Barbara Hancock - Silent Is the House

Secrets beckon where ghosts walk.

Angelica Peters has accepted an unexpected invitation to Allen House, the Long Island mansion she would’ve inherited but for a mysterious estrangement. Since her parents’ fatal accident, she’s casting about for a safe harbor, a connection, a family.

Angelica is uneasy about finally meeting Victoria Allen, the maternal grandmother she’s been forbidden to see all her life. She hardly expects the warm reception she receives—from most of the household. But Owen Ward, who grew up at Allen House and has long been Victoria’s heir, is keeping his distance. Maybe he doesn’t trust Angelica’s motives…or maybe he doesn’t trust himself to be near her. Their attraction is elemental, excruciating, exquisite.

But thoughts of passion in Owen’s arms become tangled with fear when a ghost haunts Angelica’s every move. Is the specter an echo of the past…or an omen of black deeds yet to come?

Silent is the House

Barbara J. Hancock

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Todd

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Come, the wind may never again

Blow as now it blows for us;

And the stars may never again shine as now they shine;

Long before October returns,

Seas of blood will have parted us;

And you must crush the love in your heart, and I the love in mine!

~Emily Bronte

Chapter One

I pricked my finger on the stickpin. A fat, dark droplet of blood fell on the yellowed ivory vellum. It smudged one corner of the signature on the handwritten invitation. I could imagine an austere woman scratching those few wavering lines with an antique fountain pen. And now the n on her Victoria Allen was drowned in my blood.

Drowned.

The sharp pain in my finger was a sudden contrast to the numb I experienced everywhere else. My parents had died in a sailing accident off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard a month ago. I looked at the carnation and the bloody pin through its stem that had bitten me. Every year for twenty-one years, I’d received a pink carnation in October on my birthday. Even as a child, when I would have preferred a fashion doll, the flowers had fascinated me. I kept them all—gone dry to brittle petals in an antique jewelry box.

And now, this year, something different arrived at the same time, an invitation to return to my mother’s childhood home.

Allen House.

A month too late for her to go with me. We’d never been close, but I ached over the injustice. The estrangement had never been discussed. It was like the wind or the sea—ever present. Unconsciously, I lifted my injured finger to my lips, but I wasn’t soothed, because just then my old jewelry box began to play. I jumped, startled, as a tiny ballerina that had been frozen in place for years jerked to life, seemingly spurred awake by the tinny notes of Brahms’s “Lullaby.”

I suddenly remembered with perfect clarity the day my mother had broken it. The music box had been a gift from my grandmother, too, or so we assumed. Neither it nor the carnations had ever arrived with a card. That year, the box arrived with the carnation, but it hadn’t been new. The sides had already been worn from use. With the passionate obsession of a young seven-year-old girl, I’d played and played the tune. Winding and winding and winding the aged mechanism to see the miniature porcelain doll pirouette. I’d recently become a dancer myself, with weekly lessons and closets stuffed with sparkling tutus. I remembered imagining that my grandmother knew this…and cared.

After what must have been the millionth turn of the little brass key my mother had snapped. She’d already pleaded a headache. I had selfishly continued to play the box. But I remember my shock when my normally quiet parent had stepped into my room to wrench the little ballerina in the opposite direction until a loud crack ended her dance forever.

Or so I’d thought.

I don’t know why my heart lurched painfully in my chest. I don’t know why I looked guiltily around my empty room as if the ballerina might offend my mother even weeks after her death. Maybe I looked for clues as to how the broken, unwound mechanism had suddenly found a second life?

The day was gloomy and dark. The room was unlit save for a single dim lamp in the corner. I had been sleepless and plagued by nightmares for weeks. I blamed the pregnant silence of shadows in every corner for that aching lethargy.

It was then that I noticed the dark smear of my blood on the ballerina’s crumpled gown. More than her sudden resurrection, more than the gloom, the blood on the tiny doll’s dress seemed a horror out of proportion to its reality. Her little body locked on pointe for eternity jerked as it moved. I shivered as the damaged mechanism persistently ground out the tortured tune, one laboring plink after another, until I couldn’t bear the tormented dance any longer.

I put the fresh carnation in the music box with its twenty predecessors and quickly shut the lid…only to have my heart lurch again when the song continued for several more impossible notes.

The broken music box had always haunted me. It had been a constant reminder of the potential for angry reaction that hid beneath my mother’s placid exterior. There was a raw edge beneath her surface that I grew to fear and was in constant dread of bringing forth through some careless action of my own. I had grown up learning a whole set of unspoken rules about what to do and what not to do. Even as an adult, even when my parents were away, I was as thoughtful as I could be. But now the music played again as if driven to it by some maddening unstoppable force. There was no one for its tune to anger now. The house was silent save for my own pounding heart.

Finally, finally, the last metallic plinks ended and I was left alone with my throbbing finger and the bitter smell of dried carnations resurrecting the past.

* * *

The trip from our house in Bar Harbor, Maine, to Long Island wasn’t a long one, but I’d been tense the whole way. I was still a little breathless when the airport taxi drove me to Allen House. My trip had been uneventful but harried because I was unused to travel and especially to traveling alone. The long driveway, surprisingly pitted and overgrown by hanging trees, jarred my stiffly-held back. The cab driver cursed several branches that screeched along the dented yellow sides of his sedan. It felt like a rainforest expedition to a lost city, even more so when the drive opened up into a semicircle sweep that brought us to the sprawling house itself.

Allen House was old-money big. Turn of the century railroad and banking billions to be exact, and pretty much a testament to why something much smaller in a subdivision and built from simpler materials might be more practical for future generations.

The slate roof looked green and patchy. The stone walls looked like a hundred years of Gold Coast wind and rain had worn them down to thin mints. And the square footage made me wince at the thought of energy costs. The driver was more impressed.

“Fuck me,” he cursed in awe. “It’s like something out of The Great Gatsby.”

Yes. It was an Art Deco masterpiece. It must have been amazing, say, in 1920 when flappers might have tagged it “the cat’s meow.”

Even now I was impressed. My mother had left all this like a Vanderbilt running away with a John Smith, and I was back. In the middle of the driveway’s circle, in front of the house, was a fountain that easily could have graced a Parisian square. And though it was dry and cracked and no longer flowing with water, I was suddenly, fiercely glad that I’d packed my mother’s designer luggage, and my pitiful broken jewelry box of dried carnations was hidden out of sight. My mother and father had managed to do well for themselves. They had been involved in finance. The details of which, with my dancer’s heart, I’d never been interested to hear even if there had been the slightest chance that they might confide in me.