17

I’M DRIFTING BETWEEN wakefulness and sleep, my head hopelessly full of Mr. Barrett’s smile, of the willow tree, of Catherine’s rounded stomach, when Emeline comes to me.

I sit up slowly, blinking away the haze of sleep, hardly daring to breathe.

She pads through the darkness to my bed, leaving little puddles of water in her wake. She moves with purpose, though there’s something sluggish, something halting in her gait, as if with every step she’s pulling away from some invisible force dragging at her ankles. Her face is as pale and glowing as the moon and there’s a sunken darkness around her eyes, but as sure as the wind blows, it’s my little sister.

I let out a long, shaky breath. How I have dreamed of this moment, desperately willing the universe to bend its laws and allow me to see her just one more time. I knew that my eyes had not deceived me at the pond, knew it as surely as I know the beat of my own heart.

Emeline stops when she reaches the bed. Her face is bloated, her lips blue and her lovely auburn hair is tangled with pondweeds. She doesn’t just look like she did when Mr. Barrett pulled her from the pond, but worse. As she studies me from solemn eyes so like hers in life yet so different, I shiver, trying not to inhale the wet smell of decay.

“Emeline,” I whisper through the darkness. Is she like the pale lady who will disappear as soon as she senses I’m watching her? It doesn’t matter. I am not scared of her. How could I fear my own sister?

“Hello, Lydia.” She comes right up to the edge of the bed, her intentions unmistakable.

Before I can move over to make room for her, she climbs up beside me as she has done so many times in the past when she came seeking refuge from the dark.

“Oh, Emmy,” I whisper. I’m too relieved to be frightened, too desperate for her touch to recoil. “Oh, sweetheart, what are you doing here?”

She snuggles in beside me. She’s so cold. Colder than after Mr. Barrett pulled her out of the water, colder even than the last time I touched her lying in her coffin. I put my arm around her tiny, translucent shoulders, breathlessly wondering how it is that she can really be here next to me after so many aching days and weeks of unanswered prayers. Is she just one of so many other spirits who seem to haunt Willow Hall now?

It’s unnatural, I know that. But, as if she were a small, skittish bird, I don’t want to frighten her by letting my apprehension show, so I pull her closer, relishing the familiar yet somehow different feel of her against my body.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” I tell her. “I’ve missed you more than you can know.”

“I don’t like that hill,” she says. “It’s cold and dark, and I would rather be with you.” Her voice is watery, and though she has the same high, light tone that she always did, there’s something harder around the edges of it now. Something adult and knowing.

I hesitate. “But how, Emeline? How did you come here?”

“Didn’t you want me to come? Isn’t that why you gave me this?”

She holds something out in her damp little palm. I reach out, and then catch my breath. It’s the lock of hair, tied in a faded red ribbon.

“Where did you get that?” I ask in a whisper.

She gives me a queer look. “You gave it to me.”

“I...” I did give it to her, when she died. “I saw it in your trunk.”

“Sometimes I keep things there.” She regards the hair gravely. “But sometimes I like to take them out and carry them.”

How long has she been lingering at Willow Hall? How long has she shared the same halls, the same rooms as me since she died and I haven’t known?

The candle flickers across her pale little face, her skin dewy as a rose petal. The air is suddenly thick with all the things I have wanted to tell her, to ask her, since she left. I measure my words, cautious that saying the wrong thing might make her disappear as suddenly as she came.

“Why did you go away? Why did you leave me here? You knew that it was always supposed to be you and me, together.”

My arms are wrapped around her, but rather than making her warmer, she’s making me colder, and I let out an involuntary shiver. A hurt look comes over her face.

“You would have left me someday though. You would have gotten married and gone away and left me all alone.”

“Oh, Emmy, I would never do that.” Though as soon as I say it I think of Mr. Barrett and shame flushes through me. “Besides,” I say, “one day you might have met a nice man and you wouldn’t want your older sister hanging about as you tried to kiss him, would you?”

She screws up her face at the thought of kissing a boy and laughs. I smile too, though it’s difficult, knowing that she will never fall in love, never start a family of her own.

“You don’t need to worry about me.”

“But I do,” I say. Tears are welling up faster than I can blink them away. And then I finally ask the question that has tortured me, “Oh, Emmy, why did you do it? You must have known better. How could you have been so careless?”

She regards me for a moment with her bottomless gray eyes, and then shrugs in my arms. “It was the little boy,” she says. “The little boy told me he would show me the mermaids.”

I suck in a breath. “What little boy?”

“The one in the water. He said he wanted a friend and that he would show me the mermaids if I was his friend.”

She says it so matter-of-factly. A shiver runs down my spine. “Is the little boy like Wicked George? Can only you see him?”

When Emeline was very young she had an imaginary friend who was always getting into trouble. George—or Wicked George, as he came to be known by Mother—was responsible for all sorts of things that were suspiciously like the kind of trouble little girls might get into. Could she have dreamed up a new imaginary friend that she never told me about?

“How should I know if you can see him or not?” This line of questioning is obviously tiresome to her and she gives a little yawn, her chilly breath scented with pond water.

I hesitate, wanting to hear more about this little boy, but I know better than to press Emeline on something she doesn’t want to talk about and risk her shutting down completely.

She shrugs. “I thought I could get back out, that the boy would help me, but he didn’t. I didn’t mean to.”

I can hardly breathe. “Oh, Emeline.”

“You tried to find me, didn’t you? You came into the pond to try to find me.”

“Yes,” I say. “I did.”

“But I wasn’t there.”

“No, you weren’t. Not until I was leaving.”

She thinks on this for a moment. “John had to come pull you out.”

“That’s right.”

“I like John. He tried to help me.”

“Yes, he did.” My breath catches as I wipe my eyes. “I like John too.”

Emeline touches my cheek with her cold little finger. “He’ll try to take you away someday,” she says forlornly. “The little boy told me he will.”

I catch her hand in my own and squeeze it. I want to tell her that a little hope has flared in my heart that maybe Mr. Barrett might see me the way I see him, that perhaps I won’t always be the younger, plainer version of the woman he actually admires. But even if he does return my feelings, there is no love worth more than the one I have for my little sister.

“No,” I say fiercely, pulling her closer to me. “No, I’ll never leave you. Not again.”

I’m afraid to go to sleep, to lose her again. We lie in silence for hours, one heartbeat shared between us, until finally I drift off. The next morning, sun streams in through the windows in piercing golden shafts. I roll over to an empty bed, the pillow damp, and the air smelling of stale pond water and weeds.

* * *

The next few days pass in a fog. I move automatically, dressing and eating, and occasionally finding my way into the library. More than once Catherine suspiciously asks me what I’m smiling about, but I just tell her it’s nothing. She wouldn’t understand how seeing Emeline, how holding her again, has left me dazed and with a renewed sense of hope. I hold my secret close, Emeline came to me, and me alone. I’ve wound her hair into a little braid, and coiled it inside a locket. I finger it constantly throughout the day, the metal warm and comforting against my chest.

At night I lie awake, tensed for the sound of approaching footsteps, sitting up every time a log shifts in the fire. But aside from Snip, I have no visitors, and after four nights of fitful sleep and increasingly tiring days, I begin to wonder if it was no more than a dream.

But on the fifth night, after having just resigned myself to falling asleep, a horrible sound wrenches me back awake. Heart racing, I bolt upright.

It’s not Emeline, but Mother again, that terrible wail in which she indulged our first night at Willow Hall. Just like that night, it starts low and plaintive, building into an unnatural keening. I’m about to put my head under my pillow to muffle the sound when I chastise myself. Here is my chance to comfort Mother, to make amends for my lack of judgment in going into the pond. I throw on my dressing gown and pad out into the hallway. The wailing is louder here, each sob clear and ringing; it’s a wonder that no one else has been awakened by it. When I reach Mother and Father’s bedchamber, I give a hesitant knock. There’s no answer, and the wailing continues. I’m just about to try a second time when my hand freezes in the air.

It’s not coming from behind their bedchamber door. It’s coming from the third floor.

My rational mind tells me to go back to bed, that Mother is probably upstairs in the nursery, mourning Emeline and in need of privacy. But something irrational and morbidly curious tells me that it’s not Mother, and that I ought to go upstairs and investigate.

Convincing my feet to obey me is another matter entirely. I move with small, hesitating steps, all the while the groaning sobs filling my ears, chilling me down to my bones. They grow louder as I near the stairs, and by the time I’m at the top I can almost make out distinct words.

Wiping my sweating palms on the sides of my dressing gown, I freeze again, teetering on the top step outside the ballroom. Cold seeps from the floor through the soles of my unslippered feet, but I’m knocked backward by the overwhelming smell of smoke. I don’t see any signs of a fire, but I press my mouth into my elbow to keep from choking, and move closer.

The voice, low and mournful, is not Mother’s.

“My boy,” groans the female voice. “Oh, my boy.” The timbre is achingly hopeless, and fills me with sadness as much as it does horror.

It can’t possibly be her, but I can’t stop myself from calling in a whisper, “Emeline, is that you?”

The cries continue as if I hadn’t said anything. The thick smell of smoke winds around me like an embrace, but the air is clear as ever.

Just as suddenly as it started, it stops. The words drop away, the cries evaporate, the smell of smoke recedes and a heaviness I hadn’t realized was pressing down on me lifts. I’m left alone with my thudding heart and dry mouth, and an uneasy sense that until this moment, I shared the company of something not quite of this world.

Slowly and quietly, my legs shaking, I make my way back downstairs and to my bed. No doors open, no one peers out to ask me what all the commotion was. The house is silent and everyone else sleeps on undisturbed.

* * *

When I awake dazed and tired to the light of day, it seems impossible that the hellish cries of last night had been anything more than a dream, a figment of my imagination. When I ask Catherine if she heard anything, she gives me a peevish look and informs me that the only thing making sleep difficult for her are the lumpy mattresses here. Even though I don’t think Mother would admit to such an outburst, I ask her anyway if she’s had bad nights recently. She just gives a weary sigh, and I drop the matter.

Over the course of the next few days I gradually I ease into a routine, tucking away the memories of my secret visit from Emeline, as well as the moans that apparently I alone heard in the night.

Mr. Barrett hasn’t come back since the day in my room, but if Father’s schedule is any indication, they’re both busy trying to tie up the land deal with Ezra Clarke to get the rights to the river that runs through his farm. I’m almost glad that Mr. Barrett hasn’t been round yet, as it gives me more time to emerge from my fog, more time to decide upon a book to recommend to him.

I’m happily curled up in the library with Snip at my feet and a quilt round my shoulders as I pull out every book I think he might like and sort them into piles. I’ve just moved The Castle of Wolfenbach out of the Maybe pile for the third time when Catherine flounces in.

“I need to go to town and buy cloth for my wedding dress, and Mother says you have to come with me.”

A wedding dress seems like something of a leap to make from the one letter that Mr. Pierce sent her after the failed dinner. More likely she’s looking for an excuse to buy a dress to flatter her quickly changing body.

I look at the organized chaos of my book piles, at the cozy fire licking and snapping in the hearth. “I’m busy.”

I’ve been relishing the prospect of reliving my favorite stories as I sorted my books, trying to see them as if through Mr. Barrett’s eyes for the first time. But apparently even after everything that’s happened I’m still the responsible one, and Mother thinks that I’m somehow capable of keeping Catherine in check.

“Please? Your books will be here when you get back.” Catherine’s tone is wheedling, artificially high, the kind of voice she used to use when she wanted a bigger allowance from Father. When she sees that I’m still unmoved, she adds, “You look like you just stumbled out of a crypt. Getting some fresh air will put some color into your cheeks for when you see Mr. Barrett.”

I try not to care, but she’s touched upon my little spark of vanity that ignites whenever I hear Mr. Barrett’s name. So not even an hour after I’d resolved to spend the day with my books and memories of Emeline’s visit, I’m in a fresh dress with my hair pinned up off my neck and trundling toward town with Catherine.