The floorboard outside the gallery announced her with a sharp, splintered cry, and Elena Marshford froze mid-step, her candle flame shuddering in the breath of her own alarm.
She had told herself she was fetching a book. She had told herself that quite firmly, standing in her narrow bedchamber in her stockings and wrapper while the rest of Ravenscar Hall slept in its heavy, ancestral silence. She had even taken a book from the shelf beside her door, a battered volume of Mrs. Radcliffe's romances left behind by some previous governess or perhaps by Miss Amelia herself, though Elena suspected the girl had been forbidden such frivolous reading. But her feet had not carried her toward the library. They had carried her, traitorously, here: to the long gallery, where the Ravenscar ancestors lined the walls in their gilt frames and the portraits of the living kept company with those of the dead.
She had not meant to come back tonight. Not after last night, when she had nearly been caught with her ear pressed to the door of the master's study, and not after the strange encounter in the corridor where she had thought she glimpsed a figure in white drifting toward the east wing. Not after any of it.
But sleep would not have her. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw again the way Miss Amelia's hand had trembled when she passed Elena the cup of tea that morning, and the way her voice had cracked on a single word, please, before she fled the breakfast room with such desperate haste that she had forgotten her shawl. Elena still had the shawl, folded in her drawer, and the scent of lavender water clung to the wool as though the girl had only just set it down.
She pressed her shoulder to the gallery door and eased it inward.
The hinges did not wake. That surprised her. She had expected resistance, the groan of old iron, but the door yielded as smoothly as if it had been oiled recently, and the thought made the small hairs along her arms lift beneath her wrapper. Someone had been caring for this room. Someone had been preparing it for use, or for display, or for something she could not yet name.
Inside, the portraits waited. The candlelight wandered across them in slow, wavering pools, bringing a stranger's painted eye to life, then drowning it again. Elena kept her own breathing shallow and quiet, as though she were a guest in someone else's dream. The smell of the room reached her before she had taken three steps: dust, certainly, and the dry, papery scent of old varnish, but beneath it something else, a faint sweetness like pressed roses left too long between pages. She could not place it, and that unsettled her further.
She had counted the portraits that first afternoon, when Lady Helena had given her the grand tour with such glittering, brittle cheer that Elena had known instantly to distrust it. Thirty-seven ancestors. Thirty-seven gilt frames, each one numbered in faded ink on a small brass plate at its base. The current Marquess had not been included; Lady Helena had explained, with a laugh that did not quite reach her eyes, that her husband preferred to haunt the house in person rather than suffer the indignity of being painted. Elena had smiled at the joke and thought: he is afraid of being watched.
There were, however, two portraits that had been shrouded in dark velvet. Lady Helena had swept past them without a glance, and Elena had understood, with the instinct that had kept her alive through her father's ruin and her mother's long decline and her own abrupt descent from the schoolroom to the servants' hall, that certain questions were best left unspoken.
She had been thinking of those shrouded portraits for three days now.
The candle threw her shadow long and wavering against the dado as she moved along the wall. She had left her room without a plan, or so she told herself, but her feet knew exactly where they were going, and they carried her past the stern Earl of Ravenscar in his scarlet robes, past the sweet-faced Regency beauty who had been a Reynolds' copy, past the small, square portrait of a child with a spaniel that always made her chest ache, until she stood before the first of the shrouded frames.
Up close, she could see the velvet was not as black as she had thought. The candle lent it a faint undertone of plum, and where the fabric had been handled the nap had worn to a kind of bruised sheen. A thread hung loose at the lower left corner, and there, caught in the weave, a single strand of dark hair.
Elena swallowed.
She had to remind herself to breathe. She had to remind herself that she was a governess, a woman of sense and education, that she had not been raised on country superstitions and that there was nothing in this room that could harm her that a locked door could not also harm. But her pulse was loud in her ears, and her hands had gone cold around the brass candlestick, and the smell of old roses had thickened, as though the air itself were exhaling.
She reached up and took the loose thread between her fingers. The velvet resisted, then gave, with a sound like a long-held sigh. She gathered a handful of the fabric and drew it upward.
The portrait beneath was smaller than she had expected. Perhaps eighteen inches by fourteen. A young woman, painted in three-quarter length, turned slightly toward the viewer as though she had been interrupted in the act of listening for someone at a door. The style was accomplished but a little mannered, the brushwork a touch too polished, as if the artist had been more concerned with flattering his sitter than with rendering her true. The frame, though, was lovely: dark walnut, carved with a border of small, tight roses.
But it was the face that stopped Elena's breath.
Raven hair, parted in the center and drawn back over the ears in the fashion of fifteen years past, though a few soft tendrils had escaped to frame the temples. A pale, oval face with the kind of delicate bone structure that painters loved and that life so often sharpened into something less forgiving. Brows arched and faintly satirical, as though the sitter had found the whole business of sitting mildly absurd. And the eyes. The eyes were what held Elena, the way a figure on a frozen lake holds the eye of anyone who has ever known the sound of cracking ice. Dark, heavy-lidded, mournful, and yet with a spark in their depths that suggested the sadness was not the only thing the woman had known.
Elena knew that face.
She had seen it, in fragments, in the soft oval of Miss Amelia Ravenscar's countenance, in the line of the girl's cheek and the curve of her mouth. She had heard it echoed in Miss Amelia's voice, that same breathy, slightly tremulous music, those same fading-to-whispers cadences at the ends of sentences. Miss Amelia had been told she resembled her mother. Elena now understood that this had been a considerable understatement.
This was the late Marchioness. There could be no doubt. The little brass plate at the base of the frame, almost hidden beneath the falling velvet, read in faded gilt: Amelia Ravenscar, Marchioness, obiit 1814.
Elena's hand rose to her own throat, as though to confirm the pulse still moved there. The Marchioness had died eleven years ago, when Miss Amelia could have been no more than seven or eight. The girl spoke of her rarely, and only in oblique terms: a ribbon she had saved, a tune her mother had hummed, a phrase her mother had used for the small purple flowers that grew in the kitchen garden. Elena had treasured each fragment as one treasures a shard of something whole, and had tried, with the gentle persistence her own mother had once praised in her, to coax the girl into speaking more freely.
But Miss Amelia had sealed herself off. Even the tenderest of Elena's questions had met a polite, blank smile, and the smile had been her only answer.
Elena drew the velvet further back. The candle trembled in her grip, and for an instant she thought she might drop it, might let the wax spill across the floor and the frame and her own shaking hands, and then she steadied herself with a long, deliberate breath that tasted of dust and candle smoke and something sweeter still, that impossible pressed-rose sweetness that seemed to thicken whenever she lingered too long in this room.
The portrait had been slashed.
Elena's gaze dropped to the damage only after she had taken in the face, and now it returned, and her stomach turned. A single vertical cut ran from the Marchioness's left temple down through her painted cheek and across her throat, the varnish cracked along its length, the canvas beneath puckered where the blade had been driven home. The gash had been roughly repaired, the edges smoothed and repainted with a darker pigment that did not quite match the original, but the scar remained, a hard, deliberate wound across the soft beauty of the woman's face.
Someone had done this with intention. Someone had wanted to mar her.
Elena bent closer, the candle held low, and saw something she had nearly missed. Tucked into the carving of the frame, just beneath the plate, a small folded paper, yellowed with age, the corner protruding as though it had been placed there deliberately and then forgotten, or perhaps left for someone to find. She touched it with one fingertip. It was brittle and gave under her touch as though it had been waiting a long time to be opened.
She did not open it. Not yet. Some instinct, stronger than curiosity, held her back. She had been in this house only three weeks. She had been admitted into its confidence so recently that she still felt she moved through it as a guest, and a guest, however curious, did not rifle through the private drawers of a house that was not hers.
But she looked.
The paper was a letter, folded once. She could see, even from this angle, the slope of an old-fashioned hand, and what appeared to be a signature at the bottom, though the candlelight and the cramped position of the paper made it impossible to read. The wax of her candle guttered, pooling in the brass dish, and she realized her hand was beginning to ache from holding it aloft.
From somewhere deep in the east wing, a clock struck two.
Elena lifted the candle higher, and as she did, the angle of the light shifted across the second shrouded portrait, three frames further along the wall. She had not intended to look at it. She had intended to replace the velvet, to fold it neatly, to leave no trace of her visit. But the light caught something in the fall of the dark fabric, a faint shape, a suggestion of movement, and her gaze was drawn before her will could countermand it.
The shroud on the second portrait had not been tied.
It hung, half-loosened, as though it had been drawn aside earlier that evening by someone who had meant to replace it and had been interrupted. Or as though it had been loosened, deliberately, by someone who wanted the next viewer to see.
The portrait beneath the loosened shroud was smaller than the first, set in an oval frame of tarnished gilt rather than the heavy walnut that flanked its neighbour. Elena's candle flame leaned sideways in some unfelt draft, and the shadows on the velvet shifted as though the fabric itself were breathing. She did not move to touch it. Something in the way the cloth had fallen, draped half across the painted face and pooled on the floor like spilled wine, told her that to interfere further would be a trespass she was not yet ready to make.
She ought to go. She knew it even as the thought formed. The gallery was not hers, the portraits were not hers, and whatever loose thread her curiosity had found here was not hers to pull. She had come only to check that the candle in the west sconce had not guttered to nothing before morning. A small task, a governess's task, and she had turned it into this.
She was about to lower the candle, to step back and smooth the velvet over the first portrait and leave the second as she found it, when she became aware that she was not alone.
The awareness came not as a sound but as a presence, a change in the quality of the air at her shoulder. The candle flame steadied, as though some draft had been blocked by a body, and she caught the faint scent of shaving soap and something older, the dry papery smell of old books left too long shut. She had not heard footsteps. The gallery's thick carpet swallowed them, or perhaps the man who stood now at her elbow had learned long ago how to move without being heard.
"You should not be here at this hour."
The voice was low, unhurried, and it came from very close behind her. She did not startle. She had spent three weeks learning that to startle in this house was to show a weakness that would be remembered. But her fingers tightened around the brass of the candlestick, and she felt the warmth of her own pulse against the cool metal.
She turned. Lord Ravenscar stood within arm's reach, and she saw at once that he had not come dressed for company. His shirt was white but unlaced at the throat, the collar open against his neck, and the sleeves had been rolled back to the elbow as though he had been at some private work before sleep and had risen again. He held no candle. The gallery's gloom was enough for him, it seemed, or else he did not care to see clearly what he looked at. His face in the dim light was all planes and hollows, the jaw shadowed, the eyes unreadable.
"Ambrose sent me to check the sconce," she said. It was the truth, though it sounded thin even to her own ears.
"The sconce," he repeated. He did not look at the candle she held. He looked at the second portrait, at the fallen velvet, and something moved across his expression that she could not name. "And you found this."
It was not a question. She did not try to make it one. He stepped past her, close enough that she felt the brush of his sleeve against her arm, and he drew the velvet up over the oval frame with a single motion, neither gentle nor rough, the gesture of a man who had done this many times before and did not wish to be observed doing it now. When he turned back to her the cloth was in place, the portrait once again a shapeless dark beneath its shroud, and the dust that had gathered on the velvet left a faint grey smear across the white of his cuff. He did not brush it away.
"You have been in service here three weeks," he said. His voice was still low, still without urgency, but there was a weight to it now that she had not heard in it before, a deliberateness, as though he were choosing each word with care and discarding three for every one he kept. "You have seen the gallery. You have seen the portraits in their shrouds. You have not, I hope, asked questions of the staff about them."
"No, my lord."
"Good." He paused, and the silence that followed was longer than any pause she had heard from him in the brief exchanges of her first days at the Hall. He did not look at the shrouds. He looked at her, steadily, and she had the strange impression that he was not seeing her at all but rather seeing through her to something behind, something that stood where she happened to be standing. "I am going to tell you something now. I do not know why I am telling you. Perhaps because it is late and I am tired and you are the first person in this house in two years to come into this room without flinching. Perhaps for some other reason. You will oblige me by hearing it and never speaking of it again."
She said nothing. There seemed nothing to say.
"The woman in the second portrait," he said, "was my wife."
The word landed in the silence between them like a stone dropped into still water. Wife. She had not known. The staff, in the careful evasions of her first weeks, had spoken only of the late Lady Ravenscar, and always in the singular, and always with a glance toward the east tower that Elena had not yet been invited to enter. She had assumed a single wife, a single tragedy, a single shroud. She had not understood until this moment that there had been more than one.
"Her name was Amelia."
Elena's breath caught. The name. She knew the name. Not from the staff, not from any whispered confidence in the servants' hall, but from the child she had been hired to teach, the pale girl with the soft voice and the restless hands who sat in the schoolroom each morning and spelled out her lessons as though the letters themselves might rise up and accuse her. The child who flinched at the word mother and would not say where she had learned to flinch.
"She is dead."
He said it flatly, without grief in his voice, but that was worse. There was a brittleness beneath the words, a thing held together by will alone, and she could hear it when he drew breath to go on.
"She died in the tower. Two years ago. You will not have heard the date. You will not have heard the manner. No one in this house will speak of either to you, and you will not ask. You will not so much as whisper her name in the corridors after dark, do you understand? You will not write it. You will not let it pass your lips even in the privacy of your own room, because the walls of this house are thinner than they look and I will know."
His voice cracked on the last word, just slightly, just once, a hairline fracture running through the composure he had built around the sentence. He did not try to hide it. He did not pause to repair it. He simply turned away from her, the way a man turns from a wound he cannot bear to look at twice, and walked back down the long gallery without another word.
She heard his footsteps fade into the carpet, and then the silence of the room rushed back in to fill the space where he had been. The candle in her hand had burned low. The wax pooled over her fingers, warm and almost pleasant, and she did not feel it. She stood quite still, looking at the second shroud, and now she understood why it had been loosened. Someone had stood where she was standing not many hours before, and had lifted the velvet, and had looked at the painted face beneath, and had not had the heart to tie it back in place.
Or perhaps the grief was older than that. Perhaps the shroud fell loose every few weeks, and every few weeks someone came to tie it, and the tying was its own small ceremony, and the loosening was its own small rebellion against a grief that would not stay buried.
She did not know which. She did not know if she would ever know.
What she knew was this. The child in the schoolroom, the girl who would not say mother, the girl who sometimes paused in the middle of a reading lesson and stared at the window as though she could see something in the glass that no one else in the room could see, was not, as Elena had gently assumed, mourning a parent who had died in some distant illness, in some distant place. The girl was mourning here. In this house. Under this roof. And the mother's face hung on this wall, covered now by velvet that smelled of dust and candle wax and the ghost of shaving soap.
Elena lifted the candle at last, and the light caught the smear of dust on her own sleeve where she had brushed the frame of the first portrait. She looked at it for a long moment. Then she turned, and walked back down the gallery, past the shrouded faces she did not look at, past the clock in the east wing that was beginning, distantly, to strike three, and back toward the corridor that led to her own small room above the kitchens.
She did not look behind her. She knew, without turning, that if she looked she would see him standing at the far end of the gallery in the dark, watching her go, and she did not think she could bear to see that. She did not think he could bear it either.
At the door she paused, her hand on the frame, and listened. The house was quiet. The clock had stopped its striking. Somewhere, far above her, in a room she had never entered, a child was lying awake in the dark, and the child was thinking of a face she could not quite remember, and Elena understood now why she had never been able to remember it. No one in the house had ever let her look at it twice.
Elena closed the door behind her very softly, and went to bed, and did not sleep for a long time.
The candle had burned down to a stub in the saucer on her bedside table, the wax pooled in shapes like small white roses. Elena lay on her back in the narrow bed and watched the shadows move on the low ceiling, and she tried not to think about the shrouded faces in the gallery, or the smell of the velvet, or the way the clock had struck three as though it had been waiting for her to leave.
The house made its usual sounds. Somewhere in the eaves a bird had gotten in and was scrabbling softly against the slates. A shutter in the kitchen yard tapped once, twice, and was still. The pipes in the wall behind the headboard ticked with their slow metallic patience, cooling after the day's use, and Elena listened to them as she had listened every night for the seven months since she had come to Ravenscar Hall to serve as companion to a girl she had been told was delicate and was learning now was something else entirely.
She thought about Amelia. About the way the child's hand had reached for hers in the gallery, and then had not. About the candlestick that had been lifted without permission and carried toward a door that was never to be opened. About the small face in the velvet that had been pressed against the frame, as though trying to feel the canvas through the cloth, or trying to remember what lay beneath it.
Elena turned on her side. The pillow was thin and the linen smelled of lavender and of the starch the housekeeper used, and she closed her eyes.
She opened them again almost at once.
Something was wrong with the shape of the pillow. Something lay upon it that had not been there when she came in, or, if it had been there, she had not seen it in the dark, or had been too tired and too troubled to look. She sat up slowly, and her hand found the tinderbox on the bedside table by instinct, and she struck a light without quite knowing she meant to, and the new candle flared, and the room became visible around her in its small circle of yellow.
The glove lay in the centre of the pillow. White satin, the colour of old ivory, the colour of a wedding dress that had been put away and never taken out again. It was laid out as carefully as though on a display in a shop window, the fingers extended, the thumb curved gently inward, the wrist lying flat. The satin had yellowed at the tips and there was a faint brownish stain near the cuff that might have been age, or might have been something else. The monogram was worked into the fabric at the wrist in tarnished silver thread, each letter small and precise, and the letters were A.R.
Elena did not touch it at once. She sat very still with the candle in her hand and looked at it as she had looked at the shrouded portrait in the gallery, as though if she looked long enough and carefully enough the thing itself would explain itself to her, would tell her who had brought it here, and when, and why.
A.R. The initials were familiar. They had been embroidered on the linens in the stillroom, and on the pillowcases in the best bedroom that no one ever used, and on a small leather-bound prayer book that Elena had once found on a shelf in the library and had put back without opening because she had felt, suddenly, that she was not meant to have touched it. Amelia Ravenscar. The girl's own initials. The mother, she supposed at first. But the mother was dead, and dead women did not lay gloves upon pillows in the small hours of the morning. The mother, she thought again, would not have needed to. The mother had already given her glove to her daughter.
Elena reached out at last and picked the glove up by the wrist. The satin was cold in her fingers. It had been cold before she touched it, she was certain of that. It had lain on the pillow long enough for the warmth of the bed to have passed out of it and into the linen, or it had been brought here from somewhere that was itself cold, a drawer, perhaps, or a wardrobe, or a box that had not been opened in years. She turned it over in her hand. The stitching was fine and old. The thread that formed the A and the R had gone dark in places where the silver had tarnished through to the metal beneath, and in other places it still caught the candlelight and threw a faint gleam across her knuckles.
She held it to her face and smelled it. The satin smelled of cedar and of something older and sweeter, a faint trace of rosewater perhaps, or of dried petals that had once lain in the same drawer. There was a smell beneath that which she did not want to name. A smell like the inside of a wardrobe that had been closed for a long time. A smell like the gallery.
Elena set the glove down upon the counterpane and folded her hands in her lap and thought. There were, she supposed, several explanations. A maid, tidying, had found the glove somewhere and had brought it to the mistress's room in the hope that it might be recognised and put away. But Elena was not the mistress, and the maid knew that, and the maid would not have laid it so precisely upon the pillow as though it were a gift. Mr. Graves, the butler, perhaps. But Mr. Graves did not come to her room, and Mr. Graves did not arrange things on pillows, and Mr. Graves, she thought, would have left the glove on the table in the hall where it might be noticed and dealt with in the ordinary way.
Sebastian Ravenscar himself, then. The thought came and sat beside her on the bed like a third presence in the room. He had the run of the house at all hours. He was a man who did not trouble himself overmuch with the conventions of service. He had, she was beginning to understand, his own way of arranging things, and his own reasons, and he did not always share them. He had stood at the end of the gallery in the dark and watched her go, or she had believed he had, and it was not impossible that he had come to her door afterwards, and had opened it with the key that the master of a house always carries, and had laid the glove upon her pillow with his own hands.
But the monogram, she thought. A.R. Not S.R. The glove was not his to give.
A sound came from the corridor. A footstep, soft, uncertain, and then another, and then a silence that seemed to breathe. Elena looked at the door. The door was shut, and there was no light beneath it, and the handle did not move. She sat very still and listened, and the house listened with her, and the bird in the eaves had gone quiet, and the shutter in the yard did not tap.
After a long moment there was a small sound at the door. Not a knock. A tap, with the soft pad of a finger, as though the person on the other side had lost their nerve halfway through and had decided to make the smallest possible noise instead of none at all.
Elena rose from the bed. She crossed the room in three steps, and she did not take the candle with her, and she did not hesitate at the door. She opened it.
Amelia stood in the corridor in her nightgown, her feet bare upon the boards, her hair loose over her shoulders, her face very white in the faint light that came from the window at the end of the passage. She was looking at the floor. She was holding her other hand against her chest as though she had hurt herself, or as though she were trying to keep something inside her from coming out.
Amelia," Elena said. Her voice was steady. She had not expected it to be. "What are you doing out of bed?"
The girl did not answer at once. Her eyes came up from the floor and found Elena's face, and there was something in them that Elena had not seen before, something that looked like resolve, or like the first edge of it, the way the sea looks just before it decides whether to come in or go out.
I left it for you," Amelia said. Her voice was very small, and it faded at the end as though the air had taken the last of it from her. "I thought you would understand."
Elena looked down at the glove in her own hand. She had brought it with her without thinking, or perhaps not without thinking. She held it up so that the girl could see it, and the tarnished thread caught what little light there was and glimmered faintly.
This was your mother's," Elena said.
It was mine," Amelia said. "She gave it to me. On my seventh birthday. Before she went away."
Elena looked at the child for a long moment. The corridor was cold. Somewhere in the house a clock began, very faintly, to strike four, and the sound reached them as though from a great distance.
Come in," Elena said at last. She stepped back and opened the door wider. "Come in and tell me about it. If you can."
The girl looked at her. The resolve in her face wavered, and then steadied, and then wavered again, and then she put one bare foot across the threshold, and then the other, and Elena closed the door behind her very softly, and they sat together on the narrow bed in the small cold room above the kitchens of Ravenscar Hall, and the candle burned between them, and the glove lay upon the pillow, and the night went on, and the house listened.