AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The sight of him banished Felicity’s dark message. I wanted only to feel him near, and I raised my hand to him. He came quickly to the bedside and sat next to me, holding my fingers so tight I thought he might bruise my bones. I didn’t complain.
“Did you call a doctor?” I managed, unable to directly broach the subject of what had happened to me.
“Dr. Hannigan is here. He came early yesterday morning.” His cheeks were hollowed out, his eyes tired and miserable. “He’s already diagnosed you with that terrible thing Felicity had not too long ago. Some stomach flu. It likely exacerbated whatever’s been driving you to sleepwalk. He promised to stay for a day or two to ensure you recovered.”
“Yesterday morning?” I grated. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Nearly two days.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. Sorry for worrying him, sorry for going where I shouldn’t have gone, sorry for his wife, whose pain I’d felt and whose ghost tormented me.
“Don’t apologize.” He squeezed my hand again, brought my knuckles to his lips, and kissed them gently. “Millie, why were you upstairs in the tower?”
The tower. The fairy-tale thing that had so intrigued me was full of the dead and all their withered hopes. I wasn’t ready to confide in Callum the things that had led me up those stairs, but I was ready for answers.
“I was following noises,” I offered this much but no more. “Callum, there was someone up there. I saw her, I touched her. We were inches from each other.”
“Millie, darling, you pulled the dust cloth off an old mirror. We found you lying in front of it.”
I shook my head disbelieving, unsure of my experiences. I tried to gain footing by asking a question of my own, though it barely came out.
“Did you have a child?”
Sudden grief struck a violent blow, and he pressed a hand over his eyes as though he could hide from it, his mouth a thin line of sorrow.
When he’d gained control of his voice, he replied, “None more than a hope. We lost two pregnancies very early.”
“Callum…” It was my turn to squeeze his hand, “You need to tell me about your wife.”
He took a long moment, seeming to search for a reason to avoid the conversation, to say nothing and pretend she didn’t haunt us both in one way or another. At last, he sighed, leaning to rest his elbows on his knees, weary, my hand still clasped in his, thumb rubbing circles over my ring finger as he tried to organize his thoughts.
“She was—” He paused, his voice breaking. “She was brilliant and beautiful and she loved Willowfield. Ms. Dillard’s cousin brought her to visit for a few months one spring. She’d been in a bad way, and they hoped the beauty of the gardens and the good weather would lift her spirits. The plan worked. By the time I made her acquaintance at the Independence Day dinner, she was shining. They say there’s no such thing as love at first sight, but it truly was for me.”
My heart constricted with a jealousy I was ashamed of.
“She was a fountain of questions and curiosity about the gardens, the perfumery, and my work. I’d just begun teaching at the local college then. There wasn’t a topic she didn’t want to discuss, but, like you, she was most fascinated by ghost stories.”
“You mentioned it was her idea you write about malevolent fairies.”
He looked up at me. “Not quite. Within a year of our marriage, she started losing sleep. Her insomnia kept her in the library until late at night, and she came across some of my notes on the Dullahan, a headless horseman, and asked for more reading on it. I carelessly guided her to every book I had on monsters. I thought it was harmless, charmingly eccentric, but she became enamored by the enigma of their myths. She grew withdrawn, exhausted. To bring her back to me, I chose to undertake that damnable project and included her in the research. In the beginning, it had an amazing effect. She was her old self again, and we had such a good time about it.”
He laughed a little, remembering some long-ago moment of joy that I’d not been a part of.
“Then suddenly we were expecting our first child, and her interest in the research waned, replaced by all the concerns and joys that come with impending parenthood, but during her second month, she became violently ill and miscarried. I thought she would never recover. She stayed in bed, wouldn’t see anyone but me. I was hurting but it was nothing like the pain she suffered, and I could do nothing for her. We were surprised to find she was expecting again a few months later, and Dr. Hannigan believed there was nothing to fear. Again, she became so sick she couldn’t leave the bed, and the baby was lost.”
Tears pooled at the corners of his eyes, and my empathy responded in kind. My jealousy had vanished, replaced by deep sorrow at the agony the woman must have experienced, the struggle they’d both endured.
“We went to a specialist, some new doctor in Boston. He was condescending, snide, and without even doing a thorough examination, looked at my wife and told her she didn’t have the constitution to carry children. She was destroyed. I wanted a second opinion, but she refused to see more doctors. After that she was jumpy, afraid of her own shadow, and newly obsessed with hauntings. She started spending an awful amount of time with that broad Margaret.”
The mention of Margaret caused his jaw to clench, and he spent a moment silently fighting his rage.
“I did the only thing I could think of,” he finally continued. “We left on a long holiday. A few months away. By and by, she seemed to get better. I should have never brought her back.”
He put pressure on the bridge of his nose, warding off the memories. He seemed ready to stop, but I knew the story wasn’t finished and needed to be.
“You have to tell me what happened to her, Callum,” I said.
When he looked at me, there was something I’d never seen before darkening his golden eyes. Shame.
