That sweep of the clock hands when the winter afternoon yawns into twilight. Afore the thickness and concealment of evening and the inevitable nightfall, when the Priory’s rooms are dressed in vague light blurred at the edges. Silhouettes hover, and apparitions dance with the dust. Those that hide by light step out of the shadows. Hardacre Priory inhales, filling its chamber lungs and hall veins with the consciousness of its past. The dead rise and the living fall prey… or become hunters.
†
Josiah sat on the upholstered chair beside Nancy’s bed. Watching her lay curled up like a slumbering cat, covered by a thick blanket.
Samuel had warned him not to follow, though Josiah paid no heed. Lizzie had scolded him the last time he had watched Nancy sleep, but he did not want to leave her alone, not now. Not ever. When he gazed at Nancy’s sleeping face, something deep inside his hollow chest reminded him—not of someone or something, precisely. Just a memory. Now more than ever did he feel the importance of such things. They had been alone for such a long time. It was easy to forget the softness of another’s skin or the warmth of another’s breath, what it was like to have your bedclothes tucked in tight. To have someone blow out the candle and say a prayer for his slumber. They had become accustomed to the loneliness and miserable void they occupied.
Nancy’s arrival had caused a shift in the Priory’s air. It was no longer dormant and stagnant. Josiah and his twin no longer existed in their own private time, walking the halls and rooms as they had done for more than four hundred years. Now they felt the others.
Nancy stirred. Josiah had watched her the previous night as she carried Oliver back to bed. It had tried then, had crawled from the shadowy spaces waiting to pounce. It had failed.
Nancy would fight.
History had seen others with such temperament. The Hardacre family tree marked them with short dashes between their years. To fight always appeared heroic in the beginning, but they rarely emerged triumphantly… No. Josiah thought again. None had emerged triumphant. It always won.
Now there was this mother with a ferocious spirit and fighting heart. She would fight for her boys, and she would die for them too; of that, there was little doubt. Perhaps she could do what no other before her had done—win. Nancy was the one thing the others had not been: she was not a Hardacre.
Josiah leant forwards just a touch. The resemblance to a long-lost memory was strong. Even Samuel had not denied it. He, too, sensed the familiarity.
Nancy shifted. A gentle murmur seeped from her lips—words of no consequence, yet they called Josiah forwards a little more till his face was so close. Her breath, her vital essence, a perfume so much like spring flowers that it made him weep.
Carefully, he left the chair to sit on the bed. His small body perfectly nestled between her arm and her pulled-up knees. It was right somehow. He did not want to move, to leave this mother, no matter how much Lizzie admonished him for his reckless actions.
Nancy roused. She pulled her arm up and wrapped it around Josiah, pulling him into a carefree embrace.
‘Hmmm,’ she whispered. ‘Oliver, love, I’ll be down soon. I’m just so sleepy.’ Her eyelids were as heavy as her slurred words.
He slowly touched her hair. So very soft, like silk thread. He caressed her forehead with his fingertips. ‘Hush, sweet mother. Slumber a while longer.’