Morning did not break over Rowanmere Vale so much as enter cautiously, like someone stepping into a room where grief is known to linger. A thin silver-grey veil seeped through the narrow panes of my chamber, diffusing across the walls with such hesitation it seemed the day itself was unsure whether it belonged within these walls.
The house did not resist the light, but neither did it welcome it. It accepted dawn the way an invalid accepts a cool cloth. Enduring it, not softened by it. Something deep in the wooden bones shifted, the faintest suggestion of stirring, as though the manor roused from sleep reluctantly, listening for reasons to remain dreaming.
The rain had reduced itself to a fine mist, tapping inquisitively at the glass. Its softest sounds traveled through the floorboards, through the walls, through me. In the east wing, something answered. A murmur of movement, a slow, almost imperceptible recollection of purpose.
I dressed quickly, my hair pinned with the modest practicality that travel and new employment had fostered in me. My hands felt cool, almost foreign, as though the house had not yet decided whether to acknowledge my warmth.
When I stepped into the hall, daylight had not defeated the shadows. It had only thinned them, allowing them to cling closer to the floor, the corners, the doorframes. Rowanmere seemed built for dusk and midnight, not for morning. Even sunrise dimmed itself in deference.
A faint sweetness threaded the air. Too soft to identify, too deliberate to ignore.
Lilac. It drifted past like a memory that belonged to someone else.
I followed the corridor Mrs. Harlow had described. Left past the narrow staircase, right beneath the iron candelabra that seemed to have wept wax for a century, then farther into the east wing where the ceilings lowered slightly, pressing a calm hush over everything.
The classroom lay at the end.
When I entered, the room reacted. Not visibly, but perceptibly. The air adjusted itself. The stove's warmth shifted. Shadows reconsidered their positions. It was as if the room took my measure, deciding what to reveal and what to keep.
The high ceiling held the faint resonance of voices long gone. A residue of recitations and reprimands lingered like dust. A blackboard stretched across one wall, its surface faintly scarred by the chalk of past lessons. The windows cast long, pale rectangles on the floor, not quite bright enough to dispel the room's contemplative gloom.
On the lectern lay a dark green ledger, its leather worn to softness by many hands. I had not seen it yesterday. Perhaps it had been there. Perhaps not.
I opened it.
The script inside varied. Some graceful, some clipped, some pressed down too hard, leaving faint imprints on later pages. Each name carried a quiet weight.
Thomas Fairchild. 11.
Averted eyes. Thoughtful. Follows shadows before people.
Edwin Marsh. 13.
Blind. Notices what sighted people forget.
Clara Haston. 9.
Silent laughter. Quick hands. Makes her own language when others fail her.
Wilhelmina "Mina" Lorne. 10.
Breath like thin glass. Stubborn hope.
Peter Rowe. 12.
Mute. Writes like someone older. Much older.
At the bottom, in Mrs. Harlow's unsparing hand:
Treat them with respect. They have been failed enough.
The words lingered in the air after I closed the ledger.
A faint bell chimed somewhere distant. Soft. Metallic. Almost shy. The house shifted. Barely, but noticeably. As though even it recognized the sound's authority. I set the room to rights. Slates straightened, chalk gathered, chairs aligned as if order could create safety.
Footsteps approached.
Thomas arrived first. He paused in the doorway, gaze flicking to the windows, the stove, the shadowed corners, and then finally to me. He held his hat as though it were something fragile.
"Good morning, Miss Howard," he said, voice gentle enough to coexist with the room's hush.
"Good morning, Thomas."
Edwin followed, tapping the doorframe lightly with two fingers. A way, perhaps, of greeting the space before addressing its occupant. His head tilted toward the slight sound I made adjusting a slate.
"Is that you?" he asked.
"Yes."
He smiled, a small, composed thing that warmed the air around him.
Clara burst in next, ribbons fluttering like eager thoughts. Without hesitation she signed Good morning, her hands bright and sure. I nodded, returning the greeting with my clumsy but earnest fingers. She grinned as though my effort were a gift.
Mina drifted in, quiet as dust, her breath shallow but determined. I moved her chair closer to the stove. She accepted the gesture with a brief, grateful glance before her breath found its rhythm again.
Peter arrived last.
He lingered at the threshold, gaze sweeping the room as if searching for something that had been removed. When his eyes met mine, he dipped his chin in a gesture that was neither shy nor bold. Simply deliberate. He moved to his seat near the window where the light lingered with a softness it did not offer elsewhere.
"Attendance," I said.
The room acknowledged the word, sinking into a deeper stillness.
The children answered in their ways. Thomas quietly, Clara in signs, Edwin with a steady "present," Mina with a small sound like the beginning of a whisper, Peter with a simple lift of his chin.
We began with reading.
Thomas struggled with a difficult line, the muscles in his arm working against their own reluctance. When he finally formed the sentence, relief softened his face. He did not smile, but something in him exhaled.
Edwin read aloud, his voice carrying a measured cadence that made the text sound older, larger. The room seemed to listen.
Clara followed his intonation with uncanny precision, reading his breath more than his words.
Mina whispered each line twice, coaxing the meanings forward with a patience that felt like prayer.
Peter wrote. His slate was immaculate, letters cut with an exactness that unsettled. They looked like messages from some forgotten place. When he caught me observing, he smudged them. Not to erase, but to obscure. To keep something his.
Rain began its soft tapping against the tall windows. A muted percussion that slipped neatly into the rhythm of the classroom. The stove ticked, steady and reassuring. The house listened, its attention a faint pressure against the edges of the room.
When Mrs. Harlow arrived to collect the children for broth, her eyes passed over the slates with clinical precision.
"You've done well," she said, which in her dialect counted as warmth.
As they filed out, the room sagged subtly, an exhale of presence as if the children's absence left indentations in the air.
I stepped into the corridor.
The faint green scent of damp leaves drifted to me. Something from a world less enclosed than Rowanmere. Beneath it, threading slyly through, came the barest suggestion of lilac. Not enough to name, only enough to trouble.
I followed the warmth, drawn by it as if by instinct or invitation.
The corridor widened unexpectedly. A set of tall glass doors appeared at its end, their frames beaded with moisture. When I opened them, the garden room revealed itself like a secret that had been waiting for the right witness.
The air shifted immediately. Warmer, softer, touched by a humidity that reminded me faintly of an earlier life. The glass panes stood tall and pale, streaked with condensation that blurred the outside world into shapes without meaning. Vines curled upward along the iron supports in tendrils like hurried script, dense with intention.
A stone bench waited beneath an overgrown fig tree whose leaves trembled slightly, though I felt no breeze.
I sat.
The book in my lap felt like an anchor, though I could not recall choosing it. I let my eyes wander the room. There was a muted glow here, not bright but persistent. A filtered light that felt like the memory of sunlight, not the thing itself.
Time loosened its hold.
Then something shifted.
Not the leaves.
Not the air.
Not the light.
A presence.
I looked toward the doorway.
Dr. Vale stood at the threshold, half in shadow, as if the house itself had halted him there. His posture was rigid with something that was not quite tension, not quite reluctance. More the pause of someone who has stumbled upon a scene he had not allowed himself to imagine.
His gaze moved to me slowly, a movement that felt deliberate and reluctant in equal measure. The room's air gathered itself, as though attentive to his intentions.
He stepped inside.
The temperature changed almost imperceptibly, as if his presence altered the balance between glass and shadow.
"Miss Howard," he said quietly. His voice moved through the humid air like the soft strike of a bow on a string. Measured, low, half-remembered. "I didn't expect to find you here."
"I didn't expect to be found," I said.
A faint line appeared at the corner of his mouth. Something that might have been amusement if it hadn't looked so pained.
"You prefer the east wing," he said.
"And you prefer to avoid it."
The smallest breath escaped him. Not laughter, but something adjacent to it, an acknowledgement of something he would not name.
He came closer.
The vines above him shifted faintly, trembling as though the air around him carried weight.
"You read the ledger," he said.
"Yes."
"Did it trouble you?"
"It saddened me."
He looked away for a moment, and the light caught the line of his jaw, making him appear both younger and more haunted.
"They deserve better than this place," he said. "Better than… what has shaped them."
His words faded, as though the room absorbed the rest.
"You seemed peaceful when I saw you," he added. "Peace is rare here."
"Did I?" I murmured.
"Yes." He hesitated. "I resented it."
The admission landed softly but struck deeply.
He joined me. Not sitting, but resting one hand lightly on the stone bench, close enough that the nearness altered the air between us. His fingers brushed a fleck of moisture from the back of his hand, the gesture quiet and strangely intimate.
"You shouldn't wander this wing alone," he said. "It invites… misinterpretation."
"Yours?" I asked.
His breath caught slightly. Not enough to be audible, but enough to be felt.
"Yes."
A silence followed that felt deliberate, shaped.
"If I am unwise," he said, "it is because I notice too much."
His eyes lowered briefly to my mouth, then away. As though the room itself had intervened on his behalf.
He straightened abruptly, pulling himself back into some tighter version of himself.
"I should leave you to your reading," he said, though he made no immediate move to go.
At last he turned.
At the threshold he paused, his voice a quiet thread.
"Miss Howard."
"Yes?"
"You are…"
He searched for a word that would neither betray him nor free him.
"…disruptive."
He departed before the air could settle around the word.
The vines swayed faintly. The room breathed again. And in the stillness that followed, a single echo of last night's music seemed to tremble along the tiles. Too thin to be certain, too real to ignore.
I remained on the bench, book forgotten, until the light shifted again.
The house felt awake now.
And listening.