still be here. She had been too delicate, too fragile, for childbearing, and he hadn’t protected her. God, he was doing it again. Stop thinking about her, you dolt.
Mr. Marshall reached for something in his waistcoat pocket, pulling Gabriel from his thoughts. “I hope you won’t mind the presumption, but I’ve taken the liberty of drawing up a list of all the families in town for you.” He handed Gabriel a folded sheet of paper. “Thought you might want to make the rounds and introduce yourself.”
Gabriel took the list and scanned the jumble of names, unable to fathom actually having to put faces to them. “Thank you. I’m sure this will be very useful.”
But Mr. Marshall wasn’t listening. He was worrying at his mustache, staring out into the gray dusk. “There is one name I omitted from that list.” He paused. “You would do well to steer far and clear of Sophronia Carver.”
“The widow?”
Nodding, Mr. Marshall took a slow puff from his cigar. “My wife has a flair for the dramatic, but there’s no getting around the fact that something’s not quite right about what goes on in that house.”
Gabriel followed Mr. Marshall’s gaze to the tip of a white cupola that just showed above the treetops in the distance. His heart grew heavy and his gut churned at the thought of meeting with anyone on the list, least of all the odd widow who had so captured their imaginations.
Sophronia looked down at the deluge of ink slowly spreading across her desk and bit back a curse; nothing had gone right that morning. First, she had taken out her favorite wool shawl for the winter, only to find that moths had eaten the fringe clean off. Then the magazine’s board had delivered a stern missive, warning that subscriptions were down from last year and that if she couldn’t bring in a higher caliber of submissions, then the magazine’s future would be in grave jeopardy. It was all bluster on their part, but it still was never a good sign when the board was unhappy. The last straw had been when Duchess had knocked a bottle of ink over a stack of unread submissions. Now half of them were stained and stuck together, and would be unreadable. If the next brilliant submission to save the magazine had been in that pile, she would never know.
But even on the hard days like this, she relished her role as owner and editor of the magazine, and wouldn’t give it up for anything. All the work could be done from her desk in the parlor, and then Garrett would take her packets of papers and notes and mail them to the office in Portland. It gave her a sense of fulfillment, like maybe her solitary life on the hill wasn’t completely fruitless and without merit.
She had worked hard to achieve success as the magazine’s owner. There were half a dozen editors and businessmen who would have been only too happy to see her stripped of her position. So what if her ownership was the result of a technicality? Nathaniel had thought that, should anything happen to him, the magazine would be safest in her name, somewhere competitors couldn’t get at it. She suppressed a grim laugh. If he’d had any idea when he would die, and in the manner he had, no less, he never would have taken the liberty.
“Duchess, you may have cost us the next Shelley or Byron,” Sophronia muttered as she tried to peel the inky pages apart in vain. Duchess gave her an unapologetic glare from the windowsill.
Crouching down, she set all the salvageable pages in front of the grate to dry, and rocked back on her heels. Her vision began to swim as she stared down at her hands, and for a moment they were not stained in black ink, but crimson blood. So much blood...beneath her nails, crusted into her cuticles, smeared across her face. Just like on that fateful night.
The smell of damp earth filled her nostrils, and she could feel the unforgiving wind biting at her cheeks, though the fire was licking away in the grate. Clean, clean... She had to wash her hands, scrub them until they were pink and innocent again before anyone saw and realized what she had done. Heart racing, she rushed to the kitchen sink, pouring scalding water out from the kettle and mercilessly scouring the offending flesh.
The waking nightmare didn’t break until her hands were raw and burned, the skin singing with pain. She jumped back from the sink, trembling with how quickly the chimera had come on. A nervous laugh threatened to erupt, but she held it in. God, what a foolish creature she could be.
A breath of fresh air would revive her and clear away the bad memories. She gave her hands one last harsh wipe on a towel, and then went and fetched her cloak and bonnet and steeled herself to face the outside world.
She pushed the door open. The first few steps outside the house were always the hardest, but if she could just get a little momentum, then by the time she was out the door she could keep going, at least a little ways.
If it wasn’t for the quiver of movement from the breeze, she would have completely missed the sliver of black marking the door. Slowly, she took a step back into the foyer, her gaze trained on the door and the alien object attached to it.
Below the elaborate brass knocker, a long, black feather hung from a nail.
With a trembling hand, Sophronia slowly reached out and touched it, half-hoping that it would be as fleeting and insubstantial as the delusion that had just gripped her in the kitchen. But the soft bristles met her fingers with heart-sinking solidity.
Sophronia’s blood ran cold as she jerked her hand back. It had been still and quiet in the house all morning. How had someone managed to hammer in the nail without her hearing anything?
It was as if whoever had left the ravens had read the doubts in her mind and wanted to make certain that she understood none of this was coincidence or an accident. This was as bold a statement as Martin Luther nailing his theses to the church door. This was a declaration, but of what?
In a fit of panic, Sophronia tried to pry the nail from the door. When it wouldn’t budge, she snatched at the feather, sending torn black filaments floating to the ground. But the quill would not budge.
“Blast it.” She would have to ask Garrett to pry out the nail and patch the hole. At least it could be easily fixed, and Garrett was nothing if not discreet.
But that was little comfort to Sophronia, who felt as if the world were pressing in around her. Felt as if eyes watched her every movement, even through the walls of the house. If she had thought that the change she had felt coming to Pale Harbor was to be positive, then it seemed she was sorely mistaken. Now it was a growing sense of dread that hung over her, as if a predator was circling just beyond her line of sight, slowly closing in on her.
With a letter in his pocket, Gabriel wandered down toward the harbor, looking for the post. It was a small town, with most of the homes and buildings rising up from the edges of the water, clinging to the salty lifeblood that provided its food and industry. His walk took him past the same run-down houses he had seen the previous week, now benevolently gilded in gentle sunlight. He had been in Pale Harbor for a week now, meeting with the townspeople, cleaning out the church and generally gathering his bearings. But it still felt wrong, and he no more felt that he belonged in Pale Harbor than he had in Concord without Anna.
Restless and a little homesick, the night before he had written to the only person in Concord he considered a friend, Tom Ellroy. Tom, who he had known since they were both boys running wild through the Massachusetts countryside, had stuck by him through thick and thin, and there had
