A Treason of Thorns Page 4

  When we round a bend in the road and the first curve of my House’s high stone wall comes into view, I have to stop. I set down the satchels I carry and press one hand to my mouth, the other arm to my belly.

  Apple blooms show white above the wall from the orchard, and bees buzz lazily among them. The sounds are so familiar that I can hardly draw breath. I swear to myself in this moment that I will never let anything drive me away from Burleigh House again.

  But as we come to the place where the front drive normally turns in through the great gate, I find Burleigh’s wall is marred by a vast wound. There’s no sign of the hinges or the gate itself, just a gaping hole where someone has violently blown them away. A good deal of the stone wall’s been damaged, besides. Rubble still clutters the lane. Enormous brambles tangle together in the gap, completely patching the hole where the gate once stood, and mortar weeps from the thick vines.

  ‘What did they do to you?’ I whisper, stepping forward and pressing a palm to the wall. Fury courses through me at the thought of the House being treated so shamefully. I can feel something from Burleigh too, emanating out from that thorny scar – suspicion and betrayal and hurt and fathomless exhaustion all rolled up into one bitter sensation.

  ‘Can we have a moment?’ I ask, turning to Jed and Mira. There’s quiet shock on their faces at the sight of the wound where the gate once was. They nod and disappear round the bend in the lane.

  Shifting closer to the wall, I rest my forehead against it, letting all my grief and concern and care for the House rise up and run beneath my skin like a rip current.

  ‘Burleigh,’ I murmur. ‘It’s Violet. I’ve come back, and how I’ve missed you, my darling.’

  All I feel from the House in return is mistrust, and the cold, ordinary touch of stone. My hands begin to tremble, and my eyes blur. When I speak again, the words come out thick with tears.

  ‘Oh, Burleigh, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what’s happened here, but I’m back and I want to help. I’m on your side – not the king’s, not the country’s, not anyone else’s but yours. Won’t you let me in?’

  The minutes stretch on and on and nothing changes. No way in opens before me. No sign is offered by my damaged House.

  At last I can’t contain myself any longer and stand weeping against the wall, great ugly sobs tearing my throat like thorns. I haven’t cried like this since I left Burleigh, the day of my father’s arrest. I didn’t expect to do so again on the House’s very doorstep. But it is too cruel, everything that’s happened to Burleigh and me, to both of us together, and I don’t know who I ache for more.

  Jed and Mira reappear, but after a glance I can’t look at them. Inside I’m crumbling, ruined by the death of this last hope. If I had the key, I could coax and bargain – begin at once to heal Burleigh’s hurts by channelling its own vital magic. But I am not a Caretaker, and I have nothing to offer but words and a willing heart. Taking a step back, I wrap my arms around myself, not sure how to start my life over yet again.

  Worse still is the king’s threat, ringing in my ears as if he’d only just spoken it. Either you find a way to restore Burleigh, or I will burn it to the ground.

  Make me a way, Burleigh. Make me a way.

  A small sound cuts through the fog of my sorrow, and I look over at Jed.

  ‘What did you say?’

  He shrugs his broad shoulders. ‘Nothing.’

  Pivoting on one heel, I turn back to the House only to hear the low grumbling of stone, and see the trees beyond the walls sway violently as if struck by a sudden gale. Storm clouds darken the sky over the manor grounds and the temperature drops a few degrees.

  Bitter and wild though it may have become, I’ve never been able to shake the impulse to help when Burleigh keens.

  ‘Violet, don’t!’ Mira gasps as I move towards the brambles that are reaching for me with sharp-edged fingers.

  4

  The clouds overhead vanish. The walls melt away. Dimly, I feel thorns bite into my flesh, but I can’t see them.

  Instead, my father’s room swims into focus around me, with its enormous four-poster bed and long bank of windows that look down on to Burleigh’s front drive. But that is all I recognize, because the room is terribly changed. Piles of rubble sit in the corners, fallen from the ceiling overhead. Cracks seam the walls and ivy has crept in at the windows. Briars twine up the bedposts. A smell of damp and decay and rot hangs heavy on the air.

  Worst is the wall the bed sits up against. A jagged, yard-long word has been slashed into the plaster with something sharp – a knife, or a letter-opener, perhaps. After a glance, I can’t bear to look, because the George Sterling I knew would never hurt his House so. Not even to spell out my name, VI, in tall capital letters. Something stirs under the mildewed bedcovers, and I realize with a sickening jolt that I’m not alone as I’d first thought.

  Drawing close to the bed, I look down at my sleeping father. Papa is skeletal and unshaven, his closed eyes set in shadowed hollows. Ivy twines around his wrists and ankles, and the skin is rubbed raw where he’s struggled against his living bonds. Seeing him brings the sort of pain that cuts so deep you feel it only for a moment, before your mind decides it cannot be borne and refuses to feel at all.

  As I watch, his eyes open, but they’re milky and unseeing, not the knowing hazel I remember.

  ‘Burleigh House,’ Papa rasps.

  A little tendril of ivy snakes up and brushes against his face. Papa turns his head aside and coughs. It’s a terrible rattling sound, and brings up blood and mortar, which must mean he’s close to his end.

  ‘Take what you need,’ Papa says, as I’ve heard him tell Burleigh so often before, key in hand, ready to work House magic. But I don’t know how there can possibly be anything left in him to give. There’s a rush of focused energy as Burleigh turns its full attention towards Papa. Mortar courses beneath his skin, giving him an inhuman grey cast. His eyes roll back and his hands seize on the bedspread.

  And then there is the moment that’s hung over me for seven agonizing years.

  Papa goes limp. His head lolls. His chest falls still. It is ugly, and brutal, and all at once my knees buckle. I’m left with both hands pressed to my heart, which feels as if it will burst, not just with my own grief but with the House’s, which pours into me in an overpowering groundswell of sorrow.

  The door flies open and Wyn crosses the room, sinking to his knees beside the bed. He’s changed a great deal since I last saw him, but I still know the friend of my childhood as he reaches out and shakes Papa.

  ‘George.’ Wyn’s voice cracks. ‘George, wake up.’

  ‘Oh, Wyn, he’s not going to,’ I say, but it is the House’s memory replaying the scene, for I can still feel the faint bite of thorns against my wrists. Wyn cannot see or hear me.

  ‘I told you he’d had enough,’ Wyn growls at the House. ‘You knew it too. How could you? How could you?’

  By the end, he’s shouting. Wyn scrambles to his feet and drives a fist into the rotten plaster of the wall, which gives way easily. Mortar weeps from the House’s new wound, and Burleigh shudders beneath our feet.

  Wind whips the patched fabric of my skirt around my legs as the memory fades and I’m brought back to the present. Briar thorns prick at my wrists, for I’m standing right up against the space where the gate once was, arms thrust into the brambles that fill the gap. Somewhere behind me, Jed and Mira are waiting. Above us, thunder grumbles and lightning splits the sky.

  I don’t know what I’m feeling. If it’s heartbreak, I never expected it to be such a bodily thing. My chest aches and the back of my neck has gone hot and a rushing noise fills my ears. But there is Burleigh before me, half wild with what it’s been through, and almost the last thing Papa said to me was that I must be brave for my House.

  ‘Burleigh,’ I say clearly. I force down my own pain because I was born and brought up to be a Caretaker, and a Caretaker puts her House first, no matter how it hurts. ‘It’s all right, my l
ove. None of this was your fault. You did what had to be done.’

  Perhaps my House is broken, but we are a matched set, split apart in the same place, and a broken girl is just the thing for a broken House. Without hesitation, I step forward, as if an open gate stands ahead of me rather than a thicket of briars. Not for a moment do I allow myself to doubt.

  And the brambles patching Burleigh’s wall unravel before me, leaving the way clear. The sky above roils and goes blue, becoming a glory of white clouds and spring sun. Gravel crunches underfoot as I step on to Burleigh’s grounds.

  ‘Mark my words,’ I swear to the trees, the grass, the sky, ‘I’ll be dead before I leave you behind again. And I will never, never let anyone harm you. I’m going to look after you, Burleigh.’

  A final mutter of thunder sounds on the eastern horizon, and any last trace of the House’s suspicion vanishes, replaced by a wave of relief that surges up from the earth, so strong it nearly flattens me. As I walk down Burleigh’s front drive, it’s impossible to keep more tears from falling. The air is heady with the scent of flowers and grass and rich soil, and memories spring up around me. Over there on the lawn is where Wyn taught me to turn cartwheels. Beneath the oak tree is where we sat to read together, heads bent over the same book. And on the drive itself, I’d ride my pony in eager circles, waiting for Papa to appear.

  I stood just there, on the gravel, waving to my father each time he made the journey to London, to fulfil his duty as a Caretaker and a member of the Home Council. But where he would always pause and turn back for one last farewell, something impossible has sprouted up. Towering from the middle of the drive is a tree I recognize only from the geography books Papa used to pore over whenever he had the time. It’s a jacaranda, meant for warm southern climes, and yet here it is, boughs laden with luminous purple blooms.

  Even without words, my House can sometimes speak.

  Stepping up to the tree, I run a hand across its rough bark. Lavender-tinted shadows shift about me.

  ‘He always did right by you,’ I murmur. ‘I plan to take care of things just as he did, now he’s gone.’

  Ahead of me, the front door swings open of its own accord. It seems the House has overcome its initial reluctance, and is ready to welcome me home. It’s only then that I think to glance over one shoulder and see that Jed and Mira haven’t followed. The brambles have barred the way behind me and they stand in the lane, unable to enter.

  I wag a finger at the House. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. If you want me, you know you’ll have to let them in too.’

  A breeze tosses jacaranda petals into my face, but the brambles pull away and Jed and Mira hurry inside.

  ‘I’d nearly forgotten what this place is like,’ Mira says with a shake of her head. ‘Temperamental old barn.’

  Whatever it thinks about that, Burleigh House keeps its own counsel.

  As we step indoors, the House’s interior wraps around me like a worn blanket, or a mother’s arms. Jed and Mira disappear, Mira to the kitchen and Jed to sort out our belongings. I wander the halls, calling Wyn’s name at each doorway, but not really expecting to find him. After what Burleigh showed me, I wouldn’t blame him for leaving and never coming back, though it’s a whole new sort of pain, thinking of him on his own in the world. And of course, he might not have expected me to return – he did tell me he’d rather I never came back, though I still can’t fathom why.

  As I go, I run my hands across the faded wallpaper, the cracks in the plaster, the places where ivy creeps between shattered windowpanes. Years without a proper Caretaker have left the House with an air of neglect, and despite the magic in its mortar, it’s gone wild exactly the way one might expect a more ordinary building to do. Water spots stain the ceiling in places, and there’s a vague smell of mould.

  I open windows methodically, assessing damage and starting a list in my head of repairs that will need to be made and what they’re likely to cost. If I had the Caretaker’s key, the biggest jobs could be done by House magic – focusing the House’s own energy on what needs fixing. I can feel Burleigh’s magic, churning dark and dangerous beneath my feet, and in the walls. The House is on edge because of it. The West Country is on edge. But I haven’t got a key, and without it, I don’t dare channel the House’s power.

  In my father’s office, I stop and sink into the leather chair behind his desk. The room is all wood panelling and bookshelves and, unlike the rest of the House, still smells faintly of tobacco and good parchment and ink. It’s as if Burleigh can’t let that last trace of my father go.

  I tuck my knees up under my chin and wrap my arms around them, becoming as small as I can. Papa’s household ledger sits open to the first page, where he wrote the terms of Burleigh’s binding the day his own father died and he became Caretaker. I read the terms, though I know them by heart:

  Burleigh must obey the Deedwinner and all heirs of his blood in perpetuity.

  Burleigh must not permit talk of the deeds to occur on its grounds.

  Burleigh must not channel its own magic.

  Burleigh must never take a human life, except in carrying out the first term of its binding, or in preventing itself from being unbound.

  Looking down at the terms of Burleigh’s binding, the responsibility of caring for such a vast, ancient place seems like an impossible burden to bear. And I haven’t begun to test the truth of His Majesty’s statement yet – that something has gone fundamentally wrong with Burleigh. That my House is dying.

  But there’s no time for the indulgence of self-pity at present. Burleigh’s initial relief at my return has worn off and I can feel other things from the House – exhaustion and the low ache of long-borne pain and a sharper discomfort, like an itch that wants scratching. This place needs tending. I may not have a penny to my name or a Caretaker’s key, but come hell or high water, I still intend to keep Burleigh House in good condition, just as my family’s always done.

  Leaving the study, I get a few paces down the corridor and then stop in my tracks. There’s a familiar, intermittent sound drifting from the little-used west wing, where my parents housed guests and entertained during my earliest childhood. I wander down the hallway, following the sound back through the front entry, where the wide stairs cascade down from the second-floor gallery and a four-lamp kerosene pendant hangs from the ceiling. I keep after the noise, trailing down the opposite corridor, past long-empty rooms – the ballroom, several company parlours, the smoking room, the ladies’ lounge. At the very end of the west wing is a wide dining hall, with long windows to catch the evening light. I stop at its closed door and listen. There it is. Tap tap. Tap tap tap.

  Swinging the door open, I catch my breath and lean against the frame, weak with the same relief that poured through the House the moment I stepped on to its grounds.

  Off to one side of the room, Wyn stands on a wooden stepladder, nailing boards over a shattered window.

  ‘I saw you coming up the drive,’ he says, the words muffled by a mouthful of nails. ‘Welcome home. I’ll be done in a minute.’

  ‘Take your time,’ I answer, trying not to sound too eager. He turns back to his work and hammer strikes ring through the room once more. My heart jumps with each report, until I can feel it racing in my chest.

  I watch Wyn as he finishes the job, trying to sort out who he’s become. Some of him is as I recall – that dishevelled sandy hair, the way he squints when he’s concentrating. But more has changed. There’s a leanness and narrowness about him, not just in his profile but in his eyes and what lies behind them. It wasn’t there when I left, and it speaks of hard times and storms weathered, desperation felt and darkness witnessed. Wyn’s not who I remember – and yet I feel as if I myself have hardly changed.

  At last Wyn sets his hammer aside. He climbs down from the stepladder and picks up a rucksack I hadn’t noticed sitting next to the wall.

  ‘Hello, Violet,’ he says with a nod. ‘Goodbye, Violet.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. I can’t keep di
sappointment from writing itself across my face. ‘I didn’t even know you’d be here, and now you’re leaving already? I thought we could . . . I don’t know, catch up.’

  Wyn stuffs his hands into his pockets and hunches his shoulders. ‘I don’t have much to say. I was only waiting for you to get back before I left. Now here you are, so I’m off. Good luck with Burleigh.’

  He walks past me and out into the corridor, and it’s suddenly too much. My mother, my father, the knowledge that Burleigh is dying. I can’t take another loss, another heartbreak. And I’ve never had any pride when it comes to Wyn, so I follow after him.

  ‘Please don’t go,’ I beg. ‘It’s not just the House I came back for. It’s you too. I missed you, Wyn.’

  He stops, his back still to me. I gnaw at a hangnail as he speaks. ‘You missed who I was,’ he says. ‘I’m not that person any more, Vi. I doubt you’re the same, either. We aren’t friends any more, we’re strangers.’

  ‘But we could be friends again if you stay,’ I insist. ‘We could learn to be the way we were. Do you know, I talked to you on the fens, every day? I couldn’t write, so I talked.’

  There’s a long pause, and I bite my lip, certain he’s about to leave.

  ‘I talked to you too,’ he finally admits, turning so that we’re facing one another. ‘But think of what you’re asking, Vi. Would you stay in a prison for me?’

  ‘The gate is open,’ I say. ‘It’s not a prison any more.’

  Wyn makes a small, bitter sound. ‘After seven years, Burleigh will always be my prison. Answer the question. If things were the other way around right now, would you stay?’

  I look into his eyes. Who are you? Who have you become?

  ‘Wyn, I haven’t changed,’ I tell him.