CHAPTER ONE
This is it. This is the moment where I die.
Valerie Wightman didn’t bother to hold back a scream as the carriage threw her around like a ragdoll drying on a laundry line in high winds. She clung onto the squabs, digging her fingernails into the velvet upholstery, but it barely helped.
The carriage was going too fast, and she had heard the splintering crack that spelled disaster. At first, she had mistaken it for a thunderclap, for the skies had been threatening a storm since she departed her home of Gramfield Manor. But when the carriage began to rock violently, she had realized it was something else: a wheel must have broken off, part of it at least.
Oh, how I wish I had done more. How I wish I had seen more, experienced more.
“Lord, help me,” she prayed, scrunching her eyes shut. “Oh, heavens, please help me.”
Everyone had warned her that the road to Scotland could be a treacherous one, but she had assumed she would at least get to cross the border before any difficulty befell her. At her best guess from the landscape—which wasn’t so considerable, having spent the majority of her life on the outskirts of London—they were still somewhere in the north of England.
“A godless place,”her mother would have said in a breathless whisper, if she were there. She, too, had been a city woman, never venturing further than the Chiltern Hills in all her life.
“Oh, Mama, if you can hear me, please ask the Lord to spare me,” she begged, as the carriage tipped, and she felt certain that it was about to topple over entirely.
Then, as if her prayer had been answered, the carriage jarred to a sudden and stomach-churning halt.
Valerie couldn’t quite believe it. So much so that, for the first minute or two, her fingernails remained embedded in the upholstery, her shallow breaths a rasping echo in the abrupt silence.
Am I alive?She seemed to be. Nothing broken, nothing bruised, aside from her pride at the girlish scream she had unleashed.
From outside the relative safety of the carriage, she heard the oddly comforting sound of the driver grumbling and cursing, accompanied by the agreeing nicker of the magnificent pair of draft horses. Her father would have turned purple with anger at the driver’s coarse language, but he was far away in London. InValerie’s opinion, she had never heard anything more fitting for how she felt, in that moment, than those uncouth bursts of relief and latent terror.
She straightened up as she heard footsteps coming down the side of the carriage, hoping she didn’t lookquiteas disheveled as she felt.
The door opened to reveal the pale driver, who had lost his hat and all the blood from his face in the effort to keep the carriage upright. “Miss Wightman, I apologize,” he said with a tremor in his voice. “It seems we’ve lost a wheel. Hit a rut somewhere and it’s snapped right off.”
“I thought as much,” Valerie replied. “You have my eternal gratitude for preventing true disaster.”
The driver scratched a gray-bearded jaw. “I don’t know about that, Miss Wightman. You won’t want to thank me yet.” He paused. “I’ll have to leave you here while I fetch help. There’s a town about five or six miles up the road, so it’ll be a fair few hours before I come back.”
A shudder ran down Valerie’s spine. “Stayhere? Alone?”
She peered past the driver to survey the landscape. The hour wasn’t terribly late, but the winter evening had already inked the sky with its dusky palette. She hadn’t noticed the change in light when the journey had been smoother, too engrossed in a book of poetry that was easily read by lanternlight, but now that gloom seemed very dark indeed. Not quite night, but it soon would be.
“There must be a… farm or something, nearer to us,” she added with an anxious swallow.
The driver shook his head. “There’s nothing around here but moors and hills and sheep.” He hesitated. “Well, no, that’s not exactly true. The Duke of Norwood has a castle about half a mile that way,” he gestured vaguely to the west, “but that’s as good as nothing. You’ll be better waiting here until I return.”
“Surely, a duke with a castle must have a carriage wheel to spare?” Valerie urged.
How could a wait of several hours, alone on a country road, be better than a half-mile walk to a duke’s residence? Evidently, she was missing something.
The uneasy driver clawed a hand through limp gray hair. “With respect, Miss Wightman, I’d rather fetch the wheel from the town.” His voice hardened at the edges. “I’m sorry, Miss, but I won’t go anywhere near that duke’s castle.”
“Whyever not?” she pressed. “You must tell me, Saxby, or I shall have no hope of understanding why you would rather walk so far and abandon me here in the meanwhile.”
“Because… it’s haunted, Miss,” the man replied in a hushed tone. “I don’t journey this way often anymore, but I did in my younger years. Anyone you passed told you not to ride near that castle, else you’d be touched by the curse of the estate. Filled with ghosts it is, and I’d much rather err on the side of cautionthan have us journeying on with a curse following us. You don’t ignore the local stories, Miss.”
Valerie covered her mouth with her hand, to stifle the laugh that tried to bubble out. She didn’t know what she had expected him to say, but it was notthat. The driver, Saxby, was a gruff and grizzled sort of fellow; the type of man who wore a neat uniform but never looked comfortable in it, who had an air about him that suggested he would not shy away from a fight. Yet, apparently, he was afraid of a few ghost stories.
“It’s a serious matter, Miss,” Saxby insisted, his eyes narrowing at the sight of her trying to cover her smirk.
Buttoning up the collar of her fur-trimmed, fur-lined pelisse and grabbing her ermine stole to keep her neck warm, Valerie moved to the carriage doorway. Saxby stepped back and instinctively offered a hand to help her down, his tired eyes widening as realization caught up a moment afterward.
“Miss, I really must insist on you staying here with the carriage,” he said in desperation.
