Chapter One: The Illness in Briar Hollow - Fifteen Nights with the Beast for the Ruby Rose

By the time the church bell tolled eight across Briar Hollow, Grover had coughed blood twice.

The first time, he had turned discreetly towards the wall and hidden the handkerchief beneath the bedclothes as if he thought the room itself might be deceived. The second time, there was no concealing it. The linen came away dark and wet in his trembling hand, and for one dreadful instant the whole world seemed to narrow to that single stain.

No one said a word.

The house had become accustomed to silence.

It lingered in the corridors, under the stair, behind half-closed doors, and in the chill spaces between one footstep and the next. Once, the old manor at the edge of Briar Hollow had been full of life. It had not been the grandest house in the county, but it had been a happy one. In better years, candles had glowed warmly in every window on winter evenings, laughter had drifted from the drawing room after supper, and the garden terraces had blazed each June with roses so richly red that strangers slowed on the road below just to admire them.

Those days felt impossibly far away now.

The terraces stood stripped and black under the autumn rain. The rosebushes were all thorns and ruin. The sky had darkened before the day was fairly done, and the wind moved restlessly over the roof like a thing unwilling to leave. Indoors, fires were kept smaller than they once had been, and even the servants, faithful though they remained, spoke in lowered voices as if afraid to disturb the shadow lying over the household.

Because that shadow had a name.

Grover.

Isla stood at her father’s bedside, one hand resting on the coverlet, the other wrapped round a bowl of cool water that had long since lost its chill in the heat of the sickroom. The fire in the grate gave only a modest light. It gilded the edges of the bedposts, caught faintly in the medicine bottles lined up on the table, and threw soft unsteady shadows over Grover’s face.

He had once seemed impossible to diminish. Tall, broad, capable, with a voice that carried across orchards and a presence that made problems appear smaller merely by his standing near them, Grover had been the sort of man one assumed would remain solid forever. Even after his wife’s death, when grief had carved the first true wound into him, he had endured. He had raised four daughters with more tenderness than strictness, managed his estate despite the years growing leaner, and met every fresh difficulty with the blunt determination of a man who simply refused to be beaten.

But illness had altered him with terrible speed.

His cheeks had hollowed. His skin had turned pale and thin as candle wax. A grey weariness sat beneath his eyes. Even when he lay still, there was strain in him, as though each breath had to be drawn through pain before it could be claimed.

He opened his eyes as Isla wrung out the cloth and laid it lightly across his brow.

“You ought to be downstairs,” he murmured.

“And leave you to the mercy of these dreadful tonics?” she replied softly. “Never.”

A shadow of amusement touched his face, though it vanished almost at once. “I begin to suspect the remedies may kill me sooner than the illness.”

“If they do, I shall tell the physician so.”

“That would not improve his manner.”

“Nothing would improve his manner.”

This time Grover managed the faintest breath of laughter, and Isla treasured it as if it were something precious rescued from fire.

She was the youngest of his daughters, though anyone looking at the four of them together might have thought her the eldest. Not because of her face — for there was still youth in it, and kindness, and the sort of beauty that did not announce itself at once — but because responsibility had settled upon her so naturally that it had become part of the way she moved. Her hands, though fine-boned, were no longer idle hands. They bore little burns from the kitchen, roughness from work, and the faint red marks left by endless washing, carrying, tending, mending.

Her sisters’ hands, by contrast, remained untouched by anything more burdensome than embroidery silks or jewellery clasps.

From below came a burst of laughter.

Isla stilled.

The sound rose from the drawing room — bright, careless, entirely wrong in a house where sickness stood so close. Grover heard it too. She knew he did, though his expression altered only in the slightest tightening about the eyes.

His daughters.

Three of them, at least.

The eldest, Lavinia, possessed the sort of beauty that had taught her very early to expect indulgence as naturally as warmth from a fire. She disliked discomfort in every form and spoke of inconvenience as though it were a moral offence. Beatrice, the second, was clever, polished, and sharp-tongued, with a talent for making cruelty sound almost graceful. Cecily, the third, was the most openly vain of them all — forever adjusting a ribbon, arranging a curl, or lamenting that her circumstances did not match the grandeur she believed herself born for.

Only Isla remained beside Grover whenever he asked for water, medicine, or simple company.

Only Isla had sat through the long feverish nights.

Only Isla had noticed when the illness ceased resembling any ordinary complaint.

At first it had been easy to dismiss. A cough that lingered beyond the cold season. A tiredness he blamed on poor sleep. A growing weakness that made him sit more often than usual, leave his accounts unfinished, or pass an afternoon indoors rather than riding out to inspect the farms. Then came the fever, the breathlessness, the strange sharp pain in his chest, and now the blood.

No physician could explain it.

No remedy had touched it.

No one but Isla seemed frightened enough to admit the danger aloud.

She lifted the spoon from the bedside table and poured out the next measure of tonic. The smell of it was bitter enough to sting the nose.

“Sit forward a little,” she said gently.

He obeyed, though the effort plainly cost him. She held the spoon to his lips, and he swallowed with a grimace.

“Good God,” he muttered. “I ought to recover simply to avoid taking any more of that.”

“You shall recover because I insist upon it.”

He looked at her with tired fondness. “You always did think determination a kind of magic.”

“Perhaps it is.”

He said nothing to that. His gaze drifted past her to the window, where rain had begun to pattern the panes in silver threads.

“Are they still downstairs?” he asked at length.

Isla hesitated.

“That bad?” he said quietly.

She set the spoon aside. “They do not mean harm.”

“No,” Grover replied after a pause. “They merely prefer not to be inconvenienced by sorrow.”

The words were spoken without bitterness. That made them all the sadder.

Isla lowered herself into the chair beside the bed. “You should rest.”

“You should,” he returned.

“I slept this afternoon.”

“A scandalous lie.”

She smiled despite herself. “A brief one.”

His gaze moved to her hands where they lay folded in her lap. “These hands were not meant for drudgery.”

“They are only hands.”

“They are my daughter’s hands,” he said. “There is a difference.”

Something tightened in her throat. She looked down quickly, pretending to smooth a wrinkle in the coverlet.

Since her mother’s death, many things in the house had changed shape. Some losses were loud at first and then faded. Others went quiet and never left. Isla had been the youngest when her mother died, and perhaps because of that she remembered her not in long clear scenes but in fragments — the scent of lavender and starch, the sound of a hymn softly sung, a cool palm against a hot forehead, a voice that could make fear seem foolish merely by speaking. Lavinia and Beatrice had cried more loudly when she died; Cecily had clung to black ribbons and theatrics. But Isla had carried the absence inward, where it had stayed.

“Your mother would be ashamed of me,” Grover said suddenly.

Her head came up at once. “Never.”

“For spoiling them. For not demanding more of them. For allowing one gentle-hearted child to become the strength of the whole house.”

“She would not think that of you.”

He gave her a sad little smile. “No. She would think it kindly, and that would be worse.”

Before Isla could answer, the cough took him again.

This fit was harsher than the last. It tore through him so violently that he doubled over, one hand clutched to his chest. Isla was on her feet in an instant, supporting him, pressing a fresh cloth into his hand, whispering useless soothing words because she could do nothing else. By the time it ended, he was shaking with exhaustion.

The handkerchief came away streaked crimson.

For one moment neither of them looked at it.

Then Grover folded it into his palm and lay back, closing his eyes. “Do not make that face,” he said faintly.

“I do not know what face I am making.”

“Yes, you do.”

“I am merely angry.”

“At whom?”

She hesitated. “Everyone.”

That won the smallest hint of a smile from him. “There is my girl.”

He drifted into a light doze not long after that, his breathing shallow but steadier. Isla remained beside him until she was sure he slept. Then she gathered the bloodstained cloth, the bowl, and the empty bottle, and slipped quietly from the room.

The corridor beyond felt draughty and dim after the feverish warmth of the chamber. Light spilled up from below, along with the murmur of voices. Her sisters were still gathered in the drawing room.

Isla descended the staircase.

They were precisely as she had imagined them.

Lavinia reclined in the best chair near the fire with a shawl wrapped elegantly about her shoulders, as if she were the one deserving careful treatment. Beatrice sat with a novel open in her lap, though she was paying it little attention. Cecily had positioned a small mirror near the candles and was turning her head this way and that, examining herself with grave concentration.

All three looked up when Isla entered.

“Well?” Lavinia asked. “How is Father?”

There was enough concern in the question to satisfy politeness, and no more.

“He is weaker,” Isla said.

Beatrice sighed very softly. “How grim.”

Cecily winced. “Did he cough again?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I cannot bear that sound,” Cecily said, pressing a hand to her chest. “It makes me feel quite ill myself.”

Isla looked at her.

Lavinia reached for her teacup. “Really, Isla, you look as though you expect us all to sit in darkness and starve ourselves for the duration. What good would that do?”

“No one asked you to starve.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Do I?”

Beatrice closed her book and laid it aside with deliberate calm. “Must every conversation become an accusation?”

“Must every illness become an inconvenience?” Isla replied.

That sharpened the room at once.

Lavinia sat upright. “I will not be spoken to like that.”

“Then go upstairs,” said Isla, “and sit with him.”

No one moved.

The fire crackled. Rain tapped at the windows. In the silence, the truth of them seemed suddenly unbearable.

Cecily looked away first. “I dislike sickrooms.”

Beatrice said, “He needs quiet.”

Lavinia added, “And rest.”

“He needs his daughters.”

“We are his daughters,” Lavinia said with offended dignity.

“Only by blood,” Isla answered before she could stop herself.

Beatrice’s face cooled. “That was unnecessary.”

“Was it untrue?”

Again, none of them answered.

For a long moment Isla simply stood there, looking at them — her beautiful, selfish sisters in their pretty gowns and carefully arranged curls, all of them more troubled by gloom than by the thought of their father’s death. It seemed impossible that they had been raised beneath the same roof, loved by the same man.

At last she said, very quietly, “When Mother died, I thought grief would teach this house tenderness. I see now it taught some of us only how to avoid it.”

And with that she turned and left them to their fire, their tea, and their affronted silence.

In the kitchen the servants had already finished for the night. The great room, so busy by day, was almost cavernous in the half-light. Copper pans hung gleaming from their hooks. A single lamp burned near the dresser. The clock on the wall ticked with maddening indifference.

Isla set the basin on the table and dropped the stained cloth into the water. Pink spread slowly through it.

She stared down at it.

The village physician had done all he knew. A doctor from the market town had come three days earlier and left behind more bottles, more powders, and a face so grave it had made Isla want to strike him. Nothing had changed. Grover was still sinking.

For the first time, she allowed the thought to come plainly.

He may die.

It did not arrive as drama. It arrived as a cold fact, and for that reason it was almost unbearable.

She gripped the edge of the table so tightly her fingers ached.

“No,” she whispered.

The kitchen door rattled with a knock.

Isla started so sharply that the lamp flame quivered.

No one came to the back entrance at such an hour unless something was badly wrong. Briar Hollow was not a village for midnight callers.

The knock came again.

Three deliberate taps.

She took up the lamp and crossed the kitchen. “Who is there?”

For a moment only the rain answered.

Then a woman’s voice came through the wood. “A wise woman.”

Not a doctor. Not a neighbour.

A wise woman.

Every child in Briar Hollow grew up hearing such women spoken of in lowered voices. Some called them healers. Others called them meddlesome old things who knew too much of herbs, old superstitions, and the darker corners of the wood. They were sought when ordinary remedies failed, though few admitted to doing so.

Isla lifted the latch.

The night air rushed in, damp and cold. On the threshold stood an elderly woman in a dark wool cloak, her hood shadowing much of her face. Yet the lamp caught enough for Isla to see her clearly — a narrow, weathered face, pale keen eyes, and silver hair pinned back with no attention to vanity whatsoever. Little pouches hung from her belt, along with bundles of dried herbs, a pair of bone-handled scissors, and glass vials stoppered with wax.

She looked like she belonged more to the old stories than to the village road.

“You are Grover’s youngest girl,” the woman said.

“Yes.”

“And he is still alive?”

The bluntness of it sent a chill through Isla.

“He is.”

“Then I have not come too late.”

Without waiting to be invited, the woman stepped over the threshold and pushed back her hood. Rain glistened on her cloak.

“I am Mrs Hawthorne,” she said. “Though most in the village have taken to calling me Mistress Hawthorne, as though I were a creature out of some tale. I do not much care which.”

Isla had heard the name.

Mistress Hawthorne was the old wise woman who lived alone beyond the mill road, in a cottage half-swallowed by elder trees. Mothers went to her for remedies when their children’s fevers would not break. Farmers went to her when animals sickened strangely. Those same people crossed themselves afterwards and pretended not to know her if they met her in the lane.

“Can you help him?” Isla asked.

Mrs Hawthorne’s sharp gaze lifted towards the ceiling, as though she could see through the floorboards to the room above. “That depends on whether your father is merely ill.”

The words seemed to lower the temperature of the entire kitchen.

“What else could he be?”

Instead of answering at once, the old woman reached into the folds of her cloak and withdrew a small bundle wrapped in dark cloth. She set it carefully upon the table and unfolded it.

Inside lay a single rose petal.

It was the richest red Isla had ever seen — not bright scarlet, but a deep, dark ruby shade, as though the petal had been steeped in wine and moonlight. Even in the modest lamplight it seemed almost to glow from within.

Isla stared.

“That is no rose from any garden near here,” she said.

“No,” Mrs Hawthorne replied. “It is not.”

She folded the cloth loosely over the petal again. “Your father’s sickness is not altogether of the flesh. Something older has laid hold of him. Something that does not yield to physicians’ powders and churchyard prayers.”

“You mean a curse.”

Mrs Hawthorne did not flinch from the word. “I mean that ordinary names are often too small for certain things.”

Isla felt her heart beginning to pound. “And this rose can cure him?”

“If one fresh ruby-red rose is gathered each day for fifteen days, and its essence pressed and given to him before the bloom loses its strength, then yes. It may save him.”

Hope came so suddenly it hurt.

“Where does it grow?”

The old woman met her gaze directly. “In the garden of a beast.”

Silence fell.

Rain pattered at the panes. Upstairs, far above them, the floor creaked softly.

“A beast?” Isla said at last.

“One who dwells beyond Briar Hollow, past Blackwood Ridge, in an old great house hidden from ordinary roads. Some call him cursed. Some call him monster. Most simply pretend he does not exist.”

The cloth bundle sat between them like a secret heart.

“And I must go there?”

Mrs Hawthorne began wrapping the petal once more. “Not tonight. Tonight you must understand only this: if you would save your father, the rose is your only hope.”

Isla could scarcely draw breath. “Why has no one spoken of this?”

“Because fear makes liars of most people, and cowards of the rest.”

She placed the folded bundle into Isla’s hand.

The petal inside felt almost weightless.

“I have told you enough for one night,” said Mrs Hawthorne, drawing up her hood. “By morning, the truth of what you have heard will either seem impossible or unavoidable. You must decide which.”

She turned towards the door.

“Wait,” Isla said. “If I go there… what will I find?”

Mrs Hawthorne paused at the threshold. Rain silvered the dark beyond her.

“A manor full of secrets,” she said. “A garden full of roses. And a beast who gives nothing without price.”

Then she stepped out into the wet black night.

Within moments she was gone.

Isla stood very still in the open doorway, the cloth bundle clutched in her hand, the rain-cooled air moving softly around her. Somewhere above, at the far end of the corridor, her father began to cough again — that dreadful, tearing cough that seemed to strip the life from him by slow cruel inches.

She closed the door, pressed the ruby-red petal to her chest, and listened to the sound of the storm gathering over Briar Hollow.

Beyond the village, beyond Blackwood Ridge, in the garden of a beast, there bloomed a rose that might save her father’s life.

And for the first time, Isla understood that whatever came next would demand far more of her than courage alone.