Strands of Bronze and Gold (35 page)

Gingerly I used the edge of my skirt to pick up the teeth and replace them in the jar. A glint of my own terror seemed reflected in the facets.

The very room horrified me, and I was too shaken to continue searching for money. I stumbled to my own chamber. My legs seemed turned to liquid. By sheer force of will, I commanded them to hold me up until I could sink into my chair by the fire. I twisted my hair bracelet round and round as I willed my frenzied heart to calm.

How often had I scorned the stupidity of heroines in lurid novels? Now I understood them—I had been as blind as they. I had believed Bernard had simply driven his women to their early deaths with his selfishness and possessiveness. I had thought I would be
stronger. I was a fool. A few years hence and my teeth would be in his bedside jar if I didn’t get away now.

I had a little time, though. I must think. It would be a mistake to run hysterically.

It was easy for Bernard to attract women. He was so handsome, could be so charming. Because the devil himself wouldn’t truly come equipped with the traditional horns and tail, he must be attractive and charismatic in order to reel in his prey. Bernard didn’t anticipate the fate of his wives when he married them. I didn’t suppose he intended, yet, to kill me. Oddly I believed each time he married he had hoped for a pleasant future.

Victoire had planned to flee with her lover. Perhaps Bernard had discovered them in the act, and this caused him to take leave of his senses. No, even as I thought this, I dismissed it—the seeds of insanity must always have been present from birth. Perhaps they sprouted after his little son died, and then, with Victoire’s betrayal, the monster took over. He watched and waited and then pounced. Neither Victoire nor her lover nor her maid had ever left the grounds. There were six teeth—four for wives, one for a lover, one for a servant.

Somewhere on this vast estate the bodies must lie.

Tatiana allegedly had succumbed in childbirth, but Ducky was away when it happened. It was her husband and not birthing that killed her. I would never know what had set him off—with Bernard’s lightning-quick mood changes, it might have been anything. She was buried in the chapel yard.

The accepted story was that Tara killed herself, but Ducky had wondered how she was able to use one of the armory’s jeweled knives
when it was always kept locked. Tara and Bernard had fought often. It wasn’t surprising she had lived only a year—by now Bernard was adept at ridding himself of brides. She was buried at night in the same yard as Tatiana.

Adele had lived with him longer. Bernard took her away to a “healing spring” to improve her health, but she returned to the abbey a corpse.

What if I could find the bodies of Victoire, her lover, and her maid? My weary mind quickened with the thought. If I were to find them, hopefully I would have proof of their manner of death. And what of the teeth? They were evidence as well. I shrank from the thought of going back to Bernard’s room to snatch them up, but it was the intelligent thing to do. With the teeth as tangible proof and a knowledge of the bodies’ whereabouts, I could go to the police and Bernard would be brought to justice and I could escape without being hunted. I could go to Gideon.

This was what the ghosts wanted of me—to expose their murderer to the world. Bernard liked to say that fate had brought us together, that I was “meant” to come to him. Perhaps, to this end, I was. For the first time in weeks I had not seen a glimpse of the specters all day. Possibly they had withdrawn because they knew the wheels now turned inexorably and the series of events was set in motion.

Or else they could no longer bear to watch.

If the bodies weren’t buried in the woods, the most obvious hiding place for them was the locked-up chapel in the locked-up churchyard. Like the “whited sepulchers” in Matthew, which appeared beautiful outwardly, but inwardly were full of dead men’s
bones. I would at least peek in there and then make my escape. As I made my plans, the trembling that had beset me since I first saw the teeth ceased. If I were called upon to be a brave person, I would be a brave person.

By the time I poured the contents of the amethyst glass jar into my handkerchief and tied it tightly, the black night had become edged with gray.
Hurry
. I draped myself in a thick cashmere shawl and dropped the handkerchief as well as my Christmas present—the rubies set in heavy gold—in my reticule. Hopefully I could sell the jewels. I picked up the key ring and, without a backward glance, left my bedroom.

Down the corridors, down the back twisting stairs I went, careful of the still-sleeping servants, and then out the music room door. In the forest, pine trees mourned. Somewhere a shutter or gate banged—again and again. I picked my way down the weaving, sinuous paths to the chapel yard. No movement showed in the dark windows of Wyndriven Abbey.

Blustery wind rubbed together the leaves of the tattered vines covering the yard wall, sounding like dry skin rasping and rustling. I touched my stone angel, imagining a warmth spread to my fingers from her foot, before lifting ivy away from the gate and inserting the key in the lock. It opened smoothly, as if it had been recently oiled. I replaced the ivy and shut the gate carefully behind me. Anyone walking by would see nothing unusual.

The moon still showed faintly, but by now a low, dim, cold sun also appeared at intervals between shredded clouds. The yard was tangled and overgrown so completely it was hard to make out the four granite gravestones beneath clotted weeds. Why four? Oh yes,
Bernard’s son, Anton, would be buried here as well as the three wives. I didn’t try to pull away creepers to read the inscriptions; these graves were not what I was looking for and there was nothing to hint at an unmarked grave.

The windows of the chapel were boarded over with thick planks held by many nails. Bernard may have done it to protect valuable stained-glass windows—or perhaps he wanted no one to look inside. A chilling thought snaked into my brain: He might also have wanted nothing to get out.

I struggled through to the iron-shod doors of the chapel, briers snatching and tearing at my skirt and legs. Glancing behind me at the closed gate, I placed the key in the lock and turned it. Again this door opened smoothly. An unwholesome odor greeted me—a mixture of mildew and fungus and mossy stone and decay. Air and early-dawn light filtered in through the cracked-open door and from a hole gaping in the ceiling.

In the ancient chamber slender columns twined with sculpted garlands soared upward to an arched ceiling. Old Testament murals covered the walls, the paint still bright. It was a large room, meant to be a family chapel. Blackened wood pews faced a richly carved altar, while a door behind it led to what I guessed was the sacristy. An ancient peace filled the place and held me frozen for a moment.

Something might be hidden in the sacristy. I started up the aisle.

I did not need to go that far. My hands clenched so tightly my fingernails dug into my palms.

They lay behind the altar and stretched out on the first pew and slumped against the wall and piled with tangled limbs like discarded dolls—all that remained of seven people. Bernard had not
buried three of his wives in the churchyard, although I neither knew nor cared what he had buried in their stead. He had wanted these women to suffer the final degradation for defying or displeasing him: to lie exposed.

In his arrogance he hadn’t troubled to hide the bodies. Maybe he came here sometimes for little visits.

The Mississippi heat and insects had left no flesh on the bones except a few dried scraps. Some hair clung to skulls—on four of them a reddish shade. Hollow, sightless eyes stared, teeth grimaced. If I looked closer, one tooth would be missing from each. I did not look closer. The clothing fared better than the flesh. Stained and discolored gowns that were once shades of sea foam and emerald, sapphire and primrose, told me which skeleton was which.

Tatiana lay stretched out on the pew, her child in her arms. The babe had mummified, parchment-dry skin stretched over bones. Perhaps it had been born dead, setting off Bernard’s maniacal rage. Tara and Adele lay piled together near her, as if their bodies had simply been dumped on the littered stone floor. They had died elsewhere and been brought here.

Something dark and leggy skittered beneath the skeleton slumped against the wall. This was the man, clothed in a blotchy buff frock coat with a dark waistcoat. Mr. Gregg. Victoire and the maid in her gray dress lay behind the altar, as if they had sought protection there. A black and oily-looking liquid—blood?—had dried in a puddle around these three bodies. The trio had been left where they had fallen. Bernard had somehow lured them to the chapel and killed them there.

He would have used his sword stick. A gun would have been too loud and too crass for Bernard.

I wanted to claw out my eyes, and yet I could not stop staring.

I have seen it, I have seen it, now let me leave
.

The light had changed. A shadow blocked the opening. In the crack was Garvey’s face wreathed in a grin.

I gave a shrill scream and lunged toward the door as it swung shut. Too late. Too late.

I had made a deadly mistake; I had left the key in the lock.

I beat at the door until my fists bled, then clawed at the corners until my fingernails tore off. I screamed until my throat closed. Then I listened. No sound entered from outside. Garvey was long gone, and he would allow no one within hearing distance.

Get out of here before Bernard returns
.

As I struggled back to sanity, sick and shaking and driven by a quieter terror, I searched for a way out. The once-lovely stained-glass windows were shattered low down but intact higher up. Gouges and scratches marred the stout, firmly nailed boards behind the windows.

“Did you and Mr. Gregg do that, Victoire?”

Now I was talking to corpses.

The trio—Victoire, her maid, and Mr. Gregg—had spent a nightmarish time shut in here before finally being slain by Bernard. The bloodstained slashes in their clothing revealed they had been stabbed.

The three of them—one a strong man—hadn’t been able to escape; how should I?

I am going to die
.

I snatched up a shard of window glass, wrapped my shawl around it, and jabbed at the hinges of the solid door, but without result.

The twenty-foot ceiling, soaring impossibly out of reach, was stained yellow and black from leaks. Light beams streamed now from the collapsed part of the roof, and a twiggy nest clung to gaping rafters. My boots crunched on the crumbled plaster and shattered glass that littered the floor along with bird and mouse droppings. A few small human bones had been scattered by creatures. I skirted around them.

At the edge of a mound of fallen plaster and slates and rotten wood was a different sort of object. I picked it up and shook the dust from it. A low-heeled lady’s shoe of green morocco. The leather had shriveled and cracked from exposure to the elements. Its mate still graced the foot of Victoire’s skeleton. An animal had dragged this one here, unless she had cast it off in some mad scramble for her life. I placed it beside its mate.

I would die a lingering death of thirst and starvation.

No. I shook my head slowly in a low arc. That wasn’t Bernard’s way. He would prefer to pierce my heart with his sword.

A sniveling, whimpering, pleading creature would not move Bernard in a final confrontation. What would? Reminders of my humanity? Of his? Of his former fondness for me?

Thinking like him was impossible. He was mad. His madness encompassed a terrible selfishness with neither compassion nor
empathy, a terrible anger, a terrible possessiveness, and a terrible lust for blood.

I was living the nightmare I had dreamed in the orangery, when I knew a ghastly fate approached. In it I had cried out to Anne, begging to know if my brothers were yet coming. In the reality no one was coming to help.

I need a weapon
.

There was the broken glass. I carefully picked up a long and pointed shard and placed it near the door. I could use it. I could stab Bernard. If not for my own sake, then for that of the other people he had slaughtered.

I dug at the plaster walls with another glass shard wrapped in my shawl, managing to make only dust. I rammed the boarded windows with wood fallen from the roof, until the rotten slats crumbled to shreds. I prodded and shoved and occasionally screamed.

Hours passed.

Somehow I had spent an entire day here. Now darkness seeped in. A little silver moonlight fell through the ceiling hole to give a soft outline to the altar and pews. To the mounded bodies.

My still companions were merely husks of people, like the shed cicada skins that clung to Southern trees in summertime, or so I told myself. I was not afraid of them.

I took up my weapon and sank down against the wall between the windows, pulling my knees to my chest. From here, I could see if the door opened, although I doubted it would open soon. Bernard was not due back until tomorrow. I hadn’t slept all the night before, but I must stay awake, in case.