ES Chapter 13

"—succeed?" she had been about to ask.

She stopped herself.

If the method had worked, he wouldn't need her here.

"...It didn't, did it."

He nodded.

"It was a Rottweiler I had raised from a pup. The whole family was fond of it—though its temperament had always been savage to begin with. When the evil spirit was placed into the animal, it turned on the spiritualist at once and seized him by the throat." A pause, one beat. "It had been trained as a hunting dog."

Oh God.

What followed was clear enough without asking. The spirit un-exorcised. The spiritualist fighting for his life. Blood spreading across whatever floor that had been, the spiritualist's hold on existence going in and out —and in that chaos, who could have managed anything at all.

"...What became of the spiritualist?"

"A hunting dog, once it has taken hold, will not release until the life has left."

He died.

Whether it was her imagination or not, something faint seemed to drift to her —thin, metallic, the specific quality of blood at close range.

Ayesha looked down at the table, at a loss.

The difficulty with any serious discussion of evil spirits was that every time a course was cleared and a new one arrived, the conversation broke. Cyrix had given instructions in advance for everything to come at once —so the table before her held all courses together, from the first through to the dessert.

There were five things on the table that were the color of blood.

Goulash, simmered long with fresh vegetables, tomatoes, and beef, ladled out dark and deeply red. Duck confit, beans and red cabbage arranged around it. A steak, the surface charred, the interior held reddish at the grain. A cake with several kinds of berries piled over it, retrieved from somewhere despite the season being long past. And on one side, a wine so deeply, darkly red that it was difficult not to think of blood diluted with very little water.

The food at Langfield Manor was, again, excellent.

She could not taste it.

The cutlery in her hand slowed. He noticed, and his expression became apologetic.

"My account has disturbed your dinner. I am sorry."

Ayesha composed her face.

"Not at all. These were things I needed to hear. And I ate rather a lot at luncheon —I wasn't especially hungry to begin with."

When she set down her cutlery, Cyrix did not touch the food again either. He reached for the bell.

Cling.

It rang sharp and clear through the dining room.

The servants who had been waiting outside entered on careful feet, read the angle of his chin, and began quietly removing the plates —most of them barely touched.

Where does all that food go.

The cook at Langfield Manor brought out a staggering quantity at every meal for a table that seated, as it happened, exactly two people. A demonstration of the family's wealth, presumably. For a commoner unaccustomed to waste, Ayesha found the scene persistently difficult to adapt to, even now.

She was watching the servants carry the plates away —half concerned, half simply curious —when Cyrix spoke.

"Ayesha."

"Yes?"

"Do you have plans for the remainder of the evening?"

"No —nothing in particular as yet..."

"Then would you care to look around the manor with me? I would be happy to show you."

"Yes, please."

Good.

She registered a small private satisfaction. She had been planning to find pretexts to explore the manor in any case, but having Cyrix as the guide—the person who knew it most thoroughly—would make things considerably easier.

"Just a moment—I'll go up to my room quickly. There's something I need to bring."

Paper and a quill pen, specifically. She intended to take notes on the history she had just heard, and on whatever the rooms themselves yielded as she moved through them—the layout, the atmosphere, any detail that might serve. If anyone asked, looking for traces left by an evil spirit made a perfectly adequate pretext.

"I will accompany you."

He escorted her upstairs with formal courtesy. Gentleman that he was, he stopped at the door rather than entering, and waited.

The moment Ayesha stepped into the bedroom, she crouched down to the floor and opened the suitcase.

Right—where had she put the spare quills.

She remembered packing a bundle of them. Following that memory toward the bottom of the bag, she searched—

Her heart dropped.

Every spare quill she had brought was snapped. Not one intact. Every shaft broken clean through.

"Oh—! What is all of this—"

The sound came out before she'd authorized it.

She sat back on her heels. Today was simply not her day.

"...No. That makes sense, actually."

The journey had been rough enough. Especially the day the rain came down—the jostling in the carriage, the suitcase set down hard at every stop. For a quill's thin, light shaft, the repeated impact would have been considerable. At least the ink bottles had survived; she was grateful for that much. If one had broken, the clothes packed around it would have been stained black.

But aside from the quills, the actual problem was something else entirely.

"What has happened?"

Cyrix had heard the cry and rushed in.

Into the bedroom. Right now.

On the table: the article draft. Correction marks, crossed-out lines, additions in the margins—the full evidence of revision, plainly visible.

She had been careless because the servant assigned to her couldn't read, and because no one else was permitted in the room without permission. She had not prepared for this in any way.

If I move the papers now he'll notice. He's a gentleman—he'll look away immediately—but even a word catching his eye and I'm done. That's my identity. Gone.

The door had flown open, and the current from it sent one thin sheet drifting off the table.

No time.

Ayesha dropped down onto it.

Thump.

She hit the floor squarely on top of the paper—and in doing so knocked the vase sideways.

The hydrangeas Wilton had arranged spilled out across the floorboards.

"Are you all right?"

Cyrix extended his hand.

"Oh—yes."

But she couldn't take it and stand up yet. She had just knocked over the vase, and the hydrangeas—arranged with care, the flower the family used as its emblem—were lying scattered across the floor, which struck her as particularly mortifying on top of everything else.

She gathered the fallen blooms quickly and held them up toward him.

"I'm so sorry—someone had taken such care with these."

But Cyrix did not take the bundle immediately.

There was something in the way he looked at them—something she could only describe as a subtle distance; not displeasure, not sentiment, something she could neither locate nor name, unless she had imagined it.

She tilted her head.

"Do you not care for hydrangeas? I'd heard they're the family emblem."

"I am quite fond of them. A beautiful and elegant flower—I have always thought so." A pause, slightly longer than the sentence required. "Only the smell of them is—rather like blood. I suppose."

"Oh—the green smell, from the stems..."

The raw organic smell of fresh-cut plants. Some people found cucumber fragrant; others found it acrid. That was presumably all it was.

While the hydrangeas held his attention, she crumpled the draft sheet she had sat on and pressed it into her pocket. Then she inched the suitcase, gradually, until it stood between him and the table—working the angle until his back would be turned toward it.

He turned, naturally, in the direction she needed.

She swallowed the relief silently.

"I'm perfectly all right. It was nothing—my luggage is just in a state."

"Was that the thing's doing?"

That word. In that sentence. From that mouth.

"No—no!"

She shook her head quickly.

"That was my own fault entirely. I was making a fuss over nothing."

So that was why he'd come rushing in. Something malevolent moved through this manor—and at the sound of her cry, he had feared she was hurt.

She had worried him for nothing. She was grateful, and also sorry.

"I'm sor—"

Before she could finish the word, he cut across it.

"You did the right thing." He said it with a quality of effort, the words carefully placed. "Make a fuss even over small matters. Everything, no matter how trivial. At least within this manor."

She found herself nodding—without quite deciding to.

After all, if what he described were real—a thing that harmed people, that had made his entire existence a matter of constant vigilance—of course that warranted precisely—

No. Wait.

Ayesha pulled back the self that had nearly been persuaded without her noticing.

She didn't believe in spirits.

And yet every time she listened to him, she kept finding herself pulled along—drawn into the current of his account as though it were simply the shape of things, without noticing it was happening.

Why was that.