He loved me… At least he loved me…
For God’s sake, the bastard took your father’s money and left. Are you so insane you’ve forgotten that… He didn’t love you, bitch, he used you…
I could have loved you…
I never wanted your love, whore… But her father’s voice had been bitter, furious…hurt.
Her bedroom. Her refuge. The one room her father had never stepped foot in. Her bed was still there. The wide, white-canopied confection of lace. It was a room made for a princess.
Remember, Kimmie, you’ll be free… Be free for both of us, Kimmie…
Each night her mother had whispered those words to her until her teen years, until her father had put a stop to it. He had sent Kimberly away to school. An exclusive girls’ school that had effectively placed a distance between her and the mother who had nurtured her. Who had nurtured a hatred for the father.
Why had she not remembered that?
She moved from her room, down the long hall, and to the room her mother had taken her last breath.
I was wrong… So many things…her mother had wheezed that last day. Don’t make my mistakes, Kimmie, swear to me, you won’t make my mistakes… I wanted you free, Kimmie… I wanted you free…
Free of what? Free of her father or free of Briar Cliff?
Each room she visited was more of the same. An unending collage of memories flooding her mind, her heart.
In the library, the walls were lined with the portraits of all those who had their time to possess Briar Cliff. From the first, Horace and Catherine St. Montrose. The first Briar Cliff family. It was said Catherine had been a creature of sexuality, a woman as comfortable with her body and her female desires as she was with the wealth she had inherited from her father, a Lord of the English realm. She and her husband had built Briar Cliff.
Her oldest daughter, Elizabeth St. Montrose Michaels and her husband, Hugh, wore the same happy, contented expressions of the first two. The portraits ranged around the room, a gleam of laughter, of satisfaction in the eyes of those inhabitants until she reached Tabitha Elizabeth Montageau and her husband, Diego Santiago. There was bitterness there, in Tabitha’s deep brown eyes, in the pinched contours of her lips. There was a sadness in her face only emphasized by the self-righteous arrogance of her husband.
It had been Tabitha who had established the Trust. Who had broken with willing the entire estate to the first-born daughter and set the restrictive and soul-destroying provisions on the inheritance. It was she, most likely at the direction of her husband, who decided that the desires the women of her line possessed were depraved and perverted and needed to be extinguished.
She had condemned her daughter and all those who came after her to a life of restriction and pain. And Kimberly had been her mother’s last hope of breaking the cycle. The Trust terminated in only five more years. But in waiting, in turning her back on what she had seen in Jared’s eyes, what would she be gaining? And what would she be losing?
Love endured. If Jared loved her, truly loved her, he would wait. He would wait. She had seen it in his eyes, heard it in his voice. He would make that sacrifice for her. But to what end?
She wandered over to the oaken locked shelf that she had been given the key to six years before. She knew what it contained, but she had never had the courage to open it. Five generations of journals and diaries. Accounts of the lives, the loves, and she knew, the pain the women of Briar Cliff had endured.
Slowly, she drew the key from her pocket and opened the door on a past she had sworn she would never visit.
Chapter Eighteen
Father has sworn Matthew Timmons will save me from the demons of lust that are the curse of my birth. I will do as he bids, but my heart breaks, for I know I will never again see my beloved Daniel… Sarah Santiago. She had been Tabitha and Diego’s first-born daughter.
Father was right. I am cursed. My female needs torment me both sleeping and awake. James is disgusted by my very presence, of course. I cannot blame him for this. I am a blight upon my family… Samantha Fieldings. Her husband had been James Fieldings, a religious and righteous leader of the community at the time.
God save me. I have wed Davis Eldon as Father ordered. What have I done? I have refused the demand of the one I love for this life. A life of ease, of all I knew should have been mine, for what? For the suffering I now endure. What have I done? My heart breaks for my one true love. My soul aches… Elissa Fieldings Eldon.
They can make me marry as they please, to satisfy the terms of this insane Trust. But they cannot make me suffer. Grayson may be the choice of my father, but it is his brother, Lawrence, to whom my heart and body belongs. I will not suffer the fate of those before me. I will know love, if only in the darkness of the night and the sheltering arms of deception… Karen Eldon Marshal
If only I were as strong as my parents. They loved, they laughed, and they knew at least a small measure of happiness. The man I loved, precious Kimmie, I won’t say his name. He was not your father, he was never my lover, and as your father was prone to remind me, he preferred the money. I am too weak, and I know I will not survive this illness. Should I die, then Briar Cliff and its protection falls to you. All that the women of our line have dreamed of falls upon your shoulders, my precious daughter. You can have it all. It can all be yours, just as it was meant to be. But for what? You are inheriting generations of pain, anger, deception and tears. It is truly a curse, and one I pray you deny. Love, Kimmie. Laugh. Let your heart be free and your body be your own. A house, no matter how beautiful, or how priceless, will ever take the place of those things.
I hope you are reading this diary, that you have read those who have gone before, now that I myself have passed on. I hope that the years you have spent away from this house, from me, have given you a chance to grow strong, to break away from the curse this house brings.
So many years I refused your father the truth he often pleaded for. He wanted only to know that you were his true daughter, and I, in my selfishness, refused him that. I realize now, as the end draws near, that I leave you alone, where before I had thought I would be here to see you triumph. I leave you alone. Without the father who perhaps would have treated you with kindness had I not driven the wedge between you.
I suffer now for my selfishness. No, not I, for I will pass on. But I go, knowing I will never rest, because you shall now suffer.
Briar Cliff is the curse, Kimmie, not your desires or your femininity or your gentle heart. It is this estate, and the past that has cursed us all… Claire Marshal Madison. It was dated the week of her death.
When Kimberly looked up from the final diary it was to see that night had overtaken the house. The light beside her glowed eerily, a single point of illumination within to emphasize the darkness that surrounded not just the estate, but her soul as well.