Again, My Lord: A Twist Series Novel (11 page)

Instead she left the stable and turned toward Harriet Tinkerson’s shop. Mrs. Whittle was far too busy preparing dinner to bother her with cooking breakfast at two o’clock in the afternoon. But her stomach growled. At least at the millinery she was certain to get two biscuits.

Harriet greeted her as the prodigal daughter, with surprise, then glee, then fawning enthusiasm. Calista pretended she remembered her from their school days, cutting through that foolishness, and soon Harriet had set an empty plate and cup before her. Shortly she began the wheedling, unsubtle speech about how a woman of creative and artistic
brilliance
really did need a
noble
patron to have
any
success in business these days … And wouldn’t Lady Holland like a biscuit now?

Though Harriet’s bonnets were arranged throughout the store more like meat in a butcher’s shop than hats in a millinery, they were all fetching. A few of her hats were true works of art. It was a shame Harriet herself was such a ninny. It was an even greater shame that, if tomorrow never came, she would be one of Calista’s few friends forever.

~o0o~

Dinner in the private parlor was not enjoyable.

Mr. George Smythe, indeed a silk trader in partnership with his brother, engaged the marquess in conversation about politics almost exclusively, despite Lord Dare’s many polite attempts to turn the conversation to topics more suited to ladies. Their host would not oblige, nor would the ladies themselves. Mrs. Smythe divided her time between grilling Calista on information concerning every member of the
ton
that she, her mother, and Ian knew, and disapproving of her daughter’s timid additions to the conversation.

Penelope Smythe was painfully shy, but trying valiantly not to be miserable in the company of two strangers. Her uncle managed to charmingly deflect his sister-in-law’s barbs while flirting mildly with Calista too.

At first she found it flattering. But by the end of the evening a sour flavor had invaded her mouth that had nothing to do with Mrs. Whittle’s excellent dinner. What sort of man made such a cake of himself over another man’s wife? Lord Dare had said things to her that could be construed as inappropriate flirting. But it felt different. It felt genuine, not as though he said them for the effect they would have on her, but simply because it was the truth.

He found her entirely appealing to all of his senses
. When she was covered in mud and splashing about on a high street.

Now, in unexceptionable circumstances, he barely glanced at her. Courteous, interesting, and pleasant, he was a perfect guest even to these upstart members of the petty gentry who thought that because they paid an extra guinea a night they owned this little parlor.

Claiming exhaustion, she excused herself immediately after tea and went to her room. Aphrodite’s face shone in the candlelight across the room. Unbuttoning her gown, she began to draw it off when a soft scratching sounded at the door.

Only one person had come to her door other than the women who worked in this inn: the Marquess of Dare. But he was not the sort to scratch.

Hoping it wasn’t Alan Smythe, she opened the door. The cat from the previous mornings sat on the threshold.

“You do not remember the kippers,” she said. “So why are you here?”

It mewled.

“No.” She started to draw the door shut. “You are probably riddled with fleas, and I don’t fancy waking up with bites all over my—” She pinned her lips closed. And opened the door. The cat slipped inside, leaped onto the bed, and curled up into a tight ball at the foot, its open eyes on her.

“Yes, you may stay.” She shut the door and bolted it. “But you won’t be here in the morning, you know.”

A rumbling purr sounded from its scruffy head. Calista removed her clothes and joined the skinny little creature in bed.

In the morning it was gone.

Calista lay beneath the covers
, trembling. The rainfall against the windowpane was the scratching of a thousand tiny claws. And that church bell …

That church bell.

That hideous, diabolical church bell. It tolled and tolled and tolled, and although she counted to only seven it
felt
like seven hundred thunderous death knells crawling beneath her lungs and making her hate every unblessed reverberation.

Except that she would
never
actually die. She would never move on from this day, grow old, and someday be at peace. She would remain here in this room in this inn in this village forever with only that evil bell to remind her that she was cursed. Forgotten by time. Unloved by God. Destined to insanity.

That hateful, wicked bell.

She stared unblinking at the ceiling, every nerve jittering, every surface of her skin cold with sweat, every hair on her body standing on end, and she knew one thing with a clarity she had not experienced in many days.

That bell had to die.

Now.

And she would be the one to do it.

She had already tried earplugs. On her cardplaying day, she had called upon Dr. Appleby for wax and lambswool. The following morning she awoke with empty ears. But now it was suddenly so obvious. If she could not stop herself from hearing the tolls, she would stop the tolls from being heard
by
anyone
.

She dressed, knowing exactly where she must go now.

Mrs. Whittle was exiting the kitchen when Calista descended to the foyer.

“Good day, milady! The inn’s all filled up with the rain bringing people in off the road last night, and I’ve my hands full at present. But I’ll be with you right quick. Will you be having tea or coffee?”

“Whatever you have here.” Calista took the pot from her and a cup, and poured. She drank as Mrs. Whittle watched with round eyes. Then she deposited the items in the innkeeper’s hands, grabbed a cloak off the peg, and went out into the rain.

The blacksmith’s shop was at the far end of town, on the other side of the pub and closest to the ford. The rain still fell heavily, but she pressed through it along the deserted high street until she came to her goal.

The smith was a large man, as smiths often were, she supposed, with a dark face and enormous arms. The flood had not stayed his work today; his forge was brilliant red already and as she entered he was setting a glowing horseshoe to the anvil with a pair of tongs, a hammer in his other hand.

“G’day, mum. How might I be helping you?”

“Good day. I need an axe. I’ve nothing to pay you with, but I am sure you will be tremendously happy with the outcome of my work with it, as will everybody. Except perhaps Reverend Abbot, of course. Ah, there is just the tool I require.” She crossed to the axe leaning against the wall and hefted it with some effort. “Good heavens, it’s quite a lot heavier than I had imagined. But it will do splendidly. Thank you, sir.”

He set down his work and towered over her by a head and a half.

“Can’t be letting you take my good axe, mum, especially as I’ve never seen you before.”

“Then may I have your not-as-good axe? Only to borrow. I shall return it anon.”

“Can’t do that either, mum.”

“All right.” She returned the axe to him. “Good day.” She left the shop, went to the bakery, and bought a sweet roll. Then she went to the church and waited. No one bothered her in the corner of the pew that she tucked herself into, and only two others came into the church: a slender, youngish man with yellow hair and a decent face, and the bell ringer before each hour.

At noon she went to the pub, ate lunch, read a bit of the
Book of Common Prayer
that she had taken from the church, and waited. No one bothered her here either. To these people she was not the woman who had played in the mud, danced on tables, and shepherded a flock, rather merely a traveler stranded overnight in Swinly and seeking escape from the inn.

When darkness fell entirely, she returned to the smith’s shop, now uninhabited, took up the axe, and sloshed through the puddles along the high street to the church. No one in this miserable village ever locked their doors. Either they were hopelessly naïve or the flood gave them false assurance of safety from the intrusion of outsiders. Swinly was not on the main highway, of course. Perhaps they were trusting sorts and did not suspect strangers of ill intent.

Tonight she would change their thoughts on that.

The church was a high, airy place, even in the darkness. She walked around its interior perimeter to ensure that there were no worshippers hiding inside before she returned to the west end, where she hid in a shadow behind a column.

Eventually the bell ringer appeared. He was an elderly man, but wiry, and he made his way with an easy gait to a door at the base of the tower.

Calista waited a few minutes longer until he began ringing. She counted the tolls—seven—and grinned. It seemed right that seven would be the last number of rings Old Mary would ever toll.

When the ringer appeared again, walked the length of the church’s nave toward the chancel, and let himself out at the north aisle door, Calista went to it and bolted it shut. Then she returned to the main door at the west end and bolted that too. Taking up the lamp just inside the door, she moved to the narrow, winding staircase that rose into darkness. Lifting the lantern before her and dragging the axe, she climbed the stone stairs.

From her studies of the exterior of the tower from the ground, she knew that at its top it opened into a vast belfry. Halting on the level beneath the belfry, where the stairs let off onto a floor upon which the ringer stood to pull the rope and set the bell in motion, she confirmed her conclusions. Now the rope hung lifelessly from the darkness above. Nothing else about the ringing chamber recommended itself to her: a metal placard with a Latin inscription and several English names, and a single chair were its only accoutrements.

It was clear that she would have to destroy her nemesis at its source.

Returning to the stairs, she climbed at least two dozen more to the belfry. At the top, she set her foot on the catwalk skirting the wall and heaved air into her lungs, startling a pair of doves nestled in a window. With alarmed coos, they fluttered off.

The space was open to the air on all four sides, without netting or any other enclosure. February wind batted at her as she crept around the edges of the catwalk, studying Old Mary from all sides. It was an old-fashioned rope and wheel construction, the bell not affixed in place with a moveable clapper but entirely free-swinging. More than half her height, the bell was not nearly as fearsome a beast as she had expected, fashioned of thick metal and inscribed along the edge with more Latin words. Still, as a whole, it defied easy disassembly. The clapper was fixed too far up into the monster to dislodge without hanging upside down inside the bell. Cutting the rope here at the top where it was easy to repair would be a temporary deterrent at best.

With a larger bell, the solution she had decided upon would not be possible; the beams would be far too well reinforced or perhaps even metal. But the wooden frame from which Old Mary hung looked as old as the rest of the church.

She set down the lantern. Dragging the axe up the ladder built into the narrow strip of wall between corner and open window, she turned around with awkward effort, braced her behind against it, and began to chop at the beam of the frame before her.

The wood was frightfully hard. It came away in only bits and chips. And she could not swing as widely as she wished for fear of losing her footing. But she still had almost an hour.

Several times the axe slipped in her tiring grasp and the blade came perilously close to her limbs. Occasionally, she rested.

By the time the beam had become a sideways hourglass, with only a fragment of hard pulp connecting its two ends, her arms ached viciously and her shoulders and hands were fiery clusters of cramped pain. Music from the fiddler at the pub rose upon the night air, and a breeze ran cold across her sweat-dampened skin.

A faint echo of pounding floated up the tower—pounding at the church door.

It must be eight o’clock. The bell ringer had come to ring the hour.

She swung a final time and cut through the last of the beam. As the two sides of the severed beam bent slowly in on themselves, and creaking and moaning and cracking filled the belfry, only then did Calista realize that when the bell came down, the belfry might too. At the very least, the now wounded frame to which the bell was still attached on one side might collapse.

With her in it. And the lantern.

Dropping the axe and hearing it thunk on the ringing chamber floor far below, she wrapped her hands around the ladder’s shallow rail and in horrified fascination watched the weight of the bell drag down the framework bit by bit. The wind whipped at her hair, plastering locks across her face, and abruptly the lantern light snuffed out.

“Dear God,
save me,
” she whispered.

Lit only by the starlight, with a vast, grumbling, creaking roar, the bell slumped, and then tilted. Finally the supporting frame broke free of the stone and the opposite beam snapped with a horrendous crack. The tower shook, her fingers gripped, and Old Mary crashed down—to the ringing room floor and through it and down—deafening bang after smash after crunch—an endless bellow of destruction into blackness.

Then, except for the wind humming through the belfry, there was silence.

Calista opened her eyes and found herself gripping the ladder railing. Her entire body shook. The broken frame shone bluish-silver, but she could see nothing below. Descent would have to be by touch alone.

Footstep by careful footstep, she found her way around the miraculously intact catwalk to the stone stairs. The tower, it seemed, had been sturdily built—all but the ringing room floor, apparently—and Old Mary, it seemed, had been obliging enough to fall straight downward. On wobbling knees, Calista reached the ground in one raw piece of shaking flesh and bone.

She unbolted the church door and opened it upon a cluster of villagers: the vicar in a dressing gown, the constable with glowing red cheeks from his regular Saturday evening sojourn at the pub, the bell ringer with horrified eyes, and a number of others.

“Well,” she said, blinking in the torchlight and smiling. “That takes care of that.”