Free HartsLove by K.M. Grant

. after . . . after we’ve used them.’ He wanted to say, ‘
after The One has won the Derby
,’ but could not quite form those words. He no longer wanted to hurt the horse, but that did not mean he believed in it, and even for Daisy’s sake he could not pretend otherwise. He picked up the lamp. ‘Shall we?’
    Rose tensed. ‘Now?’
    â€˜Why not?’ He turned. ‘Come on!’ he said, and strode purposefully out.
    Rose felt obliged to follow him. Lily put down her birdcage and followed Rose. The others followed her. Down the passage they trooped, past Rose’s room, and Lily’s, past the room Clover and Columbine shared, past the old nursery, past the room that had once been their nanny’s, past rooms unused for sixty years, past Garth’s room set into the tower. In single file they skirted the spiral staircase that circled dizzily down from the top of the castle to the bottom and swung right-handed into a wider, grander passage, with ill-fitting mullioned windows through which small draughts constantly disturbed the de Granville battlestandards hanging from the beams. This was their father’s passage. They tiptoed quickly past the Cannibal and past the Earl’s Room, where their father slept. They could hear Charles moving about and none of them wanted him to ask where they were going.
    At the end of this passage, again turning right-handed, the castle softened into their mother’s domain. This passage was narrow, matching the south-east wing, and between long lancet windows overlooking the courtyard closely hung watercolours of flowers made a painted garden. It smelled like a garden too, for though everything was covered in a glazy film of dust, Mrs Snipper still hung bags of lavender and rose petals behind the curtain pelmets.
    At their mother’s door, Garth stood back for Rose. ‘I can’t,’ she said. Lily shook her head. In the end, it was Clover or Columbine who pushed the door open. Garth held up the lamp. The furniture was sheeted, the room icy and as dismally tidy as the room of a dead person whose personal effects nobody quite likes to move. It was at that moment Rose realised she had been hoping that their mother might actually be there; that somehow she would have materialised from Daisy’s cobweb and be sitting at her dressing table, putting up her hair. She knew her disappointment to be ridiculous but felt it keenly nonetheless.
    Daisy slid past and hobbled straight towards the big dressing room on the far side, in which, though they had never actually been in it, they understood all their mother’s clothes had hung. The door was unlatched. Slowly, Daisy pulled it open, dreading to find it empty. That would certainly mean their mother was never coming back. For a second, there was only darkness; then, as though waking from a spell, the silks and satins began to rustle andshimmer. ‘Come in,’ they seemed to whisper. ‘We’ve been waiting.’ Daisy found Garth behind her. ‘Everything’s here,’ she said. ‘Listen! Look!’ They listened and looked together.
    It took only three lamps and the pulling off of the sheets from the furniture for the bedroom to look more as they remembered it. Even the chill seemed to lift. Far from taking everything, their mother seemed to have taken nothing with her at all: not the china vase filled with hairpins; not the tiny muslin nightcap that always rested on a small cushion like a crown; not her silver-backed brushes. A bottle of cologne, half used, sat where it had been left, with a little heart-shaped cambric bag next to it embroidered with ‘CdeG’. Rose picked the bag up. ‘Clara de Granville,’ she said. ‘I stitched this.’ She opened it and started when out of it fluttered what seemed to be dead moths. Lily caught them as they fell. They were not moths. ‘A rose petal, a lily petal, a daisy, a columbine spur, a