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A piano the color of old bone sat in the center of the room. Celia perched on the bench, coaxing out a melancholy tune that shivered with the kind of hope destined to be shattered. The last notes slipped into silence, and her fingers stroked the keys on their way to curl in her lap.
“That was lovely,” I said.
She jumped and twisted, snatching something off the seat beside her—a silver pen. A look like guilt flashed over her face before she beamed. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m not really supposed to be in here, though.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“It’s Jessamine’s piano,” she said.
“Who?” I asked, puzzled.
She pointed toward the wall, so I turned—and sucked in a breath. A portrait hung on the wall: a young girl with honey-colored hair and a white shift dress. It was the girl I’d seen outside. There was no migraine haze to hide her face from me now. I could see the dark eyes that marked her as part of the family.
In her hand was a stalk of white foxglove.
“Jessamine,” Celia repeated. “Caleb and Sandra’s daughter. She passed last year. I guess she was too young for you to have really met her,” she said, biting the corner of her lip.
“I didn’t even know she existed,” I said, shaking my head. “How did she die?”
“A heart thing?” Celia said uncertainly. “It happened really suddenly.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, struggling under how utterly insufficient the words were.A heart thing. Like Leopold.
A thought came to me, born of panic and the increasing conviction that I had made a mistake coming here.
Harrow had devoured them both.
Celia offered a fragile smile. “She was a prodigy. I like to think that if she could hear, she would be happy someone was making music with it. But it was her special thing, you know? And hearing someone else play, it just makes everybody sad. Especially Uncle Caleb.” She drooped. “You won’t tell, will you?”
“I won’t,” I assured her. She didn’t respond at first, and before I could think of something more to say, the silence started to teeter on the edge of awkward. I wasn’t good at this—conversation. Human interaction. I scrambled for something to say. “Maybe you can help me. I think I’m lost. This place is a bit of a maze.”
“Literally,” she said with a little laugh.
My brows drew together, uncomprehending.
“Oh, um, the house is supposed to remind you of a labyrinth,” she said. “It’s not actually—the corridors connect up with each other and everything so you can get through, it’s just a feeling, but Nicholas Vaughan was obsessed with the whole idea. Where were you trying to go?”
“I’m not actually sure,” I confessed. “I don’t really know what to do with myself.”
“I can show you around,” Celia offered. “At least the basics. A full tour would take days.”
“That would be really helpful,” I said with feeling. I paused. “You don’t seem to be upset about me inheriting the place.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t really change anything for me.”
“But your dad was angry,” I pointed out, cautious, not sure if she’d turn defensive.
She frowned, her chin tilting up in a way that made her nose look even shorter than it was. “I guess he thought Mom might have gotten the house? Uncle Caleb and Grandpa Leopold—well, they hadn’t really been talking for a while.”
“She didn’t change her name when she got married?” I asked, remembering what Iris had said—only a Vaughan could inherit the house.
“Dad changed his name, actually,” Celia said. “He’s very progressive.”
Roman didn’t strike me as progressive. The sort to buck tradition in the hopes of a chance at inheriting though? Possibly.
I nodded, accepting her explanation, and let her lead me down the hall.
“It’s just about impossible to find anything, so you have to memorize the rooms you have to go to a lot,” Celia told me as she showed me around. “Unless you’re Desmond. He says it’s all really regular patterns if you look at it right, nested inside each other, but I can’t see it. So either I stick to the rooms I know or I find Desmond.”
