“So the earl is here?” The earl was in residence. This was good news. She had been a little worried that he might be monitoring the estate from London.
“Yes. Arrived a seven months ago. Been trying to restore the place. Not much good will it do. The ghosts are stirring again. He’s upset the balance.”
“The balance?” A sense of warning niggled at the back of her head, but she forced herself to ignore it—and to ignore the sense that she was losing her mind.
The gardener appeared to really see her for the first time. “The balance. Between the evil and the good. Evil rules the castle. Stalks the halls and torments those who dare to live inside.”
Icy fingers raked down Jane’s back.
“Is Lord Weymouth in danger? Being in the house?” It only occurred to her after she asked that the gardener might be right, and she might be in danger, too.
The gardener looked out to sea, his eyes dark. “I don’t know. But if you plan to stay here, watch yourself, miss. Evil isn’t always what you’d expect. It can take many forms.” His voice dropped. “Many forms.”
He turned and walked away. The momentary comfort his presence provided her vanished as she gazed upon his retreating form.
She wanted to know what he meant, but she doubted she’d get much more from him. She turned her attention back to the castle. The high windows reflected the sunlight as it started to peek out from the clouds.
The image of the lady in white flashed through her mind again, blinding her to the present for a brief instant. Her heart clenched in sadness, and fear rippled through her in tiny little waves, enough to keep her on edge. Had she witnessed a true apparition, or had her own imagination run away with her? She’d half hoped her dreams of being pushed from the cliffs had been only nightmares, yet that woman looked so familiar.
She had always believed in supernatural things. She was no longer a practicing Catholic in the churchgoing sense, but her faith was strong enough that she respected the truth that there were things in this world she couldn’t understand. Like ghosts. And now she was going to enter a place bleeding with evil. She reached up to clutch the medallion of the archangel Michael that hung around her neck. The metal was warm from lying against her skin. It was a small comfort in the face of the looming castle and the fears of what might lurk in its shadows.