Haunting Violet
Page 14

I hated Tallulah.
But as always, she captured their full attention. She offered them spirit apports, which were simply gifts—such as a scatter of roses, violets, and larkspur. This was her favorite secret: how she kept the flowers in her shawl and no one noticed them falling into her hands when she began to dance, slow as a sunset. There wasn’t a lily among them, for all that I still noticed their distinctive scent.
No one else noticed the girl, standing in the shadows by the grate, water pooling under her bare feet.
She met my eyes and it was as if winter blew through the parlor. When she opened her mouth, the sound was muffled and high-pitched, like nothing I had ever heard before. She walked toward me, suddenly close enough that the hem of my skirt grew damp and cold. I cringed back in my chair, looking around wildly. Everyone was staring at my mother, except for Colin, whose eyes were narrowed and trained on my every flinch and wince. I wanted to get up and run from the room. Only Mrs. Hughes’s tight grip on my hand kept me there. Sweat pooled under my arms.
All the while, Mother was still dancing gracefully, brushing against the shoulders of the men. She stopped near the fire, where the glow was most flattering. She let her breath tremble. It was Colin’s cue. He reached her side just as she swooned, crumpling softly. He caught her and laid her in her chair. It was the best way to end, we’d found, as it curtailed too many questions. Since it was understood that it was exhausting for a medium to give herself over to the spirits, we bundled Mother up and hurried her to her bedchamber.
I darted into my room and shut the door behind me before Colin could ask me any questions. I sank onto the chaise longue, not even bothering to loosen the bellows that were cutting off the circulation in my leg. My foot tingled but I barely noticed.
No one else had seen the screaming girl.
I wiped at my damp forehead. It must be a fever of some kind, I thought again. I did feel chilled and light-headed. There. That was a perfectly reasonable explanation.
Which didn’t explain why the carpet squelched wetly under my boots. There was a puddle under my chair and I could hear the sound of dripping, as if the gutters were overflowing. I crossed the damp carpet and went to the window.
It wasn’t raining.
Perhaps Lord Jasper had heated-water pipes installed and they were leaking. They were rare so far out of the city, but he was fantastically wealthy and could likely afford them. I turned back, intending to summon a footman or a housemaid to warn him before he lost all his best furniture to a flood.
That’s when the water began to run in sheets down the walls, trickling over the floor toward me. I hurried to the door. The water followed me.
I frowned, taking a step to the side.
The water changed course.
It was still pouring down the silk paper, but when it hit the ground it followed me. It was cold, seeping into the soles of my boots. I didn’t know what to do. I might not know very much about plumbing, but I was fairly certain it couldn’t explain this particular phenomenon. The water rose to my ankles. I shivered.
“This is daft,” I muttered.
And if I stood here too long, I might just drown.
That galvanized me into moving. My steps churned up the water, splashing droplets into the air.
They froze there, hovering.
Which was utterly impossible.
My breath was loud and raspy in my ears. The beads stayed suspended around me, glittering in the light of the oil lamps. I wasn’t suffering from some kind of influenza; I was going mad.
I was reflected in one of the drops—my frantic, pale face getting wider and more distorted as I got closer. I reached out a trembling fingertip. The very moment I touched the frozen drop, it fell like a marble. The splash sounded like ice cracking, and then all of the water on the ground arced up in violent waves around me.
“To hell with this.” I leaped for the door.
The brass knob seared my hand, jagged ice bristling out of it as if it had turned into a porcupine. Tiny spots of frostbite salted my palm, tingling painfully.
And the water stopped.
Just stopped.
The next breath had it falling back to the floor and then sucking back toward the wall and up the paper.
I took a hesitant step forward. Nothing happened.
Nothing was wet. Not the rugs, the silk wallpaper, or the ceiling. Not even my boots.
I slept on the settee in the adjoining parlor that night.
CHAPTER 5
I didn’t believe in ghosts.
All the same, I avoided the downstairs drawing room the next morning and didn’t linger in my room.
Just in case.
The rest of the guests had been arriving all morning, the carriages clogging the drive and the stable boys run off their feet. The footmen carrying heavy trunks made a constant parade, and the maids all looked out of breath. Mrs. Harris was the only one who seemed to march her way through the controlled chaos without a hair out of place, the keys on her chatelaine rattling. It was all very normal and comforting. Clearly, I’d been overtired last night. And the stress of our first sitting here had frayed my nerves. That was all.
“Quickly!” Elizabeth pounced at me from behind the ferns outside the breakfast room. “My mother’s looking for me.”
“What for?”
“Does it matter?”
We rushed through a little-used door near the conservatory. Elizabeth’s mother was rather imposing and stern. And she was determined to make a good match for Elizabeth after her debut, which involved a lot of lectures on proper posture and how to address a duke’s son. I knew for a fact that she’d made Elizabeth memorize the names and holdings of every eligible bachelor of good breeding, not just the ones our age but for two generations past as well.