Free Renegade by Amy Carol Reeves Page B

father’s mansion, whether it was empty, overgrown with weeds and ivy like the castles and Roman ruins scattered about the isles. Perhaps another family, unafraid of ghosts and shadows, had moved into it, repainting and refurnishing the halls and galleries.
    Her childhood …
    She had been so curious as a child, wandering the estate daily with her governess. Usually it was just herself and the governess—they had a loch very close to the house, and she
had loved taking long walks along the water’s edge in the summers. The waters were often still and slate black, shiny, by late afternoon. She was always thrilled to see her father’s carriage on the estate’s long driveway. And now, despite her eternal eighteen-year-old form, she felt perplexed at that girlish thrill; as best she could remember, her strong, distant father had said less than a hundred words to her in her whole life. A merchant, Joseph Umphrey spent most of his time on business in London, in Edinburgh, or even overseas. She remembered bursting through the front doors on the days of his return, and seeing his hard profile as he sat warming his feet by the fire. She would run to him then, but it was always the same—he would distractedly rumple her hair, his eyes on the fire. As she chattered, he only nodded, his thoughts far away. When her governess took her upstairs to bed, there was always a gift, some expensive gown or doll, something exquisite he had brought back to her from his travels.
    She had often wondered why he didn’t care about her more, why he never wanted to look upon her. She wondered sometimes whether it was because her mother died giving birth to her. She wondered if her father hated her, his only child, for this reason. But then she had no idea whether or not he even loved her mother; the only thing she knew about her was that she was dead, that her name had been Lucy, and that there was a portrait of her hanging in the main gallery. But even the portrait couldn’t reveal to her anything specific about her mama—in the portrait, Lucy Umphrey had ordinary pretty features and an ordinary pretty smile; she wore silks and taffetas and held her small Pekingese in front of a faux pastoral background landscape. She seemed so expressionless, so vague. Whether this was the work of an unskilled artist or whether her mother was unremarkable, Seraphina would never know.
    She had had no other relatives. All her grandparents or cousins were either dead or they lived too far away to see; she often thought bitterly that her life underground, as a monster, seemed so similar, too similar, to her earlier life—isolated, secluded. Even though she was unrelentingly curious about the outside world, she was unable to participate in it, to be part of it. She was simply given beautiful things to placate her.
    Then there was her childhood skin condition. She re-membered screaming in pain when the eczema was at its worst—itchy, scale-like hives, whitish and red splotches. It had been terrible. By the time she was ten she wore long sleeves all the time, even on warm days, just to cover her arms; her arms, especially, had had the pigment altered from all the outbreaks. Anything could bring on an outbreak—a new dress or food, a change in the weather. The skin condition returned often, and became increasingly severe.
    Even now, with the disease gone, she could vividly remember the hot, burning pain. Her governesses had brought physician after physician to help her. She had been soaked in so many medicinal baths; she had taken so many herbs and bitter tonics. One physician had even tried bleeding her. She still remembered her childhood terror as he cut into her arm and began draining the “poisonous blood” into a small bowl. That hadn’t helped her at all. She had merely fainted from the loss of blood.
    She had taken up painting at the age of thirteen, and painted landscapes rich with the eyebright and orchids around the loch. At that time she had been able