The driver had been silent since Pickering.
Verity preferred it that way. A man who preferred not to talk to a single woman traveling alone was a man who would not remember her face afterwards, and that was a small advantage one learned to take and pocket.
The chaise stopped. The horse blew once, hard, the breath of an animal that had pulled too long against a bad road. Through the leaded glass the house arranged itself in pieces — slate roof, a row of dark casements, a flight of broad stone steps. No lamps at the door. Dusk had thinned to that yellow-gray that comes off Yorkshire stone an hour before full dark.
She stayed where she was a moment longer.
From the inside pocket of her traveling jacket she lifted her father's watch on its chain. The crystal had clouded long ago. She thumbed the catch — the small dry click, the same click he had made on his last morning, sitting up in bed and asking what time it was as though he did not believe her. Four minutes past four. She let it close. Returned it to the warm space against her ribs.
Then she stepped down.
The front doors opened before she had touched the bell. A short woman in black stood inside them with a ring of keys at her belt and a chatelaine's posture — neither welcoming nor unhospitable. The sort of stance taken when receiving deliveries.
"Miss Lane."
"Mrs. Aldercott, I believe."
"Come in, please. His lordship is in the drawing room."
No greeting. No word about the journey. Verity had taken six positions of this kind in her life and this was the first arrival at which no one had asked her if she had eaten.
The hall smelled of peat and old oak and the particular dryness of a house that left its outer rooms unheated. Two oil lamps stood lit on a long side table; their light reached perhaps four feet, then stopped, then began again at the next lamp. Between the lamps the air was dark enough to step through carefully.
Mrs. Aldercott moved towards a small writing desk and laid open a leather book.
"If you would, miss. Date and name. His lordship keeps it as his father did."
Verity took up the pen.
Eighteen November, in her even hand. She set the nib down on the next line, and there she paused — only for a breath, only long enough for Mrs. Aldercott to look at the lamp instead of her — and wrote Verity Lane. Lichfield.
The ink took. She blotted it. The pen went back into its stand without trembling because she had practiced the matter of pens at Mrs. Marchmount's, in a year that had felt long, and her hand was not the part of her that betrayed.
"This way, miss."
The small drawing room was three doors along the corridor, on the western side. A fire of split applewood burned low in the grate. The room held a sofa, two armchairs, a writing slope, and Lord Halloway. He stood at the hearth with his back to the door and his back to her.
He stayed where he was. "Mrs. Aldercott, you may leave us."
The housekeeper inclined her head and closed the door behind her.
"Miss Lane."
"My lord."
He spoke without facing her. "Come round to my right side, if you please. I prefer to address a person from the same side each time. It is a habit. You will find I am a man of habits now."
She walked round to his right. He was tall. Dark coat, dark waistcoat, no jacket, a white shirt with the cuffs turned back once because the fire was close. The tinted glasses were narrow and plain. His hair was cropped short at the sides — too short for the long dark hair she would find on her pillow in the morning, though she did not yet know that the comparison would matter.
He extended his hand without searching for hers, and she gave him her right.
His grip was light, dry, and held a fraction longer than would have been correct in a drawing room in town. His thumb settled across the inside of her wrist. It rested there. He was not pressing. He was reading.
A breath, perhaps two breaths, and he let go.
"Sit, please. The chair on your left."
She sat, and he spoke as if continuing a sentence he had begun before her arrival. "You came by train to Pickering and hired a chaise from the station."
"I did."
"From the yard, I take it. Not from the inn."
"From the yard."
"That is more sensible. The inn overcharges for any journey to this house. They consider it dangerous."
He said it without inflection, as one discusses the price of coal.
"You were sent by Mrs. Beale's agency in Doncaster. Mrs. Beale's hand is unmistakable. She does not lie outright but she chooses her omissions. What did she tell you of my circumstances, Miss Lane?"
"That you required a reader, my lord. That the previous reader had given notice."
"Did she say why."
"No."
"She would not. The previous reader left at the end of her second week without taking her wages. The wages are still in an envelope on the desk in my study, where they will remain until I find another use for them. I tell you this because I prefer my staff to begin with the same information I have, where I can give it." He turned his face — not quite towards her, but close enough that she felt the angle. "I dictate. You write. You read aloud. There is a deposition I am required to swear before the seventeenth of December, and an affidavit which precedes it. My solicitor has prepared a draft. We will read the draft together each morning until I am satisfied with every line of it."
December the seventeenth.
The date arrived between them like a third person sitting down.
Her hand moved before she stopped it — to the watch under the cloth of her jacket. A press of two fingers against her own ribs. Then she put the hand back in her lap.
"You are aware," he said, "of what occurred in this house."
"I have heard a part."
"You will hear all of it. Every account that has been written. You will read it aloud to me until I can recite the language of strangers as well as my own. This is necessary. I cannot read it myself."
She had been told in Doncaster that he was blind. Mrs. Beale had used that word, blind, with the small discomfort of a woman who feared some last superstition might cling to her clients. Verity had constructed an image of the man from it and the image had been wrong. The man before her presented blindness not as an absence but as a procedure — the way a clerk presents a system of indexing.
"I understand, my lord."
"Tomorrow, then. Half past nine, in the library. Until tomorrow you may consider the household yours to learn. Mrs. Aldercott will show you anything you wish to be shown."
A short silence.
"Anything," he said, "that is shown."
Dinner came an hour later in a room too large for two. The candles were beeswax and recent — the housekeeper had set them out for her benefit, Verity understood, which was either a small kindness or a small examination. She could not yet tell which.
Lord Halloway took his place at the head of the table. She was given the seat at his right hand — the same side as the handshake. The arrangement fell short of what one would have called proper. A companion ate with her mistress, or, more commonly, by herself on a tray. To seat her at the master's table on the first night was to declare, openly, that there was no longer any opinion of his household worth managing.
He did not turn his face to the fire that burned in the great hearth behind him.
Sighted men turn to fires. They take comfort in watching the flame work. He sat with his shoulders square to the room and the warmth fell across the back of his neck while he ate, as if the fire were an animal that had learned its place.
He asked her two questions during the meal. Where she had grown up. Whether her family was living. To the first she said Lichfield, which was true. To the second she said no, which was also true, but he paused a quarter of a second before his next remark, and the pause landed on the table between her wine glass and his bread knife.
She had given a true answer. He had heard something in it that she had not meant to give.
When he rose she rose. He inclined his head to her in the doorway, said good night, and added her name — Miss Lane — with the same evenness he had used for the wages in the desk. Then he walked to the staircase without his stick, counting the carpet edge under his shoe.
Mrs. Aldercott led her up.
The bedroom faced east. The walls were papered in a dark blue figured silk that had seen at least three generations of damp. The bed was made up. A small fire burned in the grate. Verity's case had already been brought up and unpacked, which she disliked, but it was no longer possible to dislike it usefully. She stood at the window for a moment and looked down into a garden the dark kept from her.
"Mrs. Aldercott."
"Miss."
"The corridor outside — does it lead anywhere I should not go?"
"It leads only to the gallery, miss, and the gallery leads only back to the stair."
"And the door at the far end."
A short pause.
"The lock in your door is sound, miss. I had it seen to this autumn. Good night."
She closed the door before Verity could ask what for.
Verity turned the key in her own lock and stood with her hand still on it until she could no longer feel the cold of the brass.
She undressed slowly. The watch went onto the small bedside table by the candle. She wound it as her father had taught her: three full turns and a half. The half-turn was important. He had been particular.
She slept lightly because she did not know how else to sleep in a new house. Some time after the candle had guttered — perhaps two in the morning, by the cold of the air — footsteps came along the corridor outside her door.
They were slow. They paused.
They paused for the count of three heartbeats. She knew the count because she counted it, lying on her side facing the door, the lock between her and the corridor.
Then the footsteps went on.
She stayed where she lay. There would be no benefit in opening the door to an empty hallway, and there might be considerable cost. She lay listening. The footsteps reached the far end of the corridor and went no further.
They were lighter than a man's tread. The shoe had no heel.
Toward dawn she fell into a thin uneven sleep with one arm under her head and her face turned towards the pillow beside her own.
She woke because the light had changed.
The room had a gray weight in it that meant six o'clock at this latitude in November. The candle had long since burned itself into a black pool. Her hair had come loose during the night and had settled across her cheek, which it sometimes did. She put up a hand to push it back.
Her hand met the hair on the pillow before it met her own.
It was not her hair.
It lay along the linen six inches from her face. A single hair. Dark, perfectly straight, longer than her arm from shoulder to wrist. Wound about it, in a slow careful coil — the kind of coil made by a finger, slowly, while looking at the face of the sleeper — was a stem. The stem of a small pink rose.
The rose was dry.
There were no roses in any garden in the North Riding in November.
She lay still.
She lay still because the person who had laid the rose six inches from her face had been near enough, while she slept, to feel her breath on their wrist.
And the person who had laid the rose had wanted her to know it.
Outside her door the corridor was quiet. The light in the room rose by the slow degree at which winter mornings rise in Yorkshire. The watch on the bedside table ticked with the small dry click of a thing that did not pretend.