“She’s recovering,” Nell said. “But slowly.” She guided Effie down the long corridor and through the high stone archways that led past the library and the old conservatory. A right turn into a narrow passage brought them to the very set of iron-banded doors that separated the public rooms from the private.

Nell’s expression sobered as she stopped in front of them. “I won’t go in. Miss Corvus insists on speaking with you alone.”

“Does she, indeed?” Effie lifted Franc from his carpetbag and set him down on the stone floor. He gave a perfunctory shake before springing into motion. Effie caught hold of his lead before he could gallop off. Franc was a loyal companion, but he was also a rogue. He couldn’t resist wandering.

She handed the lead to Nell. “If you would be so good as to take him for an airing? And pray don’t let him loose. He’s swift as a greyhound when he chooses to be. You’d never catch him.”

Nell didn’t ask any questions. She knew all about Franc’s little foibles from Effie’s letters. “I shall take him to visit the hedgerow,” she said. “Look for me when you’re done.”

Effie waited until Nell had gone before rapping twice on the door. There was a taut moment of silence before Miss Corvus answered from within.

“Come,” she said.

The clipped, frost-edged voice had its usual effect on Effie. It was a reaction borne from a memory too distant to recall as anything more than primitive emotion. It made Effie long to shrink back into herself. To make herself invisible. Maybe then Miss Corvus wouldn’t see her. Wouldn’t take her away.

But Effie had never excelled at being invisible.

Stiffening her spine, she opened the door.

• • •

Effie was met by the unsettling prospect of a darkened sitting room. The curtains had been drawn shut, and no candles had been lit. There remained only enough light to see the heavy mahogany furnishings, the vases filled with crumbling bouquets of dried flowers, and the shrouds of black fabric that covered the pictures on the walls and the mirror hanging over the fireplace.

For all Miss Corvus’s progressive views, for all her insistence on looking to the future, this was a chamber firmly enshrouded in the past. A veiled room, all stale darkness and decay.

Miss Corvus had been similarly veiled the first time Effie had seen her that fateful day eighteen years ago in the London slum of St. Giles.

But Miss Corvus wasn’t veiled now.

She sat in a green damask–upholstered armchair by the window, her uncovered face as white as wax. She was clad in stark black, just as Effie was—a plain, but impeccably tailored, silk dress worn over an abundance of petticoats and a formidable wire crinoline. A jet brooch gleamed at her throat, and an embroidered lace handkerchief was clutched in her pale hand.