The Hazard with Hearts
Chapter 1 Mid-September 1814
Standing at the base of a ruined tower at Sheldrake Castle, Vivienne shuddered as she remembered last evening’s conversation about ghosts who haunted the ruins.
Large quarried stones lay tumbled in tall grass. They looked like a child’s building block tower if one didn’t remember the cause of the tower’s fall.
“Ghosts, my dear. On the darkest night when no moon lights the velvet sky.” Julius Cavell swirled the brandy in his glass. “She drifts along these halls. When you see her, your blood will freeze. When she touches you, you will scream.”
“I do not believe in ghosts,” Vivienne lied.
Vivienne would never hand anyone in that conversation a weapon against her.A fear of ghosts could be a weapon as sharp as a knife, bloodless yet incapacitating. She would never share her fear of dark places.
She remembered how the authoress Miss Beale seized on the topic. Her lips had parted, and her eyes gleamed in the candlelight of the drawing room. “Who is this ghostly lady?”
“Lady Georgina, Viscountess Herrick. Killed when Cromwell attacked Sheldrake Castle and destroyed its towers.”
“Since she died at the castle, wouldn’t Lady Georgina haunt the castle ruins rather than the hall?”
Vivienne’s practical comment earned a scowl from the artist Julius Cavell. Had he hoped his dramatic pronouncement would elicit a scream?
“She’s right.” Lord Davitton Hurst rushed to agree. When Cavell’s scowl turned his way, Hurst shrank in his chair. Apprenticed to the artist, though, he didn’t hesitate in filling in the logic missing from Cavell’s comment. “This hall was built decades later, wasn’t it?”
Miss Beale chuckled and leaned against the upholstered back of her chair. “You are throwing logic at a ghost story, the two of you, and quite ruining Mr. Cavell’s attempt to scare us on this moonless night. Or did you not notice that it is the new moon tonight?”
Cavell set aside the snifter. “Logic means nothing to the supernatural. The supernatural forces do not follow the natural world’s physics. Do they, Vicar?”
The man startled. “That’s her, they say,” he had offered, nodding at the painting over the mantel.
A young beauty in pink satin stood beneath a rose-covered arbor. Pink cheeks and pinker lips, eyes bluer than a lake, she looked as if she would step from the painting and greet them all with a smile. Ribbons of pink and blue enhanced her powdered tresses.
Vivienne glanced away from the painting above them and around the room. She didn’t see her husband of a few weeks. Only three weeks at Sheldrake Hall, she felt quite alone here, not lost but not fitting in.
The ghost stories had begun with Miss Beale’s account of the gruesome end of a medieval monk, walled into a crypt beneath the church. His fingernails had scratched the bricks before he succumbed to suffocation. His body was discovered only months ago, when the mortar supporting the masonry caved in.
Now she shook her head decidedly, hoping Cavell and Miss Beale and Vicar Rampling would decide the ghost stories wouldn’t affect her. “I shall not purchase this bag of moonshine. The poor monk was enough of a tale, but—.”
“I assure you, that did occur. Didn’t it, Vicar?”
“Oh, indeed. Before I received the living here, though. I came only a few weeks before your arrival, Lady Sheldrake.”
Her husband hadn’t explained his reason for replacing the former vicar. He’d only stated that a new man held the position. Vivienne, feeling her blind way with fingers and toes as she assumed management of the great house, had not pursued the comment. Maxwell Herrick, ninth Earl of Sheldrake, had shared little about the neighbors she would encounter.
“The ghost story is moonshine,” she declared. “That portrait cannot be of the Lady Georgina killed in Cromwell’s attack. This lady wears the clothing of last century, not of two centuries ago. And ghosts haunt a place important to them. Sheldrake said this hall was once a large pasture. If Lady Georgina died at the castle, she would have a half-hour’s ride on ghostly clouds to reach the Hall.”
Cavell sipped his brandy then balanced the glass on one knee. “Have you explored the castle ruins?”
“Not yet. We have not had time. This celebration for Lady Forness required my attention.”
“Your pardon,” the vicar said, “but I do not understand the reason Lady Forness’ celebration is here rather than at Forness Manor.”
“She is the late earl’s only daughter,” Miss Beale said, as if those words explained anything.
The talk turned after that, straying far from ghosts.
Yet ghosts plagued Vivienne’s dreams. A nightmare woke her before dawn.
Refusing to dwell on that horrifying dream, she struggled into her snug-fitting habit. She was so far advanced with her dressing that she surprised her maid when she came with the morning tea. She surprised the stables by walking down to them only minutes after the head grooms received word that she wanted to ride. And she surprised her young groom assigned to her by riding straight for the castle ruins.
Julius Cavell would have relished the discovery that his ghost preyed on her mind.
Thin trees struggled to grow among the tumbled quarry stones while brambles and tall grasses softened the hard edges. She swished her riding crop through the grass, taking off the heavy heads of seeds.
Vivienne gathered up the long skirt of her habit and prepared to clamber over the blocks to reach a tower.
“Yer laidyship,” the groom yelled, “`tis not safe. `Twill rain soon. We gotta get back.”
A hawk’s piercing cry caught her attention. She watched its wheel against the slaty sky. A flash of movement caught her eye, high and to her left. It came from the still-standing tower. Yet she saw nothing in the double-arched window at the top of the tower. Lady Georgina?
She turned back to the groom. “Why is it not safe?” she called. “I do not intend to enter.”
He looked off to her right. None of the servants on the estate would look directly at her. The chief house servants now did, especially when she sought their gaze.
The wind rippled through the tall grasses, tugging at the groom’s coat. The sweet mare assigned to Vivienne tossed her head, not liking the rush of wind. The gelding remained stolid, nipping at the grass.
Far off, above Sheldrake Hall, the sky had purpled. The wind snared her scarf, bleeding it off to her left, teasing her hat.
“`Tis not safe,” Greggs insisted.
“I thank you for the warning. I will not enter the castle.” Then she turned back to the castle and picked her way around the tumbled blocks.
She flushed a rabbit from the tall grass. White tail shining, it bounded away from the ruins. With chittering cries, birds lifted from the burnt-out building, flying up and away.
Raindrops spattered as she reached the remains of a corner tower. She glanced back.
The reins of both horses in one hand, the groom watched her progress.
She lifted her gaze to the distant hill with its pale grey marble palladium-style Hall. Terraced gardens worked down to the greystone buildings and cottages. A grassy expanse of lawn dropped to the river. The uncut grass rippled like the waves of a lake, agitated before a storm. The wind tossed the upper branches of the old-growth trees in the parkland. Farther east, a downburst of rain greyed the farmlands of the valley.
Vivienne turned back to the old castle and picked her way around more blocks, scattered by cannonfire from Oliver Cromwell’s battle against Royalists. Lady Forness said the Lord Protector had wanted to destroy a stronghold loyal to the Stuart king.
She had glimpsed the castle ruins as the carriage rolled along the river road. High above the road, the castle dominated the valley. Leaning out the carriage window, Vivienne queried her new husband about the ruins. She learned that a Norman baron had erected the blocky center. The four towers were erected during the Wars of the Roses.
Only one tower remained whole. The others stood broken, their jagged tops washed by rain. The family had lived in the central block until fire destroyed it during the Restoration. Then they moved to the remaining tower until the fourth earl and his son Viscount Herrick built the Hall as a replacement for the ruined castle.
By then the carriage entered the parkland surrounding the Hall. Old oaks and chestnuts lifted leafy heads to the sky, admitting only flashes of the Midsummer sun. The trees obscured any view of the ruins or Sheldrake Hall, her new home. After nodding through the long day’s journey, Lady Forness had roused to describe her favorite rooms at the Hall, the Pink Salon that the dowager countess had redecorated, the Blue Chamber, and the Conservatory off the Receiving Room.
Max added nothing to his aunt’s commentary. Vivienne could not decipher if he were pleased to return home or wished to return to London.
Her new husband’s thoughts or moods often defeated her interpretation.
Sheldrake Hall had the rigidly symmetrical lines of the palladium from Queen Anne’s reign. All stone and glass panes, the formal style begged Vivienne for disruption. Broken, charred and shadowed, the castle ruins offered mystery.
Lady Georgina would not haunt the coldly formal ruins of Sheldrake Hall.
Fire had gutted the Norman square centering the ruins. Through the few openings for doors and windows Vivienne glimpsed a chaotic maze of stout timbers. Fallen beams leaned at dangerous angles, ends braced on the old walls and buried in the blackened rubble.
Lady Forness’ dry voice echoed. “A man and his army started the destruction. Nature finished it. Yet a Sheldrake bows neither to man nor nature. We rebuilt.”
After that comment of arrogance daring fate, Vivienne had glanced at her husband, but Max didn’t respond to the pride in his aunt’s voice.
She had few clues of how to present herself. The life of the countess of Sheldrake must be vastly different from her rackety life with younger siblings and a capricious father.
In London, Lady Forness had given only a few gentle hints on the position a countess would inhabit. Her own aunt, an unmarried spinster, had seemed appalled when Vivienne asked about her wifely requirements. “Think of England, my dear,” she eventually sputtered.
That had been useless advice.
When she shared Aunt Elfreda’s advice with Max, he sputtered with surprised laughter.
He could be so human then as stiff and emotionless as a marble statue. When he acted as coldly formal as the Hall, he seemed a stranger. His rare occasions of warmth were not the time to ask about the greatest mystery, the unusual deaths of his first two wives. Both had fallen to their deaths, one here at the tower, the other at the Hall. Were they ghosts?
Vivienne walked along the front of the Norman square. She peered through empty windows. A wooden palisade must have protected the whole structure in the early days of the castle, gone now as stone was not. A stairway climbed to nothingness. Missing steps warned of the folly of exploration.
She reached the base of the standing tower. In one spot the grass appeared trampled. She peered through an arrow slit. Shadows. Dust motes drifted through a shaft of light. The fiery destruction hadn’t reached this tower. A rectangle in the opposing wall opened to the hall. A stone perron mounted the interior wall, disappearing into a planked floor. The heavy beams looked sturdy after hundreds of years.
Vivienne leaned closer, trying to see more. A bird startled its alarm and flew from the arrow slit. It fluttered before her face. The wings beat her head, knocking away her hat. Vivienne recoiled and fell backward over a grass-hidden stone.
A dark shadow flashed past her startled gaze and thudded heavily to the ground. It hit the block that had tripped her. Chips struck her face.
She gasped.
At her feet rested a greystone block, large enough to crush her skull. It had crushed her hat, that jaunty Bond Street confection, a reminder of her sole ride with Max in Hyde Park on the morning he proposed. He had laughed and brushed the feather grazing her cheek.
The hat and its dashing feather were crushed beneath the block.
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