Page 8 of A Sorceress Comes to Call
He’d walked calmly from the road and into the stable, and Cordelia didn’t venture down there to check on him. She hadn’t ridden him since that day, and the loss felt like liquid filling her lungs, like she could no longer get a deep enough breath. She missed Ellen. She missed riding even more. Before, when it seemed as if the pressure under her skin would cause her to split open, she would have climbed on Falada’s back and galloped across the fields. Felt free for a little while, even if the ride always ended back at her house with its eternally open doors.
Now, when she felt that way, Cordelia gripped her temples and made a sound instead. Not a scream, which would have summoned her mother, but a small, shrill noise, like a teakettle whistling. Like the teakettle, it seemed to release some of the pressure.
With her mother gone, Cordelia could have really screamed. She tried it, experimentally, into her pillow, louder and louder, and then the scream broke into a laugh and she rolled over in her bed, feeling giddy and brave and wild.
It would not last, of course. Her mother would return, tomorrow or the next day or the next, possibly with a new husband in tow. But for the moment, the closed door was a balm and Cordelia slept deeply, without dreams.
CHAPTER 4
Three days after her first panic-filled awakening, Doom appeared on Hester’s doorstep, in the shape of a woman.
Doom was tall and slender, with the sort of figure that poets described as willowy. She had shining dark chestnut hair and large blue eyes in a fragile, heart-shaped face, and she held the Squire’s arm as if she were too delicate to stand unassisted.
Hester noted dispassionately that Doom was beautiful. Hester was not envious, but beauty was a weapon that she did not wield herself, and it was not an insignificant one in the arsenal. Her brother was particularly susceptible to it, and even more susceptible to fragility.
“My sister, Hester,” the Squire was saying, gesturing to her. “Hester, love, meet our guest, Miss Evangeline.”
“Oh no,” said Doom. “It’s Lady, I’m afraid.” When the Squire tensed, she added artlessly, “Not that there has been a Lord Evangeline for a long time, I fear.”
Hester’s brother relaxed and patted the hand tucked into his arm. Hester did not roll her eyes, but she considered it.
“Your brother was kind enough to help me,” said Lady Evangeline, turning a brilliant smile on Hester. She lost the next few words as the sense of overwhelming dread clutched at her throat. “… quite overwhelmed. The city seems so much larger than when I was there last, and I fear I became quite turned around.”
“Mmm, yes,” said Hester noncommittally. I get it. I see her. You can let go now. Was her throat working? It seemed to be, although there was a definite rasp to it. “It’s grown a great deal in the last few years.”
“Exactly. I went looking for the dressmakers that I remembered, and they’ve quite vanished.”
“Asked her to stay for dinner,” said the Squire, in jolly tones. Hester suppressed a sigh. Her brother was smitten. This was a common enough occurrence, but generally by normal women, not those with dread and horror spread behind them like wings.
She would have liked to plead a headache and escape dinner, but that would mean leaving her brother alone with Doom, and that was a terrible idea. Hester wasn’t certain yet what Lady Evangeline intended, whether she was looking for marriage or money or something more straightforward, like human flesh. Regardless of which it was, her brother would be useless to deal with it. If the woman turned out to be a hag and suddenly ripped her skin off and flung herself, red and bloody, across the table to devour the Squire, the best that Hester could hope for was that one of the footmen might drown her in the soup course while the Squire was still gaping and waving his hands. And of course the footmen could do nothing about marriage at all.
You require a butler for that, thought Hester, and smothered her laugh in a snort.
“Beg pardon, my lady?” asked Doom, a line forming for just an instant between her china-blue eyes.
“Nothing,” said Hester. Steady on, old girl, you’ll laugh yourself into an early grave with this creature about. “Dinner, you say? I’ll tell Cook to prepare an extra place.”
It was astonishing that she had any appetite at all that night, with Doom seated across from her. Her brother sat at the head of the table, with Evangeline at his left hand and Hester at his right. “Just a cozy family meal,” the Squire assured their guest. “No need to stand on ceremony.”
Ceremony might have been nice, since it meant that Hester would not be expected to speak across the table at Evangeline. On the other hand, that means that I won’t be able to head Samuel off before he says anything truly dangerous. Not that he’s going to propose over the soup course. Probably. He likes beautiful women and he likes flattery, but he’s never shown any interest in marriage.
There had been several quite attractive ladies in her brother’s life over the years, including at least one that Hester would not have minded as a sister-in-law, but the Squire had always expressed disdain for “the parson’s mousetrap” as he called it. Like many men not overly encumbered by intelligence, he had a great deal of cunning in avoiding personal unpleasantness.
On the other hand, none of those other women had woken such a premonition of dread in Hester’s soul.
“So you are in town to visit a dressmaker?” she asked, when she felt that the flirtation going on between her brother and the widow had gone far enough.
“To make an appointment for a fitting, rather,” said Evangeline. “My daughter needs an entirely new wardrobe, I fear.”
“Your daughter?” This was an interesting new wrinkle.
“Oh yes. You know how it is with children,” said Evangeline, smiling at Hester. “They stay the same size for so long, and then they shoot up six inches overnight and positively nothing fits. She is seventeen, old enough to make her coming-out to society and I had planned around that, and then suddenly…” She made swooshing gestures with her hands and laughed aloud. “I swear that she looks like a servant now, wearing castoffs, but they are the only things that fit.”
“Indeed,” said Hester. “Why, I remember when Samuel was young, and my parents despaired of him. He would have a suit fitted, and then by the time he went to pick it up at the store, his ankles and wrists would be hanging out of it. In fact, one time…”
It was a timeworn anecdote, and she did not need to turn much of her mind to relating it. Instead she studied Evangeline.
Her manners were perfect, of course. Naturally, Doom would have exquisite manners. The only flaw, if you could even call it that, was that she was clearly not used to servants waiting on her. Occasionally she would catch herself just slightly as a footman replaced a dish, and she had reached out as if to pull out her own chair upon entering the room. But she recovered from these missteps instantly and with a great deal of poise, so much so that Hester was not entirely certain that they were missteps, or part of a carefully woven image of herself as a genteel but impoverished widow.
