Rain sheeted against the carriage windows, each gust driving the deluge sideways in silver sheets that turned the Yorkshire landscape into a grey smear of moor and stone. Inside the hired post-chaise, Eleanor Ashworth pressed her forehead to the cold glass and watched the milestones blur past: Selby, then beyond it the turnpike road that wound north toward the Dales. Her gloves lay discarded in her lap. She had not worn them since Doncaster, where the carriage had changed horses and a stable boy had leered at her through the open door.
She was alone, and she had never been alone before.
The realization sat in her stomach like a cold stone, heavy and indigestible. For twenty-two years she had been defined by adjacency: sister to the heir, niece to the dowager, cousin to half the peerage of the North Riding. Now her brother was dead of a fever in Naples, and the title had passed not to her but to a man she had met exactly twice, once at the wedding and once at the funeral where he had stood at the back of the chapel with a face like carved marble and said nothing to anyone.
Lord Nathaniel Ashworth, ninth Marquess of that name, and as of three months ago, the man responsible for her future.
Eleanor straightened against the squabs and pulled the worn leather case from beneath the seat. Inside lay the papers that had summoned her: a letter from the family solicitor, a draft agreement, and a single sheet in her brother-in-law's own hand commanding her presence at Ashworth Park to "discuss matters of mutual concern." No warmth in the phrasing. No inquiry after her health. Just the cold imperative of a man who dealt in obligations rather than affection.
The carriage lurched through a pothole, and she braced herself against the side. Rain drummed on the roof with renewed fury, a sound that swallowed thought. She thought of the bright rooms in Mayfair where she had been a guest these past weeks, of the sympathetic cluck of her aunt and the not-so-subtle suggestions that she might consider the position of companion to some elderly relation. The pitying glances. The careful silences when the conversation turned to the subject of marriage portions.
She would not be a companion. She would not fade quietly into some corner of England, rusting away on a meager allowance while the world forgot the Ashworth sisters had ever existed. The Marquess had summoned her for a reason, and she meant to discover what it was.
Beyond the rain-streaked glass, a shape materialized: the dark bulk of an estate wall, then iron gates half-hidden by overgrown laurels. The carriage slowed, wheels crunching on gravel that had not seen a rake in months. Eleanor caught a glimpse of a gatehouse with shuttered windows, then the drive curved between skeletal beeches and the house revealed itself in stages. Ashworth Park. East front. The classical facade of a Palladian mansion, its stone darkened by centuries of Yorkshire weather, its windows catching what little light the storm permitted and throwing it back like dull lead.
The carriage clattered to a halt beneath a porte-cochere, and a footman in a faded livery scrambled forward with an umbrella. Before he could reach the door, it was wrenched open from outside.
"Miss Eleanor Ashworth, I presume."
The woman who stood in the downpour was not what Eleanor had expected. She was perhaps fifty, with iron-grey hair pulled back under a cap that had seen better decades, and a face that might have been kind if it were not currently arranged in an expression of such profound disapproval. Her black bombazine was spotless despite the weather, and she held herself with the rigid posture of someone who had spent a lifetime being correct in every particular.
Mrs. Pembury, Eleanor assumed, though no introduction was offered. The housekeeper's gaze swept over her once, from the crown of her modestly styled bonnet to the toes of her boots where they rested on the carriage step.
"His lordship is not at home," Mrs. Pembury continued, raising her voice against the rain. "He has been detained in Ripon. I am instructed to convey you to your room and to inform you that he will receive you tomorrow at ten o'clock in the study."
Eleanor descended into the storm, grateful for the footman's umbrella. "How considerate of him to inform me of the date of his own absence."
Something flickered in Mrs. Pembury's grey eyes, there and gone, like the glimpse of a fish in murky water. "His lordship was called away on estate business this morning. A matter of considerable urgency involving the north tenancies."
"Of course." Eleanor smoothed the front of her pelisse, which was already darkening with rain. "Then I shall take this opportunity to become reacquainted with my childhood home. Unless the doors have been locked in my absence."
The housekeeper's lips compressed into a thin line. "The family wing has been... closed. For some years. However, the east corridor and the principal apartments have been maintained. I have had a fire laid in the Blue Room."
The Blue Room. Eleanor remembered it: a formal bedchamber done in paler shades of azure, with a carved four-poster and windows that looked over the rose garden. She had slept there only once, during the long-ago Christmas when her mother was still alive, and she had been permitted to choose her own room from those in the family wing.
She had been eight years old. She had chosen the Blue Room because of the roses.
"Very well," she said. "That will be acceptable."
Mrs. Pembury inclined her head and turned toward the house without waiting to see if Eleanor followed. The footman hurried to keep pace, splashing through puddles that had formed in the hollows of the old stone courtyard. Eleanor lifted her skirts and walked after them, feeling the rain find the gaps in her boots and begin its slow invasion of her stockings.
The great hall swallowed her whole.
She had forgotten the scale of it. The ceiling soared three stories above her head, painted with gods and goddesses in various states of mythological undress, and the marble floor stretched away in all directions like a frozen lake. Portraits of long-dead Ashworths lined the walls, their painted eyes following her progress with the same faint curiosity she remembered from childhood. The air smelled of beeswax and something else, something fainter: the must of old curtains, the dry rot creeping through unseen timbers. A smell she had not noticed at eight, but which now announced itself with the insistence of a debt collector.
"The Blue Room is this way, miss."
Mrs. Pembury had paused by the foot of the grand staircase, her back straight as a ramrod. A younger maid hovered uncertainly behind her, a girl of perhaps sixteen with red-rimmed eyes and the look of someone who had been crying not long since. She bobbed a curtsy as Eleanor approached, nearly dropping the candle she held.
"Mary will attend you," Mrs. Pembury said. "I have matters to attend to in the kitchen. Dinner is at seven. His lordship does not hold with late suppers."
"I shall endeavor to arrive on time, Mrs. Pembury."
The housekeeper's gaze rested on her for a moment, unreadable, then she turned and disappeared through a servants' door with the efficiency of a woman who had spent a lifetime making herself scarce. The door closed with a soft, definitive click, and Eleanor was left standing in the vastness of the hall with only a weeping maid for company.
"Well," she said to the girl. "I suppose we had best go up."
The staircase was broad enough for six to walk abreast, and Eleanor climbed it slowly, one hand on the mahogany banister that had been polished by generations of Ashworth hands. Her own palm print joined the ghosts of those that had come before. Mary walked two steps behind her, the candle flame guttering in the draft that rose from the hall below.
"Have you been in service here long, Mary?" Eleanor asked without turning.
"Two years, miss. Since I was fourteen."
"And before that?"
"Before that I was at the Dower House, with the dowager. But she doesn't keep a full staff now. Just Mrs. Hatch and the boy who does for her."
Eleanor nodded. The dowager. Her grandmother, the formidable Countess who had ruled Ashworth Park for half a century before retreating to the smaller house on the estate when her son had married and brought his wife to the main house. She had not seen the old woman since the funeral. No one had been permitted to see her, apparently, except for the dwindling circle of servants who kept her comfortable in her voluntary exile.
"I shall call upon her tomorrow, if I may," Eleanor said.
"I couldn't say, miss. I don't know the visiting hours."
The girl sounded terrified of saying the wrong thing, and Eleanor decided to desist. They reached the first-floor landing and turned down a corridor lined with ancestral portraits, their gilt frames tarnished to the color of old honey. Mary stopped before a door near the end of the hall and produced a key from her apron pocket.
"The Blue Room, miss."
The door swung open, and Eleanor stepped into a space she had not entered in fourteen years. The room was smaller than she remembered, or perhaps she had grown. The four-poster bed was made up with fresh linens that smelled of lavender and camphor, and a fire crackled in the grate, casting dancing shadows across walls papered in blue silk that had faded to the color of a winter sky. The rose garden was just visible through rain-lashed windows, though at this hour and in this light it was impossible to make out the flower beds, only the dark shapes of leafless bushes and the grey sweep of the lawn beyond.
Eleanor crossed to the window and pressed her palm to the glass. It was cold, and her breath fogged the surface.
"Thank you, Mary," she said. "That will be all for now."
The girl curtsied again, more successfully this time, and retreated. The door closed behind her with a soft click, and Eleanor was alone.
She stood at the window for a long time, watching the rain fall on the garden where her mother had once walked with a basket and a pair of secateurs, cutting blooms for the house. The secateurs had been silver, and her mother had worn them on a ribbon at her waist like a talisman. Eleanor had been given them after the funeral, but they had disappeared at some point during the long legal process that had followed, claimed by some anonymous relative as a keepsake. She had not mourned them at the time. Now she wished she had them, wished she could hold something her mother had touched and remember the precise pressure of those fingers.
She turned from the window and began to unpack. The contents of her trunk were meager: three dresses of good but unfashionable cut, a supply of linen, a writing case with the Ashworth cipher on the clasp, a single piece of jewelry that had belonged to her mother, a thin gold chain set with three small pearls. The total of her fortune, as it currently stood, was a hundred and twenty pounds in the funds and the clothes on her back. A season in London had taught her precisely how far that would not go.
When she had finished arranging her meager possessions, she rang for Mary and asked for tea, which was brought up by a different maid, an older woman who said nothing and departed with the same expression of studied blankness Mrs. Pembury had worn. The tea was excellent, which surprised her. Either the Marquess was less impoverished than rumor suggested, or someone in the kitchen was performing miracles with a limited budget.
Eleanor drank her tea and reviewed the documents in her case. The agreement was straightforward, written in the dense legal hand of the family solicitor: she was to be provided with room and board at Ashworth Park, in exchange for which she would serve as a companion to the dowager and undertake such other duties as might reasonably be required of a lady in reduced circumstances. The allowance was generous by the standards of genteel poverty, though it was a pittance compared to what she had been raised to expect. There was a clause permitting her to withdraw from the arrangement at any time, provided she gave one month's notice.
It was, she recognized, an act of charity dressed in the language of employment. The Marquess was providing for her without the humiliation of an outright gift, and in return he expected her gratitude and her discretion.
She would give him the first. The second remained to be negotiated.
At half past six, she descended the great staircase again and made her way to the dining room by following the sound of voices and the smell of roasting meat. The room was cavernous and cold; only one end of the long table had been set, and the fire in the grate had been allowed to die to embers. Mrs. Pembury stood near the sideboard, overseeing the placement of dishes, and turned at Eleanor's entrance with an expression that suggested she had been expecting her earlier.
"You are prompt, miss," the housekeeper observed.
"I was taught that tardiness is the thief of other people's time."
"His lordship will appreciate that." The words carried a weight Eleanor could not quite parse, an inflection that might have been approval or might have been something else entirely.
She took her seat at the head of the table, then hesitated. "Should I not wait? In case Lord Nathaniel has returned?"
"He sent word an hour ago. He will not be back until morning." Mrs. Pembury placed a tureen of soup before her. "The roads are flooded north of Ripon. He was obliged to put up at the Golden Lion for the night."
Eleanor picked up her spoon. "Then I shall enjoy my dinner without the burden of conversation. Do sit down, Mrs. Pembury. I find solitary meals melancholy, and I shall be at Ashworth Park long enough that we may as well become acquainted."
The housekeeper's eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. "I eat in the kitchen, miss. It is not my place to sit at table with the family."
"The family," Eleanor repeated. "That is a small category these days, I suspect. I am not certain I qualify for inclusion, given the terms of my arrival."
Mrs. Pembury regarded her for a long moment, then something in her expression shifted, a minute relaxation of the muscles around her mouth. "You have your mother's way of asking uncomfortable questions, miss."
Eleanor set down her spoon. "Did you know her well?"
"I was in service here when she married his lordship's father. I was a chambermaid then, barely sixteen." Mrs. Pembury's gaze drifted to the portrait above the fireplace, a full-length depiction of a man in hunting attire who had died before Eleanor was born. "She was kind. Kinder than she needed to be, some said, though I never saw evidence of that myself. She had a name for every servant in the house, and she remembered the christenings and the burials."
"That sounds like her."
"It sounds like a woman who understood that the people in the portraits were not the only ones who mattered at Ashworth Park." Mrs. Pembury straightened, the brief softness vanishing from her features. "Eat your soup, miss. It will not improve with standing."
Eleanor obeyed, and Mrs. Pembury withdrew through the servants' door, leaving her alone with the ghosts of her ancestors and the steady percussion of rain against the windows. She ate methodically, tasting little, her thoughts circling the events of the day. The summons, the journey, the cold grandeur of the house, the housekeeper's guarded manner, the absent Marquess with his face of carved marble. Each was a piece in a puzzle whose shape she had not yet discerned.
After dinner, she returned to the Blue Room and sat by the fire with a book she had brought from London, a novel of manners she had read three times already. The words blurred before her eyes, and she found herself listening to the sounds of the house settling around her: the creak of timbers, the distant clatter of pans from the kitchen far below, the soft footsteps of servants going about their evening rounds. The rain had not abated. It drummed against the glass with a persistence that felt almost personal, as though the weather itself were determined to keep her indoors.
She went to bed early, but sleep was a long time coming. When it did, it was shallow and full of dreams she could not quite remember in the morning, fragments of her brother's face in the coffin, her mother's voice calling from somewhere she could not reach, a man's figure standing at the end of a corridor that stretched longer than any corridor ought to, his features indistinct, his voice when he spoke her name.
She woke before dawn, rested in body if not in mind, and lay listening to the silence that had followed the rain. It was a different quality of quiet than the night before, expectant rather than oppressive. Somewhere on the estate, a rooster announced the new day. A carriage wheel crunched on gravel, far off but approaching.
The Marquess had returned.
The morning bell rang at seven, its tone bright and insistent, a sound that had likely been ringing at that same hour for two centuries. Mrs. Pembury appeared at the Blue Room door precisely as the last note faded, carrying a small tray bearing chocolate and dry toast.
"You'll take breakfast before you meet the young miss," she said, setting the tray on the bedside table. "Children are best approached before they've had time to think of objections. And Miss Eleanor is a child who has had considerable time to think of them."
Charlotte sat up, accepting the cup with both hands. The chocolate was rich and dark, and the warmth of it spread through her before the first sip reached her stomach. Mrs. Pembury drew the curtains, letting in a pale wash of morning light that turned the gilt frames momentarily bright.
"Her mother died eight months ago," the housekeeper continued, her tone factual rather than sympathetic. "Lady Ashworth. Consumption. She was in the south of France for her health, and the journey home was too much. The late Marquess went to fetch her. He arrived too late by three days." She paused, straightening a fold of curtain that did not require straightening. "Miss Eleanor was at the schoolroom window when the carriage came up the drive. She watched her father step down alone. She has not spoken of her mother since. Not once."
"And Lord Ashworth?" Charlotte asked. "The girl's father. What does he say of it?"
Mrs. Pembury's expression tightened, a movement so slight that Charlotte would have missed it had she not been watching closely. "His lordship has said very little since his return. He spends his mornings on estate business, his afternoons with Miss Eleanor, and his evenings in the library. He has not entertained. He has not dined with the family in a fortnight. The Dowager Countess keeps to her rooms, and Lady Caroline visits when she is not occupied elsewhere. The house is quiet, Miss Winslow. Too quiet for a place with so many people in it."
There was something in the way she said it, a weight beneath the words, that suggested Mrs. Pembury herself found the quiet unsettling. Or perhaps it was something else. Perhaps the quiet was a symptom of a deeper malady the housekeeper could name but not cure.
"How old is Miss Eleanor now?" Charlotte asked.
"Six years and four months. Her birthday is in October. She is small for her age, though perfectly formed, and she has a mind that would put many adults to shame. She reads above her years and sums faster than I can follow. She also knows precisely how to make a governess feel she is not wanted, and she will deploy every weapon in her considerable arsenal by teatime."
"Is that meant to discourage me?"
Mrs. Pembury gave her a long look, the sort of look that weighed and measured and found the result interesting if not entirely reassuring. "It is meant to prepare you. I do not know if you are the right person for this position, Miss Winslow. I do not yet know if the position itself is one that can be filled. But I know that Miss Eleanor's father has interviewed four governesses in the past six months, and all four left within the fortnight. The fifth was dismissed before she unpacked. I am telling you this not to frighten you but to ensure you understand what you have agreed to. This is not a household that welcomes strangers easily. It has been wounded, and wounded creatures bite."
Charlotte finished her chocolate and set the cup down. "Then I shall endeavour not to be bitten."
Mrs. Pembury's mouth twitched, not quite a smile but the closest thing to one Charlotte had yet seen from her. "Follow me. I will show you to your room, and then I will take you to the schoolroom. The young miss takes her lessons in the east wing, in what was formerly the late Marchioness's morning room. It has a good light and a view of the garden, and Miss Eleanor refused to use any other room when her lessons resumed in the autumn. Her father could deny her nothing in those first weeks. He still cannot deny her much."
The housekeeper led her through corridors that seemed to multiply as they walked, each one a variation on a theme of pale walls and dark wood and portraits of Ashworths past, their painted eyes following Charlotte with an expression she could not quite read. Past the gallery, where the long windows looked out over the formal gardens now bare and rain-washed. Past a small parlour whose door stood ajar, revealing a flash of blue silk and the sound of a woman's voice raised in irritation, though the words were indistinct. Past a narrow staircase that spiralled upward into shadow, the steps worn smooth by generations of servants' feet.
"The family wing is through there," Mrs. Pembury said, gesturing to a doorway hung with heavy brocade curtains. "The schoolroom and the nursery are in the east wing, as I said. Your room is in the attics above, as is proper for your position. You will have your own chamber and a small sitting room that adjoins the schoolroom, in case Miss Eleanor requires attention in the night. I have had fires laid in both. The attics can be cold, even in spring."
The staircase to the attics was tucked behind a door at the end of the east corridor, so well hidden that Charlotte would have walked past it a dozen times without noticing. It was narrow and steep, with a rope banister that had seen better days, and it creaked beneath their feet in a way that suggested every step was an announcement. The air grew cooler as they ascended, and Charlotte caught the faint smell of old wood and lavender, the latter presumably from sachets placed by some long-ago housekeeper to keep the moths from the winter blankets.
Her room was at the very top, a modest space beneath the sloping eaves, furnished with a narrow bed, a washstand, a small wardrobe, and a desk positioned beneath a skylight that let in a flood of morning light. The walls were papered in a pale blue pattern of tiny roses, faded now but still pretty, and the bed was made up with white linen and a quilt that looked to be hand-stitched, each square a different shade of blue. A vase of dried lavender stood on the windowsill, and beside it lay a small wrapped parcel tied with kitchen string.
"The previous governess left that," Mrs. Pembury said, noticing Charlotte's glance. "A book of poetry, I believe. You are welcome to it, or to dispose of it as you see fit. I will send a maid up with your trunk, and you may take a few minutes to settle yourself before you come down. The schoolroom is two doors along the corridor, the one with the green baize door. I will tell Miss Eleanor you will be with her within the hour."
She turned to go, then paused at the threshold, one hand on the door frame. "Miss Winslow. I do not say this often, and I will deny it if you repeat it, but I find myself hoping you are the one who stays. Miss Eleanor needs a governess. More than that, she needs someone who will not be driven away by a clever child in pain. If that person is you, then I shall be grateful. If it is not, I shall be resigned. I have learned, in thirty years of service, to be grateful when I can and resigned when I must."
The door closed behind her, and Charlotte was alone.
She stood for a moment in the centre of the small room, turning slowly to take in its details. The view from the skylight was of rooftops and chimney pots and, beyond them, the distant grey smudge of the moor under a sky that was slowly brightening. The air was cool but not cold, and the bed looked clean and inviting despite its narrowness. A home of her own, however temporary, however modest. She had not had one of those in a very long time.
She unwrapped the parcel on the windowsill. It was indeed a book of poetry, a slim volume bound in green cloth, the gilt on the spine long since worn away. The previous governess had written her name on the flyleaf in a neat, sloping hand: Miss Harriet Felling. Beneath the name, in smaller letters, she had added: April, 1814. Three weeks, Charlotte thought. She had lasted three weeks.
She set the book on the desk and turned to the window, looking down at the courtyard below. From this height, she could see the stable yard and the kitchen garden and, beyond the low wall that separated the formal gardens from the park, a figure walking alone across the wet grass, his dark coat unmistakable even at this distance. Lord Ashworth, she presumed, taking his morning exercise before the business of the day claimed him. He walked with his head down and his hands clasped behind his back, and there was something in the set of his shoulders that suggested a man engaged in private conversation with his own thoughts, a conversation from which he would not welcome interruption.
The sound of a child's laughter drew her attention back to the house. It came from the corridor below, bright and unguarded, the sort of laugh that belonged to a much younger child than six. She moved to the door and opened it quietly, looking down the length of the attic corridor toward the green baize door Mrs. Pembury had indicated. The laughter had ceased, replaced by a deeper voice, a man's voice, though not the one she had heard at dinner. The words were indistinct, but the tone was warm, affectionate, the voice of a man speaking to someone he loved.
She could not help herself. She moved to the head of the narrow staircase and looked down through the gap in the bannisters, past the turn of the stair, into the corridor below. What she saw made her catch her breath.
The great hall of Ashworth Hall stretched below her, its marble floor gleaming in the morning light that fell through the high windows. And crossing that hall, moving with the easy grace of a man entirely at home in his own domain, was Lord Nathaniel Ashworth. He was dressed for riding, in dark breeches and a coat of deep blue that set off the width of his shoulders, his hair still slightly disordered as though he had dressed in haste. And on his shoulders, her small legs hooked around his neck, her hands tangled in his dark hair, sat a child.
Eleanor. It could be no one else. Even from this height, Charlotte could see the tumble of dark curls, the flash of a pale face, the small hand that reached down to tap her father's chest as though punctuating a sentence he was supposed to be paying closer attention to. He was saying something to her, his head tilted up toward the child on his shoulders, and though Charlotte could not make out the words, she could see the way his mouth moved, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners, the way the stern mask of the previous evening had melted into something entirely different.
He looked, Charlotte thought, like a man who had forgotten, for a moment, to be guarded. He looked like a man in love with his child. He looked like a man who had not yet learned how to protect his heart from a loss that had already happened, or how to explain to a six-year-old that the world had changed in ways that could not be explained.
The child threw her head back and laughed again, a high, clear sound that echoed in the empty hall, and he reached up to steady her with one hand, the gesture so instinctive, so tender, that Charlotte felt something catch in her throat. She had not expected this. She had expected the cold lord of Mrs. Pembury's careful warnings, the grieving widower who could not look at his brother's wife, the man who had sat at dinner like a man attending his own funeral. She had not expected this: the laughter, the play, the easy affection of a father with his daughter on his shoulders.
She stepped back from the bannister, careful not to let her footfall betray her presence, and retreated into her room. The skylight was still bright, the lavender still fragrant, the book of poetry still sitting on the desk where she had left it. But the view from the window had changed. The man in the park was no longer alone. Eleanor was with him now, running ahead across the wet grass, her dark curls bouncing, her arms spread wide as though she meant to embrace the sky itself. He followed more slowly, his hands in his pockets, and even from this height Charlotte could see the way he watched her, the way his face softened when she turned to wave.
She had a child to meet, a position to keep, a household to navigate without giving offence. She did not have time to be unsettled by the sight of a father playing with his daughter in the morning light. She did not have time to feel the ache in her chest that came from watching a man love his child with the sort of unguarded tenderness she had not known a man was capable of until this precise moment. She did not have time.
She spent the next half hour unpacking what little she had brought, arranging her few possessions in the wardrobe and on the desk, laying out her plainest dress for the morning and her better one for the afternoon, in case she were summoned to take tea with the Dowager. She unpacked her sketchbook and her pencils and locked them in the desk drawer, out of sight of any prying eyes. She unpinned her hair and rebraided it more severely, as befitted her station. She washed her face and hands in the cold water of the washstand and pinned her cap more firmly in place.
When she was ready, she looked at herself in the small mirror above the washstand. The face that looked back at her was composed, competent, unremarkable. The face of a governess. The face of a woman who had learned, through long practice, to keep her feelings to herself and her opinions to herself and her hopes to herself, in case any of them should prove inconvenient.
She went down the narrow stairs and along the attic corridor to the green baize door. Behind it, she could hear the soft sounds of a room preparing for the day: the click of a window latch, the rustle of paper, the small thud of a book being set down too hard.
She knocked.
The sounds ceased. There was a silence that lasted exactly three heartbeats, and then a voice, high and clear and carrying the particular coldness of a child who has been disappointed too many times to risk hoping again.
"Come in."
Charlotte opened the door.
The schoolroom was a bright, pleasant space, the morning light streaming through tall windows that overlooked the kitchen garden and, beyond it, the park. A large table dominated the centre of the room, already set out with books and slates and an array of pencils arranged in a small wooden rack. Bookshelves lined one wall, filled with volumes that looked new and expensive. A smaller table stood by the window, set for two, with a tea service that gleamed in the light. And in the centre of the room, standing very straight, her hands clasped behind her back, her face composed into an expression of perfect politeness, was Eleanor Ashworth.
She was small for her age, as Mrs. Pembury had said, but there was nothing small about her presence. She had her father's dark hair and her mother's pale complexion, and her eyes, large and dark and watchful, missed nothing. She was dressed in a white pinafore over a blue frock, and her dark curls had been brushed into submission, though one rebellious lock was already escaping at the temple. She looked, Charlotte thought, like a portrait of a child painted by a master who understood that childhood is a serious business, and that the most serious part of it is learning to read the faces of the adults who will determine your fate.
"Good morning," Charlotte said. "I am Miss Winslow. I believe I am to be your governess."
Eleanor regarded her for a long moment, her dark eyes moving from Charlotte's face to her cap to her hands to her shoes, assessing and dismissing in the space of a breath. "You are the sixth," she said. "I expect you will last about as long as the others. Perhaps less, if you are particularly tiresome."
"I shall endeavour not to be tiresome," Charlotte said. "It is a quality I find quite exhausting in others, and I should hate to inflict it on myself."
Eleanor's mouth twitched, a movement so small that Charlotte might have imagined it. "The others said they would not be tiresome either. The third one cried. That was undignified."
"I do not intend to cry," Charlotte said. "I find it gives one a headache, and this house appears to have a sufficient number of those without my adding to them."
Something shifted in Eleanor's expression, a flicker of something that might have been interest, quickly suppressed. "You may sit down," she said, gesturing to the smaller table. "I have ordered tea. I do not care for tea, but Cook insists, and I have learned it is easier to allow her to fuss than to argue. You may take milk or leave it. Sugar is on the tray. I do not take sugar. I find it cloying."
Charlotte sat. Eleanor remained standing, and Charlotte understood that this was a test, a small battle of wills in which the winner would be the one who understood the rules first. She poured two cups of tea, added milk to one and left the other plain, and pushed the plain one across the table toward the chair opposite.
"I did not know how you take it," she said. "I assumed plain, since you find sugar cloying. But I am happy to be corrected."
Eleanor looked at the cup, then at Charlotte, then at the cup again. The calculation in her eyes was almost visible, the weighing of whether to accept the offering or reject it on principle. After a long moment, she sat down and pulled the cup toward her, wrapping both small hands around it as though drawing warmth from it.
"You are observant," she said, which was not quite a compliment but was not, Charlotte suspected, meant as an insult.
"I am a governess," Charlotte said. "Observation is rather the point of the exercise."
"You are also a stranger."
"That will remedy itself in time."
"Perhaps." Eleanor took a sip of her tea, watching Charlotte over the rim of the cup. "The others were strangers too. Some of them tried very hard not to be. It did not help."
"And some of them did not try at all," Charlotte said. "Which was worse."
Eleanor set her cup down with a precision that belied her years. "The fifth one was dismissed before she unpacked. She had not yet unpacked when Father sent her away. She had brought a great many books with her, all of them very dull, and a small dog that bit me. Father said the dog was not suitable. I think Father said Miss Felling was not suitable. He said it in a different voice. He said it in the voice he uses when he means something he will not explain."
"And what did you make of that?"
Eleanor's eyes narrowed. "You are asking me what I thought."
"I am asking you what you made of it. Thought is a different matter, and I would not presume to ask a six-year-old what she thinks of her father's decisions."
"I am six years and four months," Eleanor said, with the precision of a child who has counted every one of them. "And I think my father's decisions are his own. I make of them what I can."
It was, Charlotte thought, the most carefully constructed piece of evasion she had ever heard from a child. There was a mind behind those dark eyes, and the mind was busy, and the mind had learned to protect itself with the same sort of careful defences Charlotte had learned to build over the years. She recognised the technique because she had invented it herself, at much the same age, after her own losses had taught her that the safest way to survive was to keep one's true thoughts hidden and one's true feelings closer.
"Your mother," Charlotte said, and watched Eleanor's face shut like a window in winter. "Mrs. Pembury told me she was in France. For her health."