The fog swallowed everything beyond ten yards, and Seraphina Marsh pressed her forehead against the cold glass of the hired carriage, searching for something solid in the grey.
She found nothing. Only the muffled rhythm of hooves on unseen road, the creak of leather springs beneath her, and the faint mineral tang of autumn rain waiting to fall.
The letter sat in her lap, folded into a perfect square, its edges soft from a hundred nervous unfoldings. She had read it so often the words had begun to lose their meaning, a prayer worn smooth by repetition. A position as lady's companion. Private chambers. A modest but comfortable salary. The address: Ravenscar Hall, Yorkshire Moors. She knew the address better than her own name now. She knew the ink had bled slightly at the R in Ravenscar, a small imperfection that somehow made the offer feel more real, more human, more possible.
The carriage lurched. Seraphina caught herself against the worn velvet seat, and her valise slid forward, knocking against her ankle. Inside it, packed with the careful thrift of a woman who could not afford to replace anything she owned, lay her modest wardrobe: two serviceable dresses, a length of ribbon her mother had pressed into her hand, three pairs of stockings, and the small leather volume of Mrs. Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho she had borrowed from the lending library and meant to return before she left.
She had not returned it. Mrs. Aldridge would notice. Mrs. Aldridge noticed everything.
The thought of the old woman, sharp-tongued Adelaide with her lorgnette and her knowing silences, made Seraphina smile despite herself. What would she say if she could see Seraphina now, rattling through the moors toward a house she had never seen, a position she did not yet understand? Probably something waspish and exactly correct. Probably something like, Well, girl, if you must throw yourself upon the mercies of strangers, at least wear clean gloves.
Seraphina glanced down. Her gloves were clean. Her hands were not. She had spent the morning helping her father pack the last of the silver into crates, and the dust of the vicarage still clung to her cuticles, grey as the fog outside.
Reverend Marsh had not wept when she left. He had stood at the gate with his hat in his hands, the way he always stood, and said only, Write when you can, Sera. Mind you write. His voice had been steady. His hands had not.
The carriage crested a rise, and for one breath the fog thinned. Seraphina caught a glimpse of darkening moorland stretching toward a sky the color of wet slate, and then the grey closed again, thicker than before. The driver, a taciturn man hired at the coaching inn, had not spoken a word since she'd climbed aboard at the village. His silence was professional, she told herself. It was not, she told herself, an omen.
"Steady there," the driver murmured, and the horse answered with a toss of its head.
Seraphina's fingers found the letter again. The lady of the house is in delicate health and requires a companion of sober disposition and quiet accomplishments. Sober disposition. Quiet accomplishments. She wondered what Miss Graves, or Mrs. Graves, or whatever the lady of the house might be called, would make of a girl who had once fallen into the duck pond at the Midsummer fête, and of a girl whose quiet accomplishments consisted almost entirely of reading aloud without stumbling, playing the spinet badly, and a near-perfect memory for she had loved since childhood.
She had not answered the advertisement, she reminded herself. Mrs. Aldridge had answered it for her, in that brisk, immovable way of hers, and had presented the reply at afternoon tea with all the ceremony of a general delivering battle plans. You will apply for this position, the old woman had said, sliding the printed notice across the table. You will not argue. You will not thank me. You will simply go.
Seraphina had not argued. She had, however, thanked her, and Mrs. Aldridge had sniffed, which was her way of accepting.
The carriage slowed. Seraphina sat forward, her pulse quickening against her throat. Through the glass, the fog seemed to thicken, then break, then thicken again in restless waves, and she caught the flicker of something darker ahead. Stone, perhaps. The suggestion of a roof. A shape too deliberate to be natural.
"There it is," the driver said. His voice was flat. "Ravenscar."
She turned her valise upright, brushed a thread of hay from her sleeve, and folded the letter into her glove. Her hands, she noticed, had begun to tremble, and she clasped them together in her lap to still them. The letter crinkled against her palm, a small, persistent sound.
The carriage wheels crunched onto gravel, and the sound was loud, so loud in all that muffling fog that she felt she had announced herself before she was ready. Somewhere ahead, she heard the low groan of what must be a gate swinging open, and the scrape of iron against stone, and then the deeper silence that followed, the silence of a house watching.
Ravenscar Hall rose out of the mist the way a great ship rises from a heavy sea, slow and inevitable. She saw it in pieces at first: a tower, perhaps, or a chimney stack; then the long pale line of a façade; then windows, their glass catching what little light remained in the day, glowing faintly like the eyes of something not quite asleep. The stone was a yellowish grey, weathered to the color of old bone, and ivy climbed it in dark determined fingers.
She had imagined something smaller. Something tidier. Something she could understand.
The carriage rolled to a stop beneath a portico she could not properly see, and the driver descended, his boots striking the gravel in quick businesslike beats. He did not come to open her door. He walked around to the front and began murmuring to the horse, and Seraphina understood, with a small cold shock, that this was as far as his duty extended.
She opened the door herself.
The air struck her face, sharp with cold and something else, something vegetal and wet, the smell of rotted leaves and distant peat smoke and the iron tang of moorland water. She drew her shawl tighter across her shoulders, gathered her valise, and stepped down onto the gravel, her boots sinking slightly into the wet stones.
"Good evening, miss."
The voice came from nowhere. Seraphina startled, her valise nearly slipping from her grip, and then a figure detached itself from the shadow of the portico, a tall man in a dark coat, his face a pale blur beneath the brim of a hat. A lamp burned somewhere behind him, throwing his shadow long across the gravel, and she thought for one absurd moment that the shadow was a second figure, walking ahead of him.
"Forgive me," he said. "I am Graves. The housekeeper's husband. I am to show you inside."
Seraphina drew a breath. "Thank you. I am Seraphina Marsh. I have come about the position."
"Yes, miss." He did not extend his hand. He did not smile. "This way, please."
He turned and walked toward the door, and Seraphina followed, the gravel crunching beneath her feet, the letter pressed hard against her palm inside her glove. The great door of Ravenscar stood before her, blackened oak bound with iron, and as Graves drew it open the hinges gave a long low sound, not quite a groan, not quite a sigh, but something in between that made the small hairs at the back of her neck rise.
Warmth met her, and lamplight, and the smell of beeswax and something older, something she could not name. The entrance hall stretched away into dimness, its floor of black and white marble tessellated like a chessboard, and on the walls hung portraits whose faces she could not yet distinguish.
Graves paused at the foot of a broad staircase, and for the first time he looked directly at her, and she saw that his eyes were the color of the fog outside, and that they held nothing she could read.
"The lady of the house will receive you in the morning," he said. "I am to take you to your rooms. You will find a fire laid, and supper sent up. Is that acceptable, miss?"
The word acceptable sounded like a test. Seraphina lifted her chin, though her heart was beating in her throat. "Yes. Thank you. That is very acceptable."
Something moved at the edge of her vision, a darker shape among the dim shapes of the hall, and she turned her head sharply, but there was nothing there. Only the portraits. Only the stillness.
Graves was already climbing the stairs, his tread soft on the worn carpet, and Seraphina gathered her valise close and followed, her free hand trailing along the polished banister, which was cold beneath her fingers, colder than the air outside, colder than it had any right to be.
The staircase turned. The portraits watched. The letter pressed its small, persistent message against her palm, and Seraphina Marsh climbed higher into the house that had asked for her, and that she had not yet learned to refuse.
ves stopped on the landing and produced a key from some hidden depth of his coat, the metal catching what little light the wall sconces offered. The lock turned with a sound like a sigh, and the door swung inward on hinges that had been recently oiled, though the room beyond still held the particular mustiness of a place long shut.
"Miss Marsh." Graves inclined his head toward the doorway. "Your rooms are through the next door on the left. The housekeeper will see to your supper."
He did not wait for her reply. His footsteps retreated down the corridor, soft and unhurried, and Seraphina stood alone in the doorway of a small sitting room where a fire had indeed been laid, its flames already climbing over the coals. The heat reached her face before she had taken a single step inside, and she could not remember, suddenly, whether she had been cold before this moment. She had been cold for so long that the warmth came as a kind of shock.
She set her valise on a chair and turned toward the connecting door, the one Graves had indicated. Before she could reach for the handle, the door opened from the other side.
The woman who stood in the gap was tall and angular, her hair pulled back so tightly that it pulled at the corners of her mouth, and her apron was so white against the dark fabric of her dress that it seemed to give off its own faint light. She had the look of someone who had not slept in some days, the hollows beneath her cheekbones shadowed in the candlelight, and her eyes, when they met Seraphina's, held something that was not quite welcome and not quite hostility, but a wary thing between the two.
"Miss Marsh," she said, and the name in her mouth sounded like a question she had not yet decided to ask.
Seraphina stared. The voice was familiar. The face was familiar, though the years had sharpened it, pared it down to bone and sinew and a grim set of the mouth that Seraphina did not remember. But the eyes, those pale blue eyes that had once been so quick to laugh, were the same.
"Hannah?"
The name fell out of her before she could stop it. The woman in the doorway did not move. Her hands, which had been resting on the doorframe, tightened there, the knuckles whitening.
"You weren't supposed to come." Hannah Pike's voice was rough, northern, stripped of the brightness Seraphina remembered, and it carried none of the playful rhythm that had once made her sound like a sparrow on a fence. "I wrote to you. I told you not to."
"I never received a letter." Seraphina's hand found the edge of the door for support. "Hannah, what are you doing here? Your mother wrote that you had gone to Whitby, to the boarding house. She said she didn't know when you'd be back."
Hannah's mouth thinned. She glanced once down the corridor behind her, toward the staircase, and when she spoke again her voice was lower, the words pressed out between her teeth.
"Get inside. Shut the door. And for pity's sake, don't speak so loud."
Seraphina stepped back into the sitting room. Hannah followed, closing both doors behind her, the bedroom door and the corridor door, and stood with her back against the latter as if she expected someone to come through it at any moment. The firelight painted strange shadows across her face, and Seraphina saw, now, the small scar at her chin that had not been there when they were girls, and the way her fingers would not stop moving against her apron.
"Three months," Hannah said. "I've been here three months. I came thinking I would find a place for a few weeks, just to earn a bit before the winter, and now I cannot leave without raising questions I don't care to answer."
"What questions?" Seraphina asked. "Hannah, what is happening in this house?"
Hannah's laugh was a short, dry sound, more breath than mirth. "What is happening. That's the question, isn't it. What has been happening. What will happen when the master returns and finds a governess in the east wing where no governess has set foot in twenty years." She crossed the room in three long strides and poured water from a jug into a basin, then stood looking at her own hands in the glass. "I had word you were on the road. The postboy at the inn mentioned it to my mother, and my mother mentioned it to me, and I have been trying all day to think of a way to send you back."
Seraphina sat down, because her legs had decided, without consulting her, that they would no longer support her weight. "The lady of the house wrote to me. She requested a governess for the boy. The letter was very particular, Hannah. It named references, named a salary, named a date of arrival. I have it here."
She drew the letter from her pocket and held it out. Hannah did not take it. She only looked at it, and at the paper, and at the seal, and something in her face shifted, a tightening around the eyes that made her look, for a moment, far older than her years.
"Where did this letter come from?" Hannah asked.
"It was waiting for me at the vicarage. Reverend Marsh brought it up from the village on the Saturday post. He said he had not seen the seal before, but that the hand was a fine one, a lady's hand."
"That it is," Hannah said softly. "That it is, the devil take it." She crossed to the window and drew back the curtain an inch, peering out into the fog as if she expected to see something moving in it. When she spoke again her voice had lost its earlier harshness, and what was left beneath it sounded tired, and afraid, and very nearly fond.
"Seraphina. Listen to me. There is no boy."
The fire popped. A log shifted in the grate, sending up a shower of sparks that rose and died against the iron back. Seraphina's fingers closed around the letter so tightly that the paper crumpled at its edges.
"What do you mean, there is no boy?"
"I mean there is no child in this house. There has been no child in this house since before I came, since before the present Lady Ravenscar came, since before anyone in the village can remember. The east wing is shut. The schoolroom is shut. There is a governess's room in the upper corridor that has not had the sheets changed since my first week here." Hannah turned from the window, and her face in the firelight was all sharp planes and darker hollows. "And yet Lady Ravenscar has been writing to agencies in three counties for a governess, and the letters have been going out for six months, and now here you are, answering the last of them, and I cannot for the life of me understand why she wants a governess if there is no child to be taught."
Seraphina looked down at the letter in her hand. The paper was heavy, the ink a deep blue-black, the handwriting sloping and elegant and very precise. She had read the letter four times before she packed her bag. She had read it again on the road, tucked inside the coach, the fog pressing at the window glass. Each time she had seen the same words, the same courteous request, the same promise of a comfortable situation for a young woman of quiet habits and good education.
"The lady will receive me in the morning," Seraphina said. "Graves told me."
"Yes." Hannah's mouth twisted. "She will receive you. She will be gracious, and she will speak of her son, and she will tell you that the boy is delicate, that he cannot bear the light, that he is kept in his rooms for his own health. And you will believe her, because she is very convincing, and because you have not yet lived in this house long enough to know what sounds are real and which are only the old wood settling, and which are the ones you must not go looking for."
She stopped. Her hands, which had been moving ceaselessly against her apron, went still at last. She stood in the middle of the floor between the fire and the window, and the candlelight and the firelight met on her face and made her look like a woman standing at the edge of something, deciding whether to step forward or step back.
"I am not trying to frighten you," she said, and her voice had lost its northern roughness now, and what was left was quieter, and younger, and very much afraid. "I am trying to send you home before you become a part of whatever this is."
The fog pressed at the window. Somewhere far off in the house, a door closed. The sound came up through the floorboards, a low soft sound, like a book being shut, and it was followed by a silence so complete that Seraphina could hear the blood moving in her own ears.
"Hannah," she said. "If I leave in the morning, before I have even seen the lady of the house, I will have thrown away the only position I have been offered since I came down from Edinburgh. I will have nothing. I will have to go back to my aunt and explain that I could not even manage this."
"I know." Hannah's voice cracked on the second word, and she pressed her hand briefly to her mouth, and when she dropped it again her eyes were bright in a way that had nothing to do with the fire. "I know that too. That is why I have not already sent word to my mother to come and fetch you in the cart. That is why I am standing here like a fool, telling you things I have no business telling, when I should simply let you take your supper and your rest and see for yourself what manner of house this is."
She drew a long breath. The brightness in her eyes did not spill over, though it looked for a moment as though it might.
"Will you stay the night, at least," she said. "Promise me you will stay the night, and let me show you the schoolroom in the morning, before you go down to Lady Ravenscar. If you see what I have seen, you will go. And if you do not believe me, then I will have done my best, and you will stay, and I will try to keep you safe, whatever that costs me."
The portraits in the corridor, Seraphina thought, though she did not say it, the portraits had been watching her all the way up the stairs, and they would be watching still, wherever she turned in this house, whatever she decided. The fire cracked and spat. Hannah stood waiting, her hands at her sides, her face a war between old loyalty and new dread.
"Yes," Seraphina said. "I will stay the night."
Hannah nodded once, as if she had expected no other answer, and turned to go, and the door closed softly behind her, and Seraphina was alone with the fire and the letter and the fog pressing at the glass, and the silence of Ravenscar Hall, which was no longer merely a silence but a kind of listening.
did not sleep. The bed was wide and cold, the sheets smelling of lavender and something older, something that had been folded away for a long time and brought out again too recently, the starch gone soft in the press. The fire had been laid but not lit, and she had not the courage to ring for a servant at such an hour, so she lay in the dark with her coat still on and listened to the house make its small complaints. A board settled somewhere above her with the sound of a knuckle tapped against wood. The wind turned in the chimney breast and produced a low, singing note, almost like a child humming to itself. Once, she thought she heard footsteps in the corridor outside, slow and deliberate, and once she was certain she had heard them, and sat up with her heart in her mouth, and then heard nothing more, and lay down again, and watched the grey square of window grow by slow degrees less grey.
When true daylight came it was the colour of dishwater, and the fog still lay over the moors as though it had taken root there for the season. Seraphina rose, splashed her face from the pitcher on the washstand, and discovered that the water in it was not cold, which meant someone had been in the room while she slept, and had taken the trouble to bring a fresh jug without waking her. She did not know whether to be grateful or afraid. She folded the letter Hannah had given her back into the pocket of her coat, and brushed the dust from the shoulders of it with her hand, and went down.
The schoolroom was at the end of the east wing, behind a door that stuck in its frame and gave onto a long, low room with a deal floor and three desks of different heights pushed together near the window. The smallest desk had a set of ruled copybooks laid out on it, and an inkwell, and a quill pen worn down to a stump. She stood in the doorway for a long moment before she touched any of it. The copybooks were dated eighteen months ago. The writing in them was painstaking and round, the writing of a child who had been taught to form her letters by someone patient and exact. There was no name on the flyleaf of the topmost book. She opened the second, and the third. No name in any of them. She did not open the desk drawer, though her hand went to it, and stopped, and returned to her side.
She made her way back through the corridor with the portraits, and did not look up at them this time, and was aware of them looking down at her all the same, and was aware, also, that this was foolishness, and was aware that she did not entirely care. Hannah would have laughed at her. Hannah had laughed at her once, summers ago, for refusing to walk past the churchyard after dark, and Seraphina had pretended to laugh too, and they had neither of them walked past the churchyard, and had taken the long way home by the river instead, and the river had been louder than usual that night, as if it too had heard something.
At the foot of the main staircase she paused, and a maid passed her without speaking, carrying a brass coal-scuttle and a folded newspaper, and the maid's eyes slid over her and away again as though she had been a piece of furniture set down in the wrong part of the house. The house seemed very quiet for one of its size, and very much awake. Somewhere a door was being opened and closed with great regularity, and the regularity of it, the steady mechanical rhythm, was worse than any noise would have been.
She found Mrs. Adelaide Aldridge in the small parlour at the back of the house, the one Hannah had called the morning room, though no morning had ever entered it that Seraphina could see. A lamp burned on the mantelpiece in spite of the hour. The curtains were drawn against the fog. On every surface that could hold a vase, a vase had been set, and most of the flowers in them were past their best, the roses gone brown at the edges, the lilies shedding their pollen in a yellow dust on the cloth beneath them. The smell of them was heavy and sweet and faintly rotten, the smell of things that had been beautiful and were determined to go on being so for as long as possible, regardless of the cost.
Mrs. Aldridge sat in a high-backed chair by the cold hearth, a cup of something steaming on the small table at her elbow. She was a small woman, very upright, dressed in black silk that had been mended at the wrists with a care that suggested both poverty and pride. Her hair was dressed in the old style, pinned close to the head, without a curl out of place. Her face was the face of a woman who had once been handsome and knew exactly what it had cost her to stop being so, and had decided long ago that dignity was the better bargain. She did not rise when Seraphina came in. She looked at her over the rim of her cup as though Seraphina were a line of copywork that needed correcting.
"So," she said. "You are the young woman."
Her voice was crisp and precise, each word set down on the air like a card laid on a table. There was a dryness to it, and a music too, the music of a woman who had been trained in a certain register of speech and had never entirely abandoned it, though she had had to learn to use it in smaller and smaller rooms.
"Yes, ma'am," said Seraphina. "I am Seraphina Marsh. I have come about the position."
"I know what you have come about. I wrote to the agency myself. Three times. The last time I enclosed a guinea and told them I would enclose two more if they sent me someone who could read aloud without making me want to put my head in the oven. They have sent me you." She set the cup down. "We shall see."
"My references are with the agency, ma'am."
"Your references," said Mrs. Aldridge, "are of no interest to me whatsoever. References are written by people who wish to be rid of you. They are the worst possible evidence. Sit down. Do not stand there like a lamp-post. The chair by the window. Yes. That one."
Seraphina sat. The chair gave a little under her, and the springs complained, and she felt as though she had been weighed and found, for the moment, acceptable. Mrs. Aldridge studied her with the unhurried attention of a woman examining a piece of embroidery.
"You are from the village," she said. "I can hear it. You have tried to take it out, but you have not tried quite hard enough, and I am glad of it, because the people who try too hard always sound as though they have something to be ashamed of. Do you play?"
"Piano, ma'am. A little."
"A little is worse than not at all. A little means you were taught by someone who did not know how to teach. Never mind. I do not require a piano. I require someone to read to me in the evenings, and to take the air with me in the mornings when the air is fit to be taken, and to sit with me when I do not wish to be alone, and to leave me when I do. I require someone who does not chatter. I require someone who does not ask questions. Above all, I require someone who understands that what happens in this house is the business of this house, and of no one outside it, and that includes the village, and includes your friend the innkeeper's daughter, and includes, most emphatically, my son."
Seraphina opened her mouth, and closed it again. Mrs. Aldridge smiled, very slightly, as though she had been waiting for precisely that little collapse of protest.
"Good," she said. "You can be taught."
She lifted her cup, and set it down again without drinking, and her eyes, which had been fixed on Seraphina's face with such attention a moment before, drifted, almost against her will, toward the closed door behind her, and toward the dark staircase that rose beyond it in the hall. She caught herself, and drew them back, and the movement was so quick and so nearly hidden that Seraphina might have missed it if she had not been watching for it.
"You have been told," Mrs. Aldridge said, in a different voice, "that there is something wrong with this house."
It was not a question. Seraphina did not answer it.
"Every person who has been sent here from the agency has been told something of the sort. They come to me with the tale already in their mouths, as though they had been rehearsing it on the road. There is a draft. There is a sound in the night. The child will not come down to breakfast. The portrait in the west corridor has changed its expression. I have heard them all. I have heard them so many times that I could write them down myself, and indeed I have, for my own amusement, in a little book that I keep by my bed." She paused. "I will tell you what I have told the others, and what they would not listen to, and what you, I suspect, will not listen to either, because you are young, and young people do not listen, they only wait for their turn to speak."
Seraphina said, very quietly, "I am listening, ma'am."
Mrs. Aldridge looked at her then, and for a moment the dryness went out of her face, and what was underneath it was not softness exactly, but something tired, and something lonely, and something that had been waiting a long time to be believed.
"My son," she said, "is unhappy. That is all. That is the whole of it. He is a man who was not made for the life he has been given, and he has not learned how to bear it, and I have not learned how to teach him, and his father is in the family vault in the churchyard, and will be of no help to either of us. The house reflects him, as a house will. That is the draft. That is the sound in the night. That is the portrait in the west corridor. It has not changed its expression. The light has changed. There is a difference, but you must have been trained to see it, and I gather you have not been trained in much, so we shall have to manage as we are."
She lifted her cup again, and this time she drank, and the cup rattled faintly against the saucer when she set it down, and she did not apologise for the rattling, because apologising for such things was not, Seraphina suspected, something that had ever occurred to her.
"I will ask you once," she said. "You may stay, or you may go. If you stay, you will be treated fairly, and paid on the quarter day, and given your own room, and left alone when you wish to be left alone. You will not be required to go above the second floor. You will not be required to speak to my son unless he speaks to you first, which he may not do, and which, if he does, you will refer to me before you answer. If you go, the carrier passes through the village at two, and you will be in time for it, and no one will think the worse of you, least of all me."
She waited. The lamp on the mantelpiece guttered once, and steadied. Somewhere above them, in the direction of the staircase, a door was opened and closed, slowly, with great care, as though someone were trying not to be heard and failing, and Mrs. Aldridge's hand tightened on the arm of her chair, and then loosened again, and she did not look toward the sound, though every line of her body listened for it.
Seraphina thought of Hannah, standing in the kitchen at the inn, with the fire between them and the letter in her hand. She thought of the schoolroom with its three desks and its nameless copybooks. She thought of the small, cold water in the pitcher that had not been cold. She thought of the letter in her pocket, which she had not been asked for, and had not been required to surrender, and which, she understood now, Mrs. Aldridge knew about, and had known about before she sat down, and had chosen not to mention, because mentioning it would have meant admitting that there was something in this house worth warning a stranger against.
"I will stay," she said.
Mrs. Aldridge nodded once, as Hannah had done, as though she had expected no other answer, and the sound above them came again, and this time it was a footstep, clear and deliberate, on the bare boards of the upper landing, and it did not stop, and it did not retreat, and it was going to come down.