Anne watched the road again the next evening at sunset. When Gabriel arrived, she ran down and gave a polite knock. She was afraid he would return to ignoring her, but after a moment the bolt slid back. He opened the door without a word and continued laying the table.
Progress, she thought.
“Did you bring it?” she asked.
He pointed to the sideboard. A violin case sat there.
“Merci,” she said.
“De rien.”
Anne opened the case and lifted the instrument from its velvet lining, her eyes widening as she read the signature next to the left f-hole: Carlo Bergonzi. One of the finest Italian luthiers of the 1700s. She reverently traced the scroll with her fingertips.
“Do you like it?” He stood at the door, watching her.
“I…. Where did you get this? It’s exquisite.”
“I know people.”
“Thank you.” She gently returned it to the case. “I promise to take excellent care of it.”
He hesitated for a moment, then bowed and left without a word, sliding the bolt shut after himself. Anne lifted it to her shoulder and drew the bow across the strings. It badly needed tuning, yet she could hear the glorious sound it would make.
She returned to the table and ate her supper, an airy soufflé and creamy potato soup with a sprig of fresh thyme, but her thoughts roamed elsewhere, piecing together the scant clues she had about his character. He knew how to cook. He could get his hands on a Bergonzi violin in a single day. He liked silly gothic novels.
He couldn’t be killed, not by traditional methods at least.
When he’d bowed to her, for a fleeting instant he seemed familiar, but then it was gone.
She went upstairs and tuned the violin, then played for a few hours, wild gypsy tunes to suit her mood. When she finally returned the instrument to its case, her fingers were swollen and tender from lack of practice. Anne hadn’t even wanted the violin. She only wanted to see if Gabriel would bring it to her. She wanted to make him to talk to her again.
Now she felt glad to have it. As much as she preferred solitude, the silence was starting to become oppressive.
She undressed and bathed with a bucket of cold water, shivering in the draft from the broken window. After she’d dried off, Anne combed her hair and wondered how had he come to be cursed, if it even was a curse. Were there others like him? Could he change at will? And how to reconcile the creature who had brutally murdered two children with the man whose only reaction when she stabbed him through the heart was to swear at her?
He seemed convinced they knew each other and that she’d done something to him, but he couldn’t be more than thirty-five years old. Anne recalled her travels over the last two decades, the various mortals she’d encountered, and came up blank. She felt sure she’d remember Gabriel. He was pleasant enough to look at if not blindingly handsome, but he had a certain volatile energy that would have left an impression.
It couldn’t be a case of mistaken identity. He knew she was a daēva and had taken precautions to contain her. He seemed to know exactly who she was. Anne frowned. Despite her diminutive size, she wasn’t used to being the weaker party. Without the talisman, she could have bested five mortal men at once. But Gabriel had his own strange power and she was entirely at his mercy.
Anne crawled under the covers but sleep refused to come. Sometime after midnight she wandered back down to the dining room. The remains of the meal sat on the table, waiting for Gabriel to remove them. Her eye landed on The Mysteries of Udolpho. Anne opened it to a random passage.
“Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni's; for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object.”
Pure rubbish.
She dragged a chair into the yellow glow of a candle and turned back to chapter one.
The next night Anne waited atop the tower and watched the road. The Channel was rough and choppy, driven by a northerly wind with gusts of rain. When she saw the mounted figure race by, she went down to the inner door and waited until she heard the rattle of dishes from the previous night’s supper being cleared. He was whistling a tune again — the same one she’d been playing on the violin.
He stayed to listen, she thought with a frisson of excitement.
“Gabriel?” she said through the door.
The whistling stopped.
“May we speak?”
There was a long silence. Then footsteps approached. The bolt slid open and he stood in the doorframe. He wore a grey woolen coat with a black velvet collar and deep cuffs. His beard was coming in again and he looked rough around the edges.
“What is it, Miss Lawrence?”
“I have a favor to ask.”
“I know I need to fix the windowpanes—”
“No, it’s something else. I need more dresses. The old ones got ruined.”
The corner of his mouth quirked, as if he suspected just what she had done with them. Gabriel pointed to a trunk next to the door. “I brought you six, in various styles, with undergarments and two warm cloaks.” His gaze roamed over her, but it was clinical rather than lecherous. “They should fit.”
“Thank you.” He started to turn away. “Also….”
“Yes?”
She pushed a tendril of rain-damp hair from her face and tried to look small and helpless. It was a look Anne had perfected over the years, to the chagrin all the men who’d underestimated her.
“I can’t outrun you, not with this.” She gestured to the rose cameo. “But if you’re going to keep me here, you have to permit me some exercise. Just a short walk. I’ll go mad. I… I can feel my body weakening.” This was a lie but she uttered it with great sincerity.
He hesitated.
“Please. I’ll wear chains on my legs if you insist. It doesn’t have to be far.”
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
Gabriel shut the door in her face and finished setting the table, then left and bolted her in.
Anne ate her solitary supper while the rain dripped outside. She dragged the trunk up to her room and examined the contents. Brocaded silks and duchesse satins and other frippery, all rumpled from being crushed inside the trunk. They smelled musty. Anne wrinkled her nose and carted the lot of it up to the top of the tower to air out.
She spent the evening playing her violin and finishing The Mysteries of Udolpho. Despite her initial reservations, Anne found herself drawn into the tale of Emily St. Aubert, a beautiful orphan who gets locked up at Castle Udolpho by the wicked Signor Montoni, an Italian brigand. Emily wept a bit too often for Anne’s taste, but she enjoyed the supernatural goings-on and the doomed romance with the poor but dashing Valancourt.
Anne turned pages into the wee hours and slipped back down to the dining room when she was done to replace the book exactly where it had been on the sideboard, lying facedown at chapter two. For some reason, she didn’t want Gabriel knowing she had devoured his ridiculous book.
The next morning, she was still lolling in bed when she heard sounds below.
Anne sat bolt upright. She rushed down the stairs in her cotton shift and found Gabriel sitting at the dining table. It was the first time he had ever come in full daylight.
“What are you doing here?” she blurted.
He glanced at The Mysteries of Udolpho. “It’s bad for the spine to leave it open like that.”
Gabriel untied the black ribbon from his hair. He picked up the book and slipped the ribbon between the pages.
Anne studied him for any sign of mockery and detected none. “Thank you. But I’ve lost interest in that one anyway.” She paused. “Maybe you could bring another?”
His lips twitched. “Of course.” He swept his arm toward the door. “Come on, then. Unless you’ve changed your mind?”
“No, I…. Let me just get dressed.” Anne ran to the top of the tower and surveyed the gowns, which were all wet from the morning dew. She chose a blue one with a high neck and quickly changed, pulling her boots on and hurrying back down the stairs.
“These are the rules,” he told her in a stern tone. “We walk within the walls for thirty minutes. If you try to run, or to hurt me, or to ask questions I don’t wish to answer, it will be the last time you leave this tower.”
Anne nodded. She had no intention of making a dash for it — not until she knew the grounds better.
Gabriel stood aside and let her go first. Her heart beat a little faster as she stepped through the forbidden door that was always barred to her. A second set of stairs wound down to the bottom of the tower and outside into a high-walled bailey. For the first time she saw the keep itself, which had been hidden by the curve of the tower.
It was not one of those fairytale concoctions of soaring spires and snapping pennants. The castle must have dated back to William the Conqueror, ancient unadorned stone meant to keep out invaders. Dead leaves piled in drifts against the outer wall. She saw no sign of servants or any other inhabitants.
They walked in silence, Gabriel’s bootheels ringing on the stone. The rain had stopped, though the morning remained overcast. Anne had never seen him in daylight before. He looked tired, with dark circles beneath his eyes. They walked together through the bailey to an overgrown garden, still brown from winter.
“You eavesdropped,” she ventured. “The other night. I heard you whistling Zigeunerweisen.”
He glanced at her. “I was curious to know if you really played the violin or if you only intended to stab me with the bow.”
Anne frowned. “What would be the point? You’d simply recover.”
He said nothing to this. They walked another turn around the desolate garden. Anne pretended to be lost in thought but made sure to catalogue every detail. The main gates lay elsewhere but she could see a barred postern gate beyond the garden.
“Where do you go at night?” she asked. “Do you live in the castle?”
“It’s mine,” he replied, which was not exactly an answer.
Emboldened, Anne gave him a friendly smile. “How did you bring me here? Normandy is a long way from the Carpathians. The last thing I remember is falling in the snow and….” She cleared her throat. “You bounding toward me.”
“We Traveled.”
The way he said it conveyed that he did not mean by a coach and four. He meant by a portal through the Dominion.
He has access to powerful talismans and the ability to use them. Anne filed this away.
“What drug did you give me?” she asked.
A pause. “Laudanum.”
She remembered raising the cup to her lips in Father Gavra’s study. She’d come to the monastery half-frozen from the long walk from Mara Vardac and he’d been very polite and kind, offering her a bit of red wine to warm up. She hadn’t wanted it, but it seemed rude to refuse. Two other monks had been present as well — Florin and Constantin — so afterwards, Anne hadn’t been sure which of them had drugged her.
She’d gone to the library and begun reading the books and felt a lethargy come over her. Anne knew right away that they’d put something in her cup. So she’d sent Florin to fetch more books from the stacks and made a run for it, climbing the outer wall before the alarm was raised.
But he’d still caught her in the end.
They made another turn around the oval walkway in silence.
“What do you do all day?” she asked, hoping to prod him into conversation.
“Cook for you.” His gaze fixed on the distant wall. “You think those dishes are simple?”
Anne’s temper began to fray. “You make a joke of it, but it’s not a joke to me,” she said stiffly.
He muttered something inaudible in French.
“My brother will pay well for my safe return. Any amount you ask for.”
He cast her a contemptuous look. “I’m not interested in money.”
“Then what do you want?”
Gabriel’s mouth set. “Justice.”
“For what?” she demanded, exasperated.
He didn’t reply.
Anne stopped walking, forcing him to halt. “Are you really a priest?”
“No, but I am a man of God.” He said this in a low, serious tone and she thought he actually believed it.
“What’s the difference?”
“I was never ordained, but I carry out His will all the same.”
Not just a man-wolf, but a religious fanatic. Heaven help me.
“How did you know I would go to Saint George’s? Were you expecting me?”
His face darkened. “Enough. I told you—”
Anne held up her hands. “All right. I’m sorry I broke your rules. Don’t make me go back just yet. We’ll talk of something else.” He scowled and she touched his sleeve. “Please, it’s been awfully lonely.”
Another lie — Anne could happily go for weeks without hearing a human voice — but she sensed a crack in the façade.
“Your choice. Art? Philosophy? Music?”
Gabriel heaved a sigh. “Music, if you like. Tell me about the piece you played.”
Anne smiled. “Zigeunerweisen. Lovely, isn’t it? Composed by Pablo de Sarasate, a Spaniard. It’s based on the rhythms of the czardas. Hungarian folk dances. They start off slow and get faster and faster….”
They took four more turns around the oval path. The sun broke through the clouds, drying the stones under their feet, and when Anne kept her word, Gabriel seemed to relax a bit. He had a fondness for the romantic composers — Chopin, Schumann, Liszt — but disliked opera, which surprised her given his propensity for melodrama.
“We should get back,” he said at last.
Her steps slowed as they approached the tower. She felt a sudden dread of entering and Gabriel seemed to sense it. He turned to her, his voice softer than she’d ever heard it.
“We can walk again tomorrow if you wish.”
She looked at him, trying to hold her claustrophobia in check. “Yes, thank you.”
He escorted her to the dining room and saw her through the inner door.
“I’ll return later with your supper.”
Anne nodded. The bolt slid home.
While she ate, Gabriel went up to her bedchamber with tools and panes of glass and repaired the window and the leaky roof. Anne tested the outer door, but he’d locked it with a key. When he left, she found another novel on the sideboard.
The Castle of Otranto.
Anne licked gravy from her fingers and opened to page one. By the third paragraph, a servant was foaming at the mouth. By the fourth, Princess Hippolita had fallen into a swoon because her son, the unfortunate Conrad, had just been crushed to death by an enormous helmet with black plumage. All on the morning of Conrad’s wedding to the beautiful Isabella.
Anne was enthralled.
But even as she read by candlelight late into the night, her mind kept returning to that postern gate beyond the garden.
Over the next week, Gabriel walked with her every morning, rain or shine. They talked about meaningless things and she refrained from pressing him about the nature of his grudge. The excursions lasted an hour or so and then she would return to her tower. It was the most time she’d spent with another person in years.
Gabriel never let her out of his sight, not for an instant. That was as she expected.
But on one particularly fine morning, Anne decided to test his new goodwill.
“Gabriel,” she said cheerfully. “Can’t we walk outside the walls today? The bailey is so small. We just go round and round like rats on a wheel. I’m sure the view from the cliffs is beautiful.”
His eyes narrowed. “So you can push me over?”
She laughed as if he’d made a jest, though the thought had crossed her mind.
“Not at the edge. I just want to see the water.”
“You can see it from the tower.”
She adopted a hurt expression. “Never mind.”
He was quiet for a while. Then he said, “There’s a path that goes down to the shore. It’s steep.”
She gave a careless shrug, though the victory was sweet. “I don’t mind.”
He led her to the postern gate and opened it with a large key. The ground on the other side sloped down to a switchback trail cut into the side of the cliff. Gabriel gestured for her to go first and they picked their way down to the shingled beach.
She could see why he’d permitted it; the shore was nothing more than a narrow crescent that would be fully submerged at high tide. But her heart lifted at being somewhere besides the garden and the tower. Gabriel sat down on a boulder as she ran to the edge of the water and let it lap at her boots. Colonies of grey and white kittiwakes nested in the crags of the cliffs. A cormorant flew low over the water, dark and serpentine. Anne loosened the pins in her hair and let the wind take it.
“When you came to the monastery, you said you were a student of folklore,” Gabriel asked behind her. “Was that true?”
Anne didn’t turn. “Yes.”
“What kind?”
“Any kind.”
But this was another lie. There were certain stories she chased, seeking their source. Hoping they might hold a grain of truth. It was the driving force of her life. Not even Vivienne and Alec knew that, though she wondered if they suspected.
“You came to hunt the pricolici, no?”
Anne glanced over her shoulder. “And I found him.”
“What other stories do you like?”
“Hmmm. Fairies. Witches. Kelpies and bugbears. They’re real, you know.”
“You’re teasing me.”
“Not in the least.”
“Have you seen such things?”
He sounded genuinely interested.
The wind stung her cheeks as she rounded on him. “Why do you care?”
“I’m only asking.”
“Well, don’t,” she snapped, more harshly than she’d intended. “Nothing personal, remember? Your rules.”
A black cloud extinguished the sun. A spattering of rain hit her face. Gabriel’s brows lowered and he looked on the verge of saying something more when the skies opened. They ran for the path, instantly soaked, and made their way up the slippery cliff face in foul humor.
Anne slammed the inner door shut before he could lock her in.