At ten-years of age, Lady Raina Goodheart was entirely too old to believe in ghosts. That did not, however, prevent her from fearing them.
Lying alone in her chambers, with her nursemaid, dead to the world, snoring away, in the connecting room, Raina stared at the floral canopy overhead.
She swallowed loudly.
Dead to the world hadn’t been right
Her only brother, Gregory, the future Duke of Argyll had assured Raina spirits returning from the dead, weren’t real. And that if they were, those haunts would have far grander, more enjoyable things to do upon their return to earth than go about bothering eleven-year-old girls attempting to sleep.
But also, now that he’d gone off to university, Gregory didn’t come ‘round like he once did.
Alone, in her rooms, with only the night’s shadows for company, and a recurring forlorn wail, Raina wasn’t altogether sure that where ghosts were concerned, her brother had the right of it.
Another, distant, broken sob, whispered in the midnight silence.
Her teeth chattering, Rain snatched her chintz coverlet and tugged it all the way to her chin.
They aren’t real.
They aren’t real.
“Whyever would a spirit spend a night here, when he could be out to all manner of mischief at some wild masquerade?” Gregory’s gently spoken reminder echoed around her mind.
In a bid to escape the terror tugging at her, she did as he’d once told her to do if he weren’t about; to repeat that conversation over and over in her mind.
She focused on breathing—just like he’d said. “They wouldn’t.” She’d answered him. “Whyever would ghosts wish to spend the evening at the Goodheart residence?”
“Precisely,” he’d reassure.
A long, forlorn moan broke once more into the quiet.
Raina squeezed her eyes shut.
If they weren’t real, then what else could possibly account for those piteous wails that came and went on various nights?
“There are no monsters,” she whispered to herself. “There are no ghosts.”
Another piercing sob spilled into the quiet.
Before her courage deserted her, Raina swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood.
The cold came up to meet her bare feet.
Shivering, Raina first fetched her wrapper, then a candlestick, and made her way from the room.
With the way Mrs. Bossley drank her gin before bed and then slept, the older woman wouldn’t have heard a mail coach were it to come crashing through her lone window.
As if to highlight that very point, the moment Raina brought the door shut behind her, an enormous, bleating, snore spilled through the white-painted panel.
Only, now alone in the long, empty, corridor, she took a look around.
The lit tapers within the gilded sconces dripped beads of clear wax like sorrowful teardrops. Dark shadows flickered off the peacock-painted wallpaper; turning those sapphire and emerald majestic birds into sinister beasts.
Raina’s hand trembled violently, and the abrupt movement sent the tiny flame out so that the only light remaining came from within the handful of sconces still lit.
As she inched deeper down the hall, she took care to keep her gaze directed forward.
How had she failed to appreciate before now, how unnaturally quiet it was in the dead of night. Or how eerie the halls were? Perhaps they’d always been?
Raina attempted to swallow around the large knot in her throat.
“Gr-Gregory,” she called out. “I know you said there are no such things as ghosts and monsters, and I believe you because you never lie to me, so I’m hoping it is just you and Rex and Edward who are here and just being noisy.” She paused to take a deep breath. “Is it you?”
He always did return at the most unexpected times and made the grandest show when he arrived.
Silence, however, served as her only answer.
Raina stilled.
Wait. Those wretched wails which had penetrated her sleep and dragged her awake were no more.
If she’d even heard them, at all.
Raina glanced about the empty corridor.
Some of the tension eased from her shoulders.
“It appears you were right, Gregory,” she grudgingly admitted. “I have a colorful imagination and hate sleep because I don’t want to miss anything. That’s what you always say, isn’t it?”
She didn’t need a reply, his already existed in her head.
A duke’s daughter lived a lonely life. The servants did not permit their children to play with Raina. The village children did, but only for those short times her family retired in the summer. As such, Raina took the one friend whom she did have in her brother, and relied on him, even when he wasn’t around.
He—
A ragged sob punctured the quiet.
With a gasp, Raina bolted and took off running back from the same direction she’d just come.
“Why-wh—why?”
Crying softly, Raina, grappled with her door handle. She made to wrench the panel open and looked with a frantic gaze for the monster. When from the distance, through her panic, she registered that single word uttered over and over.
Monsters and ghosts didn’t speak the King’s English.
Did they?
Only—Raina’s pulse continued to hammer away in her chest—she recognized that hoarse, lyrical, voice.
“Mother,” she whispered.
“No. No. No.”
She hesitated a moment; considered finding Papa or screaming down the household for a servant.
When presented with dashing off alone, again, Raina opted for the latter. She opened her mouth to get help for her mother but stopped.
Some twenty paces ahead, a tall, graceful figure, emerged from the shadows like some wispy specter in flowy white silk skirts, so sheer as to be see-through.
She blinked. “Mother,” she repeated, this time more loudly.
As the duchess trailed the halls, she gave no outward reaction she’d heard Raina. Mother and daughter existed in some strange plain; like they were trapped in a dream, but separated by a screen.
Her earlier fear aside, Raina frowned.
Where was she…going?
With her gaze, she followed her mother’s meandering path, until the duchess reached the South wing.
Springing to life, Raina took off, sprinting after her. Winded and out of breath, she stumbled around the corner.
They continued on that way.
The duchess wandering. Raina following. Until at last, Raina’s chase brought her to a wing of the house she’d never been before. Strange that. She’d lived in this household; played in every corner of it, only to discover there were still uncharted places for her to explore here.
Her mother’s shoulders sagged, and then she let herself into a room.
Click.
Alone once more, her unease and hesitancy of before returned, it was this time, with more cautious steps that Raina made the rest of her way over.
She hovered at the entryway.
Dampening her mouth, Raina pressed her ear against the door, and listened.
There came more of her mother’s tears; her mother who never cried and who always wore a smile. And as much as Raina yearned to find her way back to her corner of the household and forget everything she’d seen and heard, she couldn’t. How many times had Mother wiped Raina’s tears? Or held her when she cried.
Bringing her shoulders back, Raina caught the handle, and let herself inside. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. As she walked slowly inside, Raina moved her gaze throughout.
“Mother?” she called quietly.
There was no answer.
Then she found her.
She lay beside an ink pot, turned over on its side, the small pool of black continued to leak out, towards an empty crystal decanter.
Raina’s frown deepened. She knew what an empty bottle meant. The last time she’d discovered one so, she’d also discovered Gregory and Edward raucously inebriated and outrageously loud.
But the duchess wasn’t loud.
“Mother,” Raina whispered.
It was her mother, but at the same time, it wasn’t.
Curled on her side against the corner.
Raina fell to a knee and touched her lightly on the shoulder. “Mama?” she repeated.
Weeping softly, the duchess rolled onto her back.
Raina started at the sight of her: her glazed, vacant, eyes bloodshot and swollen as they’d never been. Her lips covered in rouge.
“I hate h-her,” the duchess slurred. “b-but I hate him more.” A gurgling half-laugh, half-sob escaped her. “But I l-love him even more than I hate him.”
Her pulse picked up again. “Wh-who, Mother?” Fear burgeoned in her belly.
The duchess lifted her tear-ravaged face. She moved a drunken gaze over Raina’s. “Why can’t I be enough?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Mama,” she implored. “You are.”
Father. Where is father?
Raina searched desperately for him. He always made Mother smile.
“I-I hate all of them,” her mother’s words rolled together so badly, Raina struggled to make out what she was saying.
When she did, a chill went through her. “Wh-Who do you hate?”
But Raina’s voice didn’t seem to penetrate the faraway misery and hate in the duchess’s eyes. “She is for us. They are for us,” she spat. “It’s never for us. It’s for him.” Another crazed laugh burst from her lips. “And I do it for him but then…I love it, because I’m just as d-depraved.”
Raina’s teeth clanked together. I don’t understand.
Did she even voice her question aloud? Maybe not, because she didn’t want to understand whatever it was Mama spoke about.
Suddenly, through whatever hell kept the duchess in its snare loosened. Lucidity glimmered in her tear-filled eyes. “We are a family of sinners, Raina. Your father. His father before him. The entire line is corrupted to the core. Me.” Her features twisted. “Gregory. My beautiful boy is n-no different than him.”
The duchess’s shoulders slumped. “I-It is in our blood, Raina,” her mother said, her voice steady and sober and all the more chilling for it. “You’ll see.”
“What is?” Raina urged, her fear redoubling. She gave the duchess a slight shake. “What is, Mama?” she repeated.
“It is in our blood, Raina. We were cursed…to be sinners. Or blessed to be sinners…”
With unsteady movements, her mother collapsed upon her back on the floor.
She’s dead.
Raina cried out. Tears ravaged her cheeks the same way they did Mama’s.
Except, the duchess fumbled her arm about and then muttering something, she fetched a small book from the floor. “Here,” she slurred, tossing the leather tome.
Raina caught it against her chest. Confused, she fanned through the pages. Upon inspection it wasn’t a book, but rather, a journal, kept in her mother’s hand—a diary.
“I protest the wicked acts he proposes we take part in, but shamefully, wickedly, and secretly, I am intrigued and…aroused. I—”
Raina’s eyes widened as she read the remainder of the sinful words her mother recorded. She slapped the book closed.
“Here,” she said, gruffly, and attempted to hand it back to her drowsy mother.
The duchess gave Raina a sad smile and rejected those attempts. “Better you know now than when you are a hopeful young woman with stars in your eyes, my dearest, Raina.”
A moment later, her eyes slipped shut, and a snore to rival Mrs. Smith’s filled the room.
Falling back on her haunches, Raina stared at the stranger before her. Not taking her gaze from her mother’s slumbering form, Then, glancing about, she grabbed a blanket off the bed. Raina looked at the cool fabric in her hands.
The crimson red satin wouldn’t keep any person warm. Still, she gently covered the duchess, and then, Raina resting her back against the bed, stayed with her mother while she slept.
The diary her mother had pushed into her hands stared tauntingly back—the book dared her to pick it up. To read.
Raina bit the inside of her lower lip hard enough to draw blood.
Then, squeezing her eyes tightly shut, she grabbed her mother’s private diary as she’d urged Raina to do.
Raina read.
And read.
And continued reading until a coldness lived within her and she’d reached the last page.
Heart pounding, Raina slammed the leather volume shut, and tossed it on the other side of the duchess’s still sleeping form.
Not taking her gaze from her mother, this stranger before her, who’d revealed the past Raina hadn’t known, and prophesied Raina’s future, she came to her feet and backed slowly away.
She continued backing away, until she’d put the room and her mother behind her.
But not the thoughts. Those horrid, hideous things she’d read, followed Raina, as she wound her way back through the maze of a household.
When she reached the corridor connecting to her hall, Raina stopped.
Why did I go seek out the source of those wails? Why?
Because then, she wouldn’t know. Then, she wouldn’t know that her parents’ love wasn’t the grand, devoted, one she’d believed, or that wickedness ran in the veins of all Goodhearts—Raina, included.
A large hand settled on Raina’s shoulder.
Crying out, she spun to face—
“Gregory,” she whispered.
“Hey, what is my favorite sister doing—” The usual cheer-filled grin on her brother’s face faded. His gaze moved from Raina’s swollen and bloodshot eyes, to her tear-stained streaks.
“Who do I have to kill?” he asked quietly, with a lethality she’d never before heard from him, in all the times they’d talked.
Raina scrubbed a hand over her face. “N-No one.” She gave her head an uneven shake.
He narrowed his eyes.
And through the haze of her misery, she noted details which she likely wouldn’t have otherwise noted—until her meeting with their mother.
Her brother’s rumpled garments. The rouge stain on his also wrinkled white cravat. The stench of spirits on his breath.
“It is in our blood, Raina. We were cursed…to be sinners. Or blessed to be sinners…”
Her mother’s half-mad sobbing laugh pinged around Raina’s head until she wanted to clamp her hands over her ears.
She wrenched her arm free of Gregory’s grip. “Let me go.”
Surprise filled his face. “Raina?”
And as Raina bolted for her bedroom, leaving Gregory behind her, she discovered too late—
If she’d been allowed to choose between a world where monsters and ghosts freely roamed or where her parents’ weren’t hopelessly, and desperately in love with only each other, she’d far prefer the former.
