She grabbed a pair of slippers at the bottom of the armoire and pulled on the silvery, shimmery articles. They pinched her toes, and her foot strained out the side.

And yet the discomfort of the poor fit was a good deal better than the stinging ice cold of the floor under her bare feet.

Pausing only to gather up the velvet sack at her bedside that contained the precious-to-her minerals she’d collected through the years, Myrtle set off in search of an alternate chamber to seek out sleep that night.

A room with a roof that didn’t leak steadily enough to soak her bed and kill her by morn from the freezing cold of it.

“Unless that hasn’t been part of their plan, too,” she muttered as she made her way down the hall, a corridor blanketed in quiet as her kin slept, with only the dancing flames of the long tapered candles to keep her company. Perhaps they wanted her to be absolutely miserable so that she’d cease complaining about the fact that they were leaving for the holiday and beginning the long journey to their family seat in Scotland.

Of course, all that would have required extensive thought on their part about Myrtle, and simply put, given these past four years, she didn’t much see that as being a driving force in their decision to let her rest her head in bed, one bad storm away from floating off like some gilded piece of flotsam.

Nay, it was more likely they’d simply done what they did best where she was concerned: forget her.

Myrtle bypassed room after room where her siblings now rested.

At one point, she’d have absolutely sought out her elder sister’s chambers and invited herself in. Cassia would have complained, as elder sisters were wont to do where younger sisters were concerned. But she’d have allowed her to remain—grudgingly . . . and ordered her quiet, and to quit squirming.

Her youngest siblings, still in the nursery as they were, would hardly have a bed for Myrtle. The lone small bed in that room not for the babes in the family was reserved for the nursemaid.

Myrtle reached the stairwell that led abovestairs to a row of guest chambers where her aunt, uncle, and cousins now slept.

That was the thing about being home . . . Everything was familiar in the household one grew up in, from which family member occupied which room at the holidays to which chambers were always vacant.

Seeking out one of those vacant ones, Myrtle let herself inside.

She blinked several times to adjust her vision to the pitch-black within. Without so much as the benefit of the intermittent candles that lined the halls, an unnatural dark blanketed the room. Myrtle hung at the entrance of the guest chambers a long while. A very long while.

She despised being alone.