Chapter 17

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

L eda's boots sank into the soggy brown sand of the beach. Each step tugged at her sole, leaving the shape of her foot imprinted on the shore, dotted with small impressions from the hobnails. Jack's father had been a shoemaker; he could tell her if she were ruining her favorite boots—her only boots. But she couldn't decline a walk along the beach, especially since the girls had invited her.

They fanned out ahead of her, Ellinore bending to peer along the rocky shingle, Muriel following the waves as they sucked themselves back into the sea with the receding tide, leaving small streams and rivers among the humped rocks crowned with seaweed. To her left the cliffs reared far above her head, a layered caked with green at the rim, the rugged stripe of white chalk, the brick red carrstone buttressed below.

So high those cliffs. So far a tumble, especially for a small woman. Leda wondered that Muriel could come here. That she did not see her mother's ghost wandering the rocks crumbling the base of the cliffs, or sitting atop a shorn boulder, weeping.

"Have you seen the ghost in the nursery?" Leda asked this in the most conversational tone she could affect as she neared Ellinore.

The girl straightened quickly, clenching her fist around what she'd found, and stabbed a look in Muriel's direction. Leda turned just in time to catch the frantic shake of Muriel's head.

Ellinore looked out to sea, the ribbon ends of her bonnet flapping beneath her chin. The air carried the morning chill, and the wind snuck around Leda's ankles beneath her petticoat, smacked her skirts against her knees.

"I donow what you mean, mum."

"You are the one who told me there are ghosts here."

The girl's neck went stiff, chin up, shoulders braced, and Leda remembered she was grieving. She'd lost her mother years ago when she left to marry—she'd known Anne-Marie was her mother, thanks to the way gossip worked in small towns, no matter what her grandparents had tried to keep from her.

And now she knew that her father was dead as well. There was no one to come for her. No parent waiting in the wings to reveal they were a king or lost princess, who would come to sweep Ellinore away from the drab of her life. She had this now: Jack, Holme Hall, Muriel for a companion, and a future she could not see on the horizon.

"I was only meaning to scare you, mum."

"I saw her. Last night. She was dancing," Leda said.

Ellinore turned, her back a sharp blade. "A girl, you say."

She hadn't said that. Leda turned to Muriel, struck by a new thought that hadn't made it through her nightmare of the previous evening, and the way Jack had completely claimed her attention after.

Grace had already been in the nursery when Leda woke in Jack's bed—she'd woken to the sound of the girls' voices—and the water in his wash basin, the fresh towel on the rack, said that May had been in the master's room, too. There was no way Leda could hide what she had done. She could only sneak through the mistress's dressing room to her own chamber, where the bed had been neatly made and water waited in the basin, still holding a trace of warmth.

The servants knew, then. Did the girls?

"Have you seen a girl up there?" Leda asked Muriel. Perhaps she wasn't an apparition. Perhaps the girls had snuck someone up to the nursery the same way Leda had slunk into Jack's room. Who was she—a local girl? A servant's child? Did Jack know?

"Do you see apparitions often, Miss Leda?"

Muriel's insolent jab was deliberate, another post hole for the fence the girl would not let her cross.

"I do not fear ghosts, Miss Burnham. Only the living. Does your father know you've had someone up there?"

Muriel faced away from her, too. Everyone was turning away from her.

"He knows."

Twin fangs of anger and hurt sank into Leda. Perhaps jealousy, too. They were all conspiring to keep something from her—she, the woman who invited confidences, the woman others begged to solve their most delicate problems, the woman who had a reputation through Bath and beyond for fixing things. Not breaking things, as Jack had first accused her. Mending. Putting people on their proper path. She had always been the one people turned to, and now these girls were shutting her out.

The birds skittered before Leda as she walked, their feet small sticks in the sand. Others wheeled overhead, calling to their own, their wings dark lace against the gray sky. A golden gleam caught her eye and she bent to see what had bubbled up beside a small rock. A leather pocket, small enough to fit in her hands, with strings curling fancifully from its corners.

"A mermaid's purse!" Ellinore peered into her palm. "Oi, that's a great find. Very lucky, mum, do the mermaid leave her magic in it."

Leda turned over the small packet with her finger. A slit showed the innards, empty.

"Alas, this one lacks magic, it would seem." She showed Muriel, who had come to hover, too. "Shall I throw it back?"

"My mother always kept them," Muriel said. "She put them on her dressing table. Said they were gifts from the sea, and one oughtn't take gifts lightly."

Leda couldn't toss the thing onto the ground after that remark, not even if she thought it a dark omen. A woman who would keep a piece of sea wrack but had spurned the gift of her husband, if she'd never reveled with him in the kind of pleasure Leda had known last night. Even now she felt pleasantly aware of the warm place between her legs, though she went about all the normal activities of her day. Ordinary life suddenly turned on its side to show a wondrous new realm available to her, underneath the rest.

"I've heard the mermaids singing," Leda said instead. "Saw one swimming last night, in fact."

Muriel met this confidence with narrowed eyes. Ellinore raised her brows. "Singing?"

"They've small round heads and pointed noses. Very long eyelashes. And they give that high, keening cry, almost like a gull, but sweeter."

Ellinore's eyes crinkled at the corners. "Thas the seals, mum."

"Seals!"

"There's a colony of them as lives here. The winter babies will be growing now. Grey seals," Muriel said with great scorn for Leda's ignorance. "Do you go around the point that way," and she pointed north, toward the sea, "there's a place where they come ashore. Scores at a time, some days."

Leda curled her hands around the mermaid purse and slipped it into her pocket. There was no enchantment here. No mermaids. Seals, a lovely creature, but flesh and bone and whiskery seal skin all the same.

And there was no ghost either, not of a girl. Only the ghost of Anne-Marie, still looming between her and Jack, to continue looming if Leda stayed. So would linger Muriel's contempt, and Ellinore's polite distance.

A figure down the beach caught her eye. A man, standing where the rocky cliffs slowly fell to their knees and sank into a sandy stretch of beach, a place where a tumble would not break a woman's neck. It was not Jack, nor anyone else she recognized. Yet she knew him.

Every muscle in Leda's body went rigid with fear. It was Toplady. A ghost in truth. The ghost of the man she'd murdered. He stood there without cuts in his coat, without blood staining his chest, but the arrogant set of that jaw, the smirk of contempt—that she knew, even from this distance.

She was going mad in truth, to see visions of him here.

Her boot kicked up a stone as she started forward—why she would run toward this apparition, she didn't know—but she looked down and froze, seeing another omen. A smooth gray stone, roughly oval in shape, with a hole straight through it the size of her finger. She plucked it from the sand, a cool weight in her palm, and stared.

"What is it?" Ellinore gaped, too.

"It's a hag stone." Muriel's cry was sharp as a seal's, fearful, she thought. Cold darted down Leda's spine. "And why should you find it? I've been looking for one all my life."

"What does it mean?" Leda asked.

"It can cure poison and keep away witches," Muriel said. "And if you look through it, you can see a witch, or a fairy."

Leda held up the stone and looked through the small window at Muriel. "You're not a fairy."

Muriel's knit brow eased, and her lips curled into a smile before she caught herself. "Boo."

"And you're not a witch." Leda swung toward Ellinore.

The girl stepped back, wide-eyed, shaking her head. "What d'you see, then?"

"Nothing. Sand."

On a mad impulse, Leda looked down the beach to where the ghost from her nightmare had appeared.

No man was there. A sea swallow darted above where he had stood, its cap a streak of black, its serrated wings cutting the sky.

No ghosts, and no magic. No world of enchantment lay through this lens. The wind swooped under her cap, stealing her breath.

Grace met them as they climbed to high land and circled back along the cliffs. "Did you know there are seals here?" Leda asked her.

"Aye, mum. I hear them singing at dusk. A sight we've never had in Wiltshire, I do say. Will the young ladies help me find raspberries?" She held out a pair of small baskets.

Muriel took hers cautiously, Ellinore with a cordial, "Of course." The three of them turned and walked along the sheltering wall of the back garden to the thicket of bushes near the orchard.

Leda wasn't included, though she loved raspberries. Perhaps Grace thought Leda would spend her afternoon out again, making calls, and that was why she was not invited.

Leda dallied back to the house, which stood hunched in its red stone against the cool spring air. Away on the fringe of the sky, to the east, was a lightening, but Holme Hall would lay a while longer under clouds. Jack was around here somewhere, digging in random places about his land, testing the earth, testing if his experimental bricks could hold against strain and weather.

How lovely it would be to walk the beach with him, her hand in his, his firm body her shield against the wind, his deep voice speaking to her of the thoughts in his mind and heart.

Somehow she had no interest in visiting today and asking the families about for likely governess candidates.

Her heart tugged in her chest, like a sheep caught on a bramble bush. She wanted to stay with Jack.

Her footsteps echoed on the wooden stairs as she climbed to the first floor. She must be sensible. She could not stay and be governess herself, not after she'd been in his arms. She'd never resist him, even if she took a salary from his hands, and she could not set that example for the girls, could not conduct herself in such a fashion beneath his roof. She could not stay and be his mistress.

She could set herself up nearby, find some way to support herself, and then she could be his mistress. She wouldn't care about talk. She would care only about being with him.

She would care, deeply, when the talk led to cuts for Ellinore and Muriel. When they were looked aslant in circles where they had the right, as the daughter and ward of a baron, to hold their heads high.

Leda set her cap on the dressing table, then the mermaid's purse, and sat on the side of the bed with a sigh.

There was nothing left of Anne-Marie in the dressing table or in the room, unless she had chosen the deep green brocade for the curtains and the patterned rug for the floor. The small Sheraton dressing table with its satinwood inlay was bare of the personal trinkets Muriel had said her mother kept. Jack, or the servants, had swept the room clean of memory.

There was no art that gave her insight into the woman, either. No bridal portrait with a delicate glow, no wedding portrait of the couple, no lavish oil of a young mother doting on her infant. No samplers on the wall with trite marital verses or sentimental adages to bear her through the day. There was nothing of Anne-Marie here at all.

A hard edge dug into her hip and, with a huff of exasperation, Leda turned on it. The flaw in this mattress had chafed her on more than one night; she would have it out once and for all. She considered reaching for her sewing scissors to cut a slit in the fabric, but saw that a slit already existed. She thrust her hand inside, among the goose feathers, and jabbed her fingertip against a hard surface. A book, the wooden cover bound with leather.

She pulled it free. The front cover bore no words, only a floral design tooled into the brown calf. The flyleaf bore the declaration, in faded brown ink: Anne-Marie Waddelow. Her diary.

Astonished, Leda turned to the first page. It was dated the fourteenth of June, 1786.

Dear diary: Today my life begins. Today I met Bohamos.

Leda could not have stopped reading to save her life, even if she were intruding on the private thoughts of a dead woman. Anne-Marie was sixteen. She had never been more than a few miles outside Snettisham, save for the one time her father took her to Norwich to buy her fabric for her first evening gown. She knew of her parents' hopes for her, beautiful as she was, their only and cherished child. She was restless and unhappy in her tiny town, when such places as London existed in the world.

And then a caravan came through the Peddars Way, on their seasonal circuit. There was a man among them, a real man, over a score of years, nothing like the green boys who blushed and stammered when they tried to speak to her. He wore a red scarf at his throat and had a scar by his brow from tumbling against the edge of his family's caravan one day when he was a boy. He taught her how to fish in the River Ingol and how to catch plover with a weighted string. He taught her the names of the constellations as they lay on their backs in the meadows on a bed of saxifrage.

He kissed me. And more. And I became stardust .

Yes. Leda thought of Jack. Yes, that is exactly how it feels .

She would have read the whole way through, pulling on the strings of Anne-Marie's life for answers, but the singing came again from the nursery, low, mournful, lacking words.

He vows he loves me, and he knows I love him. But he is promised to a girl of his own kind. It will cost him his place in the family if he refuses. And he says I must marry my own kind also, a barbarian, an Englishman.

I never will. There will never be any man for me but Bohamos. Nothing about our love is wrong. And no child of our love can be wrong, either, no matter what the neighbors say. I will love him unto death.

A giggle broke the low hum of singing, and it broke Leda's spell. She set the book on the dressing table and followed the siren's call.

The girl sat on the window seat playing with Muriel's doll. She was no ghost. She wore a small tucker and apron and had pushed off her shoes. A smear of jam marked the crest of her sweetly curved cheek. She might have been four or five, tiny, her face and frame turning from baby to girl.

She swooped the corn dolly through the air, crooning to it. Her voice had a closed-off sound to it, coming from her nose and far back in her throat. It was a sound Leda had heard from others in the madhouse, those who had stopped speaking, or had never spoken real words.

"Nanette?"

The child didn't look at her, only continued her tuneless hum. Leda walked across the floor, the heels of her boots drumming the planks. The girl's chin snapped up and her eyes flew wide.

This time, Leda wasn't imagining things. The girl was as real as day, as solid as the bench beneath the window.

Her eyes darted to the wardrobe, as if gauging how quickly she could reach it. Leda thought of the other times she had come by surprise into the nursery and saw that wardrobe buttoned shut. Certainly it was large enough to hold a child.

"They have been hiding you from me," Leda said softly. "Why?"

The girl's eyes were the light green of seablite, the same shade as Ellinore's, as Muriel's. Anne-Marie's eyes. She watched Leda's face, her mouth.

"Who are you?"

The girl wetted her lips and swallowed. She took care in pronouncing the word, pointing to herself for emphasis. "Nan."

"Hello, Nan." She wasn't certain what to say. "I am Mrs. Wroth."

The girl's gaze flitted from Leda's mouth to her eyes. "Raw."

A girl with Ellinore's eyes, Ellinore's dark hair. Muriel had Jack's auburn hair and his chin. This girl was Ellinore in miniature, minus a few years.

"Cor blarst me," came May's voice from the door. "You've gone and found the little 'un."

"Yes," Leda said softly. "What I don't understand is why I've not met her long before."

She turned to find May behind her, clutching a dinner tray. Boots clattered up the stairs, the girls surfacing first, Grace behind them. All three stopped in a troop behind May, facing Leda.

Muriel's face went completely white when she looked into the room.

"So," Leda said. "I've not been seeing ghosts, nor hearing them either, though you all let me believe it. I take it Nanette is not some local child come to play? She lives here?"

The dishes rattled on the tray as May placed it on the table. Four plates, for Grace would take her midday meal with the children. Three settings for the children's supper, when Grace would take her dinner downstairs with the other servants.

"Her has lived here since a babe, Mrs. Wroth," May said. "His lordship took her in as a mite, as she had no one else."

This wasn't the place to demand the girl's parentage. The clues lay spelled out before her, like letters in the sand. Leda shot a wounded look at Grace, the girl who had entered this house the same time she did. "You knew?"

Grace nodded warily. She moved a protective hand over her belly, an instinctive gesture. "Aye, mum."

"You've all been keeping this from me," Leda whispered. "Why?"

"That's as for his lordship to say, mum," May answered, as nervous as the others. "'Twas him axed us not to blar t'yew."

They all feared what Leda would do. Why? Did they know of her episode? Had Jack thought something about Nanette would overset Leda's delicate mind, send her spiraling again into madness and murder?

Her hands shook. She felt overset. She felt suffocated.

Jack had known there was a child in the house. He'd said nothing. He'd let Leda think she was seeing things, that her mind was rattling loose in this wild, remote place, that she was becoming unhinged from reality. He'd made love to her— love —but he hadn't trusted her enough to explain.

She had to run. She was trapped here, as she had been in Toplady's house with his cruelty and his lust, as she had been trapped in the madhouse by the accusations against her. She must escape.

She fled first to her room. Cap, gloves. She must not look like a madwoman, flinging her shoes out the window in a call for help. She would have Jack send her valise to Bath. He would do that much, be that decent. It was the least he owed her for his lies.

The book, Anne-Marie's diary, lay on the dressing table. With shaking hands, Leda placed the doll she had made for Muriel beside it. She would take only what was hers. Memories. Ash in her mouth.

Henry walked Pontus along the drive, the cart hitched and ready. "Mum. Arnt you ameant for to go with his lordship a'smornum?"

"Not today, Henry. Thank you." She hauled herself into the cart without assistance, kicking her heavy skirt from beneath her boot. A month ago she hadn't known which end was what on a horse harness, and now she was a dab hand at the ribbons. Norfolk had given her one thing.

It had given her Jack. And then it had taken him away. Her chest felt like she was strapped in an iron cage. Held to a bed by the leather bands they used at the madhouse for the fighters. Leda had suffered that once, and never again. She would not be at any man's mercy, not ever again.

"Mind how yew go, mum," Henry said, a furrow in his brow as he regarded her, as if he could sense her mood.

The dream-like state was descending again, that fog. It muffled sound and made her vision narrow, moving everything far away. She was Caledonia Hill again, her parents explaining to her that Bertram Toplady was a gentleman and a prime catch, the best a hopeless girl like herself could hope for, and the reward she owed her parents for their years of thankless care.

She was Caledonia Toplady beneath a thick veil at church, hiding her shame when she heard the whispers of what her husband had been up to in the neighborhood, felt the scorn drifting from the people who would otherwise have been her friends, her support.

She was Caledonia Toplady, maniac, non compos mentis, hearing the clang on the iron lock of the door to her chamber, seeing the iron rings in the floor where she would be chained if she screamed and thrashed against this handling.

No . She was Leda Wroth. She had walked away from that place shaking hay from her hair. She had changed her name and buried her history, buried Caledonia Toplady atop Caledonia Hill in a tomb with no markings. That starved girl, cut from her herd and forced to the chopping block, she no longer existed. Nor did the woman who had walked her own house in caution, fearing her husband's contemptuous wrath, plotting to thwart his viciousness and his greed.

Nor was she the woman watching thin plates of food shoved through a hinge in the door, shivering in her shift after the cold baths to clear her mind, stripped of her hairpins, jewelry, and garters so she could not cut or strangle herself. That woman had died.

She was Leda Wroth, and she was in full possession of her faculties.

She was a woman betrayed, but not by her own mind. By a man, which was far more mundane, one might even say inevitable.

She would go to Mrs. Styleman. The wind teased Leda's cap and the folds of her cloak. She was not dressed for calls, but Mary Styleman would help, would be pleased at the status it granted her to be the first to know of Leda's flight, that the mad baron was driving her from the hundred, just as everyone believed he would.

Mrs. Styleman could direct Leda to a coaching inn. She would go to London and then to Bath. She would throw herself back on the mercy of Lady Plume, and wonder how long she might keep her position when her ladyship learned Leda had not aided Brancaster as promised. She could find other work. She knew families in Bath, those who lived there, those who came to visit. There was always a place for a woman who was not too proud to work.

Of course, her sister knew she was alive, and by now would have notified her parents. And Eustace might still be in Bath. He might not have connected Leda Wroth, had he heard talk of her, with the woman he had known as his aunt by marriage, at whom he had leered when he came for hunting and meals and an advance on his allowance.

But if he saw her, he would know. She had not changed all that much in eight years. And neither had he.

Leda looked around, realizing she ought to have reached Hunstanton Park by now, crossed the river long ago. The ruins of a church stood in a field to her left, in better shape than St. Edmund's chapel, able to boast all four walls, if no roof and nothing inside. It stood like an etching against the landscape, like a long-forgotten thought. If she turned her hag stone upon it—the omen lay in her pocket—the ruin might vanish into the other realm from which it had come.

Leda shook her head to clear the fancies. This was not fairy-made; this was chalk and flint, a human-made building long outlasting its use. This was Ringstead Parva, a medieval village wiped out by the Black Death. Jack had told her the story. Now the village church stood naught but an empty frame, a monument to lost safety and the illusion of refuge. It stood exposed, the entire roof lifted off, its inner life whisked away, leaving a husk.

Much like Leda would be when she left here, leaving Jack behind. How had she become so attached to the man, and so quickly? Why did she understand, just as a besotted Anne-Marie had written in her diary, that the bliss they had shared was to be found with him, and him only, and once she left him, she would be bereft for the rest of her life?

Hunstanton Park was north. Leda turned down the next lane she found, heading east, determined to turn north as soon as she might. Pontus flicked his ears and trotted nervously, picking up on her distress through the narrow leather strips. She must rein in her emotions. She must keep control of her mind.

She could not show up in Mary Styleman's parlor ranting like a madwoman. It would reflect badly on Jack, and his reputation was strained enough, baron though he might be. He was struggling already to keep his estate afloat, and he had children— three children—to support. He had to keep his standing in the eyes of his neighbors, and his credit with the tradesmen about.

Pontus flicked his ears backwards, and a prickle along her spine made Leda glance behind her. A man on a horse appeared in the lane—the drift, they called it in Norfolk. He was far back, but riding at an uneasy canter. Jack had found her already?

She must reach Hunstanton Hall. She would keep her wits about her in the company of the Stylemans. She would remember he had not trusted her to learn of Nanette—for good reason, perhaps, knowing what she had done to her husband, though she had never hurt Ives.

Jack did not trust her, and she did not trust herself. The only solution was a break. Which meant he could not come after her, lure her back. She urged Pontus to a trot, and the large horse reluctantly obliged.

She passed a farm, a yard, a gravel pit. This wasn't right. Where was the lane to head north? Then the land on either side of the lane rose suddenly into grass-covered downs, with white walls forming a large sunken amphitheater before her, and she realized where she was. Jack had brought her here once, on his tour of brick making in Norfolk. This was the Ringstead chalk pit, one of the great scooped-out pits that pocked Norfolk, and there was nowhere else to go. She would have to turn and face him. Or hide.

She glanced behind her. It wasn't Jack. It was the apparition from the beach. Black hair a blot of grease atop his pale, doughy face. Dark coat flapping around his barrel of a chest. He was large, strong. He had found her. This time, she had no knife.

There was a kiln set into the face of the pit, with an iron grille of a door to keep out animals, brigands and vagabonds, and to prevent smugglers using it to hide untaxed goods. She did not care to lock herself in such a place.

But tunnels opened in the white walls like gaps between teeth, tunnels formed to follow seams of flint deep into the hill upon which sat Ringstead Magna. They were worms of darkness creeping into the hillside, and who knows how deep they ran. She could hide there until he went away. A ghost could not touch her, only haunt. She would whisk herself into the darkness, and he would disappear.

She could be lost in the hill forever, like the sleeping king beneath Norwich Castle.

She cast a look of despair behind her. The rider neared. His face, his grim smile, was pure malevolence. She halted Pontus and threw herself to the ground, then tossed the reins into a broom bush to hold the horse. He wouldn't like it, but she needed a way to find shelter once the ghost left her.

If he had found her here, he could follow her anywhere, to the edges of the island, to the far reaches of the sea. She would never be free of this ghost. Leda sobbed as she stumbled toward the kiln, frantic with the need to hide.

"Caledonia!" The voice was strange, not quite Bertram's bellow.

The door to the kiln was locked.

If he killed her, left her body here, her bones would never be found. No one would ever know what had become of Leda Wroth.

"Leda." He crooned the word, the name she had always preferred to call herself, and claimed for herself when she decided she was no longer mad.

"Stop. Be reasonable, I beg you."

Leda whirled and gaped at the man who dismounted the horse. She didn't recognize the animal; he must have hired it somewhere. He pulled down the waistcoat riding up over his large belly, then looked around for a place to tie the horse. Seeing none, he simply dropped the reins and turned toward her.

The word escaped her in a gasp of shock. "Eustace."