Chapter 2: I Read Extensively

"Miss Crane."

The voice came from the far end of the room. She turned and saw a man standing with his back to her, his attention on a volume he was holding open. He did not turn around when he spoke.

"Your husband was Thomas Crane. A solicitor in Surrey. He died of pneumonia two years ago, leaving you the house on Ashford Road and a debt of eight thousand pounds against it. Three months ago, your husband's brother challenged the will, citing a clause inserted in 1876 that transferred all liquid assets to the estate, contingent on the death of the primary heir. That clause was settled in court. You were stripped of everything except the house, which now carries a lien. You applied for a position as a cataloguer and library assistant. You are here because you need to be, Miss Crane, not because you particularly want to be."

He did not look up from the book.

Isolde discovered that her hands had begun to shake, and she pressed them flat against her skirts to still them. The will's terms had been settled between the solicitors—private documents, sealed. There was no public record. No one outside the legal offices should have known the specific terms. No one who lived twelve miles from a railway station in the middle of Yorkshire could have known it.

"How do you know that?" She was pleased to find that her voice was steady.

The man finally turned. He was tall, forty perhaps, with dark hair that had begun to grey at the temples. His face was precise rather than handsome—all sharp angles and controlled expression—and his eyes, which were a pale grey-blue, examined her with the focus of someone accustomed to reading very small text.

"I read extensively," he said.

He did not clarify what he read, or where he had read it, or how it was that the most private grief of a woman he had never met was available to his scrutiny. He stood there with the book still open in his hands, waiting for her to accept the explanation or reject it or ask further questions that he would not answer.

"I understand," Isolde said, though she did not understand at all. "I'm prepared to begin work immediately, Lord Ashford."

Brief amusement crossed his face. "The library is not usually a place for immediate certainty, Miss Crane. We will begin tomorrow. Mrs. Vane will show you to your rooms."

He turned back to his book. The conversation, she understood, was concluded.

The walk back through the house seemed longer than the walk in, though it was the same distance and Mrs. Vane's pace did not change. Isolde thought about memory, about how strange it was that the hall could look entirely different depending on the direction of approach, depending on whether one was being brought in or being dismissed. She thought about the gravel that did not make sound. She thought about the way the margins in those books had been filled with notation—thousands upon thousands of handwritten words, pressed into the paper for preservation.

She thought about how someone could know what should have been unknowable.

Mrs. Vane left her at a room on the second floor—small, clean, furnished with the kind of objects that no one had chosen with any particular care. Isolde unpacked her trunk (which had been brought up without her asking) and watched the light fail across the moor. In the distance, she could see the formless dark of the moors themselves, vast and patient.

When full dark came, she did not light her candle.

She sat instead at the window and thought about the words that had passed between them in that amber light. She was not unaccustomed to danger, and this was not quite danger. It was closer to the sensation of entering unfamiliar territory—that moment before the map fails, before you realize that the geography you expected does not match the one beneath your feet.

She drew out her notebook and began to write down everything she remembered. The gravel that made no sound. The windows at different angles. The margin notes. The exact terms of the will spoken aloud by a stranger.

Her pen moved steadily across the page. Below, in the east wing, a light was still burning.

She had written three pages when the floorboards outside her door shifted once under weight.