Blackmoore by Julianne Donaldson
Chapter 2
Four Years Before
“It is the hardest thing to bear that you visit Blackmoore every summer and I have not been once! I thought you were going to ask your mother if I might join you this year.”
My best friend, Sylvia, watched me with a wrinkled brow from her seat by the window. “I know,” she said, reaching out a comforting hand that I did not want. “I am sorry, Kitty! You know I have asked Mama dozens of times if you might go with us. She has refused. Again.”
“But why? I know there are plenty of guest rooms at Blackmoore. I do not eat much. I would not be in the way. Why has she refused?” My pacing took me to one side of the room and back, but still Sylvia answered me nothing. “Does she have something against me? Is that why I have not been invited?”
Sylvia shrugged, shaking her head vaguely. “I cannot answer that.”
I threw myself on the settee beside her, covered my face with my hands, and uttered a muffled scream. My hair settled around my shoulders in a dark cloud.
Footsteps sounded, then Henry’s voice. “What is all the screaming about?”
“Kitty is longing to see Blackmoore. Again.” Sylvia spoke with an air of forced patience, which made me sit up straight and drop my hands.
“You do not understand. Neither of you.” I looked from her to Henry and back again. Both watched me as if I were slightly mad. “You have always been able to go there, and I never have.” They could not comprehend my feelings about being left behind every single summer for as long as I could remember. They could not imagine the strangling sense I felt when I imagined them exploring the coast and the moors and the great old house with its secret passageways while I stared at the same stone walls and the same old hedgerows I had known all my life.
“But it is just a house, Kitty,” Sylvia said, looking at me as if I had lost my mind.
I shook my head. “It is not just a house.” Because it wasn’t. Not to me.
To Sylvia, Blackmoore was simply her grandfather’s estate, a place for her family’s annual summer holiday. But for me, it represented the opening of a lifelong cage. It stood in my imagination as an escape from everything that was the same and unendingly monotonous about my life at home.
“Then what is it?” Henry asked, his grey eyes more serious than I usually saw them. He watched me as if my answer meant something important.
“It is adventure,” I stated, and the word tasted like freedom. “I have never even left the county I was born in. I’ve never seen the ocean or the moors. And every summer, you two leave me for this great house perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean with the moors at its back. And you tease me—” I gave Henry a pointed look, and he grinned back unapologetically. “You tease me with rumors of ghosts on the moors and secret passageways and smugglers and refuse to tell me if any of it is actually true.” I sighed and muttered, “I would give anything to go to Blackmoore.”
“Anything?” Henry asked with a doubtful look. “I think you are exaggerating.”
“I am not exaggerating, Henry! I swear to you that I would give anything to go!”
“Such as ... ?”
I tried to think of a suitable example, so they would understand the force of my feelings. I looked down. Not my fingers. One needed all one’s fingers to excel at the pianoforte. A toe? Perhaps a little one?
“I would give a little toe to see Blackmoore,” I declared.
Sylvia blanched. Henry’s eyes lit up with interest.
“A little toe?” he asked. “Not a large one?”
I chewed on my lower lip. “No, I think large toes are crucial for balance. A little toe. Perhaps my smallest one.”
Henry leaned forward, mischief lighting up his eyes. “And how would you go about severing a little toe?”
“Henry!” Sylvia interjected.
He held up a hand, quieting her, and challenged me with a look.
I swallowed. “I would ... I would ask Cook to cut it off.”
Sylvia looked horrified. “Blood? In the kitchen? No, Kitty. It would not do.”
I tried to think bravely of the idea. “It would not be so bad. Surely there is an occasional bit of blood in the kitchen, now and then, from raw meat or ...”
Sylvia cupped her hands over both ears, shaking her head. “Say no more, I beg of you.”
Henry could hardly keep his grin in check, although he appeared to be trying. “And what would you do with that little toe, Kitty? Hmm? Is there some market for toes in exchange for trips to Blackmoore?”
My frustration quickly boiled over into anger. I picked up the pillow at my side and threw it at him. He batted it away with infuriating ease. “I do not know if there is such a market, Henry Delafield. Perhaps you could tell me, since you will one day own Blackmoore. Hmm?” I imitated his maddening half-smile. “Is there a market for little toes?” I bent over and started to unlace my boot. “Because I will cut it off right now, and pay you for my trip there, and I don’t care if your cook does object to blood in the kitchen.”
My trembling fingers could do nothing with the laces that had somehow become knots. I tugged at them without success, my face hot, my eyes clouded with the threat of tears. I blinked hard, squinting at the tangle of laces, when suddenly Henry was climbing over Sylvia, pushing her aside, and sitting beside me. He grabbed my hands, pulling them away from my boots.
“Kitty,” he said in a low voice. “Stop. Stop.” I fought his grip but only halfheartedly. “I am sorry,” he whispered, leaning his head close to mine. “I should not have teased you about Blackmoore. I know how you feel about it.”
His words had the same effect on me as water thrown on a fire. I pulled my hands away from his grip and covered my face with them, breathing in deeply. I had overreacted again. It was a great weakness of mine. It was a great weakness of all Worthington women. And now, pulled from the heat of my anger, I was embarrassed. But no less sad. No less bereft. No less frustrated. For a moment, I felt Henry rest a hand on the back of my bent head, lightly.
“Come, Kitty. Let us have no blood today,” he said, his tone light and cajoling. “Instead, let us plan what you are going to do while we’re away. You should plan some great adventure so that you will have something exciting to share with us upon our return.”
I dropped my hands and glared at him. “You know as well as I do that there is no adventure to be had here. If there was, we would have already found it! At any rate, it is no fun to have an adventure by oneself.” I crossed my arms over my chest, sullen and resentful. “But my question is, Why? Why has your mother never allowed me to go?”
Henry and Sylvia stayed silent, even though I looked at them pointedly, waiting for an answer. An ugly suspicion crept into my mind with the heavy, weighted steps of jealousy. It whispered to my mind—a question so abhorrent that my mouth turned down, as if I had bitten into something sour.
“Is Miss St.Claire going to be at Blackmoore again?”
The reluctance in Henry’s expression answered my question. Sylvia shot me a look full of pity.
My suspicion—my jealousy—laughed with glee and wriggled itself into a more comfortable position, as if it planned to stay for a very long visit. My lip curled as I imagined Henry and Sylvia spending a month at Blackmoore with Miss St.Claire, of all people.
“So your mother has no objection to inviting guests. She simply objects to me.”
“It is nothing personal, Kitty. You know she intends Miss St.Claire for Henry—”
“Sylvia!” Henry shot his sister a look of warning.
Sylvia’s mouth fell open. “What? That is no secret! We have all known that for ages.”
Nothing more was said for a long, awkward moment. I looked at the yellow fabric of the settee, thinking only of how much I resented this Miss St.Claire, whom I had never even met.
Henry turned to me, so suddenly that I started and looked at him with surprise. His grey eyes looked like steel, and in a flash I saw something in him I had never noticed before—an indomitable will. “One day I will take you to Blackmoore, Kitty. I promise.” He grasped my hand again, squeezing it hard. “I give you my word.”
I clamped my lips shut, keeping back my doubting words. Mrs. Delafield always had her way. Always. If she did not want me there, I would never go. But finally, because he would not stop squeezing my hand and because it was starting to hurt, I squeezed his hand in return. “Very well,” I whispered, giving up the fight and smiling a little for his sake.
The next month passed so slowly I thought I would go mad. During that long summer month, lazy with idleness, with sameness, with incessant nothingness, whenever I thought of the Delafields at Blackmoore with Miss St.Claire, I gritted my teeth and cursed under my breath.
Finally, at long last, on a day just like any other, I heard from a servant that the Delafields had returned. I ran down the stairs, grabbing the banister to round the corner at the first floor, and jumped the final three steps before I noticed that the front door stood open.
Jameson, our butler, was bending over and blocking my view of the door. When I stopped still in surprise, a voice called out, “If that is you, Kitty, cover your eyes!”
My heart raced at the sound of Henry’s voice. I bent down, trying to see around Jameson’s back.
“I mean it! Cover your eyes, or I will turn around and go home right now, and you shall never see your surprise!”
I sighed and clapped a hand over my eyes. “Very well. They are covered.”
I had to wait much too long while a shuffling sound passed me into the drawing room. Only my belief in Henry’s threat made me keep my eyes covered, for I was not a patient person. “Can I look now?” I begged.
In reply, a hand grabbed mine. “No, keep them closed,” Henry said, his voice close to my ear. My heart pumped with excitement. “Come this way.” He pulled me along by my hand. I bumped into a wall, then a doorjamb, and then collided knee-first with a piece of furniture.
“Ow. Can you not lead me more carefully?”
“Hush. No complaining allowed.”
Henry released my hand and stood behind me, squaring my shoulders and then saying, “Now. You may look now.”
I opened my eyes as quickly as I could and stared uncomprehendingly at the table before me. Henry had led me into the dining room, and on the table was what looked like a model of a house.
I turned my head to give Henry a questioning glance and saw him for the first time. Only a month had passed, but he had changed. His hair was longer and darker instead of lighter. He always came home from Blackmoore with light hair that had been brightened by the sun. But this year it was darker—a dark, golden color that almost begged to be called brown. His freckles had faded across the tops of his cheeks. His grey eyes were the same, though, with their ring of charcoal along the outer edge. And at this moment, his grin was so broad I felt stunned by the sight of it.
He stepped around me, gestured grandly at the model, and said, “I present to you, Miss Katherine Worthington, Blackmoore.”
My heart beat so hard it hurt. I looked from him to the model and back, and when he nodded, grinning, I dropped to my knees, bringing the house to my eye level. The windows, the wood painted to look like stone, the front doors, the chimneys. It was all here. “Where did you come by this?” I asked in awe.
“I built it.”
I looked up at him uncomprehendingly. “You built this?”
He said in an offhand voice, “My grandfather helped with the design. And Sylvia helped at the end with the painting. But most of the handiwork was mine.”
I continued to stare at him. “This must have taken you every daylight hour of your holiday.”
He lifted one shoulder, but I could tell by the half-suppressed smile he wore that I was right. And that explained his appearance. I knew the cost of this project. I knew that Henry lived for being outdoors at Blackmoore. I knew that he spent all day on the moors and on the beach, and I knew that he loved to go birding with the gardener, and I knew that only the greatest of incentives would have kept him inside all month long.
I was overwhelmed and found it suddenly difficult to speak. I cleared my throat. “You must not have had much time to spend with Miss St.Claire.”
He knelt beside me and pressed down a smile, a line creasing his cheek. “No. Not much.”
I nodded, chewing on my lip. The question that rested there, on the tip of my tongue, I did not dare to ask. But I wanted to know—needed to know—if he had built this for me. If it meant something. If I meant something.
“Now I suppose I shall be indebted to you and I shall have to find some way to pay you back.” I drew in a breath, my face hot with awkwardness. “Since you gave up your holiday and Miss St.Claire ...”
Henry cut a glance at me, then smirked and said, “I didn’t build this for you, Kitty.”
“You didn’t?” Relief mixed with disappointment rushed through me.
He shook his head. “No, you ungrateful brat, I did not.”
He leaned closer, tilting his head, examining the model. Then he grasped the tiny door handle on the front door.
“I did it,” he murmured, swinging open the miniature front door, “for your toes.”
I stifled a gasp of delight. Bending my head down, I peered through the open front door and saw a black-and-white checkerboard floor, a fireplace on one side, and an arch at the furthest end of the room, leading to a staircase.
I bit my lip to keep myself from grinning, and then I blinked hard to keep myself from crying. It was simply too much. “My toes thank you,” I finally whispered.
I could feel the width of Henry’s smile, even though I did not look at him. It was like a ray of sunshine on my face, and my cheeks grew warm. Then he pointed at the model and said, “It has thirty-five rooms, twelve chimneys, two wings, a conservatory, stables, and a top-notch view. There is, reportedly, a secret passageway that was once used by priests during the Reformation, although I will neither confirm nor deny it, as you will, no doubt, find it more intriguing and mysterious if you have something to wonder about.”
I pulled my gaze from the model to his face. He was talking quickly, saying something about the library containing over three thousand books. But all I could see was Henry, with the light in his grey eyes and the smattering of faded freckles across the top of his tanned cheeks and his dark golden hair falling over his brow and the quirk of his lips when he smiled as he talked.
“It faces the ocean and is backed by the moors,” he said. “And now you know.” A note of accomplishment entered his voice. “Now you know exactly what Blackmoore looks like. Someday you will see it for yourself, as I have promised.” He met my gaze with a warm smile. “Until then, you may keep this.”