Read Chapter 16: A Glimpse of Annabel

The garden lay quiet under a pale morning sky, dew still clinging to the yew hedges like tears unshed. Evelyn had meant only to walk—to clear her head of Lord Blackwood’s confessions, of the name Samuel Hartley burning in her thoughts like a brand. But the figure at the rose arbour stopped her cold.

A woman in grey, slight and fair-haired, stood half-hidden behind the climbing roses. Her face was turned away, but there was something in the set of her shoulders, the way she held her hand to her throat as if feeling for a chain that was no longer there, that made Evelyn’s breath catch. The woman wore no bonnet, and her hair fell loose about her shoulders in a way no lady of the household would permit.

Evelyn’s feet moved before her mind could catch up. She rounded the hedge, her skirts catching on a thorny branch. “Wait,” she called, her voice low but urgent. “Please—wait.”

The woman turned. For one brief moment, Evelyn saw her face—the pale oval, the dark eyes wide with alarm, the unmistakable shape of a small scar along her jaw. Annabel. It had to be. She looked older than the miniature Evelyn had found in the governess’s room, but the resemblance was unmissable.

Then the woman vanished into the thicket of rhododendrons at the garden’s edge, and by the time Evelyn pushed through the branches, there was nothing but the whisper of disturbed leaves and the distant caw of rooks.

Evelyn stood panting, her hands stinging from the scratches, and searched the treeline. Nothing. No movement, no colour, no sign that anyone had ever been there. But she knew what she had seen.

The cook’s daughter found her an hour later, still lingering at the garden’s edge, and led her to the kitchen weeping. The girl’s name was Mary—not the Mary of the ledger, whose name had been scratched out and replaced with a different one. No, this Mary was young, barely seventeen, with red-rimmed eyes and a trembling mouth she tried to hide behind her apron.

“Miss Hartley,” the cook said, bustling past with a tray of covered dishes, “you’ll forgive Mary, she’s had a frightful morning. Lost her mother’s brooch, she has—the one her father gave her before he passed. Sentimental, you understand.”

Evelyn nodded, but she saw the way Mary’s hands twisted in her apron, the way her eyes kept darting to the cellar door. This was not grief over a lost brooch. This was terror.

She waited until the cook had gone to the pantry, then moved closer to Mary, speaking low. “You needn’t lie to me. I saw her in the garden—the young woman in grey. Fair hair, a scar along her jaw. She disappeared before I could reach her.”

Mary’s face went white. For a moment, Evelyn thought the girl might faint. Instead, she grabbed Evelyn’s wrist with a strength that belied her slight frame and pulled her into the narrow alcove beside the cold larder.

“You mustn’t tell anyone,” Mary whispered, her voice shaking. “You mustn’t. They’ll send her away, or worse. Miss Reeves always said—she said the Lord would be merciful if he knew the truth, but the Lady, the Lady is not right in her head, and she watches everything.”

Evelyn’s heart hammered. “Mary, who is she? Is it Annabel?”

Mary’s eyes filled with fresh tears. She nodded, once, then seemed to crumple. “She’s in the old crypt. Behind the chapel, where they used to keep the Blackwood dead before the new mausoleum was built. She’s been there for months—since the accident that weren’t an accident at all. Miss Reeves helped her, said it was the only way the Lady would stop her obsessing. We take her food, my brothers and me. We leave it at night, by the iron gate. She can’t come out, not even to see the sun, because the Lady has men watching the house, and if they see her, they’ll drag her back or worse.”

Men watching the house. Evelyn thought of Lord Blackwood’s claim that he suspected his mother might have harmed Annabel before the accident. But if the Lady had men searching still, after all these months—

“Why the crypt?” Evelyn asked. “Why not flee the estate entirely?”

Mary’s face crumpled further. “Because the Lady has already had her followed once. The last time Miss Annabel tried to leave, the Lady’s men brought her back and the Lady locked her in the east wing with her. Annabel would rather die in that cold crypt than be locked up with her mother again. The Lady doesn’t see her as a daughter—she sees her as proof, as something to be watched and studied. She used to make Annabel sit for hours while she examined her face, her hands, the shape of her eyes. She said she was looking for signs—signs that Annabel was not truly her child.”

Evelyn’s blood ran cold. So Beatrice’s obsession had been even more unhinged than Lord Blackwood had suggested. Rejecting Annabel had not meant casting her away; it had meant imprisoning her, dissecting her, trying to find some proof in her very flesh that she was not a Blackwood.

“Will you take me to her?” Evelyn asked.

Mary recoiled. “I can’t. Miss Reeves said no one else could know—she said when the time came, she would write to Lord Blackwood herself, and ask for his protection. But then Miss Reeves disappeared, and now I don’t know what to do. I’m just a servant. If anyone finds out I’ve been helping her, I’ll lose my place. Or worse.”

“Your place is safe,” Evelyn said, though she had no power to promise such a thing. “I am the governess. If you take me to her now, I can speak to Lord Blackwood on her behalf. I can— I can make him understand.”

Mary stared at her, fear warring with desperate hope in her young face. “You’ll go to him? You’ll make him see that she’s alive, that the Lady is mad, that Annabel did not die in that carriage at all?”

“I will,” Evelyn said, and she meant it. Whatever Lord Blackwood’s guilt, whatever secrets he still held, a young woman was wasting away in a stone crypt beneath his chapel, and no fear of the supposed Lady’s wrath should keep her there.

Mary bit her lip, then nodded sharply. “Tonight. After the household is asleep. I’ll meet you at the chapel’s side door—the one with the loose iron handle. Bring a lantern, and a shawl for her. The crypt is cold, even in summer.”

“Tonight,” Evelyn agreed.

But even as Mary slipped away back to her duties, even as Evelyn climbed the stairs to her room to wait out the long daylight hours, she could not shake the unease that coiled in her stomach.

Miss Reeves had promised to write to Lord Blackwood. Miss Reeves had said she would leave the estate soon. And now Miss Reeves was gone, her ledger pages torn, her spectacles lying abandoned in her room as if she had vanished in the middle of her duties.

What if Miss Reeves had not been silenced by Lady Beatrice’s men at all? What if she had been silenced by Annabel herself, afraid that the governess’s promised letter would bring her mother down upon her again?

Evelyn stopped at the top of the stairs, her hand on the banister. She thought of Miss Reeves telling the children that Annabel was alive and hiding in the house. She thought of the torn page in the ledger, the ink still fresh, and the scratched-out name—MARY—that had started this whole mystery.

But the Mary before her now was a child, barely older than Annabel herself would be. She could not have hated Miss Reeves. She could not have been the one to silence her.

Could she?