading lessons in.”

  Ducking my head, I allow him to mistake my state of misery for a chill, and for a moment neither of us speaks. My hands are warm beneath my cloak, clutching the paintbrush safely to my chest, but something stops me from telling him what I’ve found. Instead I gesture toward Henry’s retreating back. “You were discussing something with my cousin. I hope nothing is wrong?”

  He makes a dismissive gesture. “I don’t think this shoot should take place,” he says. For a moment my heart leaps, but he continues. “The grounds are unsafe after the snowfall—and the weather is warming; soon it will be nothing but slush.”

  If he catches my disappointed look, he does not say. “I should not keep you out here in conversation. I think the doctor would prefer you be abed.”

  “I would be, but my dog ran off, and I was bound to follow.”

  “Not much of a lady, that one,” he says. “Or so I’ve been told.”

  I can’t meet his keen, smiling eyes. Firmly I return his coat, still keeping one hand out of view. “I’m not very cold anymore, truly. I’ll go inside to warm up.”

  Then I imagine Grace and Mrs. Whiting, buzzing about the house making plans, clearing away every sign that ours was ever a house in mourning, and think again. “Perhaps you can help me, John—do you think you can get me into my rooms unseen? My cousins will worry if they knew I was following after Stella again.”

  He touches two fingers to his head in mock salute. “As you wish, Lady Katherine. I daresay I know the secret ways of Walthingham better than any American girl.”

  Before I can decide whether that’s more cheek than I should allow, he’s started away, and I have no choice but to follow.

  It isn’t until we’re creeping up the servants’ stairs that I realize the canvas is no longer tucked inside my cloak. I must have dropped it somewhere in the woods. For a moment I consider rushing back out to find it. But with John at my side and Grace prowling about below, I know that I can’t. My freedom here is curtailed. I curse myself for losing one-half of my evidence—and the last painting that George will ever make.

  CHAPTER 12

  I SPLASH MY FACE with water, cooled in the basin and fresh on my skin. My e
yes in the glass are unnaturally bright. But it doesn’t matter anymore what my cousins think of my temper—I have proof that my brother was murdered, and finally they must listen.

  I slip off my waterlogged boots and set them before the fireplace, then step into the black pair I wore to yesterday’s funeral. My fingers are cold and stiff, fumbling with the tiny patent buttons. Around me the house bustles with the same sparkling energy that preceded the ball, as if nothing’s changed between that night and this. Clutching the paintbrush in my hands, chapped from hours spent traipsing through the woods, I imagine their faces when I finally show them. Realization, followed by slow horror. A messenger will be dispatched to the magistrate, and McAllister will be dragged in for questioning.

  I find Grace in an alcove near to the servants’ quarters, interrogating a tiny redheaded serving boy. She takes one look at my avid, windburned face and dismisses him. He throws me a look of gratitude and scampers away.

  “Katherine, good Lord,” Grace says nervously. “You look a fright—please tell me you haven’t been out in this bad weather.”

  “Grace,” I say.

  “Oh, my dear,” she presses on. “Look at your poor hands!” My hands were almost delicate after three weeks under her tutelage, but now they’re red and scored with scratches. “Did your mutt do this?”

  “Grace,” I say again, more loudly. “Let me speak. The hunt cannot go on—you and Henry must call it off immediately.”

  She looks at me blankly for a moment, then with dawning embarrassment. “Oh, I see,” she says faintly. “I understand the timing seems a bit … Certainly we are heartbroken about George, but this hunt is annual, and planned very far in advance. Many have come from quite far, and—Oh!”