Eleanor's sitting room was on the second floor, at the end of the corridor that ran away from the east wing. Small, warm, furnished without formality. A desk with papers stacked precisely. Two chairs angled toward the fireplace. Books on every available surface with the comfortable disorder of books that were actually read rather than displayed.
Victoria's portrait was on the wall facing the window.
Not hung with ceremony. Not centred or lit for effect. Hung at the height where a person sitting in the left chair would see it directly, the way you hung something you wanted to be able to look at without having to look for it.
Oz stood in front of it.
The woman in the portrait was dark-haired, pale, with a serious face that gave attention back to whoever was looking at it. She was painted at an angle, three-quarters, one hand resting on the arm of a chair. The painter had caught something in the set of her eyes that most portrait painters flattened out: a quality of assessment, of measuring what she was looking at and finding it approximately what she had expected.
Eleanor stood to one side and did not speak.
Henrietta looked at the portrait and then at Eleanor and saw what she had been reaching for since the doorstep the night before. The face was not similar. It was the same. The same arrangement of bone and expression, the same quality of attention directed outward. Eleanor was standing in her own sitting room looking like her grandmother's portrait had been painted from her.
"How old was she here," Oz said.
"Thirty-one," Eleanor said.
He looked at the portrait for another moment. Then he said thank you and went out.
In the corridor he said, quietly: "Thirty-one. She had twenty-two years after this was painted."
Henrietta said nothing. She was already doing the arithmetic and it led somewhere she needed a moment to sit with. Twenty-two years of maintaining the seal on the east wing door. Twenty-two years of knowing what was in there and saying nothing, not to a daughter, not to a granddaughter, not to the man she had called to the house to deal with it and had then let leave with the work unfinished.
They went to their rooms.
In the morning Oz asked Eleanor to take them to each place where a body had been found. Not a description. The place itself.
Fen first. The kitchen garden was through the back of the house and into the cold morning, a walled space with raised beds most of the way along the south and west sides and a strip of bare earth along the east wall where the shade was deep enough to make growing difficult. Eleanor showed them the spot: a few feet from the wall, facing it.
Oz looked at the east wall of the kitchen garden.
Then he looked at the soil at its base. The ground there was harder than the rest of the garden, compacted differently, as though something had been pressing against it from the other side for a long time. He did not touch it. He stood and looked and then moved on.
The linen corridor next. Second floor, running parallel to the east wing. Eleanor showed them the spot where Nell Graves had been found: twenty feet from the east wing door, face down, arms at her sides.
Oz looked at the floor.
There was a discolouration on the stone at that point. Faint, oval, roughly the shape and size of a person lying down. Old enough to have been there before Nell Graves died there. He crouched and looked at it without touching.
"I hadn't noticed that," Eleanor said.
He stood and moved on without comment.
The servants' stair last. A back staircase connecting the ground floor to the upper corridor, stone treads, used by the household staff. Thomas Wick had been found at the base of it. Oz went to the bottom step and crouched and looked at the lowest riser.
There was a mark on it. A single carved line, curved, roughly three inches long. Not the scored maintenance pattern from the east wing door. Something different in intention, simpler, the kind of mark a person made once rather than refreshed repeatedly. It could have been mistaken for damage from a boot heel or the edge of something heavy being moved.
He put one finger on it without pressing.
"Has this always been here," he said.
Eleanor crouched beside him and looked. "I don't know. I've never noticed it."
He stood. "The mark on the stair is not maintenance," he said to Henrietta. "It is something else."
He went back toward the main house.
The letter arrived in the afternoon, delivered by Holt from the village post. Eleanor read it at the library desk and held it for a moment before she looked up.
"Aldric Crane," she said. "A historian. He has been writing to me for two years about the estate's building records. He specialises in the architectural history of Thornshire's great houses." She set the letter down. "He is asking again whether he may visit to examine the older sections of the house."
"Has he asked about the east wing specifically," Henrietta said.
"No. He has asked about the original 1523 construction." Eleanor paused. "And about a fire in the seventeenth century that I have no record of."
Oz was standing at the window with his back to the room. He said: "What year."
"1641, he says. He has found references to it in county records."
Oz turned from the window. "Write back and invite him."
Eleanor looked at him. "You want him here."
"I want to know what he knows about 1641 and where he learned it from."
Eleanor wrote the letter at the desk. Edmund appeared in the doorway with the timing of someone who had been listening from the hall, which was either good service or something else. He took the letter and went out.
The afternoon settled into the library. A fire in the grate, three chairs, the day going grey outside the windows. Eleanor worked at the desk. Oz sat in the chair nearest the east-facing wall and read, or appeared to read, a book he had taken from the shelf without looking at the spine. Henrietta worked through the estate ledgers.
The house was quiet.
The east wing was on the other side of the wall to Oz's left, thirty feet away through stone and corridor. Whatever walked back and forth in there had been doing so since before the kitchen maid left. The silence did not mean it had stopped. It meant it was making no sound that reached this room.
Henrietta found a second gap in the ledgers. Not the one from 1639 to 1643. A smaller one: three months missing from the autumn of 1787, the year after the first portrait was painted, the year after Margaret Veldacre appeared in the record and the sequence of one-daughter generations began. Three months of household accounts, simply absent from the binding.
Someone had removed those pages too.
She wrote the dates and kept reading.