Susan’s breath caught in her throat. Her mind emptied of its litany of complaints as her eyes struggled to equate the stark, colorless vista before her with “town of Bournemouth.”
Dead, brown nothingness. Miles of it. A steep cliff jutted over black ocean. There, backlit with a smattering of fuzzy stars, a bone-white architectural monstrosity teetered impossibly close to the edge.
Moonseed Manor did not look like a place to live. Moonseed Manor looked like a place to die.
Not a single candle flickered in the windows. The carriage drew her ever closer, its wheels bouncing and slipping on sand and rocks. Susan’s skin erupted in gooseflesh. She hugged herself, struck by an invasive chill much colder than any ocean breeze could cause.
The carriage stopped. The driver handed her out, then disappeared back into his perch, leaving her to make her presence known by herself. Very well. He could stay and mind the luggage while she summoned the help. After all, Miss Susan Stanton was no shrinking violet. Although she wished for the hundredth time that her lady’s maid (and frequent collaborator in the very schemes that had gotten Susan in trouble in the first place) hadn’t been forbidden from accompanying her.
Mother had also forbidden her from contacting her friend Evangeline, who had married amid scandal of her own. If Susan was to have any prayer of returning to her parents’ good graces, she would have to play by their rules.
Which meant… she was well and truly exiled.
The back of her neck prickling with trepidation, Susan found herself curling trembling fingers around a thick brass knocker, the handle formed from the coil of a serpent about to strike. The resulting sound echoed in the eerie stillness, as if both the pale wood and the house itself were hollow and lifeless.
The door silently opened.
A scarecrow stood before her, all spindly limbs and jaundiced skin. A shock of straw-colored hair protruded at all angles above dark, cavernous eyes. The sharpness of his bones stretched his yellowed skin. His attire hung oddly on his frame, as though these clothes were not his own, but rather the castoffs of the true (and presumably human) butler.
“I... I...” Susan managed, before choking on an explanation she did not have.
She what? She was the twenty-year-old sole offspring of a loveless titled couple who had banished their ostracized disappointment of a daughter to the remotest corner of England rather than bear the sight of her? She nudged her spectacles up the bridge of her nose with the back of a gloved hand and forced what she hoped was a smile.
“My name is Miss Susan Stanton,” she tried again, deciding to leave the explanation at that. Mother had written in advance, so what more needed to be said? “I’m afraid I was expected hours ago. Is Lady Beaune at home?”
“Always,” the scarecrow rasped, after a brief pause. His sudden jagged-tooth smile unsettled Susan as surely as it must frighten the crows. “Come.”
Susan slid a dozen hesitant steps into a long, narrow passage devoid of both portraiture and decoration before the oddity of his answer reverberated in her ears.Always.What did he mean by that, and why the secret smile? Once one entered Moonseed Manor, was one to be stuck there, entombed forevermore in a beachside crypt?
“P-perhaps I should alert my driver that your mistress is at home.” She hastened forward to catch up to the scarecrow’s long-limbed strides. “I have a shocking number of valises, and—”
“Don’t worry,” came the scarecrow’s smoky rasp, once again accompanied by a grotesque slash of a smile. “He’s being taken care of.”
Normally, a lady of Susan’s class would’ve bristled with outrage at the effrontery of being interrupted by a servant. In this case, however, she was more concerned with the rented driver’s continued well-being. She was not sure she wanted him “being taken care of.” Shouldn’t the butler have said hertrunkswould be taken care of? She glanced over her shoulder at the corridor now stretching endlessly behind them, and wondered whether she was safer inside these skeletal walls or out.
Susan didn’t notice a narrow passageway intersecting the stark hall until the scarecrow disappeared within. She stood at the crossroads, hesitant to follow but even more nervous to stay behind. After the briefest of pauses, she hurried to regain the scarecrow’s side before losing him forever in the labyrinthine walls.
If he noticed her moment of indecision, he gave no sign. He made several quick turns, passing one tall closed door after another before finally making an abrupt stop at the dead end of an ill-lit corridor.
This door was open. Somewhat.
A candle flickered inside, but only succeeded in filling the room’s interior with teeming shadows.
“Sir,” the scarecrow rasped into the opening. “It’s Miss Stanton. Your guest.”
“Guest?” came a warm, smartly accented voice from somewhere within. The master of the house? No. “You were expecting guests at this hour, Ollie?”
Ollie?Susan echoed silently in her head. Lady Beaune’s husband was named Jean-Louis. Perhaps she was about to meet a distant relation. A cousin would make a lovely ally.
“All guests arrive at this hour,” a deep voice countered. “It’s midnight.”
Before Susan had a chance to parse that inexplicable response, the door swung fully open and a fairy-tale giant filled the entirety of the frame.
Her shoulders reached his hips.Hisshoulders reached the sides of the door frame and very nearly the top as well. His broad back hunched to allow his dark head to pass beneath the edge. Small black eyes glittered in an overlarge square face, his mouth hidden behind a beard the color of fresh tar. Arms that could crush tree trunks flexed at his sides. He did not offer his hand.
“Miss Stanton.”
Although her name was more a statement than a question, Susan’s well-trained spine dipped in an automatic curtsy as her mouth managed to stammer a simple “yes.”
