Foxe Manor (Part Four)
A Short Serial
Grace’s hands fumbled around her rosary, her gaze stitched to Jehezkiel’s dark, predatory eyes.
She half-thought she was dreaming; her body felt light, cold, surreal. She glanced, in spite of herself, at the clock, and found that it read nine o’clock. Had she truly seen him only this morning? Had she truly found the sparrow bones only several hours ago?
Had the young man standing before her truly appeared from an unraveled tapestry?
Jehezkiel’s smile spread, like ink rippling through water. She steeled herself.
“What do you want from me, Jehezkiel?” she asked.
His brow arched – not at the question, she thought, but perhaps at her use of his name. “I am not meant to want anything from you. It is my mistress that covets you for herself. Although, I’m certain you’ve understood this by now.”
“Not meant to want anything?”
Grace fought against the sharp instinct to run from the dining-room. Though he stood against the far wall, she had the uncanny impression that he was much too near. That he could reach her much too easily.
Jehezkiel spread his golden-brown hands. “I am only a fox spirit, after all. I want as much as anyone else.”
Grace’s lips parted. “A fox spirit?”
Jehezkiel’s smile sharpened.
“You ask what I want from you. The answer is simple, Miss Grace – or should I call you Grace, since you are not my mistress. I want what my mistress wants, too.” His tongue dampened his lips… slow, sensual. Grace felt something stir in her gut, something that was not quite fear. “I want your soul.”
Grace’s heart thudded against her throat. “My soul?”
Jehezkiel’s eyes shone, dark and glinting with something she had not noticed before. Something that looked more than predatory – it looked hungry. He did not step towards her, but his hands curled against his sides, as though he were resisting the urge. “You belong to my mistress, Grace. But she would not forbid me a small sip.”
Grace’s breaths fluttered like a moth’s wings against her ribs. She was tempted to throw her rosary towards him, to banish him. But she understood – through that strange, familiar instinct – that it would have little effect.
Instead, she tilted her chin up and said, “Wouldn’t she?”
Jehezkiel’s eyes darkened.
Grace’s voice slipped out, cool and smooth as silk, the voice she had heard her father use with those who did not know their place. “You are nothing but her servant, is that not the truth? Who are you to take what is hers? You say she would not forbid it, but I doubt that she would not punish such impudence.”
Jehezkiel’s lips curved, but his eyes remained dark and glittering. “And you believe you know her whims? Better than I?”
“It was my family that bound her, do not forget. She serves us.”
It was a lie, she knew, but it was the truth, all the same. And Jehezkiel knew it, too. He tilted his head, baring the bronze column of his throat, and appraised her, something welling behind the indignation in his eyes. Something reflective.
“Clever, aren’t we?” he said, his voice slipping out in a soft purr. “Well then, I will leave you to my mistress, if that is what you wish.” His teeth flashed. “But it will be slow and agonizing and you will find yourself begging for death before it is over with. Be warned, little pet.”
Grace’s cheeks burned, as his eyes slid to her throat.
“I would be gentle, and your begging would be of a very different nature with me.”
Grace’s smile was forced and jagged. “I will have to take your word for it. Now why don’t you run back to your mistress like a good servant?”
Jehezkiel’s eyes flashed, lightning slicing through a storm.
Then, he was gone, though she never saw him leave the room.
Grace stole the red thread from one of her mother’s gowns – aged, moth-eaten, smelling of mildew and crusted dirt. The sleeves were grimy. As though she had worn it while digging in her garden.
She never visited her mother’s rooms; they were in a wing of the house that had fallen away after her death, grown dusty and unused. The servants did not often clean it. Her father hadn’t forbidden her from going, but he had made her understand that some grief should be kept behind lock and key. Then, she had thought he meant his own grief. Now, she wondered at what he had truly been keeping behind locked doors.
The key dangled around her neck, cold and tarnished silver against her bosom. It seemed to grow heavier the longer she was in her mother’s wing.
Everything was the gray of doves and dust. The coverlets, once a pale, sea-blue; the dozens of dresses hanging within her mother’s closet; the delicate, glimmering cross above the bed. Grace stood amongst the lost and forgotten and breathed in their stench. Rotting flowers. A mockery of the sweet, floral scent she remembered to have been her mother’s.
An inherited grief, soft and sad, lingered within her. She thought of the portraits of her mother that hung through the house – dark, satin curls like her own, and hazel eyes, and lips that twisted with a secret only she knew to tell. She had once been clever, her father liked to tell her. Mischievous. A woman of faith, with a love for life that pervaded all else.
Nothing like the husk she had become – damp eyes, grimy nails scrabbling against hard dirt, a vacant smile playing on her lips.
Grace twirled inside the room, one final time, and found a forgotten desk, standing in a corner below a mound of dust.
She twisted the red thread around her finger. She had found what she was searching for. A tower of pages lay, half-scattered, across the wood of the desk.
The cold, watery apprehension that had filled her when she discovered her father’s letter sluiced through her once more. Her steps were soft, but felt too sharp, too hollow in the velvet silence. In the gloom, she could hardly make out the scrawled lettering on the pages. She cast about for a lamp and found, instead, a cherubic, crimson candle.
A match whispered against the wick, and a mellow, golden glow honeyed the pages before her. Alight, the writing was dark, spidery, staining the white of the page with smeared ink and crowded lettering. Grace set the candle on the desk and took up the first of the pages.
May 12th
My sweet, angelic child has been born. She is asleep now, yet there is no joy in doing anything but sitting at her bedside and watching the gentle rise and fall of her chest. She is beautiful, my child; graceful as her given name.
I thank God for her everyday.
I have hardly slept in the last days, but there is no sleep within me, for the moment. I do not need to sleep, when my sweet child sleeps for the both of us.
May 17th
The dreams have become a darkness in the midst of my joy. I remember nothing of them upon awakening but strange, sinful impressions. I pray, yet they haunt me all the same. There is nothing to be done.
May 19th
I awaken craving pomegranates. Each morning, as clockwork.
This morning, I awoke with a memory of her. The fox woman who haunts my dreams. Madness, one would think, that such a beautiful, ghostly creature would appear in so many dreams. Each time, she seems to grow nearer. Last night, I felt her lips against the nape of my neck. Sin incarnate. I cannot bear to so much as glance towards my Dominic without a deep, twisting guilt.
I must pray.
May 25th
She sings to me in my dreams, and her song stains my lips when I awaken. Her voice is sweet, but hollow; what I fancy a siren’s voice might sound like. Beautiful. Deadly. I answer her lulling call, in the dreams, as there is no other choice. She kissed me last night, but I placed a coin between my lips, and it tricked her – she could not steal my soul. It is what she intends to do, I am certain of it. Every morning, I awake with the intention of telling Dominic of the dreams, but something compels me against it. Guilt, perhaps.
Or greed.
June 13th
The manor has become so drab, so confining, with its twisting hallways and the strange paintings lining it. Why Dominic has chosen such crude artwork with which to adorn our home, I cannot understand. I much prefer the garden, flowered as it is, and surrounded by the scents of the forest. Once, the garden grew only roses. Now, with my coaxing, it grows lavender and lilac and ivy… It is my joy, the garden. It is all I have apart from sweet Grace. But she is asleep for so many hours. She leaves me alone to my thoughts, and I cannot bear it for long.
The fox woman seems to haunt my waking world now, too. When I gaze into the looking-glass, I swear I see her eyes behind mine. And her scent, like blood and berries, follows me. I cannot escape her. I am not certain I wish to, anymore.
She needs me. I know it.
June 14th
This morning, I planted a crow’s bones beneath the roses.
No one will know, of course. I have taken care of that. Dominic hasn’t the faintest clue. He will never find out. My sweet child… I do this for her. For her and for the woman in my dreams.
It is what she needs from me. Small sacrifices, in exchange for her love.
June 16th
The servants whisper. I feel their eyes on me at all hours of the day. I cannot abide it, so I spend most of my hours in my garden. Grace is asleep, always asleep, always asleep. Dominic suspects something, I see it in his gaze. I wonder if he sees her in mine. Perhaps not… no, I know he does not. He does not know her. She is mine. Or, rather, I am hers.
Her love. Her servant.
She asked for a rabbit this morning. I found one, white as snow. I slit its throat with one of the kitchen knives, and returned it before the servants could become aware of its absence. Poor thing. Though, it hardly suffered. And, after all, it is for her. I planted its bones underneath the crawling ivy.
The paintings all have her eyes. The shadows seem to follow me, their tendrils like tails dragging along the floors. She is trying to reach me, in this world, but she cannot. Not yet. But the sacrifices – with enough of them, she will be able to find me, to join me, outside of my dreams. She is real; she is only trapped.
Grace sleeps. Dominic has left on business, though he will not tell me what. He never does. Once again, I am alone to my thoughts.
I have become an exile. Foxe Manor is my labyrinth. My only escape from my torments is my lovely garden.
June 30th
Dominic watches me as one does someone who is ill. The servants whispering grows louder. I hear them, always, behind the glass of the windows. They are watching me garden. I know it. I must hide the deer. I must bury its bones.
Grace, Grace, I love you, my sweet child. But you, as the fox woman, cannot seem to join me in the waking world.
July 16th
I killed her. The servant girl. The one with the glazed, watching eyes and the sharp, nasal whisper. She spoke ill of me, behind my back. She told the others I was mad. Well, my mistress will adore me all the more for her sacrifice. Let her speak ill of me from the grave.
I buried her carefully. So carefully. One arm below the lilac. Her spine under the roots of the trees. Her head below the pine needles. The other servants cannot know, cannot suspect.
Even in death, she whispers. I hear her in the garden in my dreams.
July 20th
My mistress promises to allow me to worship her. I need only kill another handful, perhaps, and then she will be with me.
July 23rd
My sweet Grace. You are the only one I shall miss. If only you could come with me… but my mistress will not allow it.
She is coming. Tonight.
The servants whisper behind the looking-glass. The dead ones talk to me from the marrow of my bones… they call me an infidel, a sinner. I no longer pay them any mind. They do not understand my faith. My mistress will be with me soon, and she will silence them all.
The garden is where I must wait.
The garden is where I must wait.
The garden is where I must wait.
July 24th
Tonight, I saw another in my dreams… he means my mistress harm, I know it. I must warn her!
The green eyes are always watching, watching, watching.
July 31st
It is done, she is coming.
Goodbye, sweet Grace.
Goodbye, Foxe Manor.
Grace’s tears glazed her cheeks, hot and salted, and her fingers threaded over her lips to muffle the sobs that tore from her. She sank to her knees, the last page a glossy, fractured smudge in her hands. She hugged the pages to her chest, and wept for the mother she had never known, for the woman who had loved her enough to say goodbye, but not enough to stay.
Her lips were slick with salt and tears. Her lungs burned. Her temples throbbed with each watery gasp.
She did not know how long she knelt there, her tears leaking down her cheeks and dampening the floorboards. Only that, eventually, as she mulled over her mother’s words, a couple of phrases hooked themselves into her thoughts and would not let go.
She smeared the heels of her hands against her cheeks, and brushed the wetness onto her skirts.
Tonight, I saw another in my dreams… he means my mistress harm, I know it.
Who else could have witnessed her mother’s dreams? Her father? But she would have recognized him. Was it only madness? No… she did not think it was that, either.
The green eyes are always watching, watching, watching.
Her candle had burned to a waxy, crimson puddle in its sconce. She searched her mother’s room for a clock, found one on the mantlepiece that was frozen at midnight. The red string from her mother’s gown was tight around her neck, reminding her of the ritual she had yet to conduct. Her eyes were heavy, sore, as she stood and wandered out of her mother’s wing, nearly forgetting to lock the doors behind her.
The house was filled with silence, heavy and dark. The servants must have all gone to bed by this hour. She followed the twisting corridors, blind, her hand trailing against the wood-paneled walls, until she found herself at her own door.
Her bedroom was warm, inviting, so familiar after her mother’s rotting wing that she sank into her bed without another thought. Her head felt as though it were filled with cobwebs, soft and hazy. She knew there was something else to be done, but she could not put together what it might be. Her fingers reached… hooked around the thread at her neck.
But, by then, she had already drifted off to sleep.
Ooh, I really enjoyed her mother's descent into madness. Well done!