Foxe Manor (Part Three)
A Short Serial
Enjoy <3
Grace awoke in a garden.
It was not the garden she had just been in, the one where she had held the sparrow bones in the cup of her palms… her mother’s garden, once. This garden was pale, arching, made of white, twisting vines, and spaded ivy leaves that clambered over the walls of Foxe Manor.
Her heart thudded, sick and dreamy, as she took in the familiar walls, the curving windows and jagged turrets and the golden, fox-head knockers on the doors. Foxe Manor, as it was in her waking world. But she knew that she was not awake. She couldn’t have been, for there was no garden like this one outside of her dreams.
Rotting fruit – deep red and seeded and glistening – hung from the trees. Its bittersweet scent made her eyes water. The fruit trailed its vivid, fleshy seeds along the garden paths, like fallen entrails. Grace’s stomach lurched at the thought. Yet the seeds were the only bright-hued thing in the pale gardens, and she knew she would follow them, if only to find herself an escape from the dream. She could not even remember falling asleep yet, somehow, she had wound up here. She wondered if it was the fox woman’s doing… if she had lured her into the dreamworld, where she would follow the bloody seeds like a winding red string of fate.
Grace took the seeded path, wondering what the fox woman wanted with her, truly.
It was quiet in the garden, a quiet that hung as still and rotting as the fruit. Unnatural. Every twist of the path revealed clusters of velvet shadows, which she found herself searching for a glint of auburn eyes or a brush of vivid fur. She found nothing but the sinking quiet, and the endless red string of seeds. Yet something told her she was nearing the place where the fox woman wanted her to be. And, as the path curved, she glimpsed the black waters of the pond and the stooping, stone well, both so familiar, they might have been branded in her thoughts.
Her brow furrowed. She half-turned towards the garden… but it had vanished into a deep, silver mist. She found that the pond was wreathed with it, and the well spilled silver from its mouth. Deep shadows danced through the gloom, and the fox woman’s eyes were a bright glint of gold that preceded her, as she waltzed out from the fog.
Grace’s heart tumbled into her stomach.
The fox woman’s grin was sharp-toothed and dimpled. Her tongue, pink velvet, ran over her teeth – white-as-pearl, threaded with blood and the remnants of soft, sparrow feathers. Grace was snared by her auburn gaze, deep and vivid, and she felt herself giving in, felt her footsteps trail, meek and chosen for her, towards the fox woman. The fox woman’s eyes glittered as Grace knelt before her, her knees dampening below her skirts, her lips parted. All thoughts of escape had fled from her mind. She was where she was meant to be.
The fox woman’s hand, crowned with sharp nails, cupped her chin. Grace’s eyes fluttered shut.
Her voice, warm as satin, purred, “You have done well, sweet pet.”
Grace’s faith was a faraway thing, her rosary dripping to the grass below her, as the fox woman’s breath misted against her lips. She smelled of forest, of pine and blood and wet bark. Of dead things. Bitter and sweet, at once.
The fox woman’s nails slit, gently, into Grace’s throat. Crescents of blood welled. Her lips found hers, warm and sharp and tasting of copper and stolen sin.
Grace’s breath hitched, her eyes blooming open.
But the fox woman’s bladed nails held her there, as their kiss deepened. She felt her thoughts and words and self welling up, up, up, answering the spirit’s lulling call, and she knew that she would lose her very soul if the kiss did not end. Yet, she could not detangle them. Her eyes fell shut. The fox woman’s tongue tasted her throat; Grace tasted the sparrow’s blood.
Miss Grace…
The voice was sweet, timid, an echo made of breath and waking thoughts.
Miss Grace!
Grace’s thoughts stirred, pulling her from her daze.
Miss–
“Grace!”
Grace’s eyes pooled open. Her breath hitched, cold and sharp, behind her ribs.
She was kneeling in her mother’s garden. In the deepening twilight, the brambles and dead rosebushes and lean, bare forest that surrounded Foxe Manor were inked in shadowed brushstrokes. At the mouth of the forest, she could have sworn she caught the deep, green gleam of eyes, caught in the branches. They were gone, before she could be certain.
The fox woman could not reach her in the waking world, she told herself, uncertain. Although – she shuddered – Jehezkiel could.
The sparrow’s bones were cupped in her hands which, she realized with a soft, sickly thud, were numb with the cold, a pale, faded blue at the fingertips. When a gentle hand laid itself on her shoulder, she gasped, and the thin, delicate bones clattered against the dead grass.
“Miss Grace? Are you alright?”
Grace swung around, half-expecting – half-hoping – to see Jehezkiel behind her, his dark eyes deadly, but there, not lurking about the house, watching her when she did not know where to look for them. Never mind that it was not his voice she had heard, but the soft, sweet voice from her dreams. So deep and vivid were her imaginings that, for a breath, she saw him, standing in the withered garden, gazing at her. When she blinked, he had vanished. In his stead, she found one of the serving girls, her cheeks stained pink with worry or with the cold, her green eyes fragile and glossy.
“What is it?” Grace breathed, white frost spilling from her lips.
The serving girl – she had known her name once, she was certain, but so much had slipped from her mind with her father’s passing – took her hand away and said, her words halting, “You’ve been missing for hours, Miss Grace. Forgive me for saying so, but we thought you had vanished, alongside your father.” The girl’s eyes were bright, frightened. “You might have caught your death out here!”
Grace’s lips parted, glazed with indignation… but the girl meant well, after all. And, when she caught a glimpse of the sky over the girl’s thin shoulder, it was a deep, darkening lavender. Her heart throbbed in her throat.
Had she been in the gardens all day?
Impossible.
The serving girl’s eyes still shone, wet and green, in the dimness. Like the glint of watching eyes between the trees.
“The hours must have gotten away from me,” Grace said. Her jaw was sore, her lips cold and chapped. She knew it was hardly an explanation, and the serving girl must have known it, too. But she stitched her lips together and nodded and her gentle hands guided Grace to her feet.
Grace’s limbs awakened to a tapestry of burning needles. She stumbled, and the serving girl’s hands – quiet and light as a bird’s wing – tightened around her arms. She leaned into the girl’s steady warmth, a fresh, strange gratitude welling within her. Something about the girl’s scent – soft as her voice, and floral – reminded her of her mother; impossible, of course, but comforting all the same.
Her thoughts had drifted from the sparrow’s bones but, as she crossed the glass threshold into the house, they returned to them.
When she turned to look into the gardens once more, the small, gleaming pile of bones was gone. Vanished, like her father and the dark green glint of eyes watching her from the mouth of the trees.
The serving girl brought her a mug of lilac tea, steaming and floral pink. She cupped it between her cold, faded hands, and the warmth prickled against her palms, like pins sinking into the skin. She sipped, felt the tea burn her tongue, and turned her gaze on the serving girl, who stood in the lamplit dining-room doorway, twisting her fingers.
She ought to thank her, but the words stoppered in her throat. All she could see of the girl was her bright, green eyes, the shade of the forest. All she could think of – as the memories of her dream wafted back to her, like the curls of lilac steam – was the feeling of slick, bitter blood on her tongue, between her teeth, and the fragile weight of the sparrow bones caged between her fingers.
The girl’s fingers twisted and twisted, white at the crowns.
Grace’s own fingers shook around the mug. She placed it against its saucer.
She took in the girl’s golden freckles, her red hair, braided in a crown atop her head, the worried curve of her lips. “What is your name?”
“Caprina, Miss Grace.”
“That’s a beautiful name,” she said, thinking back to her father’s kind, equitable way with the servants. He had been a good man. He hadn’t deserved…
Any of it.
Tears stung her throat.
“Thank you, Miss Grace.”
“No, thank you. For finding me. And for the tea.” Grace forced her lips to curve into a smile. “It’s lovely.”
Caprina’s cheeks flushed; the green of her eyes only grew more vivid. “Is there anything else I can do for you, Miss Grace? Anything at all?”
Grace shook her head, quick, instinctive, just as a knock on the dining-room doors startled them both.
Another servant appeared in the crook of the doors. Grace recognized the wispy girl as the one who had informed her of her father’s absence, what felt like so many months ago. Grief, cold and sudden as spilt water, slit into her once more.
“I must go, Miss Grace,” Caprina said. Her cheeks were freckled with gold once more, having paled from their flush. She bowed her head. The girls left, the dining-room doors falling shut behind them, and Grace was alone with her thoughts again.
The lilac tea was warm against her palms, yet she felt cold as she soaked in the dining-room, which seemed as unfamiliar as it had that morning, when she had heard of her father’s absence. The paintings of the fallen angel and the three sisters were gone, she noted. The wallpaper, once pale and golden and chosen by her father, had shifted; now, it was dark as spilt ink or wine stains. And, hanging where the paintings had once hung, was a tapestry.
Edged in spiraling gold, was a well, dark and rotting, that she recognized from her dreams. The stooped well, with the moss and ivy clambering up its bricks. Curving behind it, like a dark embrace, was a green thread of trees… and between them stood Jehezkiel, his skin bronzed and gleaming in the gloom, his black, pooling eyes locked onto her.
Grace shoved herself away from the table, her teacup clattering against the wood. Her breaths came hard, fluttering. Her chair shrieked against the floorboards. Her tea forgotten, she left the room; her legs, unsteady with the cold, and with the dark gaze branded in her thoughts, took her towards her father’s office, with its warm candlelight and its shelves of slumping books. Answers, she needed answers. And she would begin with the only place she knew: the tome with the strange, pale cover and the scrawled rituals that she had found amongst his possessions.
The candlelight was mellow, honeyed. It fell strangely against words as dark as sin, and illustrations made of jagged ink and pale breaths. Grace slouched against the carpeted floors, leafing through rituals and nightmares. Her skirts were a puddle of black and white, and she sank into them. Even now, she clutched at her rosary, instinct bleeding into movement, as she read through the grim tome.
She had found little, even littler than she had expected to find, in spite of her father’s hopeless letter. The hours had trickled past her, and her eyes had begun to grow heavy. One slim finger tapped along the words, steady and lulling, and she found her thoughts drifting once more, from the ashen sketches of dead owls and bound statues, to her own memories.
Memories of her mother. Memories that had not plagued her for many years. She supposed they had been reawakened by her visit to the garden, by the pale, strange garden in her dream.
Her father and the servants told her that her mother had gone mad after giving birth to her. That the dreams that once plagued her during nights crowned by full moons, now drowned her; that she sank into them as coins sink into a fountain. She became an exile. Foxe Manor became her labyrinth. Her only escape from her own torments was her garden.
Her father tried to find her help but, he told Grace, she was too far fallen into madness. She began to whisper of fox eyes and of a voice that told her to garden. So he left her to her garden, unaware (or so he said) of what she was growing. Where seeds ought to have been buried, bones were. Frail, delicate, at first. It was a moonless night when the first servant went missing. Three more disappeared before her mother was found dead in her precious garden.
Grace was only an infant when her body was discovered.
Her heart had failed her, or so went the story her father told the servants. He was not a drinking man but once, in a drunken grief, he had slurred a truer story to Grace. That her mother’s eyes had been open, wide and fearful, to the sky, that the rain had been trickling through her hair, that her dress had been torn, along the hem and at the sleeves, as though she were trying to escape from something that had her in its clutches. He hadn’t told her the rest, the truest story… that, she had overheard in the rude, rambling whispers of the servants.
There had been claw marks, sunken into her mother’s pale, delicate belly. Her entrails had been strewn across the garden, snagging on branches, painting her beloved flowers a slick crimson. And, while her eyes had been glossy with fear, her lips had been curved into a euphoric smile.
You would never believe what they found in the mistress’ stomach when they… well, she was already opened up, wasn’t she? Bones. The same bones, likely, that she’d been planting in that strange garden of hers. And coins, like you’ve never seen before. Odd symbols drawn on them, symbols that no one recognized, and gaping holes in their middle. She’d been swallowing them, they said. Only God knows how she stayed alive as long as she did.
Grace’s stomach ribboned. She hadn’t understood the true meaning of her mother’s death then, but understanding sank into her now, cold and unbearable. Fishing through her memories, she wondered if the fox woman’s influence had been written plainly on the whole of her childhood… her mother, her father, the very rooms she had grown up in, bright and unaware.
She shook her head, slow and dreamy, but the thought would not leave her.
Her legs had fallen asleep, curled below her skirts. She pinched the skin, hoping to coax some life back into them, and thought of all that she had read in her father’s tome. Only one detail had struck her as truly important. Her thoughts returned to the myths of the red string of fate, awakening, once more, the burning pain in her bandaged forearm. The tome said that the red string could be worn, around the neck or wrist, as a form of protection from the fox spirit.
She cast a desperate glance around her father’s office, as though the red string would materialize having heard her prayer. It did not. She would have to tear a string from one of her own dresses, or from some long-forgotten curtain in the manor. But that was not what troubled her, not truly.
Her stomach sank, deep and cold. Her rosary felt heavy as iron against her wrist.
“Miss Grace?”
Grace’s heart took startled flight. The voice at the door to her father’s office held a sweet, timid timbre.
Caprina.
“Miss Grace? Apologies if I am intruding, but Miss Daniels wished me to ask if she ought to prepare supper.”
Grace hadn’t realized that her stomach felt hollow, her ribs tight behind her skin. She was famished. And yet, something warned her not to open the door just yet. Her hands leafing through the tome, past pages scrawled into her memory by now, she called out, “Tell Miss Daniels that would be lovely. I will expect supper at” – her eyes wandered to the ornate clock on her father’s mantlepiece – “half past eight. Thank you, Caprina.”
“Of course, Miss Grace,” the sweet voice returned.
Grace tilted her head, listening as the girl’s quiet footsteps vanished in the direction of the kitchens, and returned her attention to the tome before her. Or attempted to. But the hung pressed behind her ribs, and there was a deep, needling ache beginning in her temples, and she found she could not read another word. Sighing, her breath cold against her lips, she let the tome fall shut, and stood, her skirts exhaling about her.
After all, she knew what she was to do after supper, and the thought bore her no pleasure. The beads of her rosary pressed hard against her skin. She had never performed a ritual before, and was not certain she could, now. But, of course, the red string would not be enough to protect her on its own.
She sighed, passed a hand over her face.
The manor held a soft, velvet quiet when she left her father’s office, locking the door behind her with an ornate key that she slipped into her skirts. She was grateful for the narrow, twisting corridor that led to the dining-room from this part of the house, grateful that she would not pass the statue of the bleeding crone. Her footsteps carried her, light and agile, to the dining-room. The clock read a quarter past eight. She sat at the head of the table – her father’s chair, once – and her gaze wandered to the tapestry, as though drawn there.
She drew the tapestry with her eyes… and they snagged against the loose threads billowing at its base. Moss-green, gold, and a deep, startling red.
Her hand flinched towards it, then recoiled.
Jehezkiel’s eyes, still gazing into her, seemed to smile.
Before she could do anything more, her supper arrived, in a flurry of skirts and polite nods. She found herself searching – through some strange instinct, which she herself did not understand – for forest-green eyes and a splash of golden freckles. When she did not find them, she expected relief. Instead, a soft, barely-there disappointment touched her, and was gone.
Her mind must have been addled, what with the dreams, and the gnawing hunger in her stomach. She ate, casting any strange thoughts from her mind, focusing on the meal before her. The servants trickled out, and the clink and scrape of her cutlery against the porcelain plates was sharp – too sharp – against her ears. She thought, again, of her father. Her eyes flicked, again, to the tapestry.
Despite her hunger, she was barely able to finish her supper. When she finally did, feeling a touch sickly, she stood and snagged one of the crimson threads of the tapestry, and pulled.
The thread did not tear off. Instead, the whole of the tapestry unraveled, collapsing into a puddle of fractured greens, golds, and reds. Grace gasped, stumbled back, her heels tugging at her skirts. A soft, predatory laugh brushed the shell of her ear. She whipped around, clutching her rosary and swallowing hot strands of fear.
Standing behind her, his smile smug, infused with amusement, was Jehezkiel.
And, as she gazed at him, her hands steeped around her rosary, he sketched her a shallow, mocking bow.
“Lovely to see you again, Miss Grace.”
I'm really glad you chose to continue this! Really curious to see Jehezkiel's role in all this.
That was quite the cliffhanger i enjoyed