Read Chapter 32: The Unmarked Grave

The first pale streaks of dawn were still climbing over the treeline when Lord Blackwood gave the order. Three stable hands and two footmen moved through the eastern woods in a silent line, their boots crushing frost-brittle bracken, calling to one another in low, urgent voices. Evelyn stood at the edge of the garden with Annabel beside her, both of them wrapped in cloaks against the morning cold, watching the men disappear between the trunks.

Annabel had not spoken since her mother’s confession. She stood very still, her hands clasped in front of her, her face the color of skimmed milk. Evelyn wanted to reach for her, but something in the girl’s posture suggested she would shatter at the slightest touch, so she simply stood close, close enough that their shoulders nearly brushed.

The search took less than an hour. Evelyn heard the call first—a sharp, two-note whistle that cut through the trees, followed by a barked command. Then silence, long and terrible, before one of the footmen emerged from the woods, walking slowly, his cap in his hands.

Lord Blackwood met him halfway down the garden path. They spoke in voices too low to carry, but Evelyn saw the way Blackwood’s shoulders dropped, the way he pressed a hand to his mouth and turned away from the treeline for a moment before squaring himself and walking back toward the house.

He came to them at the garden’s edge. His eyes were red-rimmed, his jaw set tight.

“They’ve found her,” he said. “Beneath the oak. Just as she said.”

Annabel made a small sound, a breath caught somewhere between a gasp and a sob. Then her legs seemed to give out. Evelyn caught her by the arm, guided her down onto the low stone wall that bordered the rose garden, and sat beside her.

“I didn’t believe her,” Annabel whispered. “I thought—I thought perhaps Mrs. Reeves had run away, that she’d abandoned me like everyone else. But she didn’t. She stayed. She stayed and she died for it.”

Evelyn said nothing. There were no words that could hold the weight of that. She simply put her arm around Annabel’s shoulders and let the girl lean into her, let her weep into the wool of her cloak in great, shuddering heaves that seemed to come from somewhere deep and broken.

Lord Blackwood stood apart, watching the woods, his hands clasped behind his back. When he spoke, his voice was rough. “We will bring her home. She deserves a proper grave, a proper headstone. Not—not this.”

Evelyn nodded. “Her sister in Kent. Should I write to her?”

He turned, seemed to consider her properly for the first time that morning. “You have the letter from Miss Reeves, don’t you? The introduction she left for you?”

“I do.”

“Write to Margaret Reeves today. Tell her what has happened. She should know where her sister rests.” He paused, his voice dropping. “And I think she may prove an important witness. If the will truly exists, if it was truly hidden away to protect Annabel, then we will need every piece of evidence we can muster.”

The men emerged from the woods again, carrying a stretcher between them, draped in a canvas sheet. They moved slowly, carefully, as if the burden they carried might shatter if rushed. Evelyn looked away, but not before she saw the shape of it, the terrible smallness of a body that had once been a living woman who had laughed and written in her diary and dreamed of rescuing a girl who was not her own daughter.

Annabel’s sobs quieted into something softer, more exhausted. Evelyn held her until Lord Blackwood came and crouched in front of his niece, taking her hands in his.

“Annabel,” he said gently. “You don’t have to watch this. Come inside with me. I’ll have Mrs. Hutchins bring us tea.”

Annabel shook her head. “I want to see her properly laid out. I want to—I want to say goodbye.”

Evelyn watched the look that passed between them. Lord Blackwood’s face was a study in anguish, a man confronted at last with the full accounting of his mother’s cruelty, and his own long blindness to it.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, his voice cracking. “I should have seen it sooner. I should have listened when you spoke of Miss Reeves. I failed you both.”

Annabel looked at him, her eyes swollen and red. “You’re listening now.”

He nodded slowly, then rose and offered his hand to each of them. Evelyn took it, feeling the warmth of his palm against her own cold fingers, and allowed herself to be helped to her feet. Annabel took his other hand, and the three of them walked together, slowly, back toward the house.

The body was carried to the chapel at the far end of the east wing, a small, cold stone room that had not been used for services in Evelyn’s memory. Mrs. Hutchins appeared, her face gray and drawn, and took charge of the preparations with a quiet efficiency that Evelyn found deeply moving. She fetched clean linens, a basin of water, and candles, and she closed herself in the chapel with the body for nearly an hour before emerging, pale but composed.

“She’s presentable,” Mrs. Hutchins said quietly to Evelyn. “You should take the girl in now, if she wants to see her.”

Annabel entered the chapel alone. Evelyn waited outside, leaning against the cold stone wall, and she could hear through the heavy oak door the sound of a voice—Annabel’s voice, low and steady, speaking to the body as if her old governess could still hear her. The words were indistinguishable, but the tone was not one of grief alone. There was gratitude in it. And something like forgiveness.

When Annabel emerged, her face was calmer. She took Evelyn’s hand. “Thank you,” she said. “For finding her. For believing me when no one else did.”

Evelyn squeezed her fingers. “I didn’t find her,” she said. “Mrs. Reeves left a trail for us to follow. And you pointed me toward it, whether you knew it or not.”

Annabel almost smiled. “She would have liked you. She always said the women in this house needed more friends.”

They walked together to the kitchen, where Mrs. Hutchins had set out a pot of strong tea and a plate of bread and butter, despite the hour. They sat at the worn wooden table, Annabel wrapped in a shawl Mrs. Hutchins had fetched from her own room, and they drank their tea in silence until Lord Blackwood came through the kitchen door, shedding his coat and hanging it on the peg by the range.

He sat down across from them, accepted the cup Mrs. Hutchins poured for him, and stared into its dark surface for a long moment before speaking.

“I’ve sent for Dr. Whitmore,” he said.

Evelyn’s hand tightened around her teacup. “You believe he’ll come?”

“He’ll come,” Lord Blackwood said. “He owes this family a debt, and I intend to collect it. He will examine my mother, and he will provide the testimony I need to have her committed. Not to the asylum she intended for Annabel—no, she will not have that comfort—but to a private clinic in Bath, where she can be cared for properly. She is not well. The things she has done—the ways her mind has twisted—she cannot remain in this house.”

Annabel set down her cup. “You’re sending her away.”

“I am,” he said. There was no hesitation in his voice. “I know she is my mother, and I have spent years—too many years—making excuses for her cruelties. But this cannot continue. She arranged for a woman to be murdered. She schemed to have you committed to an asylum. She poisoned every corner of this house with her bitterness and her fear. I cannot allow her to harm anyone else. The clinic in Bath will keep her safe, and it will keep her from harming anyone else.”

Annabel was quiet for a long time. When she spoke, her voice was small. “Will she be very unhappy there?”

“I expect so,” Lord Blackwood said honestly. “But I think she has been very unhappy for a very long time. And perhaps, in a place where she cannot hurt anyone, she might find some peace she has never been able to make for herself here.”

Evelyn watched the exchange, feeling the weight of the moment settle over her. This was not justice, not in the way she had imagined it—not a trial, not a hanging, not restitution for the life that had been taken. But there was something right about it, something that felt like the first step of a long road back from the darkness that had consumed the Blackwood estate for so many years.

She thought of Miss Reeves, lying now in the chapel beneath a white linen sheet, her body finally released from the shallow grave beneath the gnarled oak. She thought of Margaret Reeves in Kent, who did not yet know her sister was dead. She thought of the letter she carried, an introduction written by a woman who had known she might not survive but had tried anyway to leave behind a thread of connection, a hand reaching out across the years.

The tea had grown cold in her cup. Mrs. Hutchins refilled it without being asked, and Evelyn wrapped her hands around the warmth and let herself breathe for what felt like the first time in days.

Lord Blackwood looked at her across the table. “I don’t know what will happen next,” he said. “The will, the trial, the questions from London—there is much to untangle. But I want you to know that whatever happens, you will not be forgotten. You came here looking for a missing girl, and you found her. You did what no one else in this house had the courage to do.”

Evelyn felt her cheeks flush. “I only did what I thought was right.”

“That is more than most do,” he said. “And I am in your debt. We all are.”

Outside, the sun had finally climbed above the treeline, casting long golden shafts of light through the kitchen windows. The chapel doors stood open at the end of the hall, and Evelyn could see candles flickering within, a quiet vigil for a woman who had been denied so much in life but would not be denied a proper farewell in death.

She sat with Annabel beside her and Lord Blackwood across from her, and for a moment, they were not a governess and an heiress and an earl, but simply three people who had survived something terrible together, holding one another upright in the fragile morning light.