Page 1 of The Witching Hour
CHAPTER1
BERRY POMEROY CASTLE, SOUTH DEVON, ENGLAND SPRING, 1848
Dying wasn’t anything like Sylvie Bentham had imagined it would be.
There were no flowers, to begin with, though to be fair, the flowers didn’t usually make their appearance until the wake. She’d only ever been to one wake, for an old friend of hers from school, but there’d been flowers at Mabel’s wake, white ones, great masses of them arranged in tall urns around the base of the casket, and single stems strewn inside it, too.
Lilies, if she remembered correctly. Yes, lilies, with pale streaks of pink in the center. Such lovely flowers, lilies, with their heady scent.
But there were no lilies for Sylvie, and no casket lined in white silk. No casket at all, come to that. She hadn’t spent a great deal of time imagining her casket—she wasn’t so macabre as that—but she’d vaguely pictured something in a dark wood, polished to a high gloss.
Nothing too showy, of course. Something tasteful.
There was no wood, however, shiny or otherwise, and no silk lining.
Mabel had mourners, as well, little old ladies hanging over her casket, whispering with their lace-edged handkerchiefs pressed to the corner of their eyes.
So heartbreaking, that she should be taken from us so young!
Why, the dear, sweet thing looks as if she’s sleeping!
They’d say the same sorts of things about her, she supposed. Mrs. Fowler from St. Mary’s would profess herself utterly wretched, and Lady Godolphin would declare she was quite overset by Sylvie’s sad fate. Quite overset, indeed. The gentlemen wouldn’t know what to say—gentlemen so rarely did—so they’d simply mutter that she’d been a fine lady, who kept a tidy garden.
That thought made her smile—or it would have, if she could have moved her lips, because really, if the most interesting thing that could be said of her was that she’d kept a tidy garden, wasn’t it well past time for her to depart this earth?
But they’d all agree she was far too young to die. That it was a great tragedy such a promising young lady had shuffled off her mortal coil with so little fanfare. No doubt they’d find it rather dull of her to expire of nothing more dramatic than a trifling fever.
At least, she imagined they would, these pretend mourners weeping beside her fictitious casket, because in truth, aside from Ada Pettit, the castle’s housekeeper and Ada’s husband Silas, the caretaker, there was no one by Sylvie’s bedside to bid her adieu. The best she could boast was a pillow under her head and a coverlet pulled up to her neck.
Given that death really wasn’t anything more than an endless sleep, it was appropriate enough she should be tucked into a bed. It was all quite tragic, dying alone at the tender age of twenty-three. Still, it was a bit disconcerting, given the pomp and ceremony, the wailing and lamenting that usually accompanied a death. Those sorts of performances were comforting, after all. One did like to lean upon their rituals in times of great stress or grief.
But there was nothing ceremonial about her passing. One moment she’d been there, and the next she was gone, rather like sinking quietly into the depths of a pool of water, and forgetting to surface again.
There would be a wake eventually, she supposed, and perhaps it would prove a bit more cheerful, though she doubted it. The townspeople weren’t keen on venturing inside these forbidding stone walls. They weren’t forbidding toher, mind you—this castle was her beloved home—but she hadn’t had a caller for months. Or had it been longer than that? A year, perhaps? The castle was just far enough removed from the village of Berry Pomeroy that the townspeople’s reluctance to visit could be easily explained away as inconvenience.
That wasn’t the real reason, though. It was the hauntings that kept them all away. The floating candlesticks, the unexplained blasts of chilly air, the ghostly footsteps, and so forth. She’d never found any of it the least bit troublesome, but she’d grown up with it, and one could become accustomed to anything.
Perhaps they’d better skip the wake, then. She wouldn’t like to make anyone uncomfortable by her death. The townspeople would protest the unorthodoxy of it, but secretly they’d be relieved, and she was quite reconciled to her death being a solitary affair, a day much like every other day before it, though it was rather a pity she couldn’t laze about inside a silk lined casket amid bunches of lilies and eavesdrop as her mourners extolled her virtues.
People adored the dead, didn’t they?
They were drawn to death, despite all their weeping and carrying on. They were fascinated with the pageantry of it—the deceased laid in state in her coffin, the funeral wreaths and ostrich feathers, the black crepe draped over the mirrors, the frozen clocks.
It all looked quite different from the vantage point of the casket’s occupant. Less solemn, and…sillier, somehow, as if a great deal of fuss were being made over something that was, after all, rather ordinary.
“There’s naught more to be done for ’er, then?”
Ah, that was Silas’s voice. Sweet, kind man! People thought him dreadfully gruff, even frightening, but he wasn’t either, really. Not once one got to know him, and no one knew him and Ada as well as she did. She’d known them her whole life, as they’d served as housekeeper and caretaker when her mother had been a girl, as well.
Now she thought of it, theirs had been an uncommonly lengthy tenure—
“Nay. It’s not the fever what’s doing her in. A young lass like Sylvie? She could shake that off right quick if she had a mind to.”
“What is it, then?”
“Broken heart, mayhap, or a broken will.” Ada sighed. “The poor lass has given up.”
Yes, yes, it was all quite tragic, but there was no such thing as a proper time to die. Surely now was as good a time as any?
