Chapter 69 Meant to Return

Chapter 69 Meant to Return
Beatris

I followed the old woman without speaking.

She moved quickly for her age, her basket tucked against one hip, her eyes scanning the street the way someone does when they have spent a lifetime learning to be afraid of being watched.

We did not go far.

A narrow lane behind the churchyard led to a row of small houses set back from the road. She stopped at the last one, opened the gate without ceremony, and gestured me inside.

"Wait here."

I stood in the small front room, heart hammering, while she disappeared through a back door.

The house smelled of dried herbs and old wood. A single window let in thin morning light. Everything looked worn but clean, the kind of cleanliness that came from having nothing better to do than maintain what was already fading.

Then the door opened again.

The woman who stepped through was old. Old in a way that made the air around her feel heavier. She walked with a cane, one hand braced against the wall, her back curved slightly forward. Her eyes, however, were clear.

She looked at me. Her face went pale.
Her hand tightened on the cane, knuckles whitening. For one terrible second, she simply stared, lips parting, breath catching as though she had opened her door and found a ghost standing on her threshold.

Her free hand rose slowly toward her chest.

"No," she whispered.

She did not say it to me. She said it to herself, as if she could will what she was seeing into something else.

Then she turned to the woman who had brought me.

"Leave us."

The old woman hesitated, then slipped out through the front door without a word.

Agnes lowered herself slowly into a chair near the window. Her hands trembled against the cane. She studied me the way someone studies a wound they are afraid to touch.

Then she spoke.

"What do you want?"

The question came sharp. Harder than I expected.

"I need help," I said.

"You need to go back." Her voice shook despite its firmness. "You should not be here. If anyone finds out I spoke to you…"

"I know."

"Then you know you should not have come."

I saw it in her face then. Fear. The kind that lives in someone who has learned what happens to people who know too much.

"Please," I said. "Alexander is away. He won't know."

"That man always knows."

Her eyes darted toward the window, then back to me.

"You need to leave. Now. Before someone sees you here."

She started to rise from the chair, one hand braced against the armrest, already dismissing me.

"Do you know who Catherine is?"

The name stopped her.

She froze mid movement, one hand still gripping the armrest, the other pressed flat against her knee. The color that had begun returning to her face drained away again.

She looked at me, and the fear in her expression softened into something worse. Pity.

She lowered herself back into the chair slowly.

"Where did you hear that name?" she asked quietly.

"Her journal," I said. "I found it hidden in the west wing."

Agnes stared at me.

"She had a journal?"

"Yes."

The old woman closed her eyes for a moment.

When she opened them, something had shifted. The panic was still there, beneath the surface, but it had been overtaken by something older. Deeper.

"Poor girl," she whispered.

The words came so softly I almost missed them.

"She was so young when he brought her in. Too young to understand what she was walking into." She shook her head. "I watched her arrive. I watched her smile at him the way they all did in the beginning. And I watched that smile disappear over the weeks that followed."

Her eyes grew distant.

"Catherine was not like the others. She was not merely obedient. She had fire in her. But fire does not last long inside that house."

She paused.

"I was there when they cleared all of Eudora’s portraits," she said softly.

My breath caught.

"I helped carry them out of the west wing. Alexander ordered every image of her removed. Every painting. Every sketch. Every trace. As if she had never existed."

She paused.

"But I saw her face. I never forgot it."

Her eyes lifted to mine.

"You have her face."

The words landed like a blow.

"I know," I whispered.

"No." She shook her head slowly. "You don't understand. You have her face. The same face. The same eyes. The same…"

She stopped herself. Her hand pressed harder against her chest.

"I came to Crimson Hill after Eudora was already dead," she continued, her voice steadier now but thin. "I never met her. But I knew her face. I helped remove those portraits from the walls. And now you stand in my house wearing it."

Silence stretched between us.

"Tell me about Catherine," I said.

Agnes looked at me for a long time before she spoke.

"Catherine came to Crimson Hill about forty years after Eudora died. Alexander brought her with him after one of his trips. She was young. Quiet. Pretty enough. At first, I think she liked him. Most women did, in the beginning. He had that way about him, that calm, that control. It made you feel like nothing bad could happen as long as you were near him."

Her mouth twisted.

"Nothing good either."

I stayed still.

"He didn't love her," Agnes continued. "That was clear within weeks. She was not a woman to him. She was something he needed. A shape. A presence. Something to fill the space Eudora had left behind."

My stomach turned.

"He made her wear dresses like the ones Eudora used to wear. Had her dye her hair red. Took her everywhere with him, the way a man carries a possession rather than a companion."

Agnes shook her head slowly.

"And still, he was never satisfied. Because no matter how much Catherine tried to become what he wanted, she was never her. She was never Eudora."

A chill moved through me.

"She found out what he was," I said.

"Yes."

Agnes's voice had gone flatter now.

"She found out, and she did not accept it. She fought. She tried to escape. More than once."

"What happened?"

"He caught her." Agnes looked at her hands. "Every time. And each time, he punished her. Not with fists. Alexander didn't need fists. He had colder ways. He would lock her in the west wing for days. Remove privileges. Make her feel small. Make her understand that she belonged to him and there was nothing outside those gates that would ever choose her over him."

My throat tightened.

"One day," Agnes said, her voice dropping lower, "two days before what they call the Crimson Night, Alexander dismissed every maid and servant from the estate. Sent us all away. No explanations. No reasons. Just go. Come back in three days."

My pulse stumbled.

"When we returned," she continued, "Catherine was gone. They told us she had been sent away. Transferred. The usual story."

She paused.

"They said Alexander finally let her go."

Her jaw tightened.

"I knew better than that."

She looked at me with eyes that had carried the weight of that suspicion for decades.

"But I was frightened," she said quietly. "We all were. So I said nothing. I accepted it. I told myself that perhaps she had truly left, that perhaps Alexander had finally shown mercy. And then I tried to forget."

Her voice cracked slightly.

"I never could."

The room fell still.

"Something is happening to me," I whispered. "Visions. Dreams. Memories that don't belong to me. I see things I shouldn't be able to see. I feel things I have never lived."

Agnes looked at me.

Neither of us spoke for a long time.

Then she leaned forward as much as her body allowed.

"I never believed in destiny, child."

Her voice had dropped to almost a whisper.

"But this..."

She looked at my face one last time, and I saw something in her expression I was not prepared for. Belief.

"You were meant to return."

The words settled into the room like dust after a closing door.

"All those years," she continued softly. "Everything he did."

Her eyes held mine.

"It was always about bringing you back."

She shook her head slowly.

"And here you are."

I swallowed hard.

"The western woods," I said.

Agnes stilled.

"There's a path through them," I pressed. "Catherine wrote about it. She said it leads outside the estate."

Agnes looked at me with something close to sadness.

"There is no way through those woods, child."

My chest tightened.

"What?"

"None that ends in freedom." Her voice was quiet and certain. "Whatever Catherine believed, whatever she was told, it was never true. There is no path through the western woods. There never was."

The words struck through me like cold water. All that hope. All that planning. All those nights lying awake believing there was a way out beyond the gates.

Gone in one sentence.

I opened my mouth to argue, to push, to demand something more than that, but before I could speak, the front door opened.

The old woman who had brought me here stepped back inside.
She moved quickly to Agnes's side, bent down, and whispered something against her ear.

Her eyes never left me. Something cold moved through my stomach.

"What is it?" I asked.

Neither of them answered.

The old woman pulled back from Agnes and looked at me again with an expression I could not name. Suspicion. Fear. Maybe both.

Agnes's face had changed again. The belief was still there, but it had hardened into something more urgent.

"You should go, child," she said quietly.

"I just got here."

"I know." Her voice was gentle now, gentler than it had been since I arrived. "But you need to stop fighting yourself."

I stared at her.

"What?"

"Stop fighting it." She looked at me with eyes that held decades of sorrow and certainty in equal measure. "Let yourself remember."

The words hit harder than anything she had said before. She believed it. She truly believed I was Eudora returned. And she wanted me to stop resisting it.

Before I could respond, a voice reached us from outside. Muffled. But clear enough.

"She's in here."

My blood went cold. I turned sharply toward the window. Footsteps were already crossing the yard.

Agnes looked at me one last time, and in her face I saw no surprise.
Only the tired, resigned expression of someone who had watched this story play out before.