Page 27 of Darkest at Dusk (Revenant Roses)

Mrs. Abernathy already had the kettle set on the hob where it hissed and spat.

She lifted it with a folded cloth, poured a little boiling water into a squat earthen pot, swirled it to warm, and tipped it out.

After measuring two scant teaspoons of leaves, dark and dry, she poured the water over them.

Then she set aside the kettle and covered the pot with a folded cloth.

“That Peg,” she said as she set two pottery mugs on the table.

She cracked two lumps of coarse sugar from the loaf with iron nippers and dropped one in each mug before adding some milk.

“She’s abed now, but she had a day, she did.

Swore up and down that the walls of the back stairs meant to crush her. ”

After a few moments, she poured the drawn tea, dark ribbons clouding into the milk, then slid a mug across the table. Isabella wrapped it with her palms, grateful for the warmth. The scent of the tea drifted up, smoky sweet.

“My first night here,” she said, “Peg told me not to be afraid. That her mam said ghosts can’t hurt you, only being afraid of them can.”

“That child,” the housekeeper said, half-chiding, half-protective.

“Sees spirits in every corner, claims she isn’t afraid, but trembles like a leaf.

” She stirred her tea, her spoon ringing soft against clay.

“Mind you, I wouldn’t call her a liar.” Her tone was thoughtful now.

“Some folks’ eyes are set to see what others can’t. ”

The words sparked along Isabella’s skin, bright and perilous. She studied the other woman over the rim of her mug. She believes Peg. Would she believe me? Her pulse skipped a beat, a quick, betraying flutter.

“Have you seen such things?” she asked carefully.

The housekeeper took a sip of her tea and set her mug down.

“When I was a slip of a thing with more bones than sense, my mother sent me to the miller’s to ask for flour on tick.

I came back late, dusk making a bruise of the lane.

A man walked ahead of me with his hat tipped just so, the way Mr. Briggs always wore it.

He turned at the stile and lifted two fingers by the brim.

Polite as Sundays.” She smiled, but it was the kind of smile that didn’t brighten anything.

“I lifted mine back. I knew him. Everyone knew him.”

She took up the cloth and began polishing the next spoon.

“In the morning there was church-bell talk and my mother’s sharp whispering.

Mr. Briggs had taken fever and gone to God two nights prior.

They’d laid him out with pennies on his eyes right while I was lifting my hand in greeting the evening after.

” She gave a soft, dismissive click of tongue and teeth.

“Did you tell anyone?” Isabella asked, lifting her mug to blow across the top.

“My mother said to hold my tongue. ‘There’s things you’ll only make worse by naming,’ she said. So I kept it.”

Isabella’s chest ached. To see and be told one had not, to hide the tale, to smile and lie and pretend…That was the shape of her own childhood. Her own life .

Mrs. Abernathy’s mouth firmed. “I’ve never seen such a thing again. But I won’t call a girl a liar for having eyes set different from mine. Peg sees something. She’s no mischief-maker.”

“No, she is not,” Isabella said, too quickly.

Heat rose to her face; she bent to sip and let the mug shield her.

The truth swelled in her throat…the wraiths, the voices, the way the house leaned close to listen.

It would be the easiest thing to set the cup down and tell this woman who polished spoons to a moon-bright shine about the dead who would not leave her be. So easy. So ruinous.

Never say it. Never show it.

Mrs. Abernathy reached across and, with the dry gentleness of a mother smoothing a child’s hair, straightened the cuff of Isabella’s sleeve where it had folded.

“Some folk see more,” she said. “Doesn’t mean they’re broken.”

The words rang like a bell tolling in a fog.

“My father…” Isabella began, and the room seemed to lean nearer, the coals shifting as if to hear.

The words lay sharp on her tongue. Duty.

Promise. Grief. She swallowed, and the swallow hurt.

She wrenched the truth into a different shape, safer, smaller.

“My father would have agreed with your mother, about the keeping of some things.” She made herself smile.

“But Peg will be the safer for being believed, and feel less lonely for it, too.”

Mrs. Abernathy set the second spoon aside and reached for a third, content with what had not been asked for. “Aye,” she said. “Belief costs little. Not believing can cost a world.”

They sat a while, quiet, bound for a moment by something perilously near trust. When Isabella rose, the mug left a pale ring on the scrubbed table. Mrs. Abernathy wiped it away with her cloth and a nod. How easily some marks could be erased.

By the end of the following week, Isabella had made headway in unpacking her father’s books and arranging them on the shelves like watchful sentinels.

The familiar scent of beeswax polish and aged paper surrounded her.

She worked by habit and rule, first creating a rough shelf-list in a ledger’s front pages, then a fair copy in the catalogue book, including title, author, language, date, provenance, any notable marginalia, her hand neat and even.

Fragile atlases and folios she laid beneath boards with a stone weight to coax their buckled leaves flat.

Torn joints she tied with narrow cotton tape.

Dog-eared corners she smoothed and touched with the lightest smear of paste.

When mold freckled a board, she wiped it with a vinegar-dampened cloth.

When she came upon a leather cover that was powder-dry, she breathed on it and polished with a square of soft flannel until it took on a healthy glow.

Everything was done precisely as Papa had taught her, and she found comfort in the familiarity of the tasks.

There were dozens of other crates she had not yet examined, ones she believed were filled with the manor’s own books. Those would need ordering by subject, then language, then size…mathematics and natural philosophy together, voyages and antiquities, sermons, and so on.

For now, she focused on her father’s collection.

Each title she placed on the shelves felt like restoring a piece of him, bringing him back to life in small, fleeting moments.

She asked Matty to bring the tall stepladder, and the boy obliged with solemn care.

Noting his interest, she taught him to set out clean blotters at her elbow and bring a small pot of fresh paste, the surface covered with damp muslin so it would not skin over.

She set a regimen against the room’s old damp, drawing the curtains when the sun was fierce, then opening them for an hour to air.

She kept the fire to a steady glow rather than a blaze.

She wrapped small cones of camphor in linen and nested them in drawers and empty nooks to keep nibbling things at bay.

She was not always alone in her work. Sometimes, Matty would help her fold thin runs of paper and lay them on the shelves so the book bottoms would not wick splinters or soot. Peg would slip in to brush dust from carved cornices with a feather whisk.

And as the days passed, no wraiths came to show themselves. Not one.

Only once, as she slid a folio home, a cool damp kissed her wrist and left a brief, bitter reek of quenched coals, the whispers rising to a roar before settling once more.

She could not recall a time in her life when wraiths had not dogged her every step. The reprieve ought to have been a relief. It was not. She could only think on how terrible it would be when they returned, when she had to once more guard her every movement, every glance.

Rhys Caradoc appeared daily, his timing unpredictable but his presence always commanding.

Oh, aloud, she was formal and polite, addressing him as Mr. Caradoc.

But in her thoughts, she allowed herself to call him Rhys, to imagine her lips shaping his name as she spoke it aloud.

She was neither a child nor a fool. He was handsome, charming when he chose, and she was—she admitted it—a little enamoured. And she recognized the danger in that.

His visits were usually brief, punctuated by an exchange of polite words that felt anything but polite.

He spoke to her with an intensity that left her heart fluttering and her thoughts clouded.

Always, his gaze lingered on her longer than it should, and always, Isabella felt her cheeks flush in response.

Today, the fire in the library hearth crackled, its warmth spreading through the room as Isabella leaned over a crate, carefully lifting out books. The smell of aged tomes rose like a faint, dusty sigh as she removed the first, its leather binding cracked but sturdy.

Behind her, the door creaked open.

“Miss Barrett,” came that familiar, low voice. The sound slid through her, as smooth and dark as velvet.

She straightened and turned, her heart skipping a beat when she saw Rhys standing just inside the doorway. His dark coat fit him impeccably, its cut accentuating the breadth of his shoulders, and a faint shadow darkened his jawline as she had noticed it did when the day aged.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Caradoc,” she replied, hoping her voice did not betray the sudden hitch in her breath. “You find me once again covered in dust.”

“I see you’ve made progress,” he said, stepping closer. His eyes swept over the neatly arranged books on the shelves, then drifted back to her. “You do your father’s collection justice.”

The warmth in his words surprised her, and for a moment, she didn’t know how to respond. He drew something from his pocket, a small oval chemist’s tin, japanned black, with a thin gilt rule circling the rim.

“Do you enjoy sweets, Miss Barrett?” he asked.