Thick, black tea. Teeth-staining tea. Good, strong, Chinese tea, Oolong for preference. The perfect sort for reading the leaves.
Francine Thwaite counted out the last thirty seconds, drank the tea quickly, swung her cup left and right three times, flipped the cup over the saucer to allow the last of the moisture to drain, and peered down at the dregs. Once a white cup, it was now discolored by tannin from countless readings. She couldn’t abide those cups with silly symbols she’d seen at the gift shop down in Hawkshead. That was for tourists and idiots, which in her mind were one and the same.
She squinted, searching for symbols. Reading the leaves was a time of quiet contemplation; not for the peace it afforded, but because it was something she had done all her life.
A gust of wind blew in through the open door of the kitchen, setting the Spode horse sliding slowly across the sloping shelf of the old sideboard.
Francine glared at it. “Bree! If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times: leave the china alone! I don’t mind if you muck about with the furniture, but not the ornaments.”
The horse stopped mid slide and the air around it took on a note of disgruntlement, like a small child scuffing the floor with her shoe.
She bit her lip to hide her smile as the chair on the opposite side of the kitchen table scraped slowly across the flagstones and the air took on a fascinated concentration. “The leaves aren’t saying much,” Francine told Bree. “There’s what looks like a C or a G with a pair of scissors near it, a lopsided heart, and a cross . . . What do you make of that? I don’t know anyone whose name begins with C or G.”
A teaspoon rose off the table and tapped against the teacup.
“Old Charlie doesn’t count,” said Francine. “He’s a hundred if he’s a day, and I’ve known him all my life. I doubt the leaves are talking about him.”
The teaspoon tapped agreement.
“Well, whoever it is, I shall be having a quarrel with them, though probably not a bad one as the scissors aren’t that close. Sharp words, maybe?”
The cross made Francine think of graveyards. She hated graveyards to the point of phobia and had never even set foot in the Thwaite graveyard just beyond the garden in Lonehowe Wood. A cross wasn’t a good symbol to see in the leaves.
“And there’s a letter coming. See the little rectangle here?” She tilted the cup towards Bree. “Should arrive sometime this morning. Bother! I could do without a trip down to Hawkshead.” She mock scowled at the chair opposite her. “I wouldn’t have to go at all if you hadn’t frightened all the postmen so none will venture up here now.” She smiled to take the sting out of her irritation that her planned day had been thrown into disarray by her fate in the leaves, adding, “You’d best get over to your tree. And no nonsense while I’m out, understand?”
With one last tap of the spoon, a hiss of warmth brushed past Francine’s face like a caress and flew out the open door into the frost-crinkled courtyard enveloped in the jutting arms of the manor.
Francine had been born and raised in Thwaite Manor, though manor was a rather grandiose description. It was too big to be called a house and too small to be called a mansion, which manor tended to imply. It was a U-shaped, triple-story, black-and-white half-timbered building sitting on a hill in the middle of Lonehowe Wood. With twin towers on either side and a defunct clock tower in the center, it seemed curiously asymmetrical, for chimneys sprouted everywhere. Once, the rooms had rung with voices—distant echoing memories, for only Francine and Bree lived here now.
Francine stood up, cleaned and dried her teacup, and walked through to the dark foyer to put on her coat. From a drawer in the table, she grabbed a handful of fennel seeds and shoved them into her pocket before slipping a homemade bracelet made of burdock root onto her thin wrist. It was an automatic action whenever she prepared to venture beyond the boundaries of the garden, for both fennel and burdock were excellent for warding off evil when traveling.
Seething mist rose above the crackling veneer of frost as Francine strode across the garden. She hesitated and glanced over her shoulder, feeling the tug of Thwaite Manor, its safety and warmth. Subdued in a cobweb of mist, the old building sagged wearily, as though Francine’s presence was all that kept it from falling into ruin.
Her eyes twitched to the driveway. It was broad, its gravel surface well maintained, but a longer route to Hawkshead. A small track broke off from the road and disappeared into Lonehowe Wood, a dark path, little more than a root-knotted track. But the woods were not a peaceful place. It never had been. Those ancient trees had seen enough human suffering and brutality to create a miasma of creeping spite.
Francine stalked up the gravel road, doubting that any message waiting for her would warrant the shortcut through the woods where she was likely to meet things she’d rather not.
As she drew nearer to Hawkshead, her pace slowed.
The Lake District was an area of outstanding beauty in the county of Cumbria in Northern England, and Hawkshead was its jewel: a tourist mecca nestled in the Vale of Esthwaite, postcard-pretty with its whitewashed houses topped with gray slate roofs clustered around narrow alleys. Francine approved of the lack of traffic; all cars were to remain in the car park provided on the outskirts of the village. No, she had no problem with the village itself; it was its denizens she had long grown to view with a wariness borne of frequent derision received from a young age.
Forcing her shoulders not to hunch under the weight of narrowed eyes peering from every window, Francine strode down a narrow, mist-muddled alley that verged onto the high street.
She glanced at her antiquated watch and stopped abruptly before crossing the road, forcing a man behind her to curse when he barreled into her.
“Dammit, Francine, you still on this jape?” he said, not unkindly, though that didn’t stop him from looking along the street uneasily.
“I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head, Gawain Farraday!” snapped Francine as a ghostly carriage passed her right on time, churning the mist, its wheels running below the road’s surface before it knocked over an equally ghostly child that darted in front of it.
“I guess you’ll be seeing the ghost of the Crellin lassie.” Gawain squinted at the spot Francine’s eyes were locked on. While the Cumbrians were a superstitious lot and long used to Francine’s Sight, most accepted it with a dash of pragmatic disbelief.
Well aware that she was laughed at behind her back, Francine nodded curtly, and with an equally curt, “Good day to you,” she marched across the road.
“It’s all in your head, y’know!” Gawain shouted after her.
Nostrils flaring with annoyance, she stalked up the high street. Then she smiled with a small vindication, for the leaves had read true as they invariably did: sharp words with the letter C or G.
It took courage for Francine to enter Postlethwaite’s and order a pound of bacon. She stood to the back of the butcher’s shop while she waited for her order to be weighed and wrapped and watched Guy Postlethwaite out of the corner of her eye. Her loathing of him, of all the people in Hawkshead, was tinged with a lingering fear from her childhood. Only two years older than Francine, he was a stooped, hulking man with a fully bald head and a potbelly that spoke of a penchant for his own wares.
Now, of course, he was a respectable man—the local butcher, as was his father before him, with the Royal Warrant of Appointment not-so-discreetly displayed on the shop window—delivering meat to the queen for decades and very proud of it.
But Francine remembered Guy’s taunts all too well. She had been the witch’s daughter through primary school, graduating to the slut’s sister in secondary school. All that hurtful scorn because of her familial associations. It was sobering to realise that very few people knew anything about her except that she lived in a crumbling Elizabethan manor and kept herself to herself. It was no knowledge at all for people who had known Francine all her life.
Worst of it all, even now Guy Postlethwaite still called her . . . “Frankie! Your order,” holding up the bacon wrapped in wax paper.
To Francine’s shame, she scuttled forward, snatched the package from his outstretched hand and hurried, hunched, out of the shop as though she were still twelve and he fourteen.
It always took some mental adjustment after a trip into Postlethwaite’s to remind herself that she was not a child anymore but a grown woman. Francine slipped into a deserted alley and stared unseeingly up at a gable end, calming her ragged breathing and settling her mind. But those unhealed scars of childhood ran deep, the whispered jibes still oozing sores.
It was a good half hour before she felt ready to hurry on to the post office. She waited impatiently in the queue, wanting desperately to go home. Home was safety. Home was free of old hurt and new.
She ensured a wide gap between the person in front of her and behind. She couldn’t bear a stranger touching her, even by chance.
“So I told her our Mollie would never do a thing like that. And do you know what that Hillary said? Why, you could’ve knocked me down with a feather . . .”
“What did she say?”
Francine glared at Marjorie Whitcombe, the postmistress, leaning so far across the counter she was in danger of toppling over the side in her eagerness to hear what this Hillary had said.
The woman being served whispered in Marjorie’s ear, whose eyes got bigger and bigger before she pulled back and declared, “She never did!”
“She did! And you know what she can be like. A real firecracker, that one. No wonder . . . And another bout of whispering ensued.
“Ahem!” said Francine loudly, unable to bear the waiting any longer.
The two women turned to the queue, then Marjorie’s lips tightened. “It’s that Francine Thwaite,” she said loud enough for everyone in the post office to hear. “I’d best see to her quickly lest she sees a ghoulie here again and scares off my customers. . .”
“Hold your wicked tongue, Marjorie Whitcombe,” said a quavery voice behind Francine.
“Oh. Hello, Miss C,” said Marjorie, grinning guiltily, like a naughty schoolgirl.
Miss Cavendish harrumphed. “You always were a frightful gossip. I remember you in the playground, always whispering behind your hand to young Kitty here.” She frowned disapprovingly at the luckless Kitty, who looked down at her feet in embarrassment. “Now, you go about your business, Kitty, so we can go about ours.”
“Yes, Miss Cavendish,” muttered Kitty, and she hurried past the queue with her eyes down.
Francine couldn’t resist a smirk, for she had been at school with Kitty and Marjorie. She had often been the topic of their gossiping, and occasionally revenge could be a dish served cold in small portions.
“And you can wipe that smirk off your face, Francine Thwaite,” said Miss Cavendish.
Francine turned to the frail old lady and smiled with genuine warmth. “Good morning, Miss C, I didn’t notice you behind me. It’s good to see you out and about.”
“Well, it doesn’t do a body any good to laze about, though my legs aren’t what they were.”
“I’ll be down your way in a couple of days and will bring you something for the pain.”
“You do that, Fran, for my legs burn something awful of a night. In the day too, to be fair.” Miss Cavendish paused then said, “I’ve been meaning to come up your way to visit your mum. I miss her.”
“So do I,” said Francine.
Miss Cavendish had been the headmistress of the local school for decades. There wasn’t a man, woman, or child in the area who didn’t have a dreadful fondness for the old lady and a healthy respect for the sharp edge of her tongue. She had also been Francine’s mother’s oldest and closest friend and the only person who still came up regularly to visit Eleanor Thwaite’s grave.
“Cathedral bells if ever I’ve met one,” muttered Miss Cavendish in a low voice intended only for Francine’s ears.
Francine bit her lip to hide her bittersweet smile. Her mum had often spoken in the secret language of flowers that only she and Miss Cavendish had understood. Eleanor had taken that language one step further, believing everyone had a floral equivalent, a totem of sorts, that spoke to their personality. Francine, too, had long thought cathedral bells suited Marjorie Whitcombe; like that incorrigible vine with its frilled, purple trumpets, Marjorie’s network of information was fast, unrepentant, and sprouted rumors everywhere.
The queue moved along quickly now that Marjorie was under the baleful eye of Miss Cavendish.
“Any messages?” asked Francine on reaching the counter.
“How’d you know there’d be a message for you?” demanded Marjorie.
Francine shrugged. She had no intention of explaining what she had seen in the tea leaves.
“It’s not normal, you know. Coming down here before I’ve even had a chance to send the message up your way.” Marjorie had a matronly figure, with an enormous bosom that lived a secret life all its own. As she turned to the pigeonholes behind her, Francine watched in fascination, especially as she had no bosom to speak of, as those mighty peaks swept majestically to the right before the rest of Marjorie did.
“If you had a phone put in,” said Marjorie’s young assistant from the other counter, “you wouldn’t have to come into the village at all.”
“Hush, Emma,” said Marjorie, with guilt that sat uncomfortably on a face usually bright with keen interest.
“Just saying,” muttered Emma. “She don’t want to see us and we don’t want to see her.”
“Is there a message?” Francine managed to keep her tone civil while ignoring Emma.
Marjorie squinted at the scrap of paper. “It’s a tenancy for five months. A carpenter and his apprentice, coming up to work on that new hotel they’re building down the way. They’ll be arriving today. A Todd Constable made the booking . . . a southerner. London, I think he said,” she added with an odd relish, as though London were a distant, exotic country.
“Today? But I haven’t spoken to them or made any arrangements.”
“There was nowhere else for them to stay, what with it being the low season, so I told them you’d have the space.” Marjorie shrugged, unabashed under Francine’s glare. “You need the lodgers; your old place must cost a fortune to maintain.”
Francine bit down on her retort, for as much as she hated to admit it, she did need the income. A five-month tenancy at this time of year was not to be sneezed at.
“Em’s right, you know,” continued Marjorie. “If you put in a phone or got yourself a mobile, I wouldn’t have to take your bookings for you. And it’s not just that, it’s the safety aspect. How would anyone know if you were hurt up there in the woods when you’re all by your . . . Oh, that reminds me, your sister phoned this morning. She asked that you phone her back as soon as possible. Won’t it be nice if Maddie comes to visit? Some company for you. And Maddie was always a good sort.”
Francine gave a genteel snort and took the piece of paper handed to her. Her sister was not what she would consider a good sort. Flighty, thoughtless, and irresponsible were far better adjectives to describe Madeleine. She hadn’t seen her sister since her last sudden visit about five years ago. Francine wondered if Madeleine was phoning because her last marriage had ended, or if she was about to get married to someone else. It was hard to keep up with her sister’s marital disasters.
She nodded goodbye to Miss Cavendish and hurried out of the post office.
Francine entered the lonely red phone box on the high street. She couldn’t abide mobile phones and had never understood why people were so attached to them. Ringing all hours of the day, not giving a body a moment’s rest with incessant chatter. Her system of receiving messages from the post office and the public phone was perfectly acceptable for her needs.
Closing the door behind her, she dialed the number on the paper. She wasn’t surprised it was different from the one Madeleine had given her the last time she’d phoned. Her sister never stayed in one place for long.
The line rang three times before it was answered.
“Hello, Madeleine,” said Francine, unable to keep the reproach from her tone.
“Franny! I’m so glad you called!”
Francine thought to rebuke the use of that hated childhood nickname but refrained, hearing the note of desperation in her sister’s voice.
“Are you well?” she asked cautiously.
Sobs echoed down the line, quiet and gut-wrenching. “Oh, Fran. Jonathon died last night. It’s been dreadful.”
“Which husband is he?” Francine interjected with some caution, well aware it wasn’t the best question to ask. On one of Madeleine’s infrequent visits home, she had left again almost immediately in a fit of sulks when Francine had mixed up husband three with the then-current . . . possibly husband five? It paid to be sure from the start.
Madeleine sighed in exasperation. “Number seven. The genealogist!”
“Oh . . . What happened to the occultist? When did you marry this Jonathon?”
“I divorced Sebastian ages ago. Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said?” Madeleine cried, dissolving into tears once more. “Jonathon is dead! He lingered for ages, and then we thought he might make a recovery, but last night his heart just gave up. He was the love of my life and now he’s gone. I am so utterly lost without him. He was—Francine! Are you still there?” Madeleine’s melodrama dampened in the face of Francine’s lack of response.
“Yes, of course I’m still here, and I did hear you. I’m, er, condolences. I’m sure it’s all been very trying,” she added lamely, yet she couldn’t suppress the thought that Madeleine had had many loves in her life. Admittedly, one dying made a change from the numerous divorces. “So, why are you phoning me?”
“Because . . .” Madeleine floundered briefly, “. . . because you’re my sister and I need you. And—”
Francine imagined her sister biting her lip in hesitation. She pounced on the silence with, “Is something else wrong?”
It was a long time before Madeleine said, “Not wrong exactly. Not now anyway.”
“What are you hiding?”
“Nothing!”
She listened to her sister’s quiet breathing, sensing a secret, but when the silence grew uncomfortable, she leaned her forehead against the glass of the phone box and stared out at the high street. “Do you want to come home?”
“Yes.” Madeleine’s relief flooded Francine’s ear. “Thank you, Franny. I knew you’d understand. You always know the right thing to say.”
Francine shook her head in disbelief. “When will you be arriving?”
“Tomorrow. No, probably the day after next. I need to sort out a few things here first . . . Oh, it’s really been too awful. And it’s been months since I last saw you . . .”
“Years,” Francine interjected in resignation.
“Really? Has it been that long?”
“I’ll see you in a couple of days, Madeleine.” She disconnected before her sister could continue and let herself out the phone box in a tangle of thoughts.
She loved Madeleine in a perfunctory sort of way because they were sisters, but they had nothing in common. Francine had secretly disagreed when her mum had bestowed Ranunculus as Madeleine’s flower. While her sister had its attributes of charm, attractiveness, and radiance, Francine thought she was better suited to the frivolity of London pride, or red geraniums for foolishness if she were to be unkind. Even in their floral counterparts the sisters were opposites, for Francine was lantana: thorough, constant, rigid, and an acquired taste, which few had taken the time to acquire.
But though they were night and day, they were all the other had; their father had died when they were both young and neither had any memory of him. Their mother had held their small family together until she died when Francine was twenty and Madeleine sixteen. It wasn’t three months after their mother’s death that Madeleine ran away to London. Francine had been devastated but, in time, she had realised it was for the best. Madeleine would have driven her around the twist if she had remained in Cumbria, and it was better they did not see each other often, for drama followed Madeleine around like a bad smell.
No longer having the time to go the cowardly long way round, Francine hurried along the little alleys of Hawkshead. The mist was thicker than before; it eddied around her, twining with the oily smoke spewing from huddled chimneys.
The village fell away as she approached St. Michael and All Angels Church sitting on its lonely hill, the parochial guardian of Hawkshead. Beyond it, Lonehowe Wood played hide-and-seek in the mist. But Francine could have found the little-used path into the woods blindfolded. Once part of the old corpse trail that led to the church, it had a macabre folklore that few in the village wished to acknowledge and was not often used by the locals.
In the woods, Francine slowed, eyes twitching left and right where trapped mist threaded and tangled through the ancient trees like sepulchral fingers. It wasn’t quiet in the woods. The constant drip, drip, drip of condensation from winter-bare branches and the crackle and creak of frost in gnarls and boles had Francine whipping around, peering hard into the mist.
The breathless murk took shape around Francine, and the further she went the more crowded it became. The tousle of roots and dead bracken on the sides of the path slowly writhed up into a tight throng of hundreds of specters, silent and watchful as she scurried past. It was not an unusual occurrence; the corpse trail was so called for the coffins that had been carried along the track to St. Michael’s in times past. It had never occurred to Francine to question what she saw. Ghosts didn’t bother her, but there were some places that felt evil and filled her with an irrational fear.
Fine droplets of moisture clung to her hair and eyelashes; she blinked rapidly, blurring her vision. At a sharp twist in the path, a vile fear scraped up her spine, the fennel seeds gripped so tightly they dug into her palm. She quickened her pace. Deep in the woods, almost disguised by the pitter-patter of condensing mist, came a spine-jangling rasp that chilled Francine to her very marrow.
It was always here, at this bend in the path, that she heard it. The branches of the trees were meshed into a tight tunnel that threshed and chafed against each other, rasping their bloody secrets in a dark litany that the living should never hear.
Breath quickening, Francine forced herself not to flee through this stretch of the gloomy woods. There wasn’t a child in the area in the past two hundred years who hadn’t been scared stiff by the story of the murdering blacksmith in the eighteenth century who’d used a claw hammer as his weapon of choice, and Francine was no exception. Her eyes flickered to the old scars on the surrounding trees, which, as legend would have it, bore testament to this being his killing ground. There was no breeze in this blackhearted part of the woods, the stagnant mist oozing against her face like cold blood. Francine scurried onwards, eyes narrowed on the meshed boughs above her that abruptly stopped their scraping, the woods growing silent but for the drip of moisture.
With a relieved shudder, she burst out of Lonehowe Wood, her heart lifting with an aching love at the welcome sight of Thwaite Manor trapped in a fogged shimmer of a time long forgotten. The stress of her trip down to Hawkshead deflated in a tremulous sigh as her eyes roved across the crooked crossbeams and blind windows. It was not a proud building; there was humility in its slightly bulging walls, a gentleness to the pitch of its warped roof, a playfulness in its higgledy-piggledy chimneys. And though it wore its years like a tired old woman, it was everything to Francine.
With no idea when her lodgers would arrive, she hurried around the manor to the courtyard, eyes averted to avoid seeing the graveyard. The courtyard walls were covered in ivy, their withered vines bare as they waited for spring. A huge oak tree stood in the center, so gnarled Francine thought it must have been planted when the house was first built. Under it was a walled well with a small slate roof and a wooden pail. The well was defunct, a relic from yesteryear, yet it, like the graveyard, sent a dark shiver up her spine.
She stood under the oak tree and squinted up into its bare branches. “Bree,” she called. “Come down. We have work to do.”
The old grandfather clock in the drawing room ticked the waiting hours away. It could be heard throughout the ground floor . . . tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . A soothing sound that Francine barely noticed unless, like now, she was waiting. Ten o’clock at night and still no sign of her lodgers. Her furious flurry of activity around the house had been for nothing.
“I don’t know when they’ll be here,” said Francine without lifting her eyes from the book she was poring over as a windowpane rattled in frustration. “Come over here and listen to this.”
She waited until a faint flutter of air brushed against her arm. “Now, where was I?” She flicked through the pages of the old tome that crackled with age and smelt like suet on the turn. “Here we are, with Thomas Thwaite . . . The Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536/37 and Bigod’s Rebellion of 1537 were in essence a boon to Thomas Thwaite. While a staunch Catholic—Stop that, Bree,” said Francine mildly as dried rosemary rained down on her. “It can’t all be interesting, can it? I find it a little worrying that you only prefer the gory bits. Although there hasn’t been much gore. Our esteemed literary ancestor Jeremiah Thwaite’s writing is as dull as ditch-water.”
She skimmed through the next few decades, then, “Thomas took to wife Eliza Ashburaner, daughter of his rival in Hawkshead, in 1542, thereby consolidating two prosperous ventures into one of the larges. . .
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