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“She is insufferable, Charlotte,” Eleanor declared, dropping onto the tufted window seat of the library. “You cannot tell me she is meant to be admired.”

Charlotte was seated cross-legged on the thick rug before the hearth with her shawl slipping from one shoulder. She turned her face up with an expression of saintly patience. “I can and I shall. Fanny Price is a creature of quiet fortitude. No, even more so. Of moral clarity.”

Eleanor made a sound of dramatic disgust and tossed a peeled apple slice to Percival, who blinked at it as though it had personally offended him.

The library was warm, a little stuffy even, with the scent of old leather, beeswax polish, and the faintest lingering trace of the pipe tobacco Nathaniel’s father seemed to favour.

Sunlight filtered in weakly through the high windows, catching dust motes in golden suspension, and outside, a soft drizzle clung to the glass in a pattern like lace.

Eleanor leaned her head against the windowpane, cool and smooth beneath her temple, and sighed with theatrical despair.

“Fanny Price,” she said, with a level of disdain normally reserved for spoiled fruit or Bonapartist politics, “is the most tiresome woman in all of fiction. She sulks, she judges, she sighs and never once does she do anything. She is a damp handkerchief given form.”

Charlotte laughed. “Eleanor!”

“She is the type of girl men say they admire and then forget at the garden party.”

“She is principled.”

“She is spineless. Give me Lizzy Bennet. Now there is a young lady, sharp-tongued and certain of herself.”

“Lizzy is delightful,” Charlotte conceded, tucking her feet beneath her skirts, “but she is a fantasy. Fanny is what most of us are, in truth. We endure. We see everything and say little, and we carry on.”

Eleanor looked at her then with her brow furrowed not in annoyance, but in thought.

“You think I’m a Fanny Price,” she said slowly, the teasing draining from her tone.

Charlotte raised one brow. “I think you were, perhaps. Once.”

A silence bloomed between them, not unpleasant, but weightier than the chatter it replaced. The fire crackled softly, and the rain outside deepened to a gentle patter.

“I was never meek,” Eleanor said at last.

“No,” Charlotte agreed. “But you were quiet. In that house. Under that roof.”

Eleanor’s mouth thinned, not at Charlotte, but at the memory. At the shape her life had once taken, so tight and narrow and suffocating she had not known it until she’d been thrust into another one entirely, which under closer scrutiny, was once again, the same.

Charlotte, reading her expression, changed the subject with a deftness only old friends could manage. “Tell me about the garden room. You said you found a bit of rot behind one of the benches?”

Eleanor beamed at the question. “I did, but it’s nothing that cannot be taken care of.

Oh, but the garden room, Charlotte … it is the most peculiar, neglected corner of the house with its crumbling plaster, cobwebs in the cornices, and a faint smell of something that might once have been lavender or perhaps mildew, but I adore it. ”

“You adore mildew?” Charlotte teased.

“A conservatory of sorts, perhaps,” Eleanor replied with equal playfulness.

“A retreat for rain-soaked afternoons and unrepentant idleness. I’ve half a mind to fill it with ferns and orange trees in great porcelain pots and hang those paper lanterns like the sort I saw in Brighton.

The kind that glows like moons when lit. ”

Charlotte grinned. “You’re going to scandalize the housemaids.”

“Oh, let them be scandalized. I want old iron garden furniture, painted white and peeling, of course, and a pianoforte in the corner, so I may play badly and without consequence. I shall drag a chaise in there for reading and do absolutely nothing that could be considered productive.” She paused, then added with a small, sly smile, “Except perhaps for thinking dangerously independent thoughts.”

Charlotte gave a bark of laughter. “God forbid.”

“There will be trellises,” Eleanor went on, quite serious now, “real ones, with climbing roses. And I shall insist on jasmine. At night it will smell like something from a fairy story.”

“Have you told your husband this plan?” Charlotte asked, reaching for a second apple slice and offering it to Percival, who, after some judgemental sniffing, accepted it with all the grace of a Roman emperor.

Eleanor hesitated for half a beat. “Well … not yet.”

“But you will?”

“I …” she started, but it was difficult to find the right words. “I’m not certain he would object. Nor am I certain he would care enough to.”

Charlotte gave her a look. It was gentle but pointed.

“It’s a little dream,” Eleanor said softly. “And I should like to see if I can make it real. Even just one room, Charlotte. One small corner of this grand, ancient house that belongs to me.”

There was a beat of silence. Then Charlotte, ever forthright, said with a smile, “Then you must make it yours. Wild roses and all.”

Eleanor nodded, a quiet determination settling in her chest. She could already see it—the sunlight pouring through clean windows, the scent of green things growing, the flutter of sheer drapery stirred by the breeze.

And somewhere in the corner, Percival snoring on a worn cushion, like the useless, beloved beast he was.

“Yes,” she murmured. “I shall.”

That was when Eleanor fell quiet. She leaned her forehead against the cool pane. Without intending to, she murmured the first thing that came to her. “He never interrupts me.”

Charlotte, who had been focused on rescuing her shawl from Percival’s growing interest in it, glanced up. “The marquess?”

Eleanor didn’t answer at once, so Charlotte waited, patient and still.

Finally, Eleanor spoke again, and her voice was softer, more thoughtful.

“The house is perfect. Not merely tidy, Charlotte. It is pristine. Precise. Everything in its proper place. And yet …” She hesitated, searching for the shape of the feeling.

“It does not welcome. It watches. I walk the halls like a guest granted a long stay, but never quite invited to settle.”

Charlotte’s eyes narrowed gently, reading between each line. “You feel invisible.”

Eleanor gave a tight, ironic smile. “More like translucent. Her grace presides and the servants … well, they obey me, but only just. I issue requests that sound too much like suggestions. And my husband …” She trailed off, then shook her head.

“He is never unkind. He is nothing but polite. But one might as well attempt conversation with a statue in a gallery. I feel as though I’m being observed but never seen. ”

Charlotte shifted, sitting upright. “And do you let them think you’re a ghost?”

“I am trying not to. The garden room is my beginning.” Eleanor glanced towards the door as if she could see through it, down the hall, into that green-tinged dream of hers.

“I don’t expect romance, Charlotte. I’m not some foolish girl with poetry behind her eyes.

But I thought, perhaps foolishly hoped that I might find …

some measure of understanding. A kind of partnership, even if quiet.

But thus far …” She spread her hands, empty and unadorned.

“I feel more like a shadow in someone else’s house. ”

Charlotte rose, smoothing her skirts, and crossed to Eleanor, sitting beside her on the wide window seat.

Her voice, when she spoke, was firm but kind.

“Then speak, Ellie. You’ve spent your life saying the right things in the right tone, but that isn’t the same as being heard.

You want this house to be yours? Make it yours.

You want to be known? Then stop waiting to be discovered like a misplaced letter. ”

Eleanor blinked at her, lips parted in the beginnings of protest.

Charlotte raised a brow. “No more silence.”

Eleanor drew a long breath. The air tasted of woodsmoke and rain. Her reflection stared back at her in the glass—soft, hesitant, unfamiliar in this house. And yet behind it, there was something clearer now. A glimmer of will beneath the politeness.

Then again, stronger. “No more silence.”

Just as the quiet between them settled into something introspective, there came a loud sound ending in a soft grunt.

It was Percival, attempting a bold leap onto the window seat and failing with great enthusiasm.

Charlotte let out a surprised snort as Eleanor reached down and scooped him up.

He settled between them with a wheeze and a sniff, then promptly sneezed on Eleanor’s sleeve.

“Charming,” she said dryly, brushing at the fine mist of pug breath.

Percival, wholly unrepentant, spun in a lopsided circle before collapsing against Eleanor’s thigh like a soldier returned from battle.

“He clearly supports your revolution,” Charlotte observed with great amusement, scratching behind his ears.

“He supports anything that involves warm upholstery and passive adoration,” Eleanor replied, though she smoothed a hand gently down his wrinkled back.

Percival gave a long, soulful sigh that seemed to say, at last, someone understands me.

Eleanor chuckled despite herself. “Do you suppose he’d object to jasmine and garden chairs?”

“He’ll likely claim the chaise for himself and bark at the ferns until they surrender.”

“Then he’ll make an excellent lord of the garden room.”

Both girls chuckled at the image, then fell silent, listening to the sound of Percival snoring softly between them. His curled tail twitched only once in sleepy delight.

Eleanor glanced at Charlotte. “Thank you. For reminding me.”

Charlotte smiled, warm and bright. “Always. But don’t think this lets you out of your promise.”

“No more silence,” Eleanor repeated, her voice quiet, but sure.

She looked out the window, at the falling rain, at the dripping branches and mist-shrouded lawn, and saw not a house that belonged to someone else, but one that might yet become hers.

And in her lap, Percival gave a rather impolite snort, as though to say about time.