Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
It had been the work of long, cold years.
My husband speaks to himself. I do not know if that is strange or not. Perhaps it isn’t. He seems to simply be working out business matters—perhaps it is like writing things down but he wishes to speak them aloud.
As a person who often spoke to myself, I didn’t make too much of that particular note until I read another one, which said:
He is still speaking to himself, but it is more in mutters under his breath now. I hear him inside his secret room where I am not permitted to go, and in other areas of the house when he thinks I am not there.
I do not know if he does it around the servants, but I know that they have begun to give him strange looks. I should not care what the servants think, but they are the only ones close to me.
I know I am their mistress, but there is no one of my station here. I have the servants alone as friends. One of them whispered to me that she found my husband’s desk drawer full of spoons that had gone missing from the kitchen. The housekeeper had been about to blame one of the maids.
I surely do not understand why he would hoard his own silverware.
I quickly switched to the next photograph, the next piece of the entry, but it said nothing about Blake Shepherd’s hoarding behavior.
My husband has cut the household staff in half. He says we have no need for so many people, that they get in his way, and disturb him when he is thinking. Now, it is only the housekeeper, the cook, and one maid.
I wished to keep on my private maid and closest friend, Laura, but he made the decision, and he retained only the older ones. They are fine enough workers, but I cannot talk to them. Without my babe, I think I would surely go mad.
Babe.
What had Darcie said? First baby four years into the marriage? So four years on and she’d still had no agency in her marriage or influence over her husband.
My eyes throbbed from concentrating on the tiny screen, and I knew I should shift to the laptop, but I couldn’t make myself walk away from the window. Because between every sentence, I’d look up to check for the others.
The clouds covered the entire sky now, a boiling black ceiling on the world, and the wind had picked up until the house groaned. No longer did I see any semblance of grass stalks, just a flat sheet of dull beige, and I was sure that some of the rain hitting my window held bits of that mushy ice that turned to sludge on a city street.
I distracted myself by reading more of Clara’s secret diary.
Today, I came in after taking our children for a walk outside to find the entire house dark and cold. My husband had ordered the housekeeper to extinguish every single fire in every single hearth.
The flames hurt his eyes, he said.
I saw fear on the housekeeper’s face, and I cannot blame her. He is changing in ways that scare me, too. At least he rarely comes to my bed. I should not say that. It is not for a wife to say. But where before, I could do my duty, now, I am afraid without knowing why. I pray for the day I fall with child again. He never came to me while I was gravid with our eldest, then again with Matthew.
I looked up again and was so used to not seeing anything that I almost missed the speck of pink in the distance. The instant I realized what it was, I dropped my phone onto the window seat, raced to grab my jacket—dark brown, hiplength, and full of deep pockets—and pulled it on as I ran down the stairs.
17
They’re back!” I yelled out to Aaron as I entered the kitchen.
But I was talking to empty air. The kitchen was silent but for the quiet rumble of the woodstove, everything tidied and put away. Of course it was. It had been at least three hours since I’d left Grace and Aaron. They were probably either upstairs or in another part of the house.
Zipping up my jacket, I went to run outside, only reconsidered what I was doing as I hit the edge of the veranda. I’d do better to get towels ready for the returning group. Stripping off my jacket on that thought, I dumped it on the back of a kitchen chair. The linen cupboard was just off the kitchen to the right, next to the laundry room—which I knew because Darcie had pointed it out.
Thanks to the cleaners her caretaker had hired to prepare the house, there was no shortage of fresh towels. Grabbing armfuls, I took them to the kitchen, the entrance through which the others would enter the house. I also piled up several blankets on the kitchen table, in case any of them wanted to strip down then and there.