Moon Shadows (35 page)

He shot her an impatient look. “It is only visible from the outside. I noticed it as I was riding across the park.”

He excused himself and rose. “I must attend to business affairs today. We'll meet again at dinner tonight. Meanwhile, Mrs. Church will show you over the house. If there are any changes you wish to make you have only to tell her.”

Phoebe didn't buy his explanation of why her room had been changed. When she'd finished her meal she went upstairs and found Elsie hovering in the corridor.

“Your things have all been moved, miss. I'm to show you to your new room.”

“Ah, yes,” Phoebe said. “I understand there was a leak of some sort?”

Elsie blinked nervously. “I don't know about any leaks, miss. But Mrs. Church has put you in the Rose Room.”

Mrs. Church was waiting for Phoebe in a magnificent room, all rose and gold and palest green. Phoebe checked the view out the window. Her suspicions were confirmed. This room was on the opposite side of the house from her previous bedchamber and overlooked the ornamental lake and woodlands.

No chance of seeing those mysterious lights from here,
she told herself.

The housekeeper waited anxiously. “I hope it meets with your approval, Miss Sutton?”

Phoebe smiled to put her at ease. “It's lovely. I'm sure I'll be happy here.”

Mrs. Church relaxed. “Then all's well. The master asked me to show you about, if this is a convenient time.”

“Very much so.”

They spent the next hour looking through various rooms and cupboards.

“Such a lovely spring day,” Mrs. Church said. “I thought to have James and one of the gardeners take down the draperies and pull up the carpets to beat out the winter's soot and dust.”

This was just the opportunity Phoebe had hoped for. “Perhaps the book room would be a good place to start, since Lord Thornwood spends so much of his time there. And if you meant to set the maids to dusting and polishing the furniture, I have a wonderful recipe for restoring dull wood to its former glory. I'll be happy to make it up for you.”

Mrs. Church took the hint. By lunchtime the library was transformed. The draperies had been taken down and aired out thoroughly, the wood paneling burnished and carpets beaten free of dust. Holloway had swooped up all the silver
ornaments, taken them off to the butler's pantry for polishing and returned them gleaming once more.

When almost everything was restored to its rightful place, Phoebe was finally allowed into the room to see their handiwork. She looked around in delight.

“How beautiful this room looks now!” she said.

Mrs. Church sighed and folded her hands at her waist. “Indeed it does, miss. It reminds me of old times. So hard it is to keep things up, what with the damp and drafts, and with only Dorcas and Elsie and James.”

“Good Heavens, yes!” Phoebe said. “I will speak to Lord Thornwood about hiring more help. Meanwhile, perhaps we could employ some local girls to help out with the daily work.”

Mrs. Church's eyes went wide. “Lord love you, miss, the village is ten miles away. And I'd wager my year's salary that not a one of the village girls would set foot in Thorne Court!”

It was Phoebe's turn to be surprised. “And why is that?”

The housekeeper regretted her hasty exclamation. “Well . . . there's always stories about old houses, miss.”

Phoebe let it go. After lunch she changed into her riding habit. She wanted a closer look at that place where she'd seen the castle.

As she exited her room she saw Elsie leaving one of the rooms at the far end of the hall with a basket of linen. The maid closed the door with her foot and hurried down the back stairs, not realizing that the door didn't catch. It swung silently open and Phoebe went along to close it.

As she drew near she heard a woman singing. The tune was plaintive, the voice like an angel's. She was drawn by its haunting beauty.

“Lord Jack did gallop up the hill, his broadsword by his side.

He rode up to the castle gates and they were opened wide.

A bonny lad, so bold and true, the bravest of all men

But seven long years did come and go, ere he was seen again.”

Phoebe peeked into the room. It was a large and sunny chamber filled with old-fashioned furniture. The pungent odor of turpentine filled the air and there were paints and sketches everywhere. Someone had attempted to make some sort of order to it, judging by the dozens of stacked canvases around the room, their faces turned to the wall.

Phoebe spied the singer, a small woman with delicate features, wearing a ruffled pink dressing gown. Her white hair was braided in a regal coronet atop her head and she sat with her back to the door, gazing out at the moor. She seemed to sense Phoebe's presence, and her song ended in midnote.

“I'm sorry if I disturbed you,” Phoebe said, stepping inside the room. “Please go on. You have a lovely voice.”

“I'm glad you liked it. That was ‘Lord Jack and the Faerie Queen,' ” the woman told Phoebe. “Do you know it?”

“No, but I should like to learn it,” Phoebe said.

“I expect you will, in time.” She smiled and her hazel eyes lit with warmth. “I'm Lady Gwynn, and you are Phoebe Sutton, of course. Would you like to see what I'm working on?”

She lifted the sketchbook from her lap and held it up. Phoebe took in a quick breath. Lady Gwynn's deft pencil strokes had captured a wide view of the moor, crowned by an airy structure of towers and turrets and crenellated walls

“This is the faerie castle on the hill,” she said. “Have you seen it yet?”

P
HOEBE
was jolted. “Then I wasn't seeing things! There really
is
a castle!”

Lady Gwynn smiled. “Yes and no.” She gave a little wink. “Only those who are mad or have the second sight can see it.”

She lowered her voice and her thin white fingers wound around Phoebe's wrist. Her grasp was strong despite her seeming frailty. “Don't tell anyone else you've seen it. They'll lock you away.”

Phoebe tried unsuccessfully to pry the clawlike hand from her wrist. Her heart was pounding. “Has Gordon seen the castle?”

Lady Gwynn stared at her a moment, then laughed. “Oh, yes. Gordon has most certainly seen it!” Her laughter grew wild and rather frightening.

Elsie came bustling back into the room carrying a glass of liquid. “Oh, miss! You oughtn't to be here. Lady Gwynn is far too unwell today.”

“The door was open . . . I heard singing and followed her voice.”

“Aye, she sings like a nightingale. But always such sad songs.” She put her arm around the dowager's shoulders and held the glass up to her lips. “Hush, now, Lady Gwynn. It's time for your medicine.”

Lady Gwynn sighed and let go of Phoebe's wrist. “Good-bye Miss Phoebe Sutton,” she said. “You must come again some other time.”

Elsie saw her to the door. “Pay no attention to anything odd she says, miss, when she's having a bad spell. Her imagination sometimes plays tricks on her.”

But,
Phoebe told herself,
mine does not!

As she went out she heard Lady Gwynn's crystalline voice pick up the threads of her song.

“Seven long years a prisoner in faerie halls he dwelled

And all that time his true love's heart with salty tears was filled.

How can I free my bonny lad and bring him home to me. . .”

The plaintive notes were cut off abruptly as Elsie closed the door.

Something about the words was familiar and Phoebe was intrigued. She went to the bookroom, hoping she might find the ballad in one of the books from the late viscount's collection.

She opened the door and went in a few feet, then stopped dead.

A sea change had come over it in her absence. The polished furniture, the gleaming glass and crystal and burnished brass were dull and clouded once more. Cobwebs wafted gently in the draft from the open door.

Phoebe fled the room and almost collided with Holloway in the hall.

“The book room!” she exclaimed. “Look inside! It's as if nothing had been cleaned in there today.”

The butler peered in, then gave an apologetic bow. “Ah, yes. Dust is always a problem in these large, old country homes. Very difficult to maintain them,” he said blandly.

She stared at him while her mind worked furiously. Either he saw nothing amiss in the book room, or he was trying to convince her so. Phoebe composed herself.

“Yes, I suppose it must be so.”

Continuing along the corridor, she met Mrs. Church coming out of the drawing room. The holland covers had been removed and James was on a ladder, polishing the lusters in the chandelier. “Everything will be set to rights by this evening,” the housekeeper told her. “Master Gordon's orders.”

“Perhaps you should save yourself the trouble,” Phoebe said. “I was just in the book room a few minutes ago. It looks just as it did last evening—as if all your work was for naught.”

“Damp and drafts,” Mrs. Church said complacently. “They are the bane of these old houses.”

Phoebe bit her lip. “So Holloway told me.”

She smiled as if nothing were wrong and continued out into the sunshine.
Either I am losing my mind or they are all in some far-reaching conspiracy to convince me to doubt the evidence of my own eyes.

Everyone but Lady Gwynn. “I shall have to cultivate her acquaintance,” Phoebe said softly. There was something
very
wrong at Thorne Court, and she intended to get to the bottom of it.

She crossed through the archway to the stables, turning back to examine the house. Despite the brightness of the afternoon, the manor seemed to stand in self-made shadows. The windows were lusterless and the ivy-covered facade seemed to absorb the light.

She hurried down to the stableyard, glad to escape the closeness of the manor. She needed fresh air and exercise and a chance to be alone to think. Hugh, the head groom, was a white-haired man with skin as brown and wrinkled as a walnut shell. He greeted Phoebe with a smile.

“ 'Tis a long while since we've had guests to Thorne Court, miss. Quite like the old days, it is, before His Lordship's accident.”

“You've been here a long time, then?”

“Oh, aye. Since I was a wee lad. 'Twas I who taught
Master Gordon to ride. Lord, he was full of spunk, always neck-or-nothing.”

She let him reminisce awhile then changed the subject. “Lord Thornwood said there is a mare I might ride.”

“Aye. Daisy is a sweet-goer, with fine manners,” he told her.

He brought out a dainty bay mare with a white blaze on her forehead and saddled her up. “If you should get lost, miss, just give Daisy her head. She'll bring you home safe and sound.”

Phoebe tried out the mare's paces and was pleased to find that Gordon was right. They were well suited. “I can see that ye've a light touch, miss. You and Daisy will come to no harm together.”

She laughed and took the mare out through the gate. Soon they were galloping across the parkland in the warm sunshine, with the wind at their backs.

The ruins of an old cottage gave her an excuse to stop and explore and also to look back at Thorne Court from an excellent vantage point. Phoebe had a keen eye. It didn't take her long to pick out Lady Gwynn's chamber or the window of her former room. There was nothing wrong with the window as far as she could tell—nor with the slate roof above.

Using the old foundation for a mounting block, she swung herself back into the saddle. She had seen what she wanted to see.

The lights and the castle were real. Real enough that Gordon had changed her room so there would be no repetition of her seeing them.

But why? What are they hiding from me?

The wind sang and she imagined she heard the faint sounds of a harp in it, the ringing of silver bells. Shadows of dreams flickered through her mind. She glanced up to the swell of land above her, where the dark rocks of the Faerie Stables loomed.

There was no sign of any structure that she could have mistaken for a castle. Nothing but the wild sweep of moor extending as far as she could see. “It must be on the far side of the hill,” she said aloud, “and I am at too low an angle to see it.”

The wind grew chill and the back of her neck prickled.

Her fingers caressed the stone of the talisman necklace her father had given her shortly after Gordon had broken their engagement. “To comfort and protect you from harm,” he'd said when she lifted the intricate silver chain with its hematite pendant from the box. “It belonged to your grandmother, who had the gift of second-sight.”

She'd been pleased and had remembered that the silver-black stone, heavy from its iron content, was a charm against enchantment. It made a comforting weight in her hand now, and she no longer felt that strange sense of disquiet that had grown greater the closer she came to the Faerie Stables.

Phoebe looked across at the manor again, dozing in the sun as if under a sorcerer's spell. She realized that she hadn't seen the shining castle on the hill until her necklace had fallen off. Perhaps its protective aura had prevented her from seeing it till then. Her mind made a leap of intuition. Gordon's accident and the Faerie Stables, Thorne Court's haunted reputation, the vanishing castle—they were all connected somehow!

Her fingers knotted together.
If only father were alive, he could help me. He would know what is wrong at Thorne Court!

But she had only herself to rely on now. And her father's last manuscript tucked inside one of her bandboxes. Phoebe was sure she'd find some answers there.

“Come, Daisy,” she said. “Time to head back.”

She turned the horse around, intending to go back, but as they rode away sounds drifted to her on the wind. Golden harp notes, silver flutes. A faint, steady drumbeat that might be nothing more than her blood rushing through her veins.

It
is
coming from up there,
she thought with a frisson of fear.
From the Faerie Stables.

She shivered, but instead of heading back to the manor as she'd intended, she turned away and into the woods that marked the western boundary of the parkland.

Dark trunks patched with green lichen rose starkly from the barren ground. There was no sound at all now, except for the muffled thud of the horse's hooves. She followed a path through the wood, touching the talisman that hung round her throat on its silver chain.

When they came out the other side of the woods into pale spring sunshine, Daisy laid her ears back and became fractious. Phoebe urged her reluctant mount on to where a tumble of rocks hid her from view of the house and reined in.

“I'll leave you here and go on afoot.”

After tethering the horse, she started up the steep moor. It was a vast and lonely place stretching out toward the far horizon. An ancient, windswept land cut by scuffed trackways older than recorded time. She followed one that led straight to the dolmen.

It took a good half hour to reach her goal, and she arrived feeling overwarm and slightly out of breath. The stones that formed the prehistoric monument loomed dark and massive.

As she approached the dolmen, clouds scudded across the clear blue sky and the silence was eerie. No sighing of wind through the dried grasses, no rustling of small animals or cry of birds broke the stillness.

A small, stunted tree grew before the dolmen's entrance, and Phoebe pushed the branches away to look inside. The scraping twigs brought a stinging shower of pebbles, stones and clods of dirt raining down on her head.

She brushed the debris from her hair and shoulders and walked between the huge upright stones with the great roofing slab overhead, uneasily aware that she was entering an ancient tomb.

Inside the air was chill, the atmosphere foreboding. The farther she went into the dolmen, the more uncomfortable she became. Especially when it continued on and on and the dim light was crowded out by deepening shadows. She stopped, deciding what to do.

It didn't seem nearly so long a passageway from the outside
, she thought.
Perhaps it goes back into the hill itself.

Just as she thought of turning back, the darkness seemed to retreat before her, luring her on. She reached the end of the long structure and felt something slither around her neck. Phoebe jumped and brushed at it, then burst into laughter. It was only her talisman necklace. The clasp had come loose somehow. She picked up the chain and silvery-black stone and dropped them into her pocket.

She was immediately blinded by a sudden burst of light. Phoebe shielded her eyes against the glare. Where dark earth had blocked her way an opening appeared, leading out to a fantastic garden in the high bloom of summer.

Birds called merrily and colored butterflies flitted from rose to rose. She hesitated only a moment, then stepped through.

When Phoebe glanced back over her shoulder, the dark interior of the dolmen was gone. In its place a lofty castle rose, its white stone and flying pennants gleaming in the sun.

She looked around in wonderment. There were swans in the moat, splashing fountains in the extensive gardens and dragonflies flitting over the lush lawns.

But something looked very odd. It took Phoebe a moment to figure it out. There were no shadows, even beneath the trees.

Except for hers.

And the butterflies weren't butterflies at all. She held out her hand and one of the slender sprites alighted on her fingertips. The dainty creature did a quick pirouette across Phoebe's palm, then flew off in a shimmering blur of gossamer wings.

There was no doubt in her mind what had happened. Somehow she had passed over the threshold between the world she knew and the magical Kingdom of Faerie.

Phoebe jumped aside as a hare bounded past her, a laughing boy on its back. Other tiny creatures in acorn caps peeked out at her slyly from among the flowers. It was extraordinary.

“Oh, if only Father could have seen this!”

He had been convinced that faeries existed, although in ever-dwindling numbers. His theory was that they were an ancient, long-lived race gifted in some unknown methods that humans called magic, and that they had fled to the secret and inaccessible places of the British Isles where they lived hidden from mortal eyes. Gordon's uncle had dismissed the idea. In his view, folktales and legends were fascinating stories conjured to beguile children and frighten the ignorant. The one belief both men shared was that the stories must be collected and preserved for posterity.