The castle keepers, p.26
The Castle Keepers, page 26
After years of being around the dead, Alec was startled that Brigitta was so . . . so . . . alive. For one, he could drown in those light blue eyes of hers. For another, she couldn’t seem to stand still. The only steadying thing about her was when she focused on him.
Alec assumed she was turning the first pages of the current chapter of his life with silent observation. She was a medical professional. Her uncle was a renowned scholar of Freud. Could she see into his soul and detect his uncertainty?
“The men should arrive tomorrow morning.” He broke her careful study of his person. “See, I’ve worked further on the basic plan I had sent you based on institutions that helped men in the previous war.” Alec smoothed his trousers.
“The men need to embrace the last stage between their war years and their lives now. As you said in your letter.”
“We need them to associate their surnames not with barked orders but with the freedom they have to transition from their old lives to the new.”
“Your plans and your letter, Alec . . . they were so detailed. Not perfect, but this is an experiment, ja?”
“Yes. Which is why I can’t help but think I have no right to propose it. My barrister in London and my friend Evan Laughton and I found some willing participants, but that doesn’t mean . . .” He stopped, took a breath. “I think there was a reason for me to learn about Dr. Hurst. I don’t want you to think this is just a whim.”
“Not a whim, Alec. You want a sense of permanence, and on some level you want to heal your uncle Daniel by proxy.”
She saw through him so clearly. Startled, he cleared his throat to maintain a semblance of control. “Dreams are repressed wishes. Isn’t that right? According to Freud, that is.”
“See?” Her eyes glistened. “That is why I named the cat for him.” She rose a little on her tiptoes, defining long legs in beige stockings. The sun streaming through the arched window backlit her profile. He was about to speak when he heard a crash that startled him far more than it should have.
He looked over to where Magdalen was picking up toppled tea trays.
Alec’s breath hitched, his chest pounded, and his ears rang with a familiar buzz. “I-I’m . . .” He didn’t get through his apology, merely nodded and splayed his right hand over his heartbeat.
Brigitta was watching him with compassion. “Startling easily is to be expected.” She set her hand over his wrist, doubtless feeling the accelerated pulse. “I guarantee it will get easier. Just like your uncle Daniel you speak of, my uncle remembers the last war. And in every story he told me, he never saw an end to the reminders. To the horrors he had seen when he got back to Vienna. You never forget, but it lessens. You find you can live again.”
“Brigitta, I—”
“Alec—”
They verbally tripped over each other a moment.
“Brigitta, I need someone to speak to on a . . . a professional and psychoanalytic level. About my dreams and what I am thinking.”
“Of course. That is why you wrote to my uncle.”
“Indeed. I don’t want you to take offense.” Alec took a beat. He had so little control over his dreams or the spirals of anxiety that assaulted his brain, catapulting him back to the war.
Yes, he wanted to redeem the estate and make amends for the riches afforded him while so many slogged back to prefab housing and long commutes on the Tube.
Still, he wanted to carve out a bit of care and attention for himself.
“I want you to be available to speak to the men arriving here. But I also need someone to talk to.” He stopped. Let the sentence hang in the air for a while, resisting the urge to justify it.
Waiting for her to catch up.
“I would like to make a proposal of my own, Alec.” Her smile spread slowly so he didn’t have to take his sentence a step further. “I will meet with the men you’ve invited here and offer them what help I can, given the limitations of my own education. But I would also like to propose that you continue to write to my uncle. Uninhibited.”
Alec raised an eyebrow. “Uninhibited?”
“And most especially if a nightmare startles you awake. You do not worry about sleep; you write my uncle instead.”
Alec exhaled his relief, then chuckled. “Is it going to be a problem that you know me as well as I know myself?”
“A problem?” She smiled. “Or an advantage?”
Chapter 6
The portraits of Alec’s ancestors watched them closely with a severity that tamed even the Culloden battle painting. The latter was looking a little like a slouched ghost in the corner, shrouded by a sheet, ready to be moved.
“It’s odd to be back here.” Alec watched the portraits back a moment. “When I was a child, I thought if I stared at them long enough, I would know their stories. I’ve heard snippets, of course. One cannot have such a magnanimous family and not hear snippets. There was a court case. A trial for murder . . .”
Brigitta’s eyes widened with interest.
“Beatrice there”—he nodded to her portrait—“was what was known as a ‘Dollar Princess.’ Her fortune saved Leedswick from financial ruin in 1870. She kept a journal of her experiences at Leedswick. It’s around here somewhere.”
“A Dollar Princess?”
“Women who were sold off by greedy mothers in New York to marry English aristocracy.” It was a crass way to put it, but that’s how his spirited mother had framed it.
“She found a new home?”
“I get the sense it took a long time for my great-grandmother to find home.”
“And your mother, Elena?”
“Sometimes I think she was most at home when we were off on adventure. My father is her home. Her paintings are her home too. She can find home anywhere.”
“Have these men, the ones who will be joining us, already been home?” Brigitta traced her finger around the rim of her empty teacup.
“Yes. And judging by their quick responses, they haven’t fared too well.” Alec stretched in his chair. “My friend Evan Laughton has been in contact with them. And I assume their stories are not so different from Evan’s own. According to his letter he told his fiancée that he was helping a friend, and he is of course. I don’t want anyone to feel that what he’s doing here has to be kept secret. But I also want the men to have the privacy that I want.” He sighed. “I’m just as lost as I assume they are.” He looked at her for a moment.
“You seem pretty found here.”
“I don’t want to play lord of the manor. But I wouldn’t mind attempting something that aligns with my conscience. Especially since I have such a large place at my disposal. And I thought that since my letters with your uncle—and you—were so meaningful to me . . .”
The very real fact was that she was a very real woman, whose slight curves and band of freckles on her nose he never could have captured in ink and paper. “Then maybe I could translate some of that and some of what Hurst did to my experience here.”
Brigitta smiled and swept up a strand of hair. Each hairpin safe in place.
For now.
* * *
Brigitta waited for Alec to rise before she abandoned the matched, if chipped, tea service. Alec centered on one cup without any wear or break. “When I was a child, I liked the chipped cups. I thought they had character. Maybe now I deserve the one whole cup.”
They explored the books and files around them. The slightest movement or touch of a spine sent a puff of dust in flight.
“I really should be consulting with Hannigan. I haven’t even shown you your office yet.”
Brigitta raised a shoulder in a shrug. Then held her finger under her nose to stifle a sneeze. Alec was immediately apologetic.
“It’s just the book’s way of saying hello,” she said.
“And telling us it needs a dusting.”
“We can see to that.” She ran her finger over the spines. “But I want some light bedtime reading and a . . . what was the word you used? Dollar? Yes. A Dollar Princess just might be it.”
Brigitta followed his sight line up over rows of tomes about psychiatry when a particularly fragile copy of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy caught her eye. She met Alec’s eyes with a slight May I? tilt of her chin.
“This library is as much yours as mine.” He helped her extract the weighty tome from its place, and she carried it over to the large mahogany desk, scalloped and elaborate and most likely from the previous century.
Would this be one of the valuable pieces he might have to sell to keep the castle? She imagined his ancestor Charles seeing to his business affairs from behind it. “This is one of the first treatises ever published on mental illness.” Brigitta had recognized it immediately. “Before they even knew it was an ailment. Burton thought that idleness was the root of melancholy.”
She turned to the opening page and smelled the stale seventeenth-century sheets of paper, near translucent with wear. “My uncle would love to see this.” She looked at the book rather than at Alec, though she felt his eyes closely on her.
He unfastened the buttons on his shirtsleeves. He stopped to examine the cuffs before folding each sleeve back and pushing the fabric up to his elbows. It wasn’t particularly warm. Was he just finding something to do with his hands? Not for the first time she noticed how they were at odds with the rest of him: always tucked in his pockets or behind his back.
Brigitta noted the strong, sinewy muscles in his forearms, then, at her observation, he pressed his long fingers on the desk blotter. The casual motion seemed a sign of his comfort with her. Not just a gentleman squire cloistered in this ancestral seat in the moors a breath away from Mr. Lockwood assessing his new tenancy at Wuthering Heights. Rather, a man assuming a new role at the coalescing of instinct and inspiration.
Names written in Alec’s hand scrolled evenly across a sheet at the top of the desk blotter: Jones, Clarington, Adamson, Laughton. Underneath, a scratch pad listed chores and ideas alongside bullet points, some of which were struck through and marred with inkblots.
When Brigitta’s eyes met Alec’s, he retreated a little. “I hope I know what I’m doing.” He rose and pushed back his chair, sighed. “I have to reconcile someone I put on paper—a faceless person—with a live human being.”
“Better than an unliving human being.” She nudged his shoulder.
“I must be off to prepare for my—our—guests.” Alec gave a small bow. “Please, stay. This room is as much yours as mine.”
“I should help too. I can help Magdalen prepare food for the week.”
“Yes, but I am sure she can spare you for a few moments. I have set up a makeshift office of your own and perhaps you can select a few books to take with you.” He smiled and Brigitta retreated to the bookshelves.
As a child she believed her uncle’s library possessed the answers to everything. Often she would pull down a random book and run her index finger under paragraphs of content that was far beyond her limited understanding.
Now she hoped that the general perusing of pages would give her an increased understanding. Another level on which she could meet Alec.
Brigitta’s attention narrowed on a small and narrow volume covered in green cloth, and she bent to retrieve it, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake.
Taking care because of its obvious age, she gingerly opened the book to a woman’s handwriting on pages stained with wear, and just near the crease of the spine was a pressed flower. It was worn and yellow, in the shape of a horn with sharp, rigid petals almost untouched by time. She read the words Charles and Leedswick.
Beatrice Alnwick.
Brigitta looked over to the portraits: An elegant woman preserved in pearls and pompadour. A man with a brown leather journal in his hand, poised to inherit the magnificent grounds around him. His wife in the portrait beside his, a gilded lily frame and elegant. A Dollar Princess. She looked to be worth far more.
Brigitta leafed through a few pages. She was holding a careful map to the estate as seen through the eyes of a woman who loved gardening and her husband but was trying to step into a new world she didn’t understand. Who used the diary not only as a way to understand the world around her but to impress memories and ask questions and write reminders that would later help her in the garden and even in her new social circumstance.
She carefully set the diary atop The Anatomy of Melancholy and took it up to her room. Even with the presence of Magdalen, Brigitta couldn’t help but feel like the only woman in the whole of Leedswick. With Beatrice’s thoughtful guidance on the bedside table, Brigitta was certain that would no longer be the case.
* * *
Leedswick was cursed, all right. By Alec’s stupidity.
His heartbeat accelerated. He wasn’t certain if that was on account of three strangers and Laughton about to arrive or the fact that Alec had invited a woman—a living, breathing woman—into his house.
“Better than an unliving one.”
He smiled thinking of her kind attempt at banter. She was going above and beyond to put him at ease.
He focused on scribbling a rudimentary schedule that included everything he could think of for distraction. For wasn’t that at the heart of all this? Distraction? He had to ensure that the time the men spent here wasn’t merely what he worried his own time would become: a means of making the time tick by in between nightmares.
Hours awake delaying the time before he had to close his eyes again.
It is terrifying . . .
Alec shook his head and refocused. Hannigan would see to a session on chopping wood and introduce the garden, shrubs, and other landscaping to the men. Magdalen would ensure that the meals were made with what was gathered and collected from their labors. Brigitta would present the men with a small introduction to her role here.
Hannigan brought the post: a telegram from Laughton about train schedules and arrivals and a telegram from Brown. Apparently Cousin Hal had been using the Mayfair town house quite a lot recently. Perhaps throwing elaborate parties beneath the Swarovski crystals of the dining room’s grand chandelier and making use of the wine cellars, dusty and untouched from before the war.
Alec couldn’t decipher if this was a warning or just a piece of information doled out pragmatically.
* * *
Alec was almost relieved when he rose the next morning. He had a feeling that the longer he, Brigitta, Hannigan, and Magdalen spent in the castle, the smaller it would seem. Mostly because of Brigitta. Even when she was not in view, he sensed her. He was well aware of her presence in the castle and the ease with which he was able to talk to her. Far more, she had become a friend as well as a confidante.
Alec strolled toward the barn—not too fast, not too slow—noting the moodiness of the clouds over the thatched roof and the incomparable stillness of dawn, his boots melting into a grass misted with morning dew.
He smiled when he saw Brigitta’s profile at the mouth of the barn. So much for solitariness. “I would think you’re hard at work.” He appraised her overalls, her blonde hair carefully braided and tucked under a gingham kerchief. Her arms were full of Sigmund Freud. The cat’s wise little face was scrunched—whether in annoyance or fond introspection, Alec couldn’t be sure.
Brigitta, apparently, had the same idea judging by the basket at her feet, likely for egg collecting.
She set the cat down and picked up a pitchfork. She scooped hay with rudimentary aptitude but impressive fervor.
“Give me that.” He nudged her aside and took up her chore.
“Look at you . . .” Brigitta studied him.
Alec smoothed his trousers, raked his fingers through his hair, and balanced the pitchfork again. Brigitta moved to the side and he continued clearing hay from the path to the chicken coops. Overhead a few raindrops evaded the makeshift board he and Hannigan had nailed earlier in hopes that when the men arrived, they might see to the waterproofing of the roof altogether.
Alec threw his weight into his task, fully conscious of Brigitta in his periphery: watching him with little care as she knelt in the hay, running her hand over the now-arched back of the languid cat.
“My mother would josh me about wanting to be out here instead of fulfilling my station as a proper heir of Leedswick. She rarely meant anything malicious by it,” he explained. “It was her brand of sarcasm. She was as suited to fulfilling her station as marchioness as I am to fulfilling my role as marquess.”
Alec smiled softly at the memory.
“You need to own every bit of who you are, Alec Alnwick,” she said after a moment. “And that means you will have to own the fact that you chose to come to a place where your family has been ostracized for years.” She smoothed the wrinkles in her old dungarees, hand-me-downs she must’ve gotten from Magdalen.
“How did . . . ?”
“I talked to Magdalen and to Hannigan. But I also know that there has been no visitor here save myself since before the war. Certainly, if you were the lauded and returned marquess, heralded by your recent service in battle, they would be lining up to put their cards on a silver platter and await your reception of them. But no one.”
Sigmund circled Alec’s leg in a casual loop as if making a statement, rubbing his soft little head against Alec’s calf.
“He likes you.” Brigitta chuckled.
“More’s the pity for him.” Alec took him in. He had to give the creature some credit for his persistence. Sigmund was determined to belong.
“Not even the vicar has been here.” Brigitta picked up her earlier theme. “Magdalen was saying that she thought it would be a good idea to at least invite the vicar. Perhaps he doesn’t think he is welcome.”
Alec set the pitchfork next to the wall, opened the latch on the chickens’ cage with a bit of trepidation, and fell back a step the moment one of the fowl squawked into animated view.
Brigitta laughed.
“Hey there,” Alec cooed at the bird while performing the careful choreography of dodging flapping wings and a curious cat in pursuit of the eggs.
