Winterly by Jeanine Croft

Author:Jeanine Croft [Croft, Jeanine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-08-04T16:00:00+00:00

Part Two

The Bride of Winterthurse

“Better to rein in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”

John Milton, Paradise Lost

Chapter Thirty-Three

Devil In The Mask

Dearest Emma,—I trust you are well and that the ‘haunting strangeness’ and ‘exquisite darkness’ you spoke of does not keep you from writing to your poor monastic relation? I long to hear more of the master of Winterthurse. God bless you and keep you safe,

Mary.

Winterly’s good claret fortified Emma’s blood as her slippers guided her towards the grand staircase. The mask and the Devil’s Bane invested her like armor. She was fatefully eager to meet the master of Winterthurse. The piquancy of that eagerness was only heightened by a nebulous black fear stirring within; fear of her own immorality? She hardly recognized the woman in the red dress who looked and sounded like Emma.

Below her the black and white checkered grand foyer was covered in glass and silver vases of all shapes and sizes. Each vase held a dense bouquet of either white or black roses, filling the air with their mysterious perfume.

Mr. Gore, the butler from London, and the equally cadaverous Mrs. Skinner materialized from the foyer below. Their uncanny black eyes flickered in the light as they peered up at her, but neither said aught. They merely offered identical nods of greeting and then glided towards the south wing like two silent revenants, one servant’s movements a macabre mimicry of the other’s.

The wispy notes of the Requiem Aeternam movement on the harp accompanied her down the curved grand staircase (how appropriate), the melody so restrained and delicate that she could hear her own train rustling down each step in her wake. The music was like a fine silver thread that drew her not towards the library but the other end of the corridor. Emma obeyed the sultry command of those silvery notes and padded softly into the great hall and from thence into the ballroom.

A lone woman was seated on a dais in the center of the ballroom, her entire face covered in a white and gold mute mask. Her voluminous skirts were spread artfully around her so that she appeared hardly human at all but like some golden statue come to life. The gilded lanterns around the ballroom seemed to shed more shadow than light, casting their stippling glow over the walls like watery spangles and spilling out into the cloistered garden spread beyond the wide, mullioned doors. The effect was otherworldly. Only the harpist’s fingers seemed to move, trailing deftly over the strings.

Outside, a sort of labyrinthine avenue of curved mirrors in all shapes and sizes had been set up along the covered colonnade. Emma paused to watch as two mysterious guests in dark dominos danced eerily before their distorted reflections. They appeared amused despite the frightening creatures mirroring their movements in the glass, and before long they disappeared further into the maze of mirrors. There were more lanterns strung from the trees in the garden, like floating silver orbs, but one had to pass the grotesque mirrors to enter that luminous Eden.

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