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 has been a season of beauty. I should not dismiss that. This land, it takes my breath away when the grass becomes a sea of gold, the morning frost the prettiest lacework in all the land. I have spent many a dawn chasing my children through that frost, their laughter as bright as the song of the bird that lives near the orange grove.
The locals call it a tui. Its plumage is blue-black with a rainbow shine and it has a little white ruff at its neck. Mattie says the bird looks like it’s wearing a tuxedo and he wonders whether it’s off to a party.
Such a lively imagination he has, my son.
A tiny drawing of a tui sat at the end of the line, the image a decoration on a bowl that spilled over with grapes.
I’d never met Clara, would never meet her, and yet I felt a deep well of joy that she’d known some happiness in this cold and inhospitable land so far from her home. But not enough, I thought as I took a break to check on Vansi and Kaea.
No change.
Telling myself that was good news even as their stillness gnawed at me, I returned to my spot and to Clara’s diary.
Blake is . . . lost to me. I have attempted to hold on to hope through the years, have attempted to be the wife he needs in the belief that it would draw him back. He was never the young lover I dreamed of in my girlish days, but, on our wedding day, he was a man proud and intelligent.
When I entered the estate house, he showed me to a salon he’d had created just for me, with furniture he’d had shipped from England. Furniture like that in my parents’ home. So that I would have a piece of England in this land on the edge of the world.
I could’ve loved that man.
But he is gone and the one who lives in Blake’s skin now is a creature disturbing. I would not worry so if it was only my life, but our children, our precious children, how can I protect them against the spreading taint of his madness?
Already, Elizabeth talks to herself when she thinks I am not looking. And she does not talk as children do, to friends created out of air. No, she talks in a way secret and dark, and even more troubling, she looks at her siblings with contempt. They adore her, wish to emulate her, and she wants nothing to do with them.
My Lizzie, my firstborn, she breaks my heart.
“Elizabeth,” I mouthed, finally putting a name to that smirking survivor. And though my bladder had begun to protest, I didn’t stop reading. Couldn’t. My heart was tight, my pulse too fast.
Lizzie hurt Diana today. My baby girl is so small and so much in love with her big sister, and Lizzie burned her. She says it was an accident and that Diana stumbled into her while she was making a candle as she likes to do, but I fear I do not believe her.
The circular burn on Diana’s soft little palm is too perfect, too precise. As if something was held to it until it seared the flesh through and through. I wish my wee babe could speak to me of it, but she does not have the words yet. She just holds up her hand and cries and I cry with her.
It is a terrible thing to write . . . but I am scared of Lizzie. No mother should ever say that, but I cannot squelch the fear inside me. When I look at her, all I see is her father’s madness—but where Blake cannot hide it, is a creature possessed of rages and whispers, Lizzie has a cunning to her that chills my blood.
I will never again leave her alone with her brother and sisters.
I couldn’t help looking over at where Darcie sat curled up in an armchair with a book. Elizabeth’s direct descendent. Linked by a bond of blood to a woman I was now certain had murdered her mother and siblings.
37
Fire.
So much of the Shepherd family history had been written in fire, I thought as I gave in to the urging of my body and closed my laptop to chance the temperatures outside the living room.
The frigid air beyond hit like a slap.
Hugging my arms tight around myself, I raced to the toilet and did my business as fast as possible while telling myself not to turn into a conspiracy theorist. Not only did I have no proof that Elizabeth had set the fire that had left her as the only Shepherd heir, I had zero reason to believe Darcie anything but sane.
Just because my feelings for Bea’s sister were complicated didn’t give me the right to shoehorn her into a psychopathic frame. Because Bea, loyal, beautiful, kind Bea, had shared the same blood.