Page 54 of Rainshadow

Ethan laughed. “You’ve committed murder, Flora.” He said it so casually.

“I did it for you,” she said, her voice a whisper. “I love you, Ethan.”

“I’m flattered,” he said, then smiled at her.

“I felt terrible today,” she said. “How… how often do we…”

“Well,” he said. “You need to get in touch with the doctor. He’ll get you some supplements. B-12 injections do wonders. I wish they were around when I started out. It’ll really help your recovery. And to answer your question, if it gets too much, I will leave and hunt.”

Flora realized with a creeping anxiety that that’s what had been in the syringes in Sylvia’s bedroom. “She was never addicted to anything.”

“Addicted?”

“You let me think she was an addict.”

“Flora,” Ethan said. “You thought whatever you needed to think. Come now. Don’t make me into some monster.”

“You are, though,” she said. “You’re a vampire.”

Ethan smiled at her. “You wanted Rainshadow, and now it’s yours.”

“Yes,” Flora said. She felt a satisfaction at that, but it was cooled. “It’s mine. I never have to leave.”

“You never will, my darling.”

Flora felt better the next day and had an easier time getting up to work. She let the horses out and cleaned their stalls. She worked Mars out, then Zeta. She started readying the lavender for spring. There was a faint scent of rot in the air, mixing with the mist from the sea, but she didn’t let herself think about it. She called the cook and housekeeper and asked them if they’d resume work. They refused. She sighed, and started making a list of people she would need to hire.

In the late afternoon, bored out of her mind, she went into Sylvia’s room. She tried on her dresses, her sweaters, her shoes (too small, which surprised her). She rifled through her silk negligees and bras and underwear. She put on her Chanel makeup and Harry Winston jewelry and gazed at herself in the mirror. When Ethan surprised her there, standing in the doorway of her bedroom, he smiled at her in a teasing way.

“You shouldn’t try to become Sylvia,” he said.

“I’m not,” Flora said, gasping. “I’m not, sorry. I was just messing around.”

“Messing around by rifling through a dead woman’s things.” He was still teasing her.

“No.” She felt her heart thumping. “I mean, yes, but it isn’t like that. You make it sound so… morbid.”

Ethan shrugged. “I’m a vampire. Morbid doesn’t bother me.”

Flora looked back at herself in the mirror. She looked like a child trying on her mother’s makeup and jewelry. She had no mother, though. She felt, suddenly, like crying.

“Have you eaten?” Ethan asked. “We could go out to dinner.”

“Ok,” Flora said, wiping mascara-black tears from her eyes. She couldn’t understand why she was crying.

27

Flora had been the lady of Rainshadow for nearly a week when she found, in the pocket of an old velvet dressing gown, a note with Sylvia’s handwriting. Flora was quite familiar with Sylvia’s handwriting at that point, the woman had made a lot of notes and lists, so finding a note didn’t surprise her. What did surprise her was it seemed to be a code to a safe.

The thought made her heart race.

Flora rushed to the safe, still wearing the long velvet dressing gown, and dialed in the three numbers, 23, 45, 66, biting her lip with anticipation. When the door creaked open, she reached inside and breathlessly pulled out the boxes contained within. Sylvia, after all, had left diamonds as big as acorns sitting in dishes by her sink—what might she actually protect in a safe?

She pulled a heavy shoe box from the back of the safe, sat on the bed, and opened it. Inside was a stack of papers, photos, and one ribbon for a dressage championship. Flora groaned with disappointment. She flipped through the photos—Sylvia as a child in the 1960s, sitting on a pony with one of her parents holding the lead. Sylvia dressed up as an angel for a school play, a beautiful, likely precocious child.

Then she found the diary. She expected it to be Sylvia’s, but it wasn’t. She opened the first page and found the name “Agatha” in loopy, old-fashioned handwriting.

“All I ever wanted,” Agatha wrote on the first page, “was to return to the idyllic world of my childhood, before the war. Being back here, at Stovingsham, made me feel, for once, like I could return to that feeling.”

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