I took the bundle gratefully, eager to get outside and find Mr. Markham. Wispel must have noticed, because she kept her hand on the food for a moment. “It does not do to follow men about,” she warned me. “The late mistress was much the same way before she married, and it only sowed unhappiness for her.”
For whatever reason, I didn’t feel defensive or chagrined—Wispel seemed kind enough in her intentions. I did, however, remember my conversation with Mrs. Harold yesterday—the one where she’d accused Mr. Markham of killing not one, but two wives.
“Thank you,” I told her, and then left the kitchens, my thoughts floating away from kisses in the dark and floating towards sabotaged saddles and gravestones. And so I turned my feet toward the village, knowing now where I’d go.
The lingering shadows seemed to hug the village church longer than any other building, and so the churchyard still had an air of night about it, even though the main street was now washed with the rosy oranges of dawn.
I walked through the sagging wooden lych-gate into the graveyard, picking my way around sunken graves and crooked gravestones, looking for a newer grave. I wanted to find Violet. It was something I should have done as soon as I’d come, but my thoughts and energy had been so occupied with her widower that I hadn’t. That surely made me a terrible cousin, but if she’d been alive, she might not have minded. Violet herself had always put men first.
The graveyard wrapped around the church, the grass impossibly green and the stones speckled with moss and lichen, and then I found Violet’s grave without even needing to scan the headstones. Mr. Markham was standing beside it, his eyes fixed on the stone, his hands behind his back.
I was unsure whether to approach or not, but then he said, without looking over at me, “Join me, Miss Leavold.”
I did, all the while thinking of Mrs. Harold and Wispel and their stories. Even though I craved his pre
sence and his touch, I came around the other side of the grave, keeping my eyes on Mr. Markham.
“You look at me so warily,” he said, again keeping his eyes fixed on the stone. He gave the impression of someone who could see everything. “Are you worried I’m going to bite?”
I didn’t answer at first. It was strange having Violet’s grave actually before me, actually between us, it was strange and terrifying but it felt inevitable as well. That if he were to kiss me again, we should be here in this gloomy place, staring at her name carved so cleanly into the white marble. Atop the plinth was a pale angel, her hands covering her face, her head bent, perhaps in sorrow or perhaps in shame.
Whose sorrow? Whose shame?
“Did you really laugh when you found her?” I asked Mr. Markham. “When you found Violet dead?”
He finally looked up, his face serious. “What are you talking about?”
“After Violet died, and you were the first to find her—I heard that you laughed.”
“No,” he said softly.
“No, you didn’t laugh?”
“No, I wasn’t the first to find her.”
The breeze blew through the yard and I shivered. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that there were footprints in the frost. Someone found her first and left her body there, without going to find help from anybody else.”
“And then you laughed?”
His eyes flashed. “What are you implying? That I was happy when Violet died? That’s a very sinister accusation, Miss Leavold.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” I said.
“Yet how carefully you keep your distance.”
Because you frighten me. And he did, in that moment. His anger was palpable, as was some darkness that roiled within him, and at the same time that part of my brain signaled me to step backward, another part of me remembered that I was dependent on him for everything—for shelter and food and almost every portion of my well being. I needed to remain sensible of that—that no matter how I loved him or how I feared him, I still relied on his goodwill and benevolence.
“I shouldn’t have disturbed you,” I said. “I’ll leave you now.”
“Don’t,” he said.
I chafed at the order, yet I obeyed.
“I want you here with me, Miss Leavold,” he said. “Violet was your family too. You should be able to pay your respects alongside her former husband.”
And so we stayed at the grave another ten minutes, me looking at Mr. Markham from underneath my eyelashes, watching his face as he traced the lines of the angel with his eyes. There was longing in his expression and pain too, and his shoulders, normally so broad and straight, were slumped, as if a great weight were pressing down on him.
