Where Ivy Dares to Grow

by Marielle Thompson

Genres: Gothic; Psychological Thrillers

Synopsis

Traveling to be with her fiancé's terminally ill mother in her last days, Saoirse Read expected her introduction to the family's ancestral home would be bittersweet. But the stark thrust of Langdon Hall against the cliff and the hundred darkened windows in its battered walls are almost as forbidding as the woman who lies wasting inside. Her fiancé's parents make no secret of their distaste for Saoirse, and their feelings have long since spread to their son. Or perhaps it is only the shadows of her mind suggesting she's unwelcome, seizing on her fears while her beloved grieves?



As Saoirse takes to wandering the estate's winding, dreamlike gardens, overgrown and half-wild with neglect, she slips back through time to 1818. There she meets Theo Page, a man like her fiancé but softer, with all the charms of that gentler age, and who clearly harbors a fervent interest in her. As it becomes clear that Theo is her fiancé's ancestor, and the tenuous peace of Langdon Hall crumbles around her, Saoirse finds she's no longer sure which dreams and doubts belong to the present—and which might not be dreams at all . . .

Release date: June 27, 2023

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

I feel like I might disappear, and I almost wish that were the truth.

There is nothing but gray up here at the top of the world, bleeding the road and the sky into one. Damp grass expands on either side of us, a steady spread before the land drops off into the black pit of the ocean below, only air and the jagged rocks of the cliff between them.

The knuckles of Jack’s left hand have blossomed white where they grip my thigh. I shift, my legs pressing farther into the sleek tan interior of the passenger side door and his hand falls away, mindlessly drifting back to mirror its partner’s grip on the steering wheel. We cut through clouds of fog hovering just above the road as we speed through the fading afternoon light, our disjointed breathing and the thrum of the engine the only sounds. The car envelopes us in a warm bubble of protection from the raging of January beyond the glass and metal.

I reach across to run a hand through the light coif of Jack’s hair, my knees still pressed away, my body facing the door, the window, beyond. There is no light to glint off of the diamond wrapped around my fourth finger, but it still draws my eye, catching my breath as it dances between the golden strands of hair. He doesn’t lean into my touch, doesn’t even seem to notice the spiritless play of my fingers across his scalp.

“It’ll be all right,” I say, and I wish I could mean it.

He says nothing because there are no words, not really, and I wonder if he even hears me, even knows I’m here. But then his eyes dart from the road, landing on my face for just a moment.

“Yeah. Thanks, love.” His tone is flat, but it’s enough. It’s the best that could be expected of him, all things considered.

We’d known that his mother’s health had been deteriorating for far too long. She’d been fighting her battle for years now. Even back when Jack and I were still building the foundations of our life together, she’d been on the cliff’s edge of health. But now not even the best medicine that Britain had to offer was enough to pull Alice back. It had tipped us all over the edge with her.

So it was no surprise when, the night before last, Jack had come through the door of our flat, tie hanging askew, a heavy weight pulling down on his gaze. These days, it could have been anything, but I knew what it was immediately. I wasn’t sure that he’d ask me to join him and his parents as they retreated to their family estate up north to hibernate together for his mother’s final months, weeks, days.

But he had. I could’ve said no—I thought about it as I sat there on the stiff leather of our couch, in our flat whose rent I couldn’t afford, our television that I had not really been watching droning listlessly behind his words. Ours, ours, ours.

But I had looked into Jack’s eyes across the space that we shared, that we had built together, and I knew that saying no to this would be saying no to much more, and so the word could not make its way off my coward’s tongue. I had nodded, said, “Of course.” I had kept reciting my script the way I was meant to.

He hadn’t hugged me, hadn’t laid his head across my lap and let me stroke my hands gently across his hair, his skin, his lips, like he did when our relationship was still in blossom. And I hadn’t let my eyes attack every inch of his appearance, looking for a stray golden hair of the work colleague whose smile opened too wide for him, or a distant gaze that meant his mind was somewhere else, on someone else. I had stopped looking for a reason, stopped caring who had filled the ocean between us, afraid to find that it would be my own empty-eyed reflection staring back at me.

And Jack had simply nodded once, placing a numb kiss upon my forehead as he drifted past me, making his way into the bedroom. I hadn’t followed him.

The door handle of the car’s interior bites back at me as Jack guides the car to the right and for a moment I think he’s leading us over the edge of the cliff at last. But then a line of sturdy-backed trees rises up through the fog, guiding us off the main road and onto a private drive.

The estate—Langdon Hall—has been the cornerstone of Jack’s family for longer than my own family can even trace our lineage, the shining star of the Page family’s extensive ownership. I wasn’t surprised when he told me this is where they’d gather now, the house full of memories of summers spent in childhood along the rocky English coast, the scent of salt spray and money on the air. No map sat unfolded in the car with us—Jack knew the journey there as well as he knew himself.

In all our years together I had never been, the weekends away always coinciding with my own familial visits, dissertation defenses, bachelorette parties. Jack’s mother could be powerful with a planner when she wanted to be. But I didn’t have any of those things, those people, in my life anymore. I only had Jack. And so here I was.

The historian in me was always fascinated by Langdon, this piece of the past that the Pages owned. I had thought of the house often, guessed what of time’s secrets it hid, what tales it could tell. But even in my most wild, vivid imaginings, I had never pictured the grandeur that rises up before us, the slate gray of the fog parting to reveal steepled stone in the distance, protected from the outside world by a looming, intricately woven iron gate that now stands to greet us. I almost expect a footman to be conjured from the mist to guide it open, to welcome the prince home. But it is 1994 and the mere press of Jack’s fingertips across a digital pad out the window are enough for the gate to creak open with a slow ominousness that makes my palms itch, the last moment of escape sliding from my grasp.

The car presses through the gates and deeper into the swirl of fog across the base of the dusky building.

It is another world.

Age has collided with the brutal English weather to turn the stones deep brown, stacked atop one another like soldiers, a fortress of peaks and archways, made all the more dominant by the sudden disappearance of the land around it, the sole inhabitant on the threatening point of a cliff. Ivy creeps up and around the sharp edges of the home, softening them, like emeralds wrapped around the thin column of a neck. Narrow, rounded turrets reach up toward the thick wall of clouds above, tiny windows nestled beneath threatening iron peaks.

A hundred windows, nearly all darkened even in the slanted evening light, stare back at me as the car edges closer, falling beneath the great silhouette of Langdon. The glass eyes seem to gaze down at me, assessing, finding me wanting. The building is weathered and worn but still immaculate, wearing its history as proudly as the Pages do.

It is terrifyingly beautiful, this looming being of stone. I imagine that once it was simply beautiful, and I wish that I could have seen it in such a state. But instead I see it as the dark form that it stands as now, a building made of shadows knit together.

“You’ll be good, right? You can manage?” Jack does not look at me, does not explain himself. He does not need to, we both know what he means. He did not used to ask these questions, though I can hardly remember those times anymore.

Even if I was not, it’s too late to turn back now, isn’t it?

“Of course. I’ve been doing well.”

Like a child to a parent, I want Jack to affirm me, tell me he sees me trying, tell me that he’s proud of me. That he’s here.

He simply nods.

That’s been the worst part of it all. Everyone stops believing you. So much so that maybe, eventually, you start thinking that you shouldn’t believe yourself either.

I used to know Jack so well. Now he’s grown distant, become a stranger. I do not know who I need to be to keep his love anymore. The pressure to find out is a ticking clock as loud as our silence.

The crunch of stone and gravel beneath rubber ceases as we pull to a stop behind the form of a black sports car, a favorite of Jack’s dad, often left unused in the wake of Alice’s grumbling. The car is a rare sighting when the Page matriarch is around, refusing to even step foot inside the vehicle. But perhaps when Edgar drives off the lot in it in a few weeks’ time, he doesn’t think he’ll need to worry about coaxing Alice into the passenger seat to leave. Because that’s why we’re here, isn’t it—because Alice will likely not be leaving Langdon at all.

The manor yawns as the wide wooden doors swing open, the dulled edges of a man barely visible through the dimness within. Jack hurriedly exits the car to greet his father, the slamming of the driver’s side door rattling those of us discarded items that remain within. With the trepidation of a decision made that cannot be revoked, I unfold myself into the expansive driveway.

Nighttime has crawled in, the gray of afternoon slipping into the navy of evening. The emptiness of the ocean, of the cliffs beyond, of nothing but air, devour the estate, casting a darkened blanket across its face. I head steadily, unarmed, into the mouth of the beast.

Jack has already disappeared into the bowels of the estate. There is only one man left lurking in the doorway, his back to me and the outside world as he watches his son scurry off with the privileged air of familiarity.

“Ah, Saoirse.” My name pulls his voice down. Edgar turns to face me, an afterthought to the arrival of his golden boy. His flaxen hair is heavy with pinstripes of gray now, but his broad shoulders and reaching form still mirror that of his son, age not yet a weight on his back.

“We’re glad you could take time off from school to come. I’m sure Jack’ll really need the support about now.” His tone is familiarly condescending, frosted by the sharp spears of the ice that live within him.

I try not to let him see me bristle at the cavalier, though expected, way in which he dismisses my PhD as mere schoolwork, as if it is simply a childlike commitment. The wound they’ve created there has long since scabbed over. I no longer hear the echoing chuckle of Edgar as he tells his mates that “Saoirse studies old pieces of paper and whatnot,” like the study of history no longer bears any consequence when it doesn’t have the Page family seal.

The night I met Jack he’d had to lean close to my ear, his breath hot and damp across my cheek as he told me over the crowded sounds of the pub that he “worked in finance, love, and family business.” I remember being charmed by the low smoothness of his accent, so at odds with the sharp points of the American tongue that I’d left the week before. He was charming and confident in a way I never was, not even then. Immediately and instinctively, I wanted him and I wanted him to want me in a way no one had before, in a way that would last. I was swept up in him so easily, in the effortless way he floated through the world, the way I could stroll along in the path he set. The way his face lit up as he discussed a cricket match, the way I would happily sit beside him in a pub for hours while he smiled up at a game I did not understand. I wanted to be there so I could see him cheer, so I could be the person he grabbed to celebrate when his team scored. Jack drew the eyes of everyone in a room, that was just his way. But he had always been looking at me.

It was only once I knew him that I realized the family business was receiving a paycheck for wearing the Page name and nearly any old job title could be attached to it.

I should have known then.

There is no impressing these people. There is no job title I can hold that will ever be enough. Not even fiancée.

I should do better now.

But I do not.

There is no sense pushing against a brick wall and hoping it will sway. So I pretend I do not see it. And that is something the Pages themselves do so well.

“Of course,” I reply to Edgar. I can hear that my voice is pinched, flat, lifeless, but I cannot remember the last time I was a woman who spoke in colors.

My future father-in-law leans toward me, his left arm and my right almost making one complete hug together, enough air between us to whistle as the stinging wind rolls through the still-open doorway.

As Edgar guides the heavy wood closed, the deep hum of finality echoes through the wide cavern of the entryway, like the top sliding over a tomb. The air stills, dark and potent.

Stone floors, blanketed in modern crimson carpets to weaken the spread of chill from building to foot, are dulled by the grandeur of the staircase that expands before us, a velvet-covered marble walkway up into wealth. Light glints off the cream railing from the chandelier above us, its buzz a better conversationalist than Edgar or I could ever be for each other. The air smells deep and metallic, life long since rusted, buried beneath stone.

The rounded edges of the room are hidden from the light’s reach, heavy doors once likely meant for the use of butlers and staff obscured. I would not be surprised to learn that the Pages could still count a few people in their employ. Perhaps those darkened alcove doors would have been more fitting for my entrance.

I pull my sweater tighter across my body as a bone-chilling draft sweeps across the room, a wind across the moor or a ghost through hallowed halls. But I am no Cathy, and I certainly have no Heathcliff awaiting me here.

I see Edgar’s eyes catch on my hand for the briefest moment as I move, the sight of the Page family ancestral ring around my finger halting his thoughts with the same dark cloud that appeared when he’d first seen it there a year ago.

The Page family. I’m meant to be one of them by this time next winter. A little bit of me falling away with the passage of every month until that name locks into place next to my own.

“Come.” Edgar turns his back on me as he begins his ascent up the gilded staircase, his shadow lengthening and coiling in his wake, a dark path of invitation to follow.

Slashes of light cut across the portraits guiding us up the stairs, highlighting the peaks and valleys of paint that form the faces of Pages long since passed. Edgar doesn’t pause long enough to let me drink in the sights, to get caught in the rows of dark hair and hazel-eyed gazes looking down at me, empty stares protecting their home. Edgar raises a hand to a few of the portraits as we pass, saying something or other about their subjects, but the steely, painted eyes steal my attention. I feel those ghostly eyes on my back like a cold fingertip down my spine, the press of chilled lips on the nape of my neck.

The thick of the carpet swallows our footsteps as we make our way up to the second floor, stepping out into a large sitting room eclectically yet tastefully merging modern and dated furniture, signs of old wealth enduring. The faded colors of the menagerie are all offset by the prominent white gilding that joins wall to ceiling. A line of windows taller than I am allows the flat blue of the early night sky to become our guest as we stand already raised above the world after just one floor.

“Alice is taking her tea just through there.” Edgar’s eyes fall to a door of faded blue and gold in the near wall, eyes still glancing over his possessions rather than landing on me. “Jack’s already visiting with her, I presume.”

I’m not sure whether the information is meant to be an invitation to enter and pay my respects to the matron of the house, or a warning of where I am meant to steer clear of.

“Better to be seen than to be heard, sometimes, yeah?” Jack had said once to me, his hand on the small of my back and a smile lifting his face as he guided me through the doorway of his parent’s expansive full-time home down in Surrey. I had thought he was joking then. I know better now.

“Harry will take your bag.” Edgar makes the decision for me, though his face is still pinched tight in the middle, as if he is as displeased about the outcome as I am.

But there is no avoiding Alice forever. I am already a fish caught on the Page family hook.

A man in a crisp shirt and trousers appears from beyond the stairwell, coaxing my duffle bag from my grip before returning to the darkened hallway, possessions in tow. I am too aware of where my sweater frays at its hem, even as I tuck the fabric into my fist. I step forward, contemplating knocking on the door, but whether it be Alice, Jack, or both, I doubt there’s a soul behind who cares whether I enter or not, so instead I simply push it open. I am shy, have been since I was a girl letting my brothers speak for me, but I cannot help but admonish myself for the way my hand trembles against the wood. More than nervous to speak but afraid to be seen, to be perceived by the people meant to know me, to be my family. I don’t think I used to be like this, but that woman is so far gone now, so who is to say if I was ever more than a dim phantom. The hinges creak as the door tilts open, the sound both grating and haunting with the hesitant slowness of my movements.

Another sitting room, larger, filled with more staunchly upright chairs that look ready to collapse with age and a twin of the couch Jack had bought for our flat. A grand piano rests in the corner, ivories darkened with age, jagged and cracked like a mouth of rotted teeth.

Jack sits in a chair facing his mother, a teapot cooling on the small table between them that Jack leans over, their voices dulled over the angry howl of the sea and wind beyond the windows. Jack’s back remains turned, the golden halo of his hair blurring into the matching, perfectly styled waves resting atop his mother’s sharp features. Sharp features that look up now while still, somehow, looking down at me. The conversation dies as quickly as I enter, the silence of me filling their mouths.

“Hello, dear.” Alice reaches her hand out to me in greeting and I cross the room to take it in my own. Her knuckles are hard knobs made prominent by illness. It feels like a trap, the term of endearment for once spoken with something like tenderness rather than bite. Dear is a title that should always be gentle, but it is often made sharp in Alice’s mouth, endearment whittled down to pointed condescension.

Alice looks smaller now, bones visible through the thick of her crisp cardigan, shoulders sitting lower, but her chin is still lifted, as always. I know better than to think there could be any weakness in this woman.

I take a precarious seat in the chair beside her, instinctually running a hand across the back of Jack’s scalp as I do, a meager offer of comfort in the face of his mother’s withering. He looks at me at last, as though he’s just remembered that I’m here. Edgar’s gaze mirrors his son’s, the father still lingering in the faded edges of the doorway. I hold all of their eyes. I pull the seams of my sweater down over my hands, the chill of this house inescapable. They have given me the stage. So I must act.

“How’re you feeling?” It’s a stupid question and I regret it immediately as Jack’s eyes fall back down to the intricate weaves of the rug.

I wish, just once, I could pass their tests. I wish Jack still gave me the answers.

“Yes, fine, fine.” Alice’s voice is crisp. A shallow answer meant to keep me on the outside, and it does. “It’s so nice that you could make it out. I figured you’d head back to Boston while Jack is busy. I know he’s mentioned your family home being a bit too . . . petite to fit extra guests. Though it seems you don’t see your family much, do you?” And there’s the familiar swoosh of Alice’s sword cutting the air between us.

I try not to let it gratify me, in a small, sick way, that she’s faded since I last saw her nearly eight months ago. Then there was still enough of Alice Page for a true fight as we sat across from each other in a sun-speckled restaurant in Mayfair. My leg had rocked our table as I jostled it endlessly. I was un-eased by the high prices on the menu before me, by all the unfamiliar faces of fellow eaters around me. It had been so long since I was surrounded by strangers that weren’t in the mirror.

It was me who was faded then, a sepia woman not prepared for Alice’s colorful attacks, her mentions of how lucky I was that I could simply take off from my PhD and its meager stipend for four months.

“How nice for you to have Jack to live off of, isn’t it?”

“Is it really all that much work at the most of times—medieval studies, no?”

“Well, now, I’ve never known anyone who needed to take mental leave, dear.”

“Stress worsens my . . . condition,” I’d said, but my voice was too small for her to hear.

Jack had taken my hand in his beneath the table, a hidden gesture of unity, though his tongue had long since frozen in the emptiness of his mouth, his ears willfully unable to hear my unspoken screams.

The chair creaks precariously as I shift, the little bites of winter draft nipping at my skin as it sweeps in from the window behind me.

“Of course. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

I wish my smile was larger, stronger, but my fingers twist and falter instead. Jack doesn’t grab my hand. There isn’t a reassuring squeeze anymore.

Alice’s gaze sweeps over me and for a moment it is only the sea crashing on the cliffs that makes a sound. But then she sighs, and it is tight. Her eyes move from me, letting me know I am no longer of fascination or importance or even curiosity.

“I’m quite tired, I think I’ll head off to rest.” Alice slowly sways her way onto her feet, her white fingers threading into Jack’s hair as she kisses his head in passing.

She and Edgar slowly make their way through the doorway and into the hall, and Jack and I are left with the ghosts of his family, this home, ourselves.

I don’t feel like I’m alone.

I suppose I’m not—Jack is drifting across the room, flat-topped fingertips leading buttons back out of their holes. Our shirts and pants color the rigid backs of dated chairs that are dispersed around the bedroom as though our nighttime activities are expecting an audience. But it’s no longer unexpected to feel alone in Jack’s fluttering presence, two worlds bumping against each other.

It’s more. It’s as if there are eyes watching me from the dark swoop of fabric over the canopied bed, frenzied breaths drifting in from the peeling wardrobe whose door sits ajar. As though Alice’s dark eyes have been sewn into the wallpaper, always assessing, always watching. I swipe a hand down my bare arm, but I cannot scrub away the goose bumps that rise there.

“Not exactly any old country house, eh?” I say lightly, desperate to put words out into the air before I choke on the quiet, before I start to hear the whispered tones of whoever’s gaze makes me burrow lower beneath the heavy down duvet. “A place like this must have quite the history. . . .