“Cousin! How odd it is that even now you seem barely aware of this man’s existence and forget his name a moment after I speak it! Do you not think there is something strange about him; how he is here all the while, watching us? I—I think he has something to do with the Cursed mystery hidden away in Lady Bertram’s favorite chamber near my own little white attic.”

“Dearest Fanny, how odd of you to speak of this—this gentleman in such a way, especially when we were just discussing the pressing matter of the play. What has he to do with anything, with the family Curse?”

“But do not you think it even a bit strange? He seems to have mesmerized everyone into—ignoring him! And—he talks to Lady Bertram and myself only, it seems. And when he does speak, it is of very strange things. Have you ever spoken more than a word to him?”

“Now that you mention it, I don’t recall. I—”

“Exactly so! It’s as if he is not here, and yet, he is, and he drinks us in, all of us, and Lady Bertram is akin to his mouthpiece, a living servant!”

“What nonsense!”

Fanny paused, then gathered courage and blurted out: “I don’t believe he is human.”

Edmund stared, his expression slowly growing perturbed from encroaching confusion. “Wait a moment, cousin, of whom are we speaking just now? I don’t recall—”

Fanny suddenly felt herself grow very cold.

“Oh, it is of no matter, cousin,” she ended quietly, and the fear was all around, coursing though her. “But—indeed, now you must be going.”

And thus, Edmund went. But there was no reading, no composure for Fanny. He had told her the most extraordinary, inconceivable, unwelcome news. Yet she could think of nothing else but Lord Eastwind and how Edmund discounted him! And—to be acting! After all his objections, after all she had heard him say, could Edmund be so inconsistent? And, Edmund, so blind! Was he not deceiving himself? Was he not wrong?

Alas! it was all Miss Crawford’s doing. Fanny had seen her influence in every speech, and was miserable. The doubts and alarms as to her own conduct, were become of little consequence now. This deeper anxiety swallowed them up. Things should take their course; she cared not how it ended. Her cousins might attack, but she was beyond their reach. And if at last obliged to yield—no matter—it was all misery now.

And—Lord Eastwind was somehow, impossibly, also at the heart of it.

Chapter XVII