Hester Fox - The Widow Of Pale Harbour

“Not from around here, are you?”

Stopping in his tracks, Gabriel reluctantly turned back. He took a fortifying breath. “No, not from around here.”

The man who spoke had light brown skin and a musical voice with an island lilt. “Thought you might not be local,” he said. “Not with that accent.”

Gabriel hadn’t bothered trying to disguise the brusqueness of his lower-class voice; he felt comfortable here on the docks in a way he hadn’t in the Marshalls’ dining room. But apparently he had been found out as an outsider anyway.

“Might as well be from Dixie,” rejoined the other man.

“Concord,” Gabriel told them, and then added, “Massachusetts. My name is Gabriel Stone.”

“Well, Gabriel Stone from Concord, I’m Manuel,” said the man with the lilting voice. “And this useless lug is Jasper.”

Jasper nodded his introduction. He was young, red-haired and pale, with a smattering of freckles. “You’re the one taking over the old church, then?” he asked Gabriel without preamble.

“That’s right.” Gabriel hoped that his curt response would be the end of it, but Jasper was giving him an assessing look, and both of the men’s curiosity seemed to be piqued.

Manuel raised a brow. “What is it you’ll be preaching?”

Damn it. Gabriel had memorized his little speech, which he had given some dozen or so times in the past week. Unsurprisingly, it came out mechanical and dry.

“Transcendentalism. It’s the belief that God is in nature, and that the answers of the universe can be found within man instead of without. The spirit comes from nature and so knows more than our minds. It’s, uh...” He paused, trying to remember all the correct words. “It’s very popular in Concord,” he finished lamely.

There was painful silence until Manuel finally said, “Meaning no disrespect, but you don’t do much in the way of putting a polish on your creed. If Saint Peter had been as ho-hum in his preaching, then I doubt Jesus would have had a church to name him the rock of.”

The man was right, of course. Without conviction in his words, Gabriel came off as a charlatan. “Well, if you change your minds, you’re always welcome.” He was just about to turn to leave when Jasper stopped him again.

“Seeing as you’re new here, you wouldn’t happen to be looking for some help around the house, would you? A cook, maybe?”

“I might. Why?” Gabriel had imagined that he would keep his own council, moving about an empty house as a monk might a cell, reveling in the solitude. But the mundane day-to-day tasks of keeping a house were proving a drudgery, and the night crept in so close and thick that he longed for some sound other than the groaning of the wind. A light footstep around the house would be welcome, and that was to say nothing of a hot meal. For the past week, he’d been subsisting entirely on bread and molasses and the charity of the townsfolk, the latter of which he was eager to stop using.

“My sister, Fanny, she needs a new position.”

“Does she have references?”

Jasper’s sharp green eyes darkened. “She works up at the castle for that woman ,” he said, barely able to choke out the last word.

Gabriel looked between the two men, brow raised. “Woman?”

Manuel gave a jerk of his head toward the hill. “Mrs. Carver,” he said. “The widow.”

Her name had now made its way to his ears several times over the course of the past week, usually in conjunction with the shaking of heads and disdainful grimaces. The people here spoke as if the devil himself was in their midst, and Gabriel was growing more and more curious about this almost mythical figure.

“It’s not a fit place for a young lady of her birth to work,” Jasper continued, his jaw tight. “Me and my sister might be fallen on hard times, but we’re of good stock, and it’s beneath her to be scrubbing away and laundering for the likes of her .”

Mr. Marshall’s warning came back to him. “People here really believe she killed her husband, then?”

Manuel spat in the dirt and went back to unloading crates without a word.

“She’s as guilty as sin,” Jasper said, his gaze still trained somewhere past the hill. “She’s the worst sort of fraud, living in her grand house like a lady, as if she’s better than the rest of us. Meanwhile, her hands are stained with blood.”

“I see,” Gabriel said, surprised at the force of the young man’s words.

“She doesn’t leave her grounds, thinks she’s too good to mix with the likes of us. But she’s not too good to work Fanny like a slave.”

Gabriel rubbed at his jaw, considering the proposition. “Send your sister to the church cottage tomorrow, and I’ll see what I can do.”

The distant, steely look in Jasper’s eyes softened into genuine relief and gratitude, and he took Gabriel’s hand, shaking it heartily. “I will. Thank you, sir.”

Gabriel said goodbye to the men and left them to their work. But instead of continuing to the post, he looped the long way around from the docks so Jasper wouldn’t see where he was going.

He wasn’t sure why he found himself drawn to the house on the hill, but his feet carried him there as if they knew the answer. For the first time in months, Gabriel’s mind was preoccupied with something other than his loss, his restless heart. He wanted to know why everyone here seemed so very determined to keep him away from the widow who lived on the hill. And if the people of Pale Harbor would give him only fairy stories and gossip about the notorious Mrs. Carver, then he would get the real story himself.

The trees hid what a grand house it really was, with its two-story facade of glass windows facing the harbor, flanked with ostentatious turrets in the Gothic style. The confusion of architectural styles and additions gave it a certain vernacular charm, but it was far from the secluded, ramshackle estate he had envisioned. The grounds teemed with activity: a squirrel chittered nervously in a tree, the grass had been raked free of fallen leaves, and the garden beds were mulched and fresh. From somewhere around back came the rhythmic pounding of an ax. For a house that had created such unease in the town, it was remarkably benign in all appearances.

A movement flickered above him from the windows, and Gabriel stopped short, craning his head up. The curtain in the window stirred, and then fell back into place, but not before he’d glimpsed the sliver of a face.

If Gabriel had thought the Marshalls wealthy and above him, their home was nothing compared to the scale of Castle Carver. What in the hell was he thinking? What would he possibly say to this woman? But he had come this far, and his curiosity had reached a peak. Gabriel took the five shallow brick steps that led up to the front door and knocked.

There was no answer. He stepped back to crane his head up to the windows again, but it was still, and no one peered back down at him. Perhaps it was true what they said: not that she was a witch, of course, but that she was a recluse, a madwoman.

The sound of the ax splitting wood had stopped, and just as Gabriel was reluctantly going back down the steps, he ran into a weathered old man, clutching an ax in his meaty hands.

“Excuse me. I’m looking for—”

“Mrs. Carver don’t take callers,” the man said. “You’re wasting your time knocking.”

Everything in the man’s posture indicated that he didn’t want Gabriel to linger for a second longer on the grounds. But Gabriel wasn’t in a hurry. He crossed his arms and squinted up into the cloudless sky. “Unnaturally warm weather, isn’t it?”