A Taste of Darkness eBook by Amy McCaw & Maria Kuzniar

Author:Amy McCaw & Maria Kuzniar [McCaw, Amy & Kuzniar, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Bess was no warmer in the morning.

I found her in the kitchen, after a labyrinthine walk through desolate, twisting corridors. The kitchen, at least, was warmer, without the smell of mildew detectable in the air.

“You’ll have to be more punctual than this,” Bess snapped when I entered. “The peacocks rise earlier.”

“Pardon me, ma’am – Bess. I got lost.”

“The house isn’t as big as all that,” the housekeeper muttered, giving an old woman I took to be Cook a look that made me flush with shame.

Cook looked me up and down with rheumy eyes, licking her thin, cracked lips as she offered me a bowl of pottage, still warm from the fire. When I took it, she sucked in her thin cheeks, paper over bone, and scowled.

It had been a rough night, full of uncanny dreams of blue-tinged windows, and a waterlogged voice calling to me through rainfall. A cool caress upon my cheek and an ancient name whispered in my ear. When, before dawn, I woke with a film of icy sweat over my body, I attempted once again to light the sodden wood in the grate to no avail, and then spent a good few hours shivering in bed, examining the strangely shaped wall behind me. Unlike the rest of the walls in the room, it was knobbly in one section, like scarred flesh, the stones laid haphazardly before being set hurriedly with lime mortar. The incongruity was bothersome.

“Cook doesn’t speak,” Bess said, sweeping up the ashes from the inglenook.

I had little experience in grand houses, but I had never heard of a housekeeper who stooped so low as to sweep the hearth! That was for the junior maid – for me, surely. It seemed that the hierarchy in this household was utterly fluid.

Like water.

“The fires, girl,” Bess snapped into the fireplace. “The wood is in the store by the solar tower gate in the courtyard.”

She waved a hand that I took to be a dismissal. I had hardly touched my food but was no longer hungry anyway.

The Urgency followed me into the grounds, appearing from behind a curve in the wall. It scratched its nails along the stone, but was, for the first time in memory, silent. It watched me with a cocked head and did not speak. I found this, if possible, more unnerving than the constant whispers of time’s short. I ignored it and sought out the wood store, dodging sleepy peacocks along the way.

When the wood was chopped and the fires lit, the grates swept and the floors washed, when the laundry was hung and the shutters opened, the dusthole cleaned and the shoes shined, the hankies made up and the coffee ground, the breakfast got up and the butter collected from the milk shop – and a dozen other scullion duties seen to – night had once again fallen.

When Cook served lamb cawl before the kitchen hearth, I was blackened with soot and had a fair few bruises on my knees and knuckles, my hands red and raw.

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