Read Chapter 14: Imprisoned

The closet was small and black as pitch, and Evelyn had already pressed her palms against every inch of its walls. Wood, mostly—rough planks that caught splinters in her skin—and one patch of colder surface near the floor where a draft crept through a gap she could not widen with her fingers alone. She had tried. Her nails were split and aching by the time she stopped.

Beatrice had locked her in with a whisper and a soft click of the key.

Evelyn pressed her ear to the door, straining for the sound of footsteps retreating down the east wing corridor. Nothing. The house had gone silent as a tomb, and she was sealed inside it.

She counted her breaths. Then she counted them again. The darkness pressed against her eyes until shapes swam behind her lids—ghostly afterimages of the woman's face, pale as candle wax, framed by hair that had once been dark like her son's. Lady Beatrice Blackwood. Alive. Locked away in her own home like a shameful secret, clutching at the edges of her sanity with trembling hands.

The scratch of the ledger page returned to her. Torn. Fresh ink. Someone had been in that room recently, someone who did not want the past exhumed.

And now that someone knew exactly where Evelyn was.

She pushed the thought away. Panic would not serve her. She had been in tighter places—the servant's stairwell at her last post, wedged between floorboards while the master's son searched for her with drink on his breath and malice in his eyes. This was better. This was only dark.

Hours passed. Her stomach cramped with hunger. She marked time by the slow shift of the draft, colder now, then warmer, then cold again. Eventually she heard it: footsteps in the corridor. Heavy. Deliberate. A man's gait.

Evelyn hammered the flat of her hand against the door. "Help! I'm in here!"

The footsteps stopped.

"Please—the closet in the east wing sitting room. I'm locked in."

A pause stretched long enough that she thought he might walk away. Then the key turned. The door swung open, and Thomas stood in the glow of a single candle, his face a careful mask of alarm.

"Ma'am," he said. "What on earth—"

"I'll explain later." She brushed past him, unsteady, her legs stiff from sitting too long in the dark. "Is anyone else awake?"

"Not that I've heard. I was making rounds, thought I heard a noise." He held the candle higher, studying her. "You look like you've seen a ghost, ma'am."

Evelyn pressed her lips together. She had, in a manner of speaking.

"Go back to bed," she said. "Forget you found me here."

Thomas hesitated. His jaw worked as if he wanted to say more, but he only nodded and retreated down the corridor, taking his light with him. Evelyn waited until the dark swallowed him, then felt her way along the banister toward the nursery stairs.

She did not sleep. She sat in the chair by the window, watching the moon drag itself across the sky, and when the first grey light crept over the treeline, she rose and washed her face in the basin. The water was cold. It steadied her.

The children would be waking soon. She had a duty to them, and to Annabel, and to whatever truth Miss Reeves had died—or vanished—trying to uncover.

But first, she had to face the lord of the house.

---

She found Lord Blackwood in the library, hunched over his desk with the morning paper unread before him. He looked up at her entrance, and something flickered across his face—guilt, or fear, or both—before he smoothed it away.

"Miss Hartley. You're up early."

"I did not sleep, my lord."

He set the paper down slowly. "I see. Shall I ring for tea?"

"No." She closed the door behind her, the latch clicking loud in the silence. "I was in the east wing yesterday evening. I found your mother."

The colour drained from his face. He gripped the edge of the desk, knuckles white. "That's not possible."

"It is not only possible. It is true." Evelyn advanced a step, not threatening, but not retreating either. "She locked me in a closet and told me she must protect you from the truth. I want to know what truth she means, my lord. And I want to know why you have kept her hidden."

For a long moment, he said nothing. Then he rose and crossed to the window, his back to her. "You have been here barely a month, Miss Hartley. You cannot understand—"

"Then help me understand."

He laughed, short and hollow. "Understanding is a luxury I have never been afforded." He turned, and she saw the man beneath the title then—exhausted, cornered, older than his years. "My mother is not well. She has not been well for a very long time. The east wing is a sanctuary for her, not a prison."

"She does not believe it is a sanctuary."

"She believes many things that are not true." He passed a hand over his face. "When my father died, she was never the same. She began to see conspiracies in every shadow. She accused the servants of poisoning her. She locked herself in her room for weeks at a time. And then—" He stopped.

"And then?"

"Annabel was born. My sister. A late child, a surprise. My mother never recovered from the birth, in her mind if not her body." His voice cracked. "She began to believe the child was not hers. That Annabel had been substituted, swapped at birth by some enemy who wished to steal her inheritance."

Evelyn's breath caught. "So she harmed her?"

"No." The word was sharp. "She never touched her. But she could not bear to be near her. She would scream if Annabel was brought into the room. She insisted the child was possessed." He swallowed. "We had no choice. We confined her to the east wing for her own safety, and for Annabel's."

"Then why tell the household she was dead?"

He flinched. "Because it was easier. Because the truth—that the lady of the house was mad, that she had rejected her own infant daughter—would have destroyed us. Annabel did not deserve that shame. And my mother did not deserve the scandal."

Evelyn's mind raced, tumbling over what she knew. The ledger. The torn pages. The scratched-out name. "And Annabel? What happened to her?"

"She died." His voice was flat now, a wall erected over grief. "A carriage accident, five years ago. I have told you this."

"No body was ever recovered." Evelyn said it quietly, watching his face. "Dr. Bell told me."

"Such accidents happen, on the moor."

"And Mary?"

The name landed like a blow. Lord Blackwood went still, all colour draining from his lips. "What did you say?"

"There was a name scratched out in the ledger. An entry from April 1857. Mary." Evelyn held his gaze. "Who was she, my lord?"

He stared at her, and for a moment she thought he might break. His mouth opened, closed, opened again. Then he shook his head, a slow, terrible motion. "I cannot—this is not—" He turned away, gripping the windowsill. "Go back to the nursery, Miss Hartley. Tend to the children. Leave the east wing alone, and I shall pretend you were never there."

"And if I do not?"

"Then I shall have to consider whether you are suited to this post after all."

The threat hung in the air between them, thin and desperate. Evelyn could see the cracks in it—he was not a cruel man, not a hard man, but a frightened one, and frightened men did terrible things to protect what remained.

She thought of the child's voice she had heard from behind the walls. She thought of Beatrice, whispering that she must protect her son from the truth. She thought of Miss Reeves, gone without a trace, leaving only a locket and a warning and a torn ledger behind.

"Very well," she said. "I will not go to the east wing again."

Relief flooded his face, so naked she almost pitied him. "You have my gratitude, Miss Hartley. I know this cannot be easy—"

"But I will not stop asking questions."

His gratitude curdled. He stared at her, and she saw the war in his eyes—gratitude and fear and something like grief, all tangled together. "You do not know what you are asking after."

"Then tell me."

He was silent for a long moment. Then he said, so quietly she barely caught it: "My mother was not the only one who believed Annabel was not her child."

Evelyn felt the floor shift beneath her. "Who else?"

But he shook his head, already retreating behind the walls he had built. "Go. Please. Before I regret my kindness."

She went. The door clicked shut behind her, and she stood in the hall a moment, heart hammering, turning over his words like stones in her palm.

*Not the only one.*

The children were awake when she reached the nursery, Thomas and Clara arguing over a wooden horse. They looked up at her entrance, and Clara's face brightened.

"Miss Hartley! You're back!"

"I never left, dearest."

"You look tired," Thomas said, with a knowingness that made her stomach clench.

"I did not sleep well. The house made noises."

"Uncle says houses always make noises," Clara offered. "He says it's just the wood settling."

Evelyn smiled and helped her with her buttons, but her hands were not steady, and her mind was anywhere but in the nursery. Mary. The mother who had rejected her child. A wife who had believed her daughter was not her own.

Somewhere in this house, a ledger held the answers. And somewhere in this house, someone was watching Evelyn, waiting to see how much she would find.

She straightened Clara's collar and smiled at the children, but beneath the surface of her calm, a cold resolve was forming. Beatrice had locked her in a closet. Lord Blackwood had threatened her post. Someone had torn pages from the ledger, and someone had heard her questions and moved to silence them.

But Evelyn Hartley had been silenced before. She had been dismissed, dismissed again, damned to poverty by men who found her inconvenient.

She had also learned how to wait.