ES Chapter 8

"Ah." She traced the contour one more time. "So that shape was a hydrangea."

Other noble families drew their crests from life—a rose rendered as a rose, a lion unmistakable as a lion. The Etheldore crest was composed of only four shapes, and she had taken it for some archaic script she didn't know. But now, tracing the outline of it, she could see it clearly: a single hydrangea in silhouette, round petals unfolded in all four directions.

"Of course, it has been considerably simplified from the actual flower—not easy to recognize at a glance."

"No—it looks enough like a hydrangea to me."

The butler clearly didn't believe her. Ayesha added an explanation.

"The scar on my body looks almost exactly like this motif, you see. I had a fever when I was very young."

An event from when she was one or two years old—she had no memory of it herself. A common enough illness, but the symptoms had been severe. High fever, blisters rising across her whole body; the whole family expected, without exception, that she would not last.

Everyone thought she was certain to die—but thankfully the fever broke, and she survived. Her skin healed clean. But just one spot, where she'd tossed in her sleep and a blister burst, left a scar.

"My parents said the shape of it looked like a hydrangea, so they named me Ayesha." A pause. "My hometown is quite famous for them—a very large and beautiful colony of the flower."

In those days, so few children made it safely through infancy—carried off by illness and accident—that newborns commonly went without names until they were two or three. Ayesha, too, had only received hers once she had survived.

"It really is a remarkable connection." She let the warmth come through, genuine enough in this at least. "Here I am—carrying the hydrangea's name, arriving at the hydrangea's house."

She had been trying to loosen the stiffness in the room with it. She watched it not quite work.

"A remarkable connection, you said." Wilton turned the phrase over with something she couldn't quite place. "You have been emphasizing connections since you arrived, miss."

"Miss."

Expression stern.

"Yes?"

"As the butler of this manor, it is my duty to guard against guests who arrive here with improper intentions. I will therefore speak plainly in advance."

Everything in her sharpened.

The smile she had been working to maintain came apart.

"Oh—yes. What is it?"

"You have said you are a medium. What does a medium do?"

"Well—someone who finds spirits, and communicates with them."

"So you have come to find spirits." A precise pause. "Is it possible that you have come to find something else as well?"

'What. How does he know.'

Her heart lurched and dropped—the preemptive kind, guilty before anything had been confirmed. Ayesha went back over everything she had said and done, with urgent attention.

'Nothing I did was suspicious. I don't know where he found me out.'

"Young and pretty young ladies," Wilton said, selecting each word with care, "know very well what their strengths are. If I may speak despite the rudeness—I have seen a great many people like you in my years of service."

'Ah. So that was it.'

Cyrix Etheldore, master of Langfield Manor: young, handsome, wealthy, nobly born. She, by comparison, was a woman of considerably inferior circumstances approaching through a profession—medium—that could not, practically speaking, be verified. From where the butler stood, running the estate, the arrival of an unknown young woman would not be especially welcome.

He hadn't seen her as a journalist. He had seen her as a woman.

One who might seduce Cyrix Etheldore.

'No—even granting all of that—this was wildly off the mark.'

The truth of her situation was simple: she was here to pull a con and sell the story.

There had never been any path to a private relationship with Cyrix to begin with. No intention. No capacity.

"I also conveyed to my master that it would be preferable not to extend an invitation to you."

At such a groundless misreading, Ayesha recovered herself.

"But the master is in quite desperate straits over this spiritual matter at present. And I must say—that statement feels rather like a discourtesy to someone who has conducted her work with a clear conscience."

"If I have overstepped, I apologize." Wilton inclined his head by exactly the correct degree. "My master himself has on occasion noted that I tend toward a certain rigidity. As this old man has devoted the greater part of his life to House Etheldore, he finds it difficult to rid himself of the habit of suspecting first." A brief pause. "Well. I shall take my leave, trusting that you have not spoken falsely."

The moment the door closed behind him, Ayesha pressed her hand to her forehead.

The old man had wrapped his words in courtesy. His saying he trusted her was, in fact, synonymous with saying he did not.

Finished.

Honestly—the easiest way to gather information in a house like this was to cultivate the servants. But since the butler who ran the estate didn't trust her, testing them would send everything straight back to him. She wouldn't get conversation. She'd get her every move watched. The servants throughout the manor would stand in as his eyes and ears.

'God. What do I do with this.'

'Had she stepped somewhere she had no business being.'

'That's why the fraudsters all gave up and ran. Because the butler isn't ordinarily rigid. Not even close.'

The understanding came too late. Already too late. She said it under her breath.

"Oh God."

"So that's why—that feeling I kept getting, the one telling me to run without ever looking back."

With her plan to work through the servants derailed from the very start, only one approach remained.

To meet Cyrix face-to-face and collect what she needed.

Of all people—the busiest and most difficult.

The unease from earlier must have been the last warning her instincts sent. The days ahead of her in this manor had already turned dizzying.

Unexpectedly, the next time she encountered Cyrix Etheldore was at breakfast the following morning.

That morning, Ayesha overslept for the first time in a long while. The unfamiliar bed had unsettled her—sleep had not come easily. In the grinding middle of the journey, she had slept just fine crammed into the narrow, hard, cheap beds of roadside inns; now that she had reached her destination and lain down on something soft, her body couldn't adapt to the comfort.

Her heart thudded as though she had just sprinted a hundred meters. She tossed and turned all through the early hours. Around the time the sky began to lighten to a thin blue-grey, she barely managed to close her eyes.

She dozed. Startled awake. The sun was already high.

"Oh—! What time is it?"

She scrambled up—a fluster of too many small movements, none quite working. Pulled back the curtain.

"Oh."

The garden came to her all at once.

Saturated with a night's rain, it sparkled in a vivid, deep green. The sky was piercingly bright, as though no rain had ever fallen. A view that filled you simply by looking at it, without doing anything else.

"This would be perfect for reading with a cup of coffee."

A long chair had been set just by the window. Ayesha sank deep into the back of it. Without looking in the mirror, her hands moving from habit, she wound her hair up and secured it, and let her gaze drift across the view outside.

"The garden really is enormous. And a glasshouse, too..."

More expansive and more elaborate than any rumor had suggested. Her eyes refused to leave it. She wasted a good stretch of time before finally ringing the bell for a servant.

"I'd like to wash up—could you prepare the bathroom?"

"Yes, miss."

Having drawn the butler's suspicion the day before, she found it difficult to treat the girl with any warmth. A stiff exchange of greetings, nothing more. The servant delivered hot water to the bathroom and vanished.

She'd probably been told not to waste words on the suspicious medium. It would be a lie to say no strip of her heart was uneasy.

But the discomfort was brief. This manor beguiled wherever the eye settled—the bedroom had its quality, the bathroom had its own, neither of them ordinary. The marble surface had been cut at regular intervals, marble of a different color inlaid into those cuts—the stone giving off a faint, diffuse glow, as though the light were coming from somewhere inside it—and however it had been accomplished, not a single seam was visible.

Not a scratch.

All of it the hydrangea motif, naturally.

She might never have noticed, if Wilton hadn't named it. But from the moment he told her the hydrangea was the Etheldore emblem, she could see how thoroughly the manor was wrapped in them—in the curtains, the walls, the carpets, the carriage she had arrived in.

The family's pride in itself was immense.