The moor swallowed the road long before I saw the house. Daylight was a sullen bruise behind the hills. The rain, thin and ceaseless, turned the world to slate. Rowanmere Vale rose from that greyness like a reprimand. Tall and narrow, its chimneys wrote dark script against the sky. When the carriage halted, the driver touched his hat and would not meet my eyes.
I stepped down. Gravel shifted, my cloak drank from the puddles, and the rain stitched cold along my cheeks. The door opened before I could knock. A small, watchful man held a lamp high.
"Miss Howard," he said. "We have been expecting you."
He took my cloak and guided me into a hall that exhaled stone, candle wax, and the faintest sweetness. Lilac, so light I might have imagined it. My boots rang once on the marble and then the sound died, as if the house had swallowed it.
"Mrs. Harlow will attend you," he said, and vanished.
She appeared at once. Tall, spare, a ring of keys at her waist. "Miss Howard," she said, with the gravity of someone naming a condition. "You met Finch. This way."
We moved through a corridor where portraits glimmered and receded, faces breathing with the walls. At the end she opened a door upon a drawing room where a fire had been laid and a grand piano loomed like a dark animal at rest.
"You will wish to warm yourself," Mrs. Harlow said. "When the sun rises, you will meet Mr. Vale."
"Mr. Vale," I repeated. The name sat in the room like a person who had not been asked to leave.
She led me up a staircase that turned upon itself like a thought one cannot dismiss. On the landing the air warmed a little. She opened a door to a room trimmed with restraint. A narrow bed, a writing table, a washstand, a small fire whispering apology. Rain fretted at the panes. My reflection trembled in the window. Pale, travel-worn, hair dark as mahogany where the fire touched it.
"The bell is here," she said. "The master is not to be disturbed after ten."
"I rarely disturb anyone," I said.
Her mouth softened. "Then the house and you may agree."
When she had gone, I unpinned my hair. It fell in a long weight past my shoulders. The sensation was indecently human after a day of being a parcel moved from coach to coach. The scent returned. Faint, floral, insinuating. I had not worn perfume in years. The memory that rose with it did not belong to me.
A clock below counted eight. No footman came. The quiet arranged itself with the care of a governess pinning a shawl. At a quarter past, the floor spoke in a thin creak, and from the dark under my door rose a thread of sound. A note, low and patient, as if a fingertip had found a single key and pressed without hurry.
I told myself it was the wind working a seam in the house.
Another note followed, then another, spaced like breath between confessions. Music is only air given order, yet this air knew too much. The silence between the notes was the truer song. A measured refusal.
I took up the candle, cupping the flame as one steadies a child, and opened the door. The corridor looked longer by half in the dark. Shadows waited like furniture. I walked, counting my steps. The stair began after a bend, a narrow tilt downward, the rail polished by hands long gone. The candle cast its pale geography. My fingers, the knuckles, the ring I no longer wore. The sheen of the banister. The soft lift and fall of my skirts.
The lower I went, the clearer the music grew. It was deliberation, not display, as if the player feared to hurry the truth. A bar resolved into something almost familiar, then slipped away. I paused at the turn. The candle shivered as if the house had sighed.
On the last steps the scent was undeniable. Lilac. I despise it, for reasons I prefer not to speak. Yet there it was, high and sweet and faintly rotten, like kindness gone on too long. I told myself it was trapped in draperies from a spring when the windows had been open. I told myself many things.
At the drawing-room door I hesitated. The fire had fallen to an amber bed. My candle made its own small country of light, and beyond it the piano stood with its mouth slightly open, speaking. A man sat at the keys. He wore a black coat. His head was bowed, as if the music asked a question he resented for its accuracy. His hands were long and careful and understood how to hurt with beauty.
I stood very still. He did not turn at once. The melody thinned to a line I could have broken with a word. I did not break it. When it ended, the silence felt like a cloth pulled over a body.
He rose. He was tall without arrogance, pale in the way of a man who has educated himself away from the sun. Candlelight bronzed his throat and caught in his eyes, which were the color of trees before they break into storm.
"I am Mr. Vale," he said. His voice was low, made of midnight and self-command. "You must be Miss Howard."
The fact of him surprised me. It was not his face, fine, unremarkable, but the voice, which moved through the air like a bow across the lowest string of a violin. I had the ridiculous thought that if he whispered, glass would frost.
"Yes," I said. "I was told we would meet at supper."
"I am poor company for supper," he said. "You found the music."
"Or it found me."
A corner of his mouth admitted that possibility. He gestured to a chair, then thought better of it, as if furniture were complicity. "We keep irregular hours at Rowanmere. I apologise for the discourtesy."
"I prefer irregular hours," I said. "They are honest."
He studied me as one reads a page twice to ensure it has not altered. I set the candle on the edge of the piano and watched the light gather along the lacquer, watched the keys receive it like small, surprised teeth. I should not have noticed his hands again. I did. The music had left them slightly tremulous. He clasped them behind his back as if to quiet them.
"Do you play, Miss Howard?"
"I do not perform," I said. "But I have loved music, in the way one loves a mirror that tells the truth only when the room is dark."
"Then you know its discourtesy," he said. "It tells on us."
"And on houses," I said. "Mrs. Harlow told me the pianoforte was the way this one breathed."
He looked not at me but at the instrument. "She is fond of saying so."
The lilac gathered. I kept my face calm. If he noticed, he gifted me his silence. He lowered the wick, and the room leaned closer, shadow inviting itself into the corners. The mirror above the mantel was covered, but our shapes shimmered faintly through the thin cloth like memories under gauze.
"You are here to order the library," he said, as if stating a penance. "It is a mercy I have delayed too long."
"I am here to earn my bread," I said, more sharply than I intended.
"So are we all." Something in his face latched shut.
He sat again and set his fingers lightly on the keys. He did not play. The silence lengthened until it became a structure we both inhabited. It was a relief when he spoke.
"You will hear many things about this manor," he said. "Most will be true in the way feelings are true. Accurate at the time, incapable of proof. If you wish the truth, ask me. I will try not to lie."
"Try?" I said.
"I have lied by silence," he said. "I am practising speech."
In another mouth it would have been vanity. In his it sounded like debt. Wax had travelled down one side of the candle and made a white tear along my fingers. I did not mind the sting.
"It wasn't," he said. "It was like a prayer that forgot the words."
"Prayers never forget," I said. "We do."
He looked at me then, and what I had mistaken for indifference revealed itself as fear groomed into civility. I had the sudden, uncharitable thought that he would prefer me plain. Beauty, to him, was hazard. The thought made me straighten my spine in some private rebellion.
"If you dislike the music," he said, "I can close the instrument at night."
"I dislike silence more."
"Then we are ill-suited and must make a life together," he said, and almost smiled.
A draught found the room. The flame fell and recovered. My hair had begun to loosen, and the cool of it along my neck made me aware of skin in a way I had taught myself never to be. I set the candle farther from us, afraid of being seen too clearly, afraid of what would be seen.
He drew one soft chord from the instrument, then another. Not music. Weather. The boards under my feet leaned toward the sound. I imagined the house listening, the stairs pausing in their slow surrender to time, the portraits turning their painted eyes toward us with the impolite interest of the dead.
"I will begin in the morning," I said, because I needed a sentence with a door in it.
"You will find the east library most in need," he said. "I have avoided it. Cowardice, perhaps. Or conservation."
"I am not afraid of dust."
"It is not the dust I avoid," he said, and then added, "The ceiling leaks. I would spare the books."
A kindness with a wound inside it. I set the candle nearer the door, knowing I must leave or be drawn further in and call it accident. He rested his hands on his knees, a monk awaiting sentence.
"Good night, Mr. Vale," I said.
He stood. "Good night, Miss Howard."
I felt his gaze follow the flame as I lifted it. The room went on existing behind me, but differently, as if the corners had shifted. The corridor received me with reluctance. At the stair the music resumed. Not a lament now, but something steadier, a line that held itself without pleading. I stood in the middle of the staircase, the candle painting an oval of light at my feet. The banister was warm from other hands, smooth as confession.
On the landing above, a window made a dim mirror of the night. For an instant I thought I saw another woman there, not much older than myself, smiling with the satisfaction of private victories. I kept my eyes on the flame until the thought passed. Lilac breathed up the stairs and thinned.
In my chamber I set the candle by the bed and sat until the wick guttered low. The music wandered the floors and faded to a silence so complete it seemed a choice rather than an absence. I lay down without undressing fully. When I closed my eyes, the house gathered itself around me, and I felt, as I have sometimes felt before prayer, that I stood at the edge of a fact too large to speak.
I slept, and if I dreamed, the dreams forgot me before morning. Toward dawn the rain weakened. I woke once to the faintest echo of a chord, as if some remnant of the night had persisted in the wood and wished to speak again. The fire had gone to ash. The room wore a pale, uncertain color. I lay listening to the house decide whether to sleep or rise and knew that whatever had begun below would not be content to remain there. It had found me. For good, perhaps.