Read Chapter 6: The Footprints

The landing outside the nursery smelled of rain-soaked wool and cold stone, but Evelyn noticed something else beneath it—a faint, earthy dampness, as if the moor itself had crept indoors. She had risen early, before the household stirred, intending to search the nursery for the rest of Miss Reeves's ledger. Instead, she found a trail of wet footprints crossing the corridor.

She knelt. The impressions were small, narrow, the stride of someone slight. A child's feet, or a woman's. But the rain had stopped hours ago, and the servants were not yet about with their mops. She touched the edge of the print. Water beaded on her fingertip, fresh enough to have been made within the hour.

Evelyn straightened and followed the prints. They led away from the nursery, past the schoolroom, past the row of family portraits whose painted eyes seemed to track her. The corridor turned, and the footprints continued. She counted them—eleven, thirteen, twenty—each one deliberate, unhurried. Whoever had walked here had not been running. Had not been fleeing.

The prints stopped at a door.

Evelyn had not noticed it before. It was set between two unused bedchambers, its paint the same dark green as the walls, almost invisible unless you stood directly before it. The brass handle was dull with age. A keyhole gaped beneath it, and when Evelyn leaned close, she saw that the keyhole was not empty. A thin line of light glowed beyond it.

The door was locked.

She tried the handle anyway. It did not move, but the metal was cold beneath her palm—not the cold of an unused room, but the chill of recent touch. She pressed her ear to the wood. For a moment, there was nothing but the distant ticking of the great clock in the hall. Then, faint as a bird trapped in a chimney, a sound.

A whimper.

Evelyn's heart seized. The sound was muffled, as if coming through layers of cloth or from a corner far inside, but it was unmistakably human. And it was small. The cry of someone who had learned to keep silent and had failed.

"Hello?" Evelyn whispered, her lips brushing the wood.

Silence.

She knocked, gently at first, then harder. "Is someone in there? Can you hear me?"

A scuffling noise answered. Something moved across the floor inside, slow and dragging. Then a voice, thin and cracked with years of disuse, spoke from the other side of the door.

"Who are you?"

Evelyn's breath caught. It was not a child's voice, but it was young. A girl's voice, or a woman who had been a girl when she was locked away.

"My name is Evelyn Hartley. I'm the governess." She hesitated, the lie of simplicity rising in her throat. "I'm new here."

"New." The voice repeated the word as if tasting it. "She said you would come."

She. Evelyn's skin prickled. The lady in the attic. The one who had announced her arrival to the children.

"Who said?" Evelyn asked. "Who told you I would come?"

The voice did not answer. Instead, a soft laugh came through the door—not cruel, but sad, the laugh of someone who had long given up expecting rescue and no longer knew what to do when it arrived.

"You should not have come here," the voice said. "She is watching the door. She is always watching the door."

Evelyn turned sharply, scanning the corridor. It was empty. But the shadows in the corners seemed deeper than they should be, and the portraits on the walls seemed to lean toward her.

"Who are you?" Evelyn pressed. "What is your name?"

A long pause. Then: "You know my name. Why else would you be here?"

Evelyn's blood went cold. The torn page in her sleeve seemed to burn against her wrist—the scrap of ledger with the label written in a child's careful hand. Annabel.

"Annabel," Evelyn breathed.

The voice did not confirm. It did not deny. It simply said, "She burns my garden. She says I am not real. But I am real, Miss Hartley. I am as real as the rain that brought you here."

The whimper returned, softer now, and with it a new sound—the dragging of something heavy across the floor, as if the speaker was pulling herself away from the door.

"Wait," Evelyn called, pressing her whole body against the wood. "Please, don't go. I can help you. I can find the key."

"You already have the key," the voice said, fading. "She gave it to you. The old woman. She gave it to you because she knows what you are."

Evelyn's hand flew to her pocket. The key Thorne had given her—the one to the sealed attic rooms in the east wing—was still there, warm from her body. But this door did not match that key. She had seen the attic door in the servants' corridor. This lock was different.

"The key you hold belongs to a room that was locked from the outside," the voice continued, barely audible now. "But this door is locked from within. Do you understand? I am not trapped. I am hiding. If you open this door, she will find me."

Evelyn's mind raced. "Hiding from whom? Mrs. Coyle?"

The laugh returned, and this time there was something else beneath it. Fear.

"Mrs. Coyle is not the one you should fear," the voice whispered. "She is only the keeper. The watcher for the one who owns the house. The one who owns us all."

A door slammed somewhere below—the servants' entrance, perhaps, or the kitchen. Evelyn jumped, and the sound of her heart was loud in her ears. The footsteps of a servant approaching echoed from the stairs.

"I have to go," Evelyn whispered. "But I will come back. I will find a way to help you."

"Go," the voice said. "But do not trust the master. He knows where I am. He has always known."

Evelyn opened her mouth to ask more, but the footfalls were closer now. She stepped away from the door, smoothing her skirts, and was halfway back toward the nursery when Mrs. Coyle appeared at the end of the corridor.

The housekeeper's sharp eyes flicked to Evelyn, then to the door behind her, then back. Her expression did not change, but her hand tightened around the ring of keys at her belt.

"Miss Hartley," Mrs. Coyle said. "The nursery is in the other direction."

"I lost my way," Evelyn said, keeping her voice steady. "The corridors in this house are a warren."

"They are," Mrs. Coyle agreed. She stepped forward, and Evelyn forced herself not to step back. "But you seem to have found the one door in this house you should not have found. Curious."

There was no accusation in the words. No threat. But Evelyn felt the weight of them nonetheless.

"I was looking for a privy," Evelyn said.

Mrs. Coyle studied her for a long moment. Then she smiled—a thin, bloodless expression that did not reach her eyes.

"Then you shall find it behind you," she said. "The door you were pressing your ear against is the entrance to the old dumbwaiter shaft. It has been sealed for years. Perhaps you heard the rats."

Evelyn felt the torn page in her sleeve press against her skin, and she knew with sudden, fierce certainty that Mrs. Coyle was lying. The voice she had heard was no rat. The name she had spoken was no ghost.

But she nodded, murmured an apology, and walked back toward the nursery with Mrs. Coyle's eyes burning into her back. When she reached the safety of the schoolroom, she closed the door and leaned against it, her breath coming fast.

She pulled the torn page from her sleeve and unfolded it.

Annabel, it read. Blue ribbon. Wednesday. June 12th. Missing.

Evelyn looked at the words, then at the locked door in her mind's eye. If Annabel was hiding behind that door, then Miss Reeves had not found proof in the east wing. She had found proof here—and she had paid for it with her disappearance.

Evelyn tucked the page back into her sleeve and looked out the window. The pale figure was there again, standing at the edge of the garden, watching the nursery window with eyes that seemed to see straight through her. But this time, Evelyn did not look away. She stared back, and she whispered to the empty room.

"I will find you, Annabel. Whatever it costs."