The door clicked shut behind her father, and Lucie gazed around her shadowed room. Where was her ghost?

“Well, that was interesting,” said Jesse in a thoughtful voice.

Lucie spun around and glared at Jesse, who was sitting on the windowsill, all pale skin and dark eyebrows like slashes in his face. He did not reflect against the glass panes. They were black and empty behind him.

“You’re just lucky I didn’t tell him you were here,” she said. “He would have believed me. And if he thought there was a boy in his daughter’s room, he would have figured out how to tear him limb from limb, even if he couldn’t see him.”

Jesse didn’t seem particularly concerned. “What did he call you? When he was leaving the room?”

“Fy nghariad bach. It means ‘my darling’ in Welsh. ‘My little darling.’ ”

She gazed at him challengingly, but he didn’t seem inclined to mock her. “My mother speaks often of your father,” he said. “I did not think he would be like that.”

“Like what?”

His gaze slid away from hers. “My own father died before I was born. I thought perhaps I would see him when I died, but I have not. The dead go somewhere far away. I cannot follow them.”

“Why not?” Lucie had once asked Jessamine what happened after one died: Jessamine had replied that she did not know, that the limbo ghosts inhabited was not the land of death.

“I am held here,” said Jesse. “When the sun rises, I go into darkness. I am not conscious again until the night. If there is an afterlife, I have never seen it.”

“But you can speak to your sister and mother,” said Lucie. “They must know how odd all this is. But they keep it a secret? Has Grace ever told James?”

“She has not,” said Jesse. “The Blackthorns are used to keeping secrets. It is only by accident that I discovered Grace was meeting your brother tonight. I saw her writing to James, though she didn’t know I was there.”

“Oh, yes—the secret rendezvous,” Lucie said. “Are you worried that Grace will be ruined?”

It was distressingly easy for a young lady to be “ruined”—her reputation destroyed if she was found alone with a gentleman. The mother always hoped the gentleman would do the right thing and marry the lady rather than doom her to a life of a shame, even if he didn’t love her, but it was far from a sure thing. And if he didn’t, one could be sure no other man would go near her. She would never marry.

Lucie thought of Eugenia.

“Nothing so trivial,” said Jesse. “You know the stories of my grandfather, I am sure?”

Lucie raised an eyebrow. “The one who turned into a great worm because of demon pox, and was slain by my father and uncles?”