Read Chapter 11: The Children's Secret

The morning light was thin and grey when Thomas appeared at the schoolroom door, his face pale and serious. Clara hovered behind him, clutching the sleeve of his coat like a lifeline.

“Miss Hartley,” Thomas said, his voice barely above a whisper. “We need to show you something. But you must promise not to tell Uncle.”

I set down the chalk I had been holding. The lesson plans for the day lay scattered across the desk, abandoned before they had begun. The children had been subdued since my return from the east wing, their eyes following me with a strange mixture of fear and expectation.

“I promise,” I said, though the words sat uneasy on my tongue. I had already told so many lies in this house that one more felt almost natural.

Thomas nodded once, sharply, then turned and led the way down the service stairs. Clara took my hand, her small fingers cold and trembling. We passed through the kitchens, empty at this hour, and out through the scullery door into the misty morning.

The gardens behind Blackwood were overgrown and wild, brambles reaching for the sky like grasping hands. Thomas moved with purpose, stepping over fallen branches and pushing aside nettles without hesitation. He knew this path well.

At the edge of the wood that bordered the estate stood an ancient oak, its trunk gnarled and split. Thomas stopped before it, glancing back at me with a look that belonged on a face twice his age.

“Miss Reeves showed us this place,” he said. “She said if anyone ever asked the right questions, we should bring them here.”

Clara released my hand and knelt at the base of the tree, her small fingers working at a section of bark that seemed no different from any other. But it moved—a cleverly fitted door carved to match the surrounding surface. Inside, the hollow of the tree had been lined with a scrap of oilcloth, protecting its contents from the damp.

Thomas reached in and withdrew a small tin box, its surface rusted at the corners. He opened it with the careful reverence of a priest handling sacred relics.

Inside lay a collection of treasures: a blue ribbon, a chipped porcelain doll’s head, a child’s drawing of a house with too many windows, and at the bottom, wrapped in a square of faded velvet, a silver locket on a broken chain.

Thomas held it out to me. The metal was warm from his palm. I turned it over and found the clasp frozen with age. Clara reached up and pressed it with surprising force, and the locket sprang open.

Inside, a miniature portrait smiled up at me—a girl of perhaps nine years, with dark curls and eyes that held a spark of mischief. She wore a blue dress with a white collar, and behind her, painted in soft watercolor, was a garden I recognized as the one that had once surrounded Blackwood before neglect had claimed it.

“Annabel,” I breathed.

“She gave it to us,” Clara said, her voice small. “Before she went away.”

I looked at Thomas. “Your uncle’s sister gave you this?”

He shook his head. “Miss Reeves gave it to us. She said Annabel wanted us to have it. She said—” He paused, swallowing hard. “She said Annabel is alive. And that one day she would come back for it.”

The locket trembled in my hand. I thought of the voice I had heard behind the walls, the child’s plea for help. I thought of the portrait in the library, dated 1856, and Lord Blackwood’s confession that his sister had died later than he had claimed—but died nonetheless.

“Miss Reeves told you this before she left?” I asked.

“She told us the night before she disappeared,” Thomas said. “She came to our room after Mrs. Coyle had put us to bed. She looked scared, Miss Hartley. More scared than I’d ever seen her.”

Clara nodded vigorously. “She said we mustn’t tell Uncle. She said Uncle doesn’t know the truth, and if he found out, something terrible would happen.”

“What truth?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

But Thomas only shook his head. “She didn’t say. She just made us promise to keep the locket safe, and to show it to anyone who asked about Annabel the way she did.”

“The way she did?” I repeated.

“The way you do,” Clara said, looking up at me with those too-old eyes. “Like you care about what happened to her. Not like the others who just want to know so they can spread gossip.”

I crouched down until I was level with them, the locket still warm in my palm. “Clara, Thomas—what do you know about Annabel? Anything at all. Anything she said to you, anything Miss Reeves said about her.”

Thomas exchanged a glance with his sister. Then he said, “Annabel used to play with us. Before she went away. She would come to our room at night and tell us stories about the secret passages in the house. She knew them all.”

“She said there was a room,” Clara added, “a special room, where their mother used to hide from the daytime. She said it was a secret, and we must never tell Uncle because it made him sad to think about it.”

A room where their mother used to hide. The hidden room behind the tapestry. The voice behind the walls.

“Do you know where this room is?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

Thomas shook his head. “Annabel said it was a secret. She said she would take us there one day, when we were older. But then she went away.”

“And Miss Reeves?” I pressed. “Did she know about the room?”

“She found it,” Thomas said. “She told us she found it, and that she had seen Annabel.”

My heart stopped. “She saw Annabel? Where?”

“In the house,” Clara said simply. “She said Annabel was hiding, because she was afraid. And that we must help her not be afraid anymore.”

The locket felt impossibly heavy in my hand. Miss Reeves had seen Annabel. She had spoken to her. And then Miss Reeves had disappeared—the same fate that seemed to await anyone who discovered the truth about the Blackwood family.

“Why would Annabel be hiding?” I asked, more to myself than to them.

Thomas’s face contorted, as if he were wrestling with a decision. Finally, he said, “Because of Uncle.”

I stared at him. “Your uncle did something to her?”

“Not like that,” Thomas said quickly. “Not—not like that. But Annabel said Uncle was angry with her. Very angry. She said she had done something wrong, and Uncle said she must be punished. And so she hid.”

“When was this?” I asked. “How old were you?”

“I was six,” Thomas said. “Clara was four.”

Six years ago. The date on the photograph had been 1856—one year after my own arrival would have been, if the years had passed as I calculated. I did the arithmetic in my head, counting backward from the current year of 1863. If Thomas was now twelve, he had been six in 1857.

“And you have not seen Annabel since?” I asked.

“No,” Thomas said. “But Miss Reeves said she was still here. She said Annabel was still in the house, and that she was trying to find a way to help her leave.”

I thought of the ledger, of Miss Reeves’s repeated visits to the east wing. She had been trying to help Annabel escape. And whatever she had discovered, whatever plan she had set in motion, it had cost her everything.

“Miss Hartley.” Thomas’s voice pulled me from my thoughts. “You won’t tell Uncle, will you? About the locket? About what we told you?”

I looked at his earnest face, at Clara’s trusting eyes. They had placed their faith in me—a stranger who had been in their home for less than two weeks. They had risked everything because Miss Reeves had told them that anyone who asked the right questions could be trusted.

I closed my hand around the locket. “I won’t tell your uncle. I promise.”

Relief flooded their faces. Clara threw her arms around my waist, and for a moment she was just a little girl again, not a keeper of terrible secrets.

“But,” I added gently, “I need to keep this locket for a little while. I need to study it. Do you think you can trust me with it?”

Thomas hesitated, then nodded. “Miss Reeves said we should trust you. She said you would be like her.”

There it was again—the shadow of my predecessor stretching over me like a warning. Miss Reeves had been like me. And Miss Reeves had vanished.

I tucked the locket into the pocket of my dress, pressing it against my hip. The portrait of Annabel Blackwood—a girl who had been declared dead, whose body was never found, who was said to be hiding in the walls of her own home—now rested against my skin like a coal of fire.

“Go back to the house,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Go to the schoolroom and start your sums. Act as if nothing has happened.”

Thomas nodded and took Clara’s hand. They started back toward the house, but Clara paused, turning back to look at me.

“Miss Hartley?”

“Yes?”

“Annabel said Uncle was angry because she knew something. Something about their mother.”

I felt the words land like stones in my chest. “What did she know?”

Clara shrugged. “She never said. But she told me once that their mother didn’t die. She said she went away too. Just like Annabel.”

Before I could ask more, Thomas pulled his sister along, and they disappeared through the scullery door, swallowed by the grey morning.

I stood alone beside the hollow oak, the mist curling around my skirts, and thought of the portrait in the library—of Lady Blackwood, painted with her two children, a woman supposedly dead for over a decade.

Two women, gone from this house without bodies. And now a girl who spoke from behind the walls.

The ledger had been missing pages. Miss Reeves had vanished. And somewhere, hidden in this house, a member of the Blackwood family was waiting for someone to find her.

I pressed my hand against the locket’s cold silver and made my way back toward the house, my mind spinning with new questions and half-formed theories. But one certainty burned through the confusion like a brand:

I could no longer trust anything Lord Blackwood had told me.

Including whether anyone in his family was actually dead at all.