The Fire and the Earth: Glenncailty Castle, Book 2 (11 page)

Séan stepped up, grabbed the keys and selected one, handing it back. “It’s this one.”

Seamus searched his face. “You’re certain?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

Séan’s voice was grim. “I don’t know.”

Sorcha dashed to his side. “Séan.” When he looked at her, she let out a breath of relief. His eyes were brown. “Stay with me,” she begged him. “Hold on to me.”

His eyes searched her face. “You’ll protect me from the ghosts.”

“I will.”

“Everyone stand back.” Elizabeth shooed everyone but Seamus away from the door. “Whatever’s back there has been there for at least a few hundred years and I expect the air will be rancid.”

Sorcha and Séan retreated.

Calm as ever, Seamus put the key in the lock. There was scream of rusted metal, then a thunk. Seamus put his hand on the knob, turned it and opened the door.

Sorcha gagged and pressed her face into Séan’s arm. The air was rancid as Elizabeth had predicted, and the smell was nauseating. She coughed, and Séan turned her body into his, as if he could shield her.

A shudder wracked her and she was filled with the urge to run. This was a bad place. Bad things had happened here, would happen here, and she should go.

“Jaysus,” Liam said. “I’ll go get a fan.” He headed off.

Elizabeth had retreated further than any of them, her jacket held over her face. “We’ll need more than a fan. I’m going to get some candles.”

She too left, and Sorcha wanted to follow them, to leave this place.

“We haven’t looked yet,” she whispered against Séan’s shoulder. “We can leave.”

She felt his lips on the top of her head. “You should go. I’m going to stay and see what I was meant to see.” He rubbed her back once, then eased away from her. “Go.”

“No.” His strength fed hers. “I’m staying with you.” She wanted to be here incase whatever had possessed him before came back. “And you’re right, some…thing wanted us to open this door. The least we can do is find out what’s on the other side.”

Seamus had grabbed the stand-mounted floodlights and placed them in the doorway. Sorcha and Séan moved up beside him. Seamus looked at both of them, his expression both fierce and somber. He flicked on the lights.

Sorcha closed her eyes, an instinctive unwillingness to see what was beyond the door. She was holding on to Séan’s forearm, feeling the tension in his muscles, but after a moment of strained silence she felt him relax.

“This is a later period room,” Seamus said, as if he were commenting on the weather.

Sorcha opened her eyes.

The hidden room was large. Where she’d expected stone walls there was wainscoting, with pale blue patterned wallpaper above. A turned over piece of furniture near the door cast a thick shadow, but what she could see of that and a bed against one wall was Victorian in style.

“This explains the bricks,” Seamus said.

“We have a piece like that in our front room,” Séan added, pointing to the armoire on its side by the door.

Seamus picked up the lights and carried them in, Séan following him.

Sorcha hesitated. It was probably just residual fear that caused her to hesitate, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong here.

“Séan, will you help me lift this?” Seamus said.

Sorcha forced herself to follow them into the room, hugging the wall to stay out of their way as they righted the cabinet. One leg had broken, so they carried it to the wall, where they could prop it up. Once it was out of the way, the light spread, illuminating more of the room.

Sorcha’s breath caught.

She took a few tentative steps into the room. Heavy shutters covered the windows, and there were bits of decayed cloth and broken furniture carpeting the wood floors. A modest four-poster bed was the closest intact piece. Trembling, she raised her hand as she passed the bed, looking not at it, but at something on the other side.

A lovely wood crib sat amid the dust and debris. Tattered lace draped the railings. Sorcha reached in and picked up a small square pillow. The lace cracked under her hands. She bit her lip and swallowed against the tears that spilled down her cheeks.

“It’s the nursery,” she said.

“Sorcha? Did you say something?” Séan’s voice was warm in the cold of the room.

She stepped aside and turned, letting the light hit the crib. “This is a nursery.”

“Ah, Sorcha, don’t cry.”

She turned her back to Séan, not wanting him to see her tears. She placed the pillow back into the crib and then dabbed her eyes with her sleeve. She was midway into the room, but the floodlights didn’t reach far. Despite the fact that it couldn’t be much past half noon, the room was dark as night, the shuttered windows made it seem as dark as the grave.

She couldn’t stand it.

Filled with the need to let in the light, Sorcha crossed the room, kicking bits of debris out of her way. Because this room had three exterior walls, there were windows everywhere, but she wanted to be away from that crib.

There was a fireplace in the front wall, a massive, deep thing, clearly a remnant of the original architecture, though it had been covered in the same white wood paneling of the wainscoting. A fireplace screen as tall as her shoulder was half-fallen over, the stained glass insets broken out. Windows flanked the fireplace, and she went to the one closest to the door. The latch for the heavy shutters was rusted shut. She smacked it with her palm until the bolt slid back, flecks of coppery rust falling down. She pulled, and with a yank, the shutters gave way, hinges screaming as they opened for the first time in a hundred years.

The glass window was dirty, and a broken pane had allowed soil and leaves to build up in the space between that and the shutter. Sorcha took a step back as the debris fell to the floor in soggy clumps.

As disgusting as it was, at least now there was some sunlight. The sunny morning had turned into a cloudy afternoon, and the light that cut across the floor was more silver than gold.

Metal screamed, and she looked over to see Seamus and Séan opening the other windows, starting with those closest to the door.

Bit by bit, the room was revealed with more clarity than the harsh light and shadow of the emergency lamps had allowed. Sorcha pressed shaking fingers over her lips as she looked at the walls. There were framed panes of glass with pressed flowers between them, shadow boxes opaque with dust, and delicate illustrations of Bible stories suitable for a nursery—Noah’s Ark, Jonah and the whale, and Christ kneeling among the children.

A tipped-over rocking horse lay on a rug in the center of the room. A small table waited there, a vase that might have held flowers sitting atop it, strangely untouched by the chaos around it. There were other, smaller beds next to the first one they’d seen. The larger bed must have been for the nurse. Shredded white cloth hung from the ceiling over each of the bed frames—the remnants of pretty canopies. The scrolled sleigh-style bedframes were beautiful, though obscured by the mattresses, which were pulled off, one of which was ripped open and leaking horsehair. Whatever had happened in here had nearly destroyed the room.

“I don’t see any valuables,” Seamus was saying. “It may have been looted at some point.”

“All this destruction for some silver spoons?” Séan was tugging at a particularly stubborn window. When it was open, he turned around. “It’s a waste, you can see that whoever was here was loved.”

Sorcha smiled. He was such a good man. He was right, this was clearly the nursery of the master of Glenncailty’s children. And yet there was still a terrible knot of dread and fear in her belly. Maybe those feelings had nothing to do with the room, but with her, and what she’d lost.

She looked over the debris again, and this time a dollhouse caught her eye. She could just see the roof of it between two of the beds. Ignoring the men, who were examining what they thought might be a mouse nest, she went to the beds. She used her sleeve to wipe away the dust that obscured the carvings on the foot of the bed. Her fingers traced the seashells and mermaids carved there.

One of the mattresses blocked her from the dollhouse, and considering that Séan seemed to think there were mice, she wasn’t thinking she wanted to touch it. From what she could see, it was a delicate Victorian mansion in an English style.

She rubbed a hand over her belly, wishing the feelings of wrongness would go away.

Stepping back, she caught her heel on something and stumbled, falling to her hands and knees.

It didn’t matter anymore, he could do whatever he wanted to her, he couldn’t hurt her more than he already had. He’d taken everything from her—and she’d taken everything from him.

“You bloody witch.”

Pain exploded in her sides as his boot connected with her ribs. He grabbed her by the hair and pulled her up, slapping her across the face with his other hand.

“You murdering Irish whore.”

Her head hit the floor as he threw her down.

Murderer. He called her a murderer, and God and the saints forgiver her, it was the truth. But her sins were nothing to his.

She pushed to her hands and knees, wanting to rise up and look at him but she couldn’t, he’d broken one of her legs, and there was no strength in her. He’d beat her to death, but her strength had fled long before his fists fell. What light was left in her was gone after the terrible thing she’d done.

“I’ll burn in Satan’s Hell for my sins,” she said, watching the blood drops fall to the floor, “and I’ll see you there beside me.”

Sorcha screamed.

The sound of it brought her back to herself, as if she’d been sleeping, having a nightmare, and by crying out woken herself.

“Sorcha, did you hurt yourself?” Séan was there beside her, his hands warm and strong on her arms. He drew her up, hugging her to him.

Sorcha clung to him as her breath slowed. What had just happened? Like in a nightmare, she’d both felt what the woman felt and been able to see the scene as if she were outside of that body. The woman had been redheaded and young, wearing a green dress with a high lace collar, though the clothing was ripped and stained with blood. The man who beat her was only a shadow figure with dark hair.

“Sorcha?” Séan leaned away, smoothing her hair from her face.

“We should leave.” She didn’t know why she didn’t tell him what she’d seen, except that she herself didn’t understand it. Maybe she’d hit her head and imagined it all. It was certainly nothing like what he’d been through.

“Aye.” He kissed her forehead. “We will, we’ll go now.”

The touch was intimate, something a longtime lover would do. They’d spent only one night together, and she didn’t plan to repeat that, and yet right now she needed his touch, needed to feel his strength and calm. She searched his face, looking for a hint of the dark madness that had taken him over, but there was only his steady hazel gaze. It was strange how only hours ago she’d pushed him away, and now she was clinging to him as if she’d never let go.

Realizing that, Sorcha pulled back.

“I’m sorry, I just…” She gestured around, not knowing what to say.

Séan’s gaze searched her face. “Let me take you away from here.”

Feeling ten kinds of a fool for being the squeamish one when he was the one with the battered hands who’d been possessed by a ghost, she forced a smile. “Will you leave?”

He looked over his shoulder. “I want to check the floor with Seamus. I worry that we shouldn’t even be standing here, except I know it was reinforced from below.”

“Be careful of your hands,” she said.

He went back to Seamus, who’d jumped up at her scream but was now crouched, examining the floorboards.

Sorcha examined her palms, which were red from hitting the floor. Her imagination must be running away with her. This room was bringing up old feelings and emotions and it was making her foolish. Her shoes had come off when she fell, so she untangled them from the mess of fabric that had tripped her, which was probably the rest of the bed hangings.

Lip curled at the feel of the old, dusty fabric, she gathered it up and set it aside, exposing the wood floor. Frowning, she crouched and looked closer. Dark brown dots stained the wood. She touched one and a rush of anger and pain overwhelmed her.

She jerked her hand back, gasping. Taking a wad of the fabric she’d just bundled up, she wiped the floor, cleaning away a layer of dust. Drops and smears of dark brown littered the wood, as if someone had carelessly dripped wood stain.

But it wasn’t wood stain.

“This is blood,” she whispered.

Following the path she moved toward the center of the room, cleaning as she went. Her cloth uncovered a massive stain and beside it a perfect handprint, rendered in blood. She looked over her shoulder at Séan but didn’t call him over.

That hadn’t been a dream, but some sort of memory. It made as much sense as anything that a soul so tortured that it would remain on Earth as a ghost might leave memories or feelings embedded in the place where they died.

And looking at the stain and the bloody handprint, she had no doubt that the redheaded woman in the green dress had died here.