“Good night.”
***
Her room was small but clean, tucked into a corner of the floor below the nursery. A fire had been laid, and someone—Mrs Potter, no doubt—had ensured that hot water stood ready in a pitcher and fresh linens adorned the narrow bed.
Lorraine washed, changed into her nightgown, and sat for some moments upon the edge of the mattress, listening to the wind as it swept across the moors.
Temporary,she reminded herself.Three months. Perhaps less. The grandparents will arrive, the boy will depart, and you will go on to the next household, the next family, the next set of children who require you—until they do not.
She had made her peace with such a life. Or if not peace, then something approaching a truce. She possessed a skill, and it was valued; and if she would never have a home of her own, nor a family, nor a name unshadowed by scandal—well. That was the price of the choice she had made. The choice she would make again, if compelled, even knowing its cost.
Do not grow attached.
Yet she could still feel the weight of Thomas’s gaze. The studied blankness. The small, reluctantgood nightthat had escaped him despite his evident determination to withhold it.
She shut the thought down.
She extinguished the candle and lay in the darkness of Rovewood Hall, listening to the wind, the silence, and the vast, hollow spaces of a house that had forgotten how to hold warmth.
Somewhere below, she thought she heard footsteps. Slow. Measured. Pacing.
The Duke of Ravenswood, perhaps. The man who went nowhere. The soldier who had returned from war only to shut himself within this beautiful, frozen tomb.
I shall meet him tomorrow,she thought.And then I shall understand.
She slept, and dreamed of nothing, and woke before dawn to the sound of a child crying somewhere above her in the dark.
Chapter Two
“You are pacing again, Your Grace.”
Dominic Vane, sixth Duke of Ravenswood, halted mid-stride and turned to find Graves standing in the doorway of his study, his expression one of studied neutrality—the surest sign that the butler was restraining comment. It was not yet six o’clock. The fire had burned low, and the whisky decanter upon the sideboard was appreciably emptier than it had been at midnight.
“I am not pacing,” Dominic said. “I am… considering.”
“Of course, Your Grace.” Graves’s tone suggested he knew precisely how much considering had taken place, and how much of it had consisted in wearing a path into the Turkish carpet. “The new governess has arrived. Mrs Potter settled her in the blue room last night.”
The new governess.Dominic’s jaw tightened before he could prevent it. The fifth in as many months—though, in fairness, two had departed of their own accord, citing the isolation, the gloom, and the child’s unsettling silences, while only two had been dismissed: one for incompetence, the other for asking too many questions about the war.
This one came with excellent references. A Mrs Whitmore had written effusively of Miss Weston’s skill with difficult children, her intelligence, her discretion.A treasure, the woman had called her.You shall not find better.
Dominic did not want a treasure. He wanted someone competent enough to keep the boy fed, educated, and out of his sight until the Hardings arrived to collect him. Was that so much to require?
“I shall see her at nine,” he said. “Here. Inform her.”
“Very good, Your Grace.” Graves paused. “Shall I have breakfast sent up, or will you—”
“I am not hungry.”
Another pause. Graves had served the Vane family for forty years and had known Dominic since he was a boy in short coats, terrorising nursery maids and trailing mud through the gallery. He had earned the right to certain liberties—though he seldom exercised them directly.
“Mrs Potter mentioned,” the butler said carefully, “that Miss Weston made a favourable impression upon Master Thomas last evening.”
Dominic’s hand, reaching for the whisky decanter, stilled. “Did she?”
“The boy spoke to her, apparently. Unprompted.”
Spoke.Thomas had not spoken unprompted to anyone in this household since his arrival. He answered when directly addressed—brief, colourless replies that revealed nothing—but he did not initiate. Did not volunteer. Did not, so far as Dominic could discern, exist as anything more than a small, silent ghost drifting through the upper floors of a house that had ghosts enough already.
