The Beautiful and the Cursed: Marco's Story (5 page)

She took a step backward. The clouds parted and the orchard lit just enough for her to see movement behind a tree to her right.

“I’m leaving,” she announced.

The bare limbs creaked. Still the barrow boy didn’t respond. The clouds raced back over the moon. Awkwardly, Brigitte kept backing away, a cold sweat dampening her chest. Something felt wrong.

She hadn’t gone back three more paces when she slammed into something solid—and a cold, sharp pain burst through her abdomen. Brigitte opened her mouth to scream, but a hiss of air was all that escaped. Her shaking fingers slipped over a pair of smooth rods, one embedded below her navel, the other where her rib cage split. In the moonlight, the rods gleamed bright as elephant tusks. A thick black swell flowed down each tusk. Blood.
Her
blood.

She heard a low growl and gagged at the hot gust of rancid breath. Just as Brigitte realized that she would never make it back to the walled garden, the thing with tusks jerked her off her feet.
Such folly
, she thought as the world spun away from her. She
was
alone.

Just as all the other girls had been.

S
o this was what a nightmare looked like by the light of day.

Ingrid stared through the window as the coach drew to a halt along rue Dante’s snowy curb, a single block from the ice-crusted Seine. Mother could not be serious. This place, this
ruin
, was to be their new home? Ingrid rubbed the fogged glass and saw the ancient and desolate abbey clearly.

“You’ve completely lost your mind,” Ingrid whispered. Her mother ignored her and continued to gaze out the coach window.

Pockmarks riddled the blocks of dirty gray limestone, leaving the abbey looking like a ravaged victim of the pox. The four front-facing arched windows held dull and warped stained glass that had more cracks and gaps than lead and glass. The two planks of desiccated wood acting as doors had been left slightly ajar, as if beckoning someone, anyone, to enter. Ingrid didn’t think she’d ever seen a lonelier place.

Her mother’s eyes began to mist over. “Isn’t it marvelous, girls?”

“Mama, please don’t start crying again. You’ve gone through all your hankies.” Ingrid’s younger sister, Gabriella, opened her beaded reticule for one of her own.

Their mother, Lady Charlotte Brickton, had been sniffling ever since their steamer had reached Calais and her feet had met solid French soil for the first time in over sixteen years. She was overjoyed to be home. Ingrid was just relieved to be gone from London. She never wanted to go back there. Not now, not after what had happened and what she’d done. But this abbey … it only added insult to injury.

“Marvelous? It looks condemned,” Ingrid said.

The place was a hulking wreck. Even the new layer of powdery snow couldn’t soften the blow. It coated the spikes of a tall wrought-iron fence like icing. Thick twists formed the gate, which was draped with ivy, roses, and thorny vines forged from the same metal. It was all as cold and uninviting as the white-capped waters of the English Channel had been.

“It’s absolutely horrifying,” Gabby whispered. An awestruck grin bowed her lips. Ingrid’s sister pressed the tip of her nose against the cold pane of glass to get a better look.

“Gabby, among the sane, horrific things don’t generally bring about smiles.” Ingrid flipped up the black mink hood of her cloak.

Gabby pushed out her full lower lip. “It has charm.”

“If you find abandoned and haunted churches charming,” Ingrid shot back.

Their mother spared them an irritated glance as the footman opened the coach door. “Don’t be so dramatic, girls. The abbey is a masterpiece, and entirely fitting for my gallery.”

The footman kicked down the short flight of steps and helped their mother to the curb. Behind them, a second carriage carrying their lady’s maids and luggage rolled to a stop.

“Do you really think it’s haunted?” Gabby asked. “We’ll have to ask Grayson if he’s sensed anything. Oh! I know—we’ll host a séance!”

Ingrid sighed and held her tongue. Her twin brother, Grayson, would have better luck talking Gabby down from her idea of a resident ghost. Not even eighteen and without so much as one personal servant, Grayson had been sent ahead of them to Paris two months before to scout out a location for their mother’s art gallery. Both the trip
and
the art gallery had been planned in a snap. Ingrid hadn’t been able to believe that her father, Lord Philip Northcross Waverly III, Earl of Brickton, had finally decided to fund her mother’s lifelong dream of opening a gallery of her own. He’d turned the idea down year after year—patronage of the arts was his wife’s torch, not his, and he wasn’t certain he wanted the Brickton name associated with such a bohemian endeavor.

So when Grayson had rushed off less than two days after their father abruptly announced his support, Ingrid had started to wonder if the art gallery was being launched more because of the growing rift between Papa and Grayson than because of Mama’s dream.

Things had never been easy between her father and brother, but within the last year or so their quarreling had escalated. And taking to life as a wild, pleasure-seeking rake had only worsened Grayson’s standing with their father. Ingrid hoped it was just a rebellious phase, but Papa had no tolerance for it. He might have sent Grayson to Paris with this task to occupy him, or maybe just to get him out of his hair. What Ingrid couldn’t stop wondering was why everything had happened so quickly. Grayson hadn’t confided in her before he left, and for the last two months she hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that something secret and serious had happened to spur everything on.

The footman helped Ingrid navigate the steps to the curb. The December cold ate through her burgundy velvet dress as if it were a sheer slip of silk. She stared at the abbey, at the frescoes that had crumbled into unrecognizable scenes, and at the dozens of slates missing from the ramshackle roof. What had her brother been thinking when he’d chosen to invest in this heap? Ingrid was only thankful Papa couldn’t see it. Some business with his seat at the House of Lords had kept him from escorting them to Paris as he’d intended. He’d come later, he’d assured them. Definitely for the gallery opening.

“Where is Grayson? I thought he was to meet us here,” Gabby said as she lighted on the curb. Her ruffled pink parasol was already open against snowflakes drifting from the platinum clouds.

With her smoky eyes, short, slightly upturned nose, rosebud lips, and hair the color of golden rum, Gabby was a fifteen-year old replica of their mother. Ingrid stood out in sharp contrast to them. Her hair, flaxen like Grayson’s and Papa’s, was only a shade lighter than her fair complexion. She’d been told more times than she cared for in her seventeen years that she was the epitome of English beauty: all cream and roses and soft petal-pink lips. With it came the expectation of a sweet disposition—an expectation those who met Ingrid dismissed immediately.

“It’s too cold for Grayson to stand out here all day waiting for us,” Ingrid answered.

She clenched her fingers into fists, hating the buzz of anxiety she hadn’t been able to cast off for months. It always flared at the mention of Grayson, turning her blood into a glass of frothing champagne. The jittery feeling didn’t worry her. She’d had this sixth sense for as long as she could remember. She and Grayson shared it, the same way they’d shared a womb, a nursery, and, before his recent rebellion, a personality. No, what worried her was what it always meant: that something was wrong with her twin.

The sooner she saw Grayson, the better. And then maybe she could finally get answers about what had happened with Papa.

Mother spoke in her native tongue to the footman, gesturing toward their bags, boxes, and trunks strapped to the top and rear of the servants’ coach. Ingrid couldn’t understand the fast flow of French. She’d never quite grasped her lessons the way Gabby and Grayson had. She could only guess that her mother was instructing the footman to have their drivers go around to the abbey’s rectory. Grayson had written in his letter, that it sat kitty-corner to the abbey on the property. They would all live there while Mama managed the abbey’s renovations, which would definitely be more extensive than Ingrid had imagined.

Her mother pushed the great iron gates ajar. The hinges squealed, disturbing a flock of blackbirds on the copper gutters, oxidized to a sickly green, that ran along the abbey roof. The sudden movement led Ingrid’s eyes upward. The cloud of fluttering black wings cleared, revealing massive statues crowning each of the abbey’s twin bell towers.

Most of the statues—angels, most likely, as Ingrid could make out the shape of wings—were covered in white powder, but a few smaller ones sat on the jutting ledges at the bases of the rectangular towers. The snow had blown free of these and Ingrid saw them clearly: not angels. Gargoyles.

Their mouths had been carved into wide, silent screams, tongues rolling from between daggerlike teeth. They had bulging eyes, clipped, doglike ears, and talons curling straight into the roofline’s stonework. The wings were spread open on some, while on others they’d been sculpted into folds behind their hunched backs.

Ingrid stood outside the gate, her stomach in a knot. Why would anyone put gargoyles on a church? The stone creatures were hideous enough to cause the small hairs on her arms to prickle. She turned her eyes away. The abbey sat at the head of an intersecting street lined with grand pale stone buildings. Apartments, Ingrid supposed, terraced here and there, with ground-floor shops and colorful awnings. There were a few people out, but the wide avenue looked mostly stark. Much like the abbey that crowned it.

Gabby and their mother had already reached the abbey’s vaulted double doors. They disappeared inside. Ingrid slowly followed their tracks in the dusting of snow. She wanted to get to Grayson. She wanted to keep moving. Every step took her farther from London, their home on Grosvenor Square, Papa, even her dearest friend, Anna Bettinger. She’d miss her friend, but honestly, the trip to Paris couldn’t have come at a better time. She could never face Anna again.

Not after what Ingrid had done.

She took a deep breath, pushed back her shoulders, and stepped over the threshold and into the vestibule. Her gloved fingers were numb, and the air in the vestibule was just as cold as it had been outdoors. On top of that, it was dark and damp. Ingrid could barely see a thing inside the nave. Little light fell through the grimy, cracked stained-glass windows running up and down each side of the abbey. Behind the pulpit, a large rose window of pale-yellow glass bloomed at the center of the apse. Ingrid wrinkled her nose against a damp, musty odor.

Gabby’s voice echoed off the vaulted ceilings. “It’s even more terrible on the inside. Don’t you think, Griddy?”

Ingrid’s shin struck an overturned pew draped in shadow. She hissed an unladylike word. “Please don’t call me that. It’s bad enough the horrid nickname caught on in London.”

Lady Griddy—rather than Lady Ingrid Waverly, the title due to her as the daughter of an earl—sounded like the name of a wizened old dowager.

Their mother appeared from behind a column, running her hand along the creamy swirls of marble.

“This will be the main gallery. Oh, I do think Grayson chose well, didn’t he, girls? It simply aches with character. And we have quite a while before your father arrives for the opening, plenty of time to make all the repairs it requires.”

Ingrid stared at her mother, doubt plain on her face. Her mother waved it away. “Honestly, Ingrid, must you be so contrary? Think of Paris as a fresh start.” She turned away before continuing. “Leaving London for the winter was in your best interests, dear, especially given what happened with Mr. Walker.”

Heat flooded Ingrid’s cheeks. Her fingers clutched the curved arm of a pew.
Mr. Walker
. Jonathan Walker.

“Mother,”
Gabby said.

No one had spoken Jonathan’s name since the disastrous gala and the event that had marked the death of Ingrid’s spotless reputation in London.

Ingrid fought her rising blush. “It’s true. Leaving London was the best thing for me.”

With her eyes cast down, she continued toward the pulpit but veered to the right, into the transept, before reaching it. Beyond, there was a wooden door. From the heavy silence behind her she knew her mother and sister were exchanging wide-eyed glares and emphatic arm gestures. Gabby wanted to tiptoe around the subject; her mother wished to chastise Ingrid for being too bold and public about her feelings for Jonathan. Neither approach would change a thing. Ingrid had wanted to marry Jonathan, and Jonathan had proposed—to Ingrid’s closest friend, Anna Bettinger.

And then Ingrid had set fire to Anna’s house.

It had been an accident. A horrific accident that Ingrid would never forgive herself for. But it didn’t matter. She was finished in London.

Ingrid shoved open the transept door and the sudden brightness of the snow-dusted churchyard nearly blinded her. When her eyes adjusted, she saw a two-story Gothic-style stone rectory just behind the abbey’s glass-and-iron rotunda. Their coach footman stood in the rectory’s open doorway with a tall, muttonchopped man. The man blended into the bleak surroundings in his gray broadcloth suit and gloves and gray domed hat.

“Who is that?” her mother asked as she came into the churchyard behind Ingrid. She hurried forward as fast as her stout hourglass figure could go in her restrictive trumpet-shaped skirt and fitted S-bend corset.

“Mama shouldn’t have said anything,” Gabby said quietly as she and Ingrid trailed her at a distance.

Ingrid tightened her cloak’s collar around her neck, avoiding her sister’s frank gaze. “She can say whatever she pleases. I’m past it.”

She was an awful liar. Gabby knew it, too, but was gracious enough to let the matter drop.

When they reached the doorway to the rectory, their mother and the stranger were finishing introducing themselves.