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“You only talk about cats,” he said. “That is all you want out of life at present, it seems.”

“It is all I want out of life at present, yes.” Alice said and giggled so loudly, that Leonora laughed before she could stop herself, a real laugh that she felt rather than planned. Alice turned to her, looking immensely pleased to have caused it.

Anthony glanced up at the sound to meet her eyes, and caught Leonora off guard by it. Her laughter stopped just as quickly, aware all at once of the warmth climbing into her cheeks. She looked away toward the window, certain he was still watching her even without turning to check, and wondered, not for the first time that week, what she meant to do with all these new feelings, and whether she was equipped to manage them at all.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“…Then,” Alice said, leaning so far forward on the rug that she nearly toppled into the low fire, her small hands spread wide for emphasis. “…the man was walking home from the village, and it was very late, and very dark, and he heard something behind him on the road.”

The fire had been let burn low on purpose. Marian had drawn the curtains against what remained of the evening light before Alice had even finished arranging herself properly on the rug, and the result was a room gone soft and shadowed at its edges, the sort of dimness that made every ordinary corner look like there was a shadow of a monster standing in it.

“What sort of something?” Marian asked, with wide eyes, seemingly engrossed in the story.

“Footsteps. Only when he turned around there was nothing there, just the road, empty as anything.” Alice paused for effect, clearly pleased with the silence she had produced. “But then he heard it again, closer, and when he turned around that time, there was a great black dog standing right in the middle of the road, with eyes like two burning coals.”

“Then…” Alice went on, warming further to her own telling. “…the dog followed him the whole way home, and it never made a single sound, not one bark, nothing, just followed, and nobody else could see it but him, and the very next week, he died.”

Leonora kept her expression carefully arranged into something appreciative, because Alice was watching her for a reaction and would be crushed by anything less, but privately she could not understand the appeal of any of this. The world held more than enough to frighten a person without inventing dogs with burning eyes to add to the pile. There were children not three streets from this very house who went hungry because some lord in Parliament had decided the price of bread ought to rise again. There were women turned out of their own homes for debts that were never truly theirs to begin with, left to manage however they could on streets that offered them very little mercy. That was frightening. A dog in a story, however convincingly told, was not.

“That is the whole tale?” Marian asked. “A dog that only he could see, and nothing further to it?”

“That is the whole of it. This is the frightening part. That nobody believes you, even when you know exactly what you saw, and you are left all alone with it regardless.” Alice said and sat back on her heels, clearly pleased with herself for having delivered the moral along with the story.

“Where on earth did you hear such a thing?” Leonora asked her.

“Her Grace told me.” Alice answered. “She tells me a lot of stories when we are in the library together, writing.”

Leonora was not in the least surprised. Her sister had never in her life picked up a romance novel if she could help it, finding the entire genre a waste of perfectly good reading hours, but she would devour anything else set in front of her without discrimination, histories thick enough to double as doorstops, broadsheets nobody else in the household bothered with, collections of regional folklore that had clearly taken considerable effort to track down and no one but Seraphina had the patience to read cover to cover. Of course she had a black dog with burning eyes tucked away somewhere, ready to be passed along to an eager six year old the moment the opportunity presented itself.

“It is so odd.” Leonora shook her head. “ Do you know there was a time, not so very long ago, Alice, when you would not sleep without three candles lit and the door propped wide open, for fear of what might be lurking under the bed?”

Alice frowned. “That was ages ago. I was little then.”

“You are little now.”

“I am considerably less little than I was.” Alice said. “Besides, Seraphina taught me that there is nothing actually frightening in the world, not really. Or rather, that anything frightening is only as frightening as a person decides to let it be. So I decided not to let the dog story frighten me, and then, once I had decided it, it simply did not. I do love a good horror story.”

It was, Leonora thought, a remarkably good lesson to give a child, better reasoned than most grown advice she had ever received on the subject of fear herself, and delivered with a conviction most adults she knew could not have managed even with practice.

She found herself wondering, with a suddenness that caught her off guard entirely, whether she would ever have a small daughter of her own to teach such things to, someone small and serious who might sit just like this, cross legged on a rug, absorbing whatever wisdom was handed down to her. Whether she would pass along what she herself had learned, from Lady Byron’s particular brand of blunt, unsentimental honesty, from her sisters’ hard won certainties, from every book she had ever stayed up far too late reading by candlelight when she ought to have been asleep. It was the first time in her entire life she had properly let herself think such a thing, pondering on it rather than letting it pass through unexamined, and stranger still, the thought did not frighten her the way she suspected it ought to.

She shook her head vigorously, trying not to think of it. It was simpler, and considerably safer, to decide instead that her heart had merely gone soft and unguarded since her mother’s death, worn thin enough in places that all manner of foolish, tender thoughts were slipping in through the cracks where they had no proper business being, and to leave the matter settled there rather than look any further into it.

She had not known, when she first proposed this evening to Marian and to Alice, that it would turn into an evening of ghost stories specifically. She had only meant an evening of stories of any kind, something to occupy a restless child for a few hours and, if she was honest with herself, something to occupy her own mind as well, to keep it away from the places it had taken to wandering lately whenever it was given the chance. It had turned out to be exactly the right sort of distraction regardless of the subject matter. She had not thought of her mother once in the better part of an hour, had not thought of George Bannerman or the shop or the investigation Anthony was currently doing for her, had not thought of anything at all beyond the small, warm circle of firelight and Alice’s increasingly dramatic hand gestures. For that alone she was grateful to whatever instinct had made her suggest it.

“Thank you, Alice. That was very well told indeed.” Leonora turned to Marian. “Whose turn is it next?”

“Mine, I think, since I have been saving the very best one for last.” Marian’s eyes caught what little firelight remained in a way that struck Leonora as faintly alarming, given what usually followed when the dowager duchess looked quite so pleased with herself.

That was when the door opened and Anthony appeared in it, still in his shirtsleeves, looking between the three of them curiously. “What precisely is happening in here? Why is it so dark? You three look like shadows.”

“We are telling horror stories, Uncle Anthony,” Alice informed him.

“Horror stories? Well, that sounds interesting.” He stepped further into the room, taking in the low fire, the curtains drawn, the shadows pooling thick in every corner the flames did not quite reach.

“I do not find it interesting in the least,” Leonora said. “I do not care for horror stories, as a rule.”

“Ah. Is that so?” He looked directly at her when he said it, something faintly knowing in his expression, almost as if he had already guessed as much and found her objection entirely predictable. Leonora looked away before she could decide what to make of that look, and said nothing further on the matter.