February 14 — Feast of Saint Valentine
The Folk consumed:
All the smoked meat
A smallish bit of Corinna Stonewall.
But I am one of the lucky ones. I am not paralyzed, I am not wasting away. No one need know, for my clothes hide the clusters of bruises, and I am armed with a new protection.
I have this newest charm from Cook. Pale, silent Cook — except when he curses — his eyes red-rimmed as though he’s forever peeling onions. He tried to pour my charm into a cone of paper. “Damn sea air!” he muttered when it stuck and he had to go at it with a spoon. The cone is small to hold so vast a substance. Salt, Salt of Eternity, workaday stuff to us, agony for one of the Folk.
I told Mrs. Bains I am not yet well enough to take supper with the others. I shall spend my evening in the Cellar instead.
February 15
My mouth turns bitter when I read yesterday’s words. I thought I had all I needed, and more. Delicacies from Cook that would have made the Rhysbridge Folk swoon dead away. Why would these Folk not be content with smoked pheasant and turkey eggs and a tub of milk? I even stirred the milk a long while, blending in the cream. That’s how they like it best.
But I opened the Folk Door to the same simmering energy, waiting only for darkness to allow it into the Cellar. I sat myself in double concentric rings of bread and salt. Damp seeped through my breeches. With my fingertips, I snuffed the candle.
Crash! The Door slammed against the wall. A tidal wave of power boiled across cold stone, then sucked itself back at the ring of salt.
The salt couldn’t hold them off, I knew that even then, knew it couldn’t contain that terrible force straining over the thin crystalline Ring of Eternity. I could perhaps have fled, many another Folk Keeper would. But in order to keep your place, you have to do your job well, drawing the anger of the Folk upon yourself, diverting it from the livestock and the crops.
There was a rush of power, crossing the salt with screams so shrill they bore into the webbed netting of my bones. Was this what Old Francis had felt, the cramping that doubled my toes to my heels, that pushed my shoulders to my lap? It mixed me all together with myself, my insides turning outward to meet my own translucent skin.
I did not cry out. I poured my screams into silent curses, blasting the Folk with my rage. Me, why me? I, who feed them and stir the milk and sit countless hours on the damp floor!
Foolish girl, Corinna. What are you thinking? The Folk have no hearts; they do not care for kindness.
February 16
I am finding the Lady Rona everywhere!
I found her again today at dusk when I visited the Marblehaugh Park churchyard. There was not much to visit, as it was no larger than a handkerchief, only a handful of gravestones and a little chapel, shoved against the seaward wall of the Manor.
I was looking for churchyard mold. I’d once heard it whispered that graveyard earth may ward off the anger of the Folk, provided it’s taken from a grave no more than twenty-one years old. Provided, too, that the occupant of the grave was descended from, or married into, the family that established the churchyard.
I came in at an iron gate. In the middle of the churchyard was a fresh slab heading a slash of raw earth, now very muddy, as it was still raining. That would be Lord Merton, just recently buried. According to the inscription, very clean and crisp, His Lordship had been sixty-four years old.
I walked round the graveyard. There were old headstones, all older than twenty-one years; too old to help. Then a grave lying at a little distance from Lord Merton’s. I pulled aside the ivy to read the stone, and there was the Lady Rona again.
THE LADY RONA. That was all it said, and as I let the ivy fall back into place, a dark cloud caught the corner of my eye. It came streaming from a circular shaft at the far end of the cemetery; and I thought at first it was smoke, very strange to see in the rainy air.
But no smoke ever made that faint fluttering. I spoke aloud. “Not smoke, bats!”
I’d heard of these shafts in the ground, opening directly into the Caverns and walled off for safety. The Folk were closer than I’d known, but if the bats could turn their backs on them, so could I. There was a last grave, tiny, tucked under the chapel eaves. The carved Saints set into the wall looked down on it with empty stone eyes. It, too, was covered with lichen and ivy, and here again there was no name, but an epitaph:
Unnamed from the darkness came.
Unnamed to the darkness returned.
Born and died: Midsummer Eve.
Who was buried in these last two graves? If only they were Marblehaugh Park descendants, and not more than twenty-one years buried, the mold from their graves might serve me against the Folk.
I would have to ask Finian, barter away another Conviction.
It was time to tell Mrs. Bains I was well enough to join the family for supper.
February 16 — supper
Mrs. Bains has made me a suit! It is very fine, of watered gray silk, with embroidered bands on the breeches. There are seventeen buttons to the waistcoat, and each of them a pearl. Not that I care; I am no dandy like Sir Edward.
Sir Edward and Lady Alicia were glad I was well enough to come to supper for the first time, but Finian teased me about how handsome I looked.
“Don’t mind him,” said Lady Alicia, very handsome herself in claret silk over an embroidered underskirt. “Finian’s still a little boy who likes to be out poking worms onto hooks and never washing his hands.”
Supper was a waste of time; there was no chance to speak to Finian alone. The dining room was scarlet and gold, with yard of table bursting with candelabra. Identical footmen in striped livery and powdered hair served us. They must all be brothers to the Valet, or cousins at least, their lips all pursed like respectable prunes.
Old Francis was the only one who didn’t match, now stumbling against a chair, now struggling with a platter of dumplings, now chilling me with his frozen eye.
I understood why Finian was so bored. It was all talk about the weather and the estate, and to an estate, weather is everything.
“Well, Corin,” said Lady Alicia. “How do you like this rain of ours?”
“I like it very well,” I said, which is perhaps the first true thing I’ve ever told her. I like rain and mist. I’ve never understood why people exclaim over bright skies and bushels of glaring sunshine.
“It will help our crops,” said Sir Edward.
Then it was all crops until the end of dinner. Lady Alicia asking questions of Sir Edward, trying very hard to learn about the estate, and Finian making faces at me, but I never laugh when I don’t choose.
We retired to the Music Room after supper. From weather to crops to music; and still no chance to speak to Finian. The Music Room was small by Manor standards (not big enough to hold more than fifty elephants), and all white and gold, with huge marble fireplaces that yawned into the room with tongues of flame.
The music was not too bad, really.
Lady Alicia sat at a spinet in an alcove; Finian raised his little whistle. The room gradually reduced itself to a golden bubble, just big enough to hold a candle, Lady Alicia’s shining hair, and Finian’s big fingers dancing over a scrap of tin. The silver thread of Finian’s whistle wove itself into a rainbow of arpeggios as Lady Alicia spiraled to the final chord. She kissed Finian’s cheek before she left the alcove. She did love him best of all, anyone could see that.
“Look at Corin’s eyes shining!” said Finian. He took Lady Alicia’s place, perching his big body on the delicate stool. I stood beside him. We were private enough; Lady Alicia had moved three or four leagues away to stand before the fire.
“I owe you a Conviction,” I said.
“I’ve been waiting for it.”
“This must be your business,” I said. “Discover what those around you love best. Then, if they forbid you from doing as you choose, you have a hold on them. You can threaten their dearest treasures.”
“I don’t think I’d be very good at that.” Finian and I were much of a height, now that he was seated. “Is that how you get what you like?”
“I’ll tell you more in exchange for another Secret.”
“Another Conviction?” He took off his spectacles and stared as though he could see better without them. There was a blue vein running from the corner of his eye into the bridge of his nose. You sometimes see it in babies. “Very well, what do you want to know?”
“Who is the Lady Rona?”
“Who was she, you mean. She was Lord Merton’s first wife. She went mad, which I can understand, being married to him!”
“Did she die fewer than twenty-one years ago?” I said.
“Oh, yes,” he said, “although she died young. Mrs. Bains says she’ll never forget how Her Ladyship was terrified of the sea — screamed if she even looked at it — but otherwise never spoke a word.”
“Poor Lady,” I said.
“Poor Lady,” said Finian. “Mrs. Bains says she used to walk round and round, her hair streaming all about. She says the Lady could glide through crowds of furniture and people with her eyes closed!”
Until then I’d felt a certain kinship with the solitary Lady Rona, set apart from everyone else, but here we parted ways. I could walk through nothingness and stumble every time.
“She’d spend hours in the Cellar, too,” said Finian, “and never bring a candle.”
“She must have had a candle!” I said.
“To hold off the Folk, you mean?” said Finian. “I have always wondered how she survived them.”
I nodded, but there was more to it than that. Without a light, how could she have chiseled her name into the walls?
“I love to gossip with Mrs. Bains,” said Finian. “I tell her she’s my sweetheart, and she gossips all the more.”
“I thought the Windcuffer was your sweetheart.”
“I lie sometimes,” he said. “You do as well, don’t you, to get what you want?”
I had a very nasty feeling that Finian could see more without his spectacles than most people could who needed none.
Finian spoke over my silence. “I’ll have my Conviction now.”
“You must avenge yourself on people who mistreat you,” I said. “You must destroy what they love.” I thought of the Valet, of his love for himself, and how I’d squashed it.
“So bloodthirsty, Corin!” said Finian. “Perhaps I’m too weak for your Convictions.” He unfolded his body from the stool. “There’s Mrs. Bains with the cakes, and I’ve always been partial to pink icing.”
“Wait!” I said. “I have another Conviction, and I need another Secret.” I knew now that Lady Rona was a proper descendant of the owners of Marblehaugh Park, but what of the unnamed person beneath the tiny gravestone?
“But I can’t digest your Convictions,” said Finian. “Give me something gentler next time. Just remind me it’s worth fighting for my dream of building ships and having a life with the sea.”
Have I ever felt so dreadful in my life? So squirmy inside, so like an insect or a worm?
“Think on it, Corin. Come sailing with me and give me a new sort of Conviction then.”
“I haven’t time for sailing.” The more time I spent in the Cellar, the more likely it was I’d catch the Folk in a moment of mischief and draw off their anger.
“But you want to know the Secret?” said Finian.
He knew I did. He had his own way of getting what he wanted. “Very well,” I muttered. “I’ll come sailing.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” I offered my fingertip, so we could swear on blood, but he said he’d believe me without.
Why does he insist so on my promise? They are inconvenient things, promises. I rarely keep them, myself.
February 17
I didn’t tell Mrs. Bains why I wanted the pins. No one saw me last night when I slipped off to the Cellar, hundreds of pins stuck crosswise in my clothes. No one, that is, except the mournful old dog, Taffy, who followed me to the Kitchens, where I filled a bucket with very fresh and bloody meat.
“It’s not for you!” I shut the Cellar door in his face and heard him sink to the floor, wheezing like an ancient bellows.
The pins held the Folk off only a moment. Their cob-webbed energy paused, then struck. My bones echoed with their screams; the pins burned with cold.
There came a howling from the world above. I fastened on the sound to suspend myself above the tightening round my muscles, the cramping that pulled every nerve to the outside.
Think of nothing but the time, Corinna, the passing of the hours. A quarter past midnight. Twenty-three minutes past two. Eight minutes past three.
It was half past four when I opened my eyes. My cheek lay pressed to the floor. The pins were stuck into my flesh, and at all angles. I was twenty-five minutes picking them out.
As for the meat, the Folk had eaten it, every scrap. Only bones remained, and even those were marked with shapes that looked like nothing so much as a legion of large square teeth. The Folk in Rhysbridge were never so fiercely ravenous.
I came up the Cellar stairs into the smell of baking bread. I’d forgotten about the old dog, with his watery yellow eyes, who flapped his feeble tail at me. He hauled himself up from his station beneath the ever-burning candle.
“Go away!” Those blunted teeth were nothing to me now. I’d seen what real teeth could do. But Taffy’s toenails clicked behind me, down the corridor, up the stairs. If I could, I’d turn him back with the power of The Last Word. I heard from the pattern of his toenails that he was winding up the treads, side to side, to soften the angle of his climb.
I stopped at a rattling from above. Old Francis, coming down with a coal scuttle.
He stopped too, and there we were, the three of us on the stairs: Taffy below, stiff and arthritic; Old Francis above, stiff and paralyzed; and me in the middle, stiff and silent. There was only the sound of Taffy wheezing.
“I heard the dogs howling,” said Old Francis presently.
“Dogs will howl at anything.” But it was too late for bluffing.
“I know how it is,” he said. “They howl when the Folk scream. You tried the pins, I see. Try scissors, opened to a cross. It worked for me many times.”
He bowed, then passed without another look. I will accept any advice he chooses to offer, but if he knows I need advice, he also knows I haven’t the power of The Last Word. He’d best not tell anyone. My revenge would be swift and terrible.
I made sure I was the first one at breakfast. But instead of filling my Folk Bag, I found myself staring at the platters of bacon and poppy cakes, the bowls of sardines in oil, the tankards of honey ale. I peered into a chaffing dish. Steam rose from a mound of eggs in cream, misting the silver lid. It all of a sudden seemed terribly futile. I had lost control of the Folk. What was the point in saving anything for them?
I reached for the sardines. The smell raised a hungry sea beneath my tongue. I dropped them into my mouth, one by one, dunking bread in the oil to soften it, then catching up the last drops with my fingers. My hands still smell of fish.
And I am still famished.