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That couldn’t be right. Mary would have known not to risk riding so close to the edge in inclement weather, no matter how reckless she was. “But I thought it was closer to where the path goes up to the hills.”
“No, it was here,” Bridget said. “We were…”
She trailed off at the sound of the flock of ducks taking off from the water. In the distance was the rumble of a cart, and they both heard it, making her step abruptly away from him. She was still crying, though, and she swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.
“I wish I could tell you more,” she said. “But it is simply not possible.”
“Not possible?” Graham said. “You can’t be serious. Please, Bridget, you must tell me everything.”
She was sobbing now, rushing for her horse. He could not stop her as she put her foot in the stirrup and pulled herself up, sitting up straight. The lady was in such a hurry that she dislodged her saddlebag, not noticing as charcoal and papers scattered across the gravel path.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry, Graham. I am so very, very sorry.”
Then, she rode off at a gallop, leaving him with ever more questions.
CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE
Graham stood in stunned silence for a few moments as he watched her ride away, then as she disappeared into the tree line. He could not understand the way she had reacted to his questioning, nor how secretive she remained about the whole ordeal.
Yes, he assumed it must have been very shocking, but didn’t he deserve to know? And she had offered to tell him after their afternoon at the willow tree. But now she seemed to have changed her mind.
What on earth was going on? And what did it all have to do with the lake?
Her papers were flying across the path, some drifting into the water and floating across the surface. When he realized they were not blank but covered in drawings, he rushed to catch them, stacking them in his hands. Charcoal rubbed off on his thumbs, leaving them blackened as he shuffled the sketches into some sort of order.
“Damn,” he cursed under his breath. Now the shock of the moment had worn off, he realized he was soaked to the skin, nursing a horrible headache, and without a horse. It would be a long walk back to Foxglove Hall, at least an hour in the blazing sun. His horse must have run off in the night, hopefully back to the barn or into the village. Graham’s shoulders slumped, and he turned around to fetch his shoes, placing the drawings under a stone as he sat down to pull on his stockings and boots.
At least his stockings were dry, he supposed. That would be a boon for his hike home.
Graham rested his elbows on his knees and raked his hands through his wet hair, hoping to let his clothes dry just a bit before he started walking. The only sound was the cry of birds in the distance, and the rustling of the pages under the stone beside him. He opened his eyes and peered down at them, wondering if he would find more images of himself. Her sketches in the trunk of the willow tree had been quite lovely, and he had found his own likeness amongst the pages more often than he could ever have suspected.
But what he found was far from charming. In fact, the drawings were more disturbing than anything else.
Graham’s eyes widened as he picked up the papers, his jaw agape at the sight. Bridget had drawn horrible images: a figure prone on the beach, dark charcoal bleeding from the figure’s head. Graham gasped at the next image in the set, a closeup of eyes he recognized as Mary’s, glazed over and clearly dead.
Bridget’s dreams must be horrible indeed if she was drawing such things. He could not imagine what her nightmares must be like in the wake of seeing such a terrible accident. These were not anything out of the creative mind of a gifted artist but images straight out of a gothic horror novel, or the crime quarterlies bought for pennies in London. Graham himself rarely indulged in such things, though some in the city delighted in them. He almost put the papers down, unwilling to look any further at the horrific sketches of his sister’s corpse, feeling sick with the aftermath of the night’s drinking and the sight of those spectral eyes.
But he was drawn to further examine them with a sick fascination, and the desire to know more about what had happened.
If Bridget would not speak to him of his sister’s death, perhaps this was where he would find the answers he sought. He flipped through them, one by one, not daring to look too closely. Almost all were some depiction of the body, posed at an unnatural angle, limbs akimbo and neck bent. And they were bloody, smears of charcoal used in place of blood. Graham could practically see the grey and black images turn red, Bridget’s command of the human form was so lifelike.
He was starting to think he had subjected himself to the graphic images for no reason when he stumbled upon one final image that gave him pause.
A hand, holding a rock as if to strike someone with it, the edge stained with darkness.
Graham's heart was fluttering out of control, like a bird in a cage. He gasped for air as he stared at the rock, his fingers curling into the edges of the paper to the point of tearing it in half. He was no detective, and firsthand testimony had allegedly established that Mary's death had been entirely accidental. But heknew he had to keep the drawing no matter what.
For it may be the proof he needed that Mary’s death was not an accident.
But it brought up a host of other questions, none of them remotely pleasant. Why did Bridget have the drawing? What did she know?
Did he recognize the fingers wrapped around the wickedly sharp stone? Did they belong to someone he knew? The shape of them was monstrous, the nails sharp, dark shadows in every line of the knuckles. It could have belonged to a man or woman, or to something entirely inhuman.
Did they belong to a man? To some villain he did not yet know?
Or perhaps to a lovely, gentle lady he could never have imagined doing such a thing?
Graham folded up the paper and stuffed it into his shirt pocket, breathing hard. His clothes had dried enough now to ensure it would not be damaged, but he knew he had to keep the drawing secret and safe. The after-effects of his drinking were almost forgotten as he stood, the other drawings in his hand and set off toward Foxglove Hall.
