but gales of wind blowing down from the mountain, whistling. Nobody could possibly be down there. I could brave the wind and snow, but it would do me no good. Nevenero was empty.
I had turned to go when a sound came from somewhere beyond the mausoleum. I stopped to listen. There it was again: snow crunching as something moved over the east lawn. An animal, most likely, I thought as I walked past the white mulberry trees, straining to see across the lawn. At the edge of my vision, a flicker: someone walking near the greenhouse. There was a flash of white in the darkness as the figure paused, then disappeared behind the greenhouse.
My first thought was that Sal must be collecting herbs again, but I dismissed it: Sal was listening to opera in the mews. Then I wondered if it could be a large animal—perhaps a bear that had wandered down from the mountain. Or maybe I’d been tricked by fog settling over the pond. On cold, wet nights, sheets of mist collected over the valley, layering the lawn with a milky film. But while it might have been possible that a low cloud had twisted over the lawn, it was not the case on that particular night. The sky was clear, with a full moon and stars blazing overhead. No, it wasn’t fog. It could not have been anything other than what I saw: a person walking across the east lawn.
Whoever it was, I wanted to get as far away from it as possible. I hurried down the path to the pond, heading toward the gate in the hedge, the chill air sweeping over my skin. The temperature had dropped, and the air was so cold it caught in my chest and compressed, settling heavy in my lungs, making it difficult to breathe. The mink wasn’t enough to keep me warm, and my shoes were soaking wet, but it didn’t matter—I was too numb with fear to care.
I jogged past the pond and was almost at the gate in the hedge when I saw a figure standing in the distance, beyond the greenhouse by the castle wall. It was tall, with long hair, which made me believe it to be a woman, yet, as I strained to see more clearly, I couldn’t be sure.
Whatever it was, it seemed as surprised as I was. In that moment, the two of us frozen with fear, I became paralyzed, unable to breathe, unable to even blink. It stared at me, and I stared at it, stunned. My heart beat hard, the sound thrumming in my ears. Finally, I turned away, breaking the moment, and the figure ran.
Sixteen
What happened on the east lawn left me too unnerved to sleep. I lay in bed, my mind circling what I had experienced, dissecting the encounter in the way one might track the memory of a car accident, desperate to create a logical sequence out of a chaotic tragedy. After the person ran, I had stood there for what seemed a very long time, too afraid and disoriented to move. I almost believed I’d imagined the whole thing, but it had left several clusters of footprints in the snow. I’d squatted down to get a better look and found there, illuminated in the moonlight, the impression of a large, flat foot. The snow was powdery, the print imprecise, but it was clear enough to see that it had not been an animal.
Back in the courtyard, I leaned against the gate, breathing so hard the world seemed to drain away. There was only the cold metal against my back, the flash of stars overhead, and the realization that whomever I saw on the east lawn, that strange pale creature, was not something in my head. It was real.
By the time the sun rose, I had managed to convince myself that everything I had experienced on the east lawn—the strange apparition of what could only have been a woman, the footprints in the snow, all of it—could be explained in a logical fashion. Obviously, there was someone living in the castle I hadn’t met yet. It couldn’t have been my great-grandmother—the woman had been too young—but perhaps it had been the cook, Bernadette, collecting herbs for her medicines from the greenhouse. Basil had warned me that Bernadette’s appearance was peculiar, and the woman I had discovered was definitely that. It had been a dark, windy night; she had taken me by surprise, and I had simply overreacted.