Read Chapter 2: The Reluctant Heir

The morning light came thin and gray through the nursery windows, as if the sky itself were reluctant to commit to the day. Evelyn had slept poorly—the ledger sat wrapped in oilcloth beneath her mattress, its words pressing against her dreams like stones in a riverbed. She dressed quickly, pinning her hair with practiced efficiency, and descended to find the children already seated at the long oak table in the schoolroom.

They looked at her with the unnerving stillness of creatures that had learned to be watched. Thomas and Clara—both fair-haired, both with eyes the color of storm water—sat with their hands folded, their spines straight as rulers. They could not have been more than eight.

“Good morning,” Evelyn said, setting her satchel on the desk. “I am Miss Hartley. I understand you were expecting me.”

Clara tilted her head. “She told us you would come.”

The hair on Evelyn’s arms lifted. “She?”

Thomas kicked his sister under the table. Clara did not flinch.

“Who told you?” Evelyn pressed, keeping her voice light, as if the question were inconsequential.

But before either child could answer, the door swung open and a man stepped in, filling the doorway with his height and the particular gravity of someone accustomed to being the largest presence in any room. Lord Blackwood. She knew him by the resemblance—the sharp jaw, the storm-colored eyes—though where the children were soft and unfinished, he was carved from something harder.

“Miss Hartley,” he said. It was not a greeting. It was an inventory, a reckoning of her worth conducted in the span of three words.

“My lord.” She dipped her head, schooling her features into composure.

He did not return the courtesy. He crossed to the window, hands clasped behind his back, and looked out at the rain-soaked grounds as if expecting the landscape to offer him an escape. “I was not informed of your arrival until this morning. Mrs. Coyle saw fit to let you in last night without consulting me.”

“The storm was severe,” Evelyn said. “I did not think it wise to wait.”

“You did not think.” He said it flatly, without malice, which somehow made it worse. “That is precisely the problem with governesses. You arrive with your methods and your theories, and within a month the children are speaking in French and weeping over pianoforte exercises, and I am left to undo the damage.”

Clara made a small sound—almost a giggle, quickly suppressed. Lord Blackwood’s gaze flicked to her, and something in his face softened by a fraction before it hardened again.

“The children have had three governesses in two years,” he continued, turning back to Evelyn. “Miss Reeves lasted the longest. She also left without notice, as I am sure you have heard.”

“I have heard very little, my lord. I arrived only last night.”

“Then allow me to be plain.” He stepped toward her, and though he did not raise his voice, the air in the room seemed to thin. “I do not want a governess. I do not want a stranger in my house, prying into matters that do not concern her. But my late sister’s will was explicit—the children must be educated, and I must employ a suitable young woman to do so. You are that young woman, or so the agency assures me. So we shall endure one another, Miss Hartley, and you shall do your duty, and you shall ask no questions that do not pertain to arithmetic and grammar. Is that understood?”

Evelyn held his gaze. Her pulse was loud in her ears, but she had spent her life learning to hide the tremor in her hands. “Perfectly, my lord.”

He studied her for a long moment, as if trying to determine whether she was lying or merely incompetent. Then he turned on his heel and made for the door, pausing with his hand on the frame.

“Thomas. Clara. A word before your lessons.”

The children slid from their chairs and followed him, leaving Evelyn alone in the schoolroom. She released a breath she had not realized she was holding and turned to the desk, where a stack of primers sat neatly arranged. But her eyes caught on the far wall, where a portrait hung in a patch of shadow.

She had not noticed it before. It depicted a woman—young, dark-haired, with a faint smile that did not reach her eyes. The frame was plain, unadorned, and the paint was dulled with age, but there was something arresting in the way she held herself, as if she were waiting for someone to enter the room.

Evelyn stepped closer. The woman’s hand rested on the shoulder of a small child—a girl, partially obscured by the angle of the light. The girl’s face was turned away, but her hair gleamed the same dark shade as the woman’s.

A soft footfall behind her made Evelyn turn. Clara stood in the doorway, her eyes wide.

“That’s Aunt Margaret,” Clara said. “She was our mother’s sister. She died before we were born.”

“I see.” Evelyn looked back at the portrait. “And the child?”

Clara did not answer. When Evelyn turned, the girl had gone pale, her small hands twisting in her skirt.

“Clara?”

“She says not to talk about the portrait,” Clara whispered. “She says it makes the lady in the attic angry.”

Evelyn’s heart quickened. “The lady in the attic—is that who told you I was coming?”

Clara nodded, then seemed to realize what she had done. She clamped her mouth shut and fled, her footsteps pattering down the corridor like rain on glass.

Evelyn stood alone in the schoolroom, the portrait watching her from the shadows. She thought of the ledger beneath her mattress, of Miss Reeves’s spidery handwriting and the name written over and over like a prayer.

*Annabel.*

The same name she had come to find.

She turned back to the portrait, studying the girl’s obscured face with new eyes. The shape of the head, the way the hair fell—it was possible. It was possible.

But if Annabel was in the portrait, and the portrait had been painted before the twins were born, then the girl had existed here, in this house, before she vanished. And someone in the attic knew the whole of it.

Evelyn's fingers brushed the edge of the frame. The wood was warm, as if someone had been standing there moments before.

Her mission had seemed simple when she had accepted it: find the truth of Annabel Marsh’s disappearance, report back to the family that still grieved her, and collect the modest fee that would keep her own younger sister fed for another year. But Blackwood Manor was not a simple house. It held its secrets the way the earth held water, seeping up through cracks when you least expected them.

She heard the children’s voices in the corridor, approaching. Their lesson would begin shortly, and she would stand before them and teach them their arithmetic and their grammar, and she would smile and nod when Mrs. Coyle passed by with her suspicious eyes.

But beneath the schoolmistress’s calm, Evelyn Hartley was counting the hours until she could return to the ledgers and follow the trail of a ghost.