“It was a girl,” I whispered, still watching the empty door of the boathouse. “Or was it a woman?” I reflected aloud. Jessie titched and moved from my side, but I remained where I knelt, unable to shake free the vision of that solitary gray creature upon the lawn.

After a time, there came such clatter and bang behind me, I sat back from the curtain and turned round. Her freckled brow drawn into a sharp crease, Jessie prepared my wardrobe with terrible concentration, drawing the thin white dress from out of the shadows of the armoire, bearing it in her arms gently as a child, to lay it across the foot of my bed in readiness for the lace collar and cuffs, both of which she pulled from the silken lining of the cedar drawers.

“What a lady you are making me,” I remarked, a bit testily.

“’Tis only just your clothing, miss,” she answered, fastening the green-gold trim to the waist sash upon the dress, the arms dutifully stretched on either side of the cinched fabric.

“No, no. Jessie, please to look at her,” I said, nearly as disquieted by this languid linen shape upon the bed as by the apparition in the fog. “How exhausted she is already.” Jessie snapped two petticoats in the air beside me and did not reply. I watched the slight dust shaken free from the bouncing skirts. And with that done, she ended further discussion, gesturing for me to turn my back so she could brush out my hair.

Dressed for the day, I descended the carpeted stairs, pausing at the stairway turn to look out the vast window there, my thoughts in a jumble. The fog crossed swiftly now across the morning, and below the covering gray, the bright green of the lawn had begun to assert itself.

Several guests sat already at breakfast. An older man with enormous white mustaches I had noticed the previous night crumbled a roll into his coffee with one hand while the other traced the lines of a letter that lay open in front of him. A hideously unattractive woman sat beside him, though lively eyes peered out the window into the brightening morning from her heavyset, rather mannish features. At another table sat a tidy little mother with her two fair children and their dark-haired governess, a plain Jane of a woman.

Had none of them seen the gray figure? I looked round at the ordinary gathering. Not a one betrayed the slightest hint of the unease I felt. For though I liked a story, I reflected, taking my chair, the longing in that figure’s pose rather more unnerved than thrilled—as if a character had reached out a hand from the pages of a book and pointed, direct to me.

“Shall we order a picnic for today, Maisie?” Mama asked, replacing my inborn thoughts with the airy vision of her lilac silk as she took the chair opposite. I grimaced.