The mirror in Mrs. Harlow's corridor had always been a thing I passed with the speed of habit, a sliver of glass nailed into gilt that caught only what it was paid to show: a hat's angle, a smear of soot on a cheek, the polite composure of a governess prepared for lessons. That morning its reflection arrested me as if it had claws.
A girl looked out at me from the glass. My shape, my bone, my hair pinned in the same practical coil. The face that leaned there was not the face I had seen in other mirrors. She was smaller in some interior measurement, and her eyes were made of a thin, anxious light. Her mouth was set as though she feared being asked a question she could not answer. She moved her lips in a pattern I could not hear. She looked nothing like the woman I had arranged myself to be that morning; and yet there was no mistaking the way an old scar above the brow matched the light, or the hair that had settled to the left in a selfsame obstinacy. She was, impossibly, me. Only she had the quickness of someone perpetually on the verge of leaving.
I stopped. The corridor's hush folded about me. For an instant the house. A great, discreet animal. Seemed to pause in its slow breathing. Even Mrs. Harlow's kettle, far away, took a tiny hesitation in its hiss. The girl in the glass tilted her head. Her eyes searched mine, not as a mirror would, but as though she sought recognition. I felt my throat close. There rose in me an old, unnameable dread, the sort that had nothing to do with ghosts and everything to do with self-knowledge. I stepped closer, and the girl stepped closer. An exact economy of motion. And then, with the littlest sob that might have been a man's footfall in another house, she smiled a frightened smile and looked away.
I reached up as if by habit, touching the place on my temple where hair had thinned in a certain unflattering crescent. The skin was mine, warm. The reflection kept its distance now; the corridor had resumed its indifferent movement. I told myself I had only been tired the previous night: that dreams, damp with the house's peculiar attentions, had left some residue on the glass. I told myself a thousand practised lies. The truth, small and stubborn, settled somewhere behind my sternum. The girl in the mirror had known me better than I know myself. That notion made my hands tremble.
I might have gone on with my duties, bearing the tremor like a flint in my palm, had I not felt my fingers find something cold and metal against the hem of my skirt. My hand came up with a weight I did not remember dropping. The ring lay against the cotton like a small, patient thing. Gold dulled by time and travel, its band thinner than it had been in youth. For a score of heartbeats it hovered on my palm as if reluctant to return to the past.
Edmund Ashcombe's ring.
The name arrived unbidden, heavy with years. Edmund. My husband. Whose hands had been rough and warm, whose letters had been my solace in the grey weeks after we first married, whose laugh had once reshaped afternoons, whose absence I had dressed in polite regret until the thread of it pulled taut and I could no longer make the garment sit. Edmund Ashcombe had the sort of face that taught itself to be polite; he had been kind enough to the poor, precise enough with accounts, a man as Victorian as moulded cornices and the thorned hedgerows his name suggested. I had called him my stead when steadiness felt like a luxury. I had called him my keeper when I wanted to supply myself with reasons.
I had worn his band until the black day I did not. I remembered the warmth of it like an old hymn. The way it had slid easy over knuckles swollen with work. The quiet click of it on the washstand in the mornings when one of us rose before the other. I had mourned him, in those methodical ways the living perform for propriety's sake. I had folded the grief into order and folded the order into my life at Rowanmere until the lines blurred and the house itself had become a sort of mourning dress that fit me by habit.
So to find the ring now. Here, where no one should have placed it but the hands that placed it. Was to find a conversation restarted without preface. How it came to be in that corridor I could not fathom. I turned the band over in my fingers. There was an old nick at its edge where a carriage door had caught, years ago, when Edmund had been in a hurry to rescue some small inconvenience. The silver in him had always been small, stubborn mercy; his faults had been proportionate and his loves steady. To hold this circle again was to be given back an hour I had locked in a drawer and told myself could no longer be opened.
Pausing in the corridor, I allowed the memory to arrive like weather. Edmund's hands.
Broad, callused where he had clasped a ledger too long had once steadied me on the nights when grief made the world tilt. He had not been an exquisite man. He had been a practical one. He had loved me in ways that had been quiet, built in the reliable architecture of someone who trades in small comforts: the coat brushed clean, a brazer stoked, a neighbour aided. He had died. Sudden, like a clap of distant thunder in a placid sky. And the grief afterward had been the sort that does not detail itself in public. It was noted in registers and in the way Mrs. Harlow folded collars and did not speak of my nights. I had learned to hold my memory of him with the gentleness of someone who carries a delicate glass under a shawl.
Now the ring glinted in my palm with a suggestion I had not expected: not merely of Edmund's steadiness but of all the small, private moments our marriage had contained. A dozen trivialities flowered up: his hand at the back of my neck as I leaned over the washstand; the book he had left unfinished on the bedside table; the smell of boiled barley when he came home late. For a moment I let myself be that version of me, unguarded and tender, with grief thin and recent enough to sting.
Then the girl in the mirror looked over my shoulder.
She mouthed something with slow urgency—not a word I could understand in air, but her hands combed through her hair as if reckoning something, as if seeking to make herself presentable in case someone rescued her from the glass. Her eyes held an anxious fervour that pricked my skin. She watched me handle the ring and the ring seemed to trouble her as much as it troubled me. The peculiar thing was that I had never seen that expression on my own face in waking life—only in dreams and now, apparently, in glass.
I slipped the band into my pocket, though I had no plan for it. It felt like a talisman and a tether all at once; a weight that made my steps measured as I moved toward the classroom. The house cleared its throat as I passed the great staircase, and the world around me arranged itself into tasks and small, mechanical kindnesses.
The classroom was empty and smelled pleasantly of dust and chalk—the odour of industry and small rebellions. I had been promised a day of quiet: a day to sort slates, to file handwriting exercises into their proper places, to press the linen I used for new spines. I set about the work in a manner that was supposed to steady me. The children's absence had a hollow in it; the room seemed to wait, like a mouth waiting for words.
What I found, half-hidden beneath a slate and tucked awkwardly behind a spool of blue twine, was a letter.
At first I thought it merely an envelope misplaced, pale and powdered. Then I saw the hand—no mistaking Dr. Vale's script once I had read it in his ledger—an angular, controlled hand that spared no flourish but left little emphases where his feeling had wedged itself into order. I had seen that hand at the bedside of sick children, inscribing their ailments with a physician's brevity; I had seen it coaxing small remediations from the household's accounts; I had seen it watching me sometimes with an expression that said, in its minor way, more than it would ever speak.
My fingers closed around the envelope before I could decide why. There was no seal to the letter now; the flap had been tucked with a deliberate gentleness. The paper within smelled faintly of a tobacco he did not otherwise patronize and of the faint lingering of lilac which, in Rowanmere, was never without meaning.
I did not intend to read it. I had promised myself stern things: not to overstep, not to pry. But as any woman who has loved and lost—or found a curiosity that makes her heartbeat quicken—knows, promise is a discretion that fails often under temptation. The letter slipped between my damp fingers and opened like a small confession.
The handwriting within was the same, severe and precise, until the margins where it softened into something else. A name unfolded across the page as if it could not wholly be contained by the line: Amelia.
He addressed it there in a way that made me drop the paper for a second, as if the name alone had a gravity capable of turning my knees to water. It began with small domesticities—meetings of meaning known only to two—and then turned, by a slow, almost stealthy curve, into a strain of love so particular it might have been a legal document had it not been drenched in tenderness. He wrote of mornings that sustained him, of a laugh that unclasped the sternness of his days, of a hand-shaped habit that had come to mean home. He confessed, in the most sober of phrases, to the folly of thinking himself free of temptation when in truth the heart's law is rarely obedient to the mind's.
There was a phrase that made me catch: "If I am a poor custodian of my own steadiness, I will be a better keeper of yours, should you permit it." He had drawn a small flourish beneath the sentence, the only trace of warmth in his otherwise restrained scrawl. I read and read, as one reads a sickness one does not wish to catch but cannot resist touching.
The letter's edges trembled in my hand. For reasons I could not name, for reasons that felt at once like trespass and revelation, the name Amelia struck through me with a peculiar ache. I had not heard the name before in any conversation at Rowanmere. It felt intimate in the way a pocketed token does when found in the folds of an old coat. The house pressed against the seams of the walls as if that small utterance were a bell rung in its innards.
At that precise instant—my heartbeat in my mouth and the room reeling gently with the hush of discovery—a sound as mundane as a broomstick's scrape at the classroom door made me start. I folded the letter with a careful haste I pretended had no guilt in it. The slate above where I had found the missive sat patiently, ignorant of revelation. The classroom's dust motes hung in the shaft of light as if nothing had disturbed the fabric of their slow noon.
I put the letter into my bosom, close to where the ring lay warming against my undergarment, and for a second the two weights felt like the twin sides of a scale. One belonged to my past: Edmund, steady and precise. The other belonged—somehow, unknowably—to Dr. Vale: the name Amelia, inked in an order that implied constancy and ache.
I glanced again at the mirror in the high window pane opposite me. The reflection was ordinary: my face, worn but composed; my hair a tidy coil; the line of my dress plain and unashamed. The girl I had seen on the corridor was not here. Yet my mouth felt strange, as if it rehearsed the name it had found. I wondered whether that frightened reflection of myself had been some premonition—the anxious echo of a woman who glimpses her life cracking open and does not yet know if the light to come will warm or burn.
When I closed the classroom door behind me and made my way down the corridor, the house exhaled, and in the exhale I fancied that the ledger of its long memory had just acquired a new, fine entry. I held Edmund's ring and Dr. Vale's letter like contraband. I had not meant to trespass into a letter's privacy; I had not meant to make the past and present collide in the narrow span of a few stolen moments. But the collision had occurred, and at its seam lay questions that would not be sutured by silence.
A sound across the hall—a footfall that was too soft to belong to Mrs. Harlow and too deliberate to be a child—made me freeze. The house listened with me. My hand went instinctively to the place where both ring and letter were kept: near my heart, where keeping things felt both brave and dangerous.
I did not know who would enter the corridor, or whether the step would be his, or another's. The mirror's glass seemed to darken; the girl in it, if she had returned, had not yet shown herself. The hush in the house deepened into something that hinted at a turning.
I drew the bell of my skirts close and waited, with the slow, dreadful patience of a woman who has found a key and does not know which door it will open.