old, I hear.”
“How interesting, Sam. Rose-something? I wonder what his estate is called.”
“Oh, I got that! Seabeck. Yah, Seabeck, funny kind of name, stuck in my head. Didn’t never hear that word before, did you?”
“Why, no, I don’t believe I have. I wonder what it means.”
Sam, a lad of about sixteen, adopted a look of wisdom. “I fink,” he said in a paternal way, “that it means the estate is by the sea.”
“Oh, of course, Sam,” she said. “That’s so smart of you. Thank you.”
“Anytime, Mrs. Bishop. Anytime. You need anyfing else, you just ring and tell ’em you want Sam.”
“I will do that,” she assured him. “As you can see, I’m a curious sort of person.”
“So ’m I!” He laughed. “My mum allus said I was a curious sort of boy. Good fing to be in my job.”
“Curiosity is a great thing,” Harriet said. “It leads to all sorts of knowledge.”
She meant it. She now knew, thanks to her new friends in service, exactly where Frances was taking Annis. There was no need to skulk around corners or hide behind a veil. She would simply buy a train ticket to Dorset.
She ordered a pot of tea and a sandwich to be brought to her, and she sat by the window as she ate, watching the road to choose her moment. When the Allington party appeared, with their trunks and valises on trolleys, Harriet held her grandmother’s charm in her hand and concentrated.
Frances kept one small valise on her lap as they took their places in the carriage. That, Harriet felt certain, was where she had packed her materials. The herbs, the candle, the saucer, everything she had seen in the cabin, would be in that valise.
The manikin was there, too. Harriet sensed its presence, that tiny golem that should never have been created. It was a tiny shadow where there should be sunshine, a flaw in the bright afternoon. The wrongness of it made her fingertips ache with the memory of dark magic.
“You’re making a terrible mistake, Frances,” she muttered, gazing down on the group settling itself into the carriage. “I fear for you.”
Four floors beneath her, Frances’s head jerked up. She frowned deeply, gazing up at the facade of the hotel. Harriet hastily drew back, watching with just one eye through a tiny rent in the fabric of the curtain as Frances looked this way and that, scanning the windows. Frances pressed a palm to her breast.
“Yes,” Harriet whispered. “Do you see, Grandmother? She feels it. She knows someone is looking at her.”
Beryl didn’t answer, but Harriet thought her grandmother must be aware. She had predicted it. “There is darkness in the girl,” Beryl had said while they were still in the midst of Frances’s training. “You will need to watch out for that, Harriet.”
The cousins had not spoken since their argument at the wedding. Frances had never set foot in the Dakota. Harriet had never passed through the doors of Allington House a second time and observed Frances only from a distance.
She and Beryl had failed her, despite their best efforts. Nothing they did could relieve Frances’s bitterness over the poverty of her childhood. Nothing they said could erase her resentment of the dingy flat she had grown up in, the ragged clothes she had worn, the low status of her mother. It seemed now, though she wore beautiful gowns and lived in a fine house, that she still carried that hungry, angry girl inside her. Nothing cooled the fire of her craving, of her drive to vanquish the memory of her younger self.
Frances had discovered on her own how to wield the maleficia. Harriet, cleaning out Beryl’s library, had found the old books, hidden behind a dozen newer ones on a top shelf. She wasn’t surprised her grandmother had saved them, since Beryl had cared so much about preserving the history of the Bishop witches. She was saddened to realize Frances had discovered them and learned what the worst of them contained.
Frances had experienced the power of the maleficia and succumbed to its temptation. Beryl had been right about the danger of the dark practice. It was, inevitably, corrupting.
Now Annis, innocent of all of this, had become Frances’s most recent weapon.
Harriet sighed, tucked the amulet beneath her shirtwaist, and went to pack up her things for the trip to Dorset, and a place called Seabeck.
15
Annis
Lady Whitmore’s tea party had been even more tedious than Annis had anticipated. Every guest seemed to her as stilted and shallow