16 August

I write this in the panicked dark of the night. There is too much to describe. The events of the day have been more evil than I could have ever anticipated; I once thought I should never forget the day I met the rector of the little church in Dorset, but such nonsense will find no space in my memories when compared to the tragedy that befell not only myself, but all I have met in England. Had I but died! I wish for it, pray for it, beg for it, anything to give back what has been lost today, but as it stands, I am nearly alone and filled with nothing but remorse for what my life has become.

We fled as fast as we could from the inn between my two homes, hardly wasting any time to thank Mr. Bakersfield for his enduring hospitality. I would give him everything I ever owned for the rest of my life as thanks, if only I could return to Evelyn and find her safe. Lord DeCourt had the foresight to send the carriage driver ahead of us, leaving behind a horse so that we might follow, in the hopes that he could prepare the way and deliver news of our impending arrival to our friends. We packed as quickly as we could, but there was hardly anything holding us to the inn. Surely, neither the Lord nor myself could have expected to be imprisoned for anything more than a week, much less the majority of the year!

Was it silly of me to regret having missed the spring season? If the pattern of my life continued, spring would be a fantasy better dreamt about than anything I could hope to experience myself in this country. Would I remain for it? It was a curious question, but one I had no time to devote my fancies to.

By midnight of the fifteenth, the Lord and I had departed, riding away on his silver-brown horse into the warmth of the summer air. Even as we fled, I marvelled at the weather. Gone were the mountains of snow and the endless landscapes of white! It felt like only yesterday that I had been surrounded by winter in every aspect. Where was I now, that grasses grew green and trees swayed with fresh arms of coloured leaves? I tell you, even knowing what I do know and having seen the terror that awaited us in Cambridge, the change of seasons in my sickened slumber still give me cause confusion and wonder.

The ride back swift. We stopped for nothing, waiting on no one. There was nothing for us between the inn and the house, at any rate, and the scenery gradually grew more civilised as the hours rushed by. We arrived at Cambridge early in the morning, when the birds still slept in their nests, when the people still hid in their homes under the guise of snoring away their dreams. It was a surreal experience, to bounce on the back of that sweating horse on the empty streets. Only a cat watched us ride by, its yellow eyes watching impassively as we neared our doom.

"He's bound to have opened the gates," the Lord muttered under his breath. Though we were (oddly, strangely!) in the summer, the night was still cool and bade him shiver under the milky light of the moon. He looked the very picture of a ghost, and I was glad not to have seen him out of my window that night. He said no more, but urged the horse onward, eyes staring hard into the foggy gloom. Even as we approached the boundaries of his magnificent estate, he pricked his ears and flinched at every sound, as though he knew of what waited for us in the dark of his house. Nothing, however, moved. There was no sign that anything was different, that anything had changed. All was as it had been eight months ago, excepting, of course, the snow.

As we approached the house, the wind picked up some, rustled the trees around us as if to welcome us home. "Careful now," the Lord murmured, sliding down awkwardly and holding his hand out for mine. I wondered what he'd looked like some twenty years past, when he was whole and healthy and as intimate with the knowledge of the horse as his own body. I stared at him, picturing him in his handsome youth, but there was no sign of the frivolous, spoiled boy now. His eyes were narrowed, focused on something I couldn't see.

There was no time to ask him what it was he looked for. Once he made sure I was safe on my two feet, he quickly tied the horse to a nearby tree (taking a quick second to pat it gratefully on the neck and point it to a nearby pool of water) and pulled me along, limping severely without the use of his cane. What a sight we must have looked like! My hair loose and flowing like my muddied dress, his entire visage rippling like moonlight across the long field before the house. Once we had run to the front door, he hammered on it before throwing his meagre weight against the magnificent wooden frame. "Dammit all!" he swore, beating his fists against it. "He hasn't unlocked it... Where is he?" Just as the Lord made to turn and find some other entrance to the house, the door groaned and gave in, eerily swinging into the thick darkness that lay in wait. The carriage driver had not opened the door, that much was obvious, but someone had. I pulled on his sleeve with a horrified expression (how recently had someone trespassed on the property?), but the Lord merely moved on, stepping over the threshold and staring at what should have been a welcome sight after a long, hard journey.

There was nothing that I could see, but my eyes quickly focused and noticed a table in the centre of the floor, a table I could not remember having been so inconveniently placed during my last visit. Settled on the small surface, illuminated by a nearly extinguished candle, was a box.

"Don't you dare touch that, Ms. Peterson!" He made to stop me, but it was a gift for us, was it not? Someone had known of our arrival, and had made their presence known by this strange present. I felt in the pit of my stomach that our carriage driver had not met a pleasant end before I picked up the box and held it to the candlelight.

"It's a pen," I said quietly, once the lid had been folded back and the contents illuminated. "Just... a pen."

"A -why?" The Lord's chest rose and fell as he took in several thin, panicked breaths.

"It's engraved. Look." I held it out, and he took it in his pale hands, frowning over the slender instrument.

"Giaour, it says. I... I know no man by this name."

"It's a poem," I whispered, pulling the Lord's hands down and replacing the pen. "Lord Byron, he wrote it after journeying in the East. It... tells of an infidel, of a love affair in which... in which the adulteress is thrown into the sea." Lord DeCourt stared at me with an unreadable expression. "You would not have heard of it, not with your specific interests, but it is something of a popular tale amongst the sort of readers I am involved with..." How loathe I was to know something the Lord did not!

"Why is this waiting for us? What does an Eastern adulteress have to do with my house?" The Lord blinked and turned, if possible, paler. "Is that all that happens to the woman?"

"I... yes. The murderer, however..." I looked down at the pen and swallowed hard. "May I recite what I remember from the poem?"

There was a tense pause as the Lord looked at the pen, his nose casting a sharp shadow against his face in the flickering remnants of candlelight. "What harm could it do?" he said at last, his skin prickling with the bumps of the cold.

"But first, on earth as vampire sent,

Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:

Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

And suck the blood of all thy race;

There from thy daughter, sister, wife,

At midnight drain the stream of life;

Yet loathe the banquet which perforce

Must feed thy livid living corse:

Thy victims ere they yet expire

Shall know the demon for their sire,

As cursing thee, thou cursing them,

Thy flowers are withered on the stem."

How unfortunate that the poem had been a favourite of mine! Never before had I regretted knowing a line of literature in my life. As I recited the words, the Lord trembled, grasped the small table, and seemed to convulse with some strange fear.

"Winnifred," he said in a hollow voice, once I had wept out the last line, all pretense for social courtesies gone, "we must go the Radcliffe house. At once."

"What does it mean?" I sobbed, but he did not answer, only pulled me once more into the night, mounting the shining horse as soon as he could and hoisting me behind him. As I gripped his waist, my tears blinding me to the blurred journey along the road, I could only replay the words in my head and wonder what any of it meant, why any of it was related to the mystery I had become entrenched in. I already, I think, knew what the poem meant, what the doctor had intended in leaving the words behind. Surely, it had been him who'd taken the driver unawares, who'd broken into the house, who'd left behind our cryptic gift. What else could he have prepared for us in the time it took to ride to his grim abode of death and decay?

I can very nearly say with absolute power that neither the Lord nor myself expected to see the doctor on the road in front of the house, his familiar cloak billowing in a gust of cool wind. All of the subterfuge and mystery, and yet he stood there, expecting. That, I guarantee you, shall never leave my mind, that image of his dark figure against the shine of the moon. How curious the comparison; my companion, dressed in white, racing towards my captor in black.

We came to a sudden stop, the Lord sliding down and stumbling as his leg gave out. He hit the ground with a loud crack, a sound so stark against the quiet night that I swear the trees gasped nearly as loud as I. Before I could make my way from the horse's heaving back, the doctor approached, a hand held out as if in aid. I saw his face, though, the expression that was etched like the words on the graves in the little churchyard, and I knew at once that he meant the Lord nothing but harm.

"Stop!" I cried, but I could do nothing but watch as the doctor brought his foot down on the leg of the Lord, another crack sounding in the night. This time, a scream came from the mouth of the Lord, a scream that echoed endlessly, hopelessly. Was there nobody to hear, to help?

"Haven't you heard," the doctor said, a grin lighting up his horrid face, "that a break makes for a cleaner recovery!" As the Lord screamed on the ground, the doctor stalked his way to the horse and wrenched me free, picking me up as though my kicks and cries were the light brushes of a butterfly's wings. I could only sob as he dragged me past the Lord, leaving yet another one of my friends behind in the stark image of my own failures.

"Hush, little Winnifred," he whispered in my ear, heaving the front door open as though it wasn't there. "We don't want to miss the birth of our darling Evelyn's child, now do we?" I could do nothing but cry as he pulled me past the woeful corpse of the bear, too frightened of what lay ahead to ask when Evelyn had become pregnant.

The nightmare persisted up each one of those rotten steps, until the doctor flung me down beside the door of what I had known only in passing to be his room. "Go!" he cried, raising his voice against the echoing screams of the Lord outside, of Evelyn inside. I had no choice but to crawl forward in the dark, pushing my way into the doctor's room and the eventual arms of my friend.

I tell you, I hardly expected to awake that morning in a different month, reunited with Evelyn under circumstances as bloody as these. Her hair was a mess, unkempt across her face and shoulders. She had lost too much blood - it stained what had once been a white nightdress, covered her legs and her hands and the carpet all around her. Those eyes, once so full of life, full of that sparkling brown light, were almost dead. These eyes looked at me as I crawled my way forward and pulled her hands in mine, filled with fresh tears as I pressed my lips to hers.

"Push," was all I said when I pulled back, and Evelyn Thomas pushed until the scream shattered a glass somewhere in the dark, until another voice joined in, a new voice of fresh life, cursed to a miserable existence in the house of that evil doctor. She pushed until the blood bubbled forth, filled her lap with a fresh bath of dark liquid, soaked the carpet and my own dress straight through. She pushed until she lay limp, too tired to scream anymore, too tired to try and breathe.

I held in my hands the produce of eight long months, of mystery and isolation and torture. It squalled and screamed as loud as its mother, and I held it to Evelyn's chest, wrapped her arms around it, whispered in her ear that she had given birth to the doctor's child. As I felt myself sob, she reached her hand out and gripped my neck with newfound strength, her nails digging into my skin and tearing it open.

"It... it isn't his," she gasped in shuddering breaths, her lips ragged and cracked. "It isn't his." The effort was too much for her, and she collapsed against the ground, the baby's cries growing harsh against her heavy breast. "Thank God!"

"Where is he?" I asked, realising that if Evelyn was right, then the doctor must know, too. "Evelyn, does he live?"

"Do you wish that ungrateful, prideful brat was here to help, Ms. Peterson?" The doctor had appeared in the doorway, his figure blocking out any of the light of the hall. The smell of blood seemed to have drawn him, or was it the feeble moaning of his dying wife? Whatever it was, his anger towards Atticus Andrews had vanished upon seeing the hopeless state of Evelyn, and he fell to his knees beside her. Cupping her head in his lap, he pressed his hands to her face, her neck, her chest. I did not recognise the look on his face. Who was this man? Had he not caused the Lord outside irreparable damage just minutes ago? Was he not the purveyor of pain for an unknowable amount of people? Why then, were his reddish-brown eyes filled with tears, was he weeping over Evelyn's ghostly face?

Reaching his hand up to his mouth, he bit down on his own palm until blood ran down the bone-like skin. Desperately, he pressed it to Evelyn's own mouth, but she did not drink of it, only limply gurgled as the blood filled her throat, choked her further. "Stop it," I begged hoarsely, but the doctor shook me off and again, insistently pressed his palm to her lips and begged her to drink.

I did not understand, you must know, could not see why the doctor had pressed this strange gift to Evelyn's pale lips. Now, of course, it makes perfect sense, pieces together the grim clues I have been presented for the last year, but as I watched Evelyn's eyes grow cold and her hands fall limply to the floor, I knew nothing, only that I was too late to help her.

As the doctor himself began to scream, a cry that rivalled any I had heard before, I knew there was only one thing I had left to do. I tripped over my dress, took in my arms the only remnant of the bonds I had fostered in England and slipped out of the room, pulling myself along with only the strength of Evelyn's last words to carry me. Once I had stumbled down the stairs, away from the grieving cries of a man who had only ever wanted his own family, into the street, I tripped over the twisted limbs of Lord DeCourt, just barely saving the babe from a rather quick end by rolling at the last second.

"Ms. Peterson," he said weakly, tears slick across his face, "Ms. Peterson, please. Take the horse, and go."

"What of you?" I wept, but he shook his head and wheezed where he lay.

"I am no more," he replied with a wavering smile. "Think of me fondly, but I beg you, take the baby and go! Anywhere but here." He pushed me away, back to my feet, and I had no choice but to climb atop the horse of Lord DeCourt, and ride into the night, my bloodstained dress rippling in the wind, the baby sobbing in my arms until we came to a stop, exhausted atop the steps of Evelyn Thomas' house.

When I laid eyes on her father, I fell from the horse's back, the babe wrapped in my arms, and I knew no more that night.