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Desmond was right, I thought. There was a pattern here. A strange sameness to the turns, like the same shape rotated indifferent arrangements. That sameness made it impossible to tell where in the pattern you were. Walking through the house felt like a recurring dream. Like you knew you’d been here before and something dreadful waited just ahead, but you couldn’t stop yourself from walking toward it.
I was glad when our tour brought us out on the back veranda, into the cool air and away from the tightening gyre of corridors.
We weren’t the only ones finding refuge under the open sky. Desmond sat on the stone railing at the edge of the veranda, his notebook balanced on his knee, this time scribbling with a cheap ballpoint pen.
“Morning,” he said.
“So it is,” I replied. Celia hopped up on the railing next to him, her heels swinging. “Celia was just giving me the tour.”
“What do you think of your kingdom, then?” Desmond asked.
I spoke carefully. I had the feeling that direct questions weren’t going to get me too far, but maybe I’d learn something if I came at it sideways. “It’s all just so weird. I haven’t even seen most of this place, and it’s mine. I don’t even know how big it is. The grounds, I mean.”
“Forty-six acres,” Desmond said immediately. “So you at least have plenty of room to wander.”
“It’s not like I ever go out anyway,” I said. Though I was already feeling the difference between wanting to stay at home and not being allowed to leave. I leaned against the railing of the veranda and looked down the cascading levels of patios that led to the lawn.
“And it’s not like there’s anything in Eston worth leaving for,”Desmond said. “Unless you want to watch last season’s movies in a theater with sticky floors. And hey, at least you’ll have the witch for company.”
“The witch?” I echoed, eyebrows shooting up.
“Desmond,” Celia chided him, but he ignored her.
“Beware, beware, the Harrow Witch, with soul as black as blackest pitch,” he intoned with a grin that said he knew he was annoying her. “The witch is a local legend. It goes back all the way to when Harrow was built. Nicholas Vaughan was a weirdo, and he liked the locals being afraid of him, so I think he encouraged all the stories about this place. Then they kind of took on a life of their own.”
“They’re not just stories,” Celia said quietly.
Desmond shook his head. “You don’t really think Harrow’s haunted, do you?”
Celia’s cheeks turned pink, and she didn’t answer.
“So there isn’t really a witch?” I asked, still puzzled.
“No,” Desmond said at the same time as Celia said, “Yes.” They looked at each other, and Celia got pinker.
“There’s this girl,” Desmond allowed. “She’s just the groundskeeper’s daughter, but Celia started joking that she was the Harrow Witch a few years ago and I guess it stuck.”
“I wasn’t the one that started calling her the witch. You were,” Celia objected.
“No, it definitely wasn’t me,” Desmond said. “Maybe it was...”
He stopped himself, biting back the words.Maybe it was Jessamine, I thought he’d been about to say.
I thought of the girl in the graveyard, with her knife and herwithering stare. The way her eyes had seemed to slice right through me—as if she could see below my skin, the way I could see.
I hadn’t been able to see her that way, though. It wasn’t like I had been trying to, of course. But there had been something about her, something that made me think that even if I did, I could never peer within her. Never know her secrets unless she let me.
“I think I met her,” I said softly. “She was in the graveyard yesterday.”
“You talked to her?” Desmond asked, sounding intrigued. I nodded, and he looked impressed. “I don’t think she’s said more than ten words to me, ever.”
I hardly heard him. I touched the pocket where I’d stowed the pouch she’d given me. I couldn’t get her face out of my mind—that narrow chin, those gray-green eyes, the dark freckles scattered across her cheeks. She wasn’t pretty. She was too harsh, too strange, to be pretty. She made me think of the skull still resting on the desk back in my room. That unsettling beauty, those sharp teeth. “What’s her name?” I asked.
“Bryony. Bryony Locke,” Desmond supplied. It felt like I’d known it all along.Bryony.
Behind us, a bell rang, making me jump. “That’s the bell for lunch,” Desmond explained.
Lunchtime already? I was startled to realize how much time had passed while Celia and I wandered the halls.
