Read Chapter 20: The Missing Governess

The crypt air clung to Evelyn’s dress like a second skin—damp, mineral, the smell of old stone and colder earth. She had left Mary at the kitchen entrance with a warning to stay quiet, and now she stood in her own room, the ledger open on the desk before her, the candle flame steadying as her hands stilled.

She read the final entry again. Not for the first time. Not for the last.

*I have found her. She is thin but strong-willed, and she remembers everything. We leave tonight. If I do not return, let this record stand as proof of what I attempted.*

Evelyn traced the words with her fingertip. The ink was faded but legible, pressed hard into the page in a hand that had been in a hurry. Miss Reeves had written this before going to meet Annabel. Before vanishing.

But Annabel had said Miss Reeves never came.

Evelyn closed the ledger and pressed her palms flat against its cover. The leather was worn smooth at the corners, the spine cracked from years of use. A governess’s ledger. Lesson plans, household observations, a record of a life spent in service to other people’s children. And now, a record of something far darker.

She needed to know what had happened that night. Not Annabel’s version. Not Lord Blackwood’s version. The truth, whatever remained of it.

Evelyn rose and extinguished the candle. The house was settling into its nighttime quiet—the creak of timbers, the distant sigh of wind through the east wing’s unused corridors. She knew the servants’ quarters well enough by now. Mrs. Hutchins’s room was at the end of the narrow passage, nearest the back stairs, so the housekeeper could reach any part of the house quickly.

The passage was dark. Evelyn moved by memory, one hand trailing along the wall, counting doors. She knocked softly. No answer. She knocked again, harder.

The door opened a crack. A face peered out—one of the younger maids, a girl named Polly, her cap askew and her eyes heavy with sleep.

“Miss Hartley?” Polly blinked. “Is something wrong? Is it the mistress?”

“No, no. I’m sorry to wake you, Polly. I was looking for Mrs. Hutchins. Is she unwell?”

Polly’s face shifted into something unreadable. “She’s not here, miss. She’s been gone since supper. Said she had a headache and went to lie down, but she’s not in her room. I checked, because she usually likes her tea before bed.”

Evelyn kept her expression mild. “Gone where, do you know?”

“No, miss. She didn’t say. Just that she needed air.” Polly hesitated. “I thought it odd, her going out in the dark. She’s not one for the grounds at night, not since the accident.”

“What accident?”

“The groom, Mr. Thorne. She used to walk the gardens after dark with him sometimes, when he was still alive. He’d tell her about the horses and she’d complain about the mud on his boots.” Polly’s mouth tightened. “After he died, she stopped going out at all. Said the night air felt wrong now.”

Evelyn filed that away. Mrs. Hutchins and Mr. Thorne had been close enough to walk together. That was a detail no one had mentioned before.

“And tonight she went out anyway,” Evelyn said.

“Yes, miss. I thought maybe she was just restless. But it’s been hours now.”

Evelyn nodded slowly. “Well, she’ll be back soon enough. Don’t worry, Polly. Go back to sleep.”

Polly looked as though she wanted to say more, but she just nodded and closed the door. Evelyn stood in the passage for a long moment, then turned and made her way back to the main house.

Mrs. Hutchins absent on the same night Annabel had fled. Mrs. Hutchins absent on the night Miss Reeves had disappeared.

It might be coincidence. But Evelyn no longer believed in coincidence.

She found Mrs. Hutchins in the morning room, standing at the window with her back to the door. The housekeeper turned at the sound of Evelyn’s footsteps, and her face arranged itself into its usual pleasant mask.

“Miss Hartley. You’re up early.”

“I couldn’t sleep.” Evelyn crossed the room and stood beside her, looking out at the same grey garden. “I wanted to ask you something.”

“Of course.”

“The night Miss Reeves disappeared. You were here, weren’t you?”

Mrs. Hutchins’s eyes flickered—just for a moment—before she smoothed her expression. “I was here, yes. I saw her go out and assumed she was taking a walk. Governesses often need air, especially in this house.”

“Did you see her return?”

“I was asleep by then, I expect. I didn’t hear anything unusual.”

Evelyn let the silence stretch. Then she said, quietly, “One of the maids told me you weren’t in your room last night. She said you went out after supper and didn’t come back for hours.”

Mrs. Hutchins’s mask slipped—a crack, quickly closed. “I had a headache. I needed air.”

“The same air that felt wrong to you since Mr. Thorne died?”

The housekeeper’s jaw tightened. “You’ve been talking to Polly.”

“I’ve been listening.” Evelyn met her gaze. “And I’ve been reading Miss Reeves’s ledger. She wrote that she planned to leave with Annabel that night. She wrote that she was going to save her. But Annabel waited, and Miss Reeves never came.”

Mrs. Hutchins was very still. Her hands were clasped in front of her, fingers white against the dark fabric of her dress.

“I don’t know anything about that,” she said. “Miss Reeves was a troubled woman. She disappeared. The constable was called, and nothing was found. It was ruled that she’d left on her own, and the matter was closed.”

“Ruled by whom?”

“By Lord Blackwood. And the constable agreed.”

“But what do you think happened?”

Mrs. Hutchins looked away. For a moment, she seemed to be struggling with something—a decision, a confession, a memory. Then she shook her head.

“I think some questions are better left unanswered, Miss Hartley. For everyone’s sake.”

“Whose sake? Yours?”

The housekeeper’s eyes snapped back to hers. “You’re new here. You don’t understand this house, or the people in it. You would do well to remember that.”

She swept past Evelyn and out of the room, leaving the door open behind her. Evelyn stood by the window, watching her retreating figure until it disappeared down the corridor.

Mrs. Hutchins knew something. That much was certain. But whether she was protecting herself or someone else, Evelyn couldn’t yet tell.

She turned back to the window. The garden was grey, the sky heavy with unshed rain. Somewhere out there, Annabel waited in the crypt, growing weaker by the day. And somewhere—maybe in this house, maybe in the ground—Miss Reeves’s proof of what Lady Beatrice had done was waiting to be found.

Evelyn left the morning room and made her way up the main staircase, past the family portraits, past the closed doors of rooms she had never entered. Miss Reeves’s old room had been sealed after her disappearance, but Evelyn had found the key in a drawer in the library, tucked behind a stack of old correspondence. She had not yet used it. Now, she knew, the time had come.

The room was at the end of the corridor on the third floor, smaller than the other servants’ quarters, with a single window overlooking the garden. Evelyn unlocked the door and pushed it open.

Dust motes swirled in the thin light from the window. The room had been stripped—the bed frame bare, the wardrobe empty, the desk cleared. But Evelyn had read Miss Reeves’s ledger. She knew the woman had kept everything. There had to be something left.

She ran her fingers along the underside of the desk. Nothing. She checked the wardrobe’s back panel, the floorboards beneath the bed, the hollow space behind the wainscoting. Nothing.

Then she noticed the window seat. The cushion was old and faded, but the seam ran slightly crooked, as though it had been opened and resewn. Evelyn knelt and worked her fingers into the seam, pulling until the stitching gave way.

Inside the cushion’s hollow, wrapped in oilcloth, was a bundle of letters.

Evelyn sat back on her heels and untied the twine. The letters were old, some yellowed with age, some newer. She spread them across the floor. They were addressed to Miss Reeves in a hand Evelyn did not recognize, but the first one she opened bore a date from before Annabel’s disappearance, and the signature at the bottom read *Beatrice Blackwood*.

Evelyn’s breath caught. She unfolded the letter and read.

*You will do as I have asked. The girl is not my son’s child, and I will not see my family’s name tarnished by a bastard’s inheritance. If you care for your position—and for the life of that niece you keep hidden in London—you will see that the matter is resolved quietly. I have made arrangements. You need only follow them.*

The candle in Evelyn’s hand flickered and steadied. Below the letter was another, and another. Each one darker than the last. A plot. A plan. A mother’s determination to rid herself of a child she believed illegitimate.

And at the bottom of the pile, separate from the others, a single sheet of paper folded into thirds. Evelyn opened it.

It was not a letter. It was a debt note—a promise of payment in the amount of fifty pounds, made out in Mrs. Hutchins’s hand, payable to Beatrice Blackwood, dated two weeks after Miss Reeves’s disappearance.

Evelyn lowered the paper. The room was quiet around her, the dust still settling. Mrs. Hutchins had been paid. And Miss Reeves had never come back.

She folded the debt note carefully and placed it in her pocket, along with the letters. Then she stood, brushed the dust from her skirt, and looked at the empty room around her.

Miss Reeves had left a trail. Not in the ledger, but here, hidden where only someone with the patience to search would find it. Maybe she had known she might not survive. Maybe she had left it for exactly this purpose—for someone to pick up where she had been forced to stop.

Evelyn closed the door behind her and locked it.

She would not ask Mrs. Hutchins again. But she now knew two things with absolute certainty. Beatrice Blackwood had planned to have Annabel killed. And Mrs. Hutchins had been paid to do something that had made it possible.

What she had done, and what she had gotten in return, Evelyn intended to find out.

The corridor stretched empty before her. Somewhere below, she could hear the faint clatter of the kitchen beginning its morning work. The house was waking. The day was beginning.

Evelyn tucked the letters deeper into her pocket and walked toward the stairs.