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Chapter Three
Florence Brown struggledwith the fire until she’d warmed herself in the struggle instead. “Don’t need flames if you’re sweating this much,” she said. The trouble was the chimney, she believed, but she dared not relocate to a different part of the house. The smoke from this fire might be visible enough as it was. She hoped the weather would conceal it.
At least while she stayed at the rear of the structure, she did not give away too much with lights or her own shadow against a window.
Ullinn House was not hers.
But it had the reputation of being haunted and Mr. Mason had been dead for months. A local girl who’d been told of the reclusive Mr. Mason and his errant brother, its lack of an owner was why she’d chosen it as a hiding place. She reasoned that people would stay away due to the rumors. If they did happen to see smoke or a light or hear an odd sound, then she could playact as a ghost and scare them even more.
Florence did not believe in them. The world could be horrifying enough on its own without any preternatural interference. They had been the subject of fun tales to tell her young charges, nothing more.
A nursemaid had to have eerie stories up her sleeve.Disgraced nursemaid,she thought.
She confirmed whose Ullinn House was from the bookplates in the books she pilfered from the library and a few old letters she’d seen in the study. Mr. Roderick Mason. So at leastpartsof the stories were true.
As to whether he really had killed his own brother in a duel over his wife’s honor—for that was how the stories went—she did not know. Nothing readily available in his study told her. Anyway, it would not be the sort of thing one cheerfully jotted down in a ledger.Shewould not have jotted down something of the kind.
She reasoned since Mr. Mason was dead and his house had been left empty, it would do well as a hiding place for her. Her cursory investigations did not reveal any family or legal obligations that would lead people to the home. She concluded she should be safe here. For a while.
Until she decided what to do.
Florence was running from an employer who was not only a philanderer but also a violent man. She could perhaps forgive one, but not the other. Put another way: she was sure there might be men who philandered and were not terrible, exactly. But no man who gave into brutality could be any good.
Mr. Danvers had proven one afternoon in the empty nursery that he was not to be trusted.
She had so been looking forward to Christmas and Hogmanay with the children, but it was not to be. Mrs. Danvers was from York and her husband was from Inverness. Their respective origins made for a busy time of the year, but the little girls were beside themselves with joy.
Now Florence’s lot was to spend the season in a reputedly haunted home.
To her mind, she was hiding here temporarily until she came up with a plan to hide permanently. It should not beimpossibleto come up with an assumed name and disappear somewhere. Florence chewed at her lower lip, refusing to think too much about such a tangled thing. She’d been running for two weeks.
She should be thinking about happier matters, like her freedom.
The freedom came at a high cost, but it was freedom, nonetheless.
After twenty minutes of trying to build flames without smoke billowing into the drawing room, she was successful to a point. She was satisfied that she would not suffocate herself.
She tore a piece off the loaf she’d bought from the village baker before any news of her leaving respectable employment could have traveled the area. She studied it before popping it into her mouth. Soon she would be out of provisions.
She had what little money she’d saved, but it would do no good when she could not purchase anything for fear of being caught. If that was even a realistic fear. It did not have to be for it to make her cautious.
There were mice. But the number she’d need to catch to feel satisfied was probably vast, and she did not know how to skin something so small.
Florence sat on the chaise that still puffed dust under her weight despite having been covered in a white cloth when she arrived. She had cried often in the last fortnight. She refused to begin again this very moment, although her stubbornness was most taxed.
She had always wanted her own family. As nursemaid to the Danvers’ girls, she could pretend and practice. It seemed that now that she had stopped running, things felt more desperate. It could have been the house. It was falling apart slowly in the way once-decent places would if they were left alone.
More than the lonely house putting her in a dark frame of mind, she had to admit how dire her circumstances were. She did not know how, unless she rebuilt herself from the ground up, she would find the ability to live normally. Marry. Mother her own children. It seemed foolhardy now, in the dreich, howling twilight, not to have put up with a little brutality in exchange for security. She wondered about Mrs. Danvers and her three little girls. She had not noticed any signs of violence and prayed there hadn’t ever been any. None of the other servants had mumbled anything of the kind, either.
Florence had been in the household for six months and considered herself perceptive.
With perverse luck, it was only something aboutherthat had turned Mr. Danvers’ head and hand.
Once tea wasbrought, Mr. Lester spoke more readily.
“It started before your father passed, Mr. Mason.”
“Rumors of a haunting?”
