“Aaron? Is that you? What are you doing down here?”
For a moment, a full and genuine moment, she thought it was Aaron. The same dark hair. The same slight build. The same face, almost.Almost.
But not quite.
The clothes were wrong, for one thing. Rougher than anything Aaron wore. A shirt that had not been pressed, tucked unevenly into breeches that sat too high at the ankle. And there was something in the way he held himself that was different. Aaron stood in a room the way he owned it, easy and careless and warm. This boy stood like he was waiting to be told to leave.
He looked at her.
Catherine looked back.
For a breath, neither of them moved. Then the boy turned and slipped sideways into the deeper dark of the cellar, quick and silent, and was gone as though he had never been there at all.
Catherine took a step forward. Her mouth opened.
“Miss Ainsley!”
She spun. Mrs. Pallard stood at the top of the cellar stairs, a basket of linen balanced against one hip, her face arranged in an expression of calm pleasantness that Catherine, even at eight, could tell was not entirely real.
“There you are, love. Come up out of there. His Grace would not take kindly to someone snooping about the house—even the daughter of his late Duchess’ friend.”
The very mention of the old and brooding Duke of Winchester had her spine tingling. Catherine looked back into the dark. Itwas empty. It had the feeling of a room that had been empty for a very long time.
She climbed the stairs and took the hand Mrs. Pallard offered.
Aaron was back in the parlor when she returned, sitting on the piano bench with his legs swinging and a second apple in his hand, as though he had never left at all.
“I found it,” he said.
“Found what?”
He grinned. That crooked, quick grin. “The echo. In the parlor. Listen.” He leaned forward and struck a single note on the piano, high and bright, and Catherine listened, and heard nothing but the note fading into the quiet of the room.
She did not think about the boy in the cellar again that afternoon.
CHAPTER 2
Holborn, London
“Spare a penny, miss?” came a desperate voice from the shadows.
Catherine jumped, clutching her worn cloak closer around her slender frame. She looked into an alleyway where a grimy hand was extended to her from a bundle of rags. She made out a face, eyes dull.
“Yes, of course,” she said, breath pluming in frosty clouds. The coins were meant for emergencies—but what emergency could be greater than hunger?
Fumbling in her purse, she produced a penny, which she pressed into the sullen hand. There were precious few, but she could not ignore the plea.
“Shouldn’t be on your own in these streets, lass,” the beggar croaked, accepting the coin, “but thank ye nevertheless.”
“I understand,” Catherine tried for an earnest smile.
She resumed her walk along Gray’s Inn Lane. The rapid puff of icy vapors were testament to the fear that clawed at her throat. This journey was a desperate roll of the dice.
It is foolhardy, but it is my only hope of escape from Haventon Manor. From Aunt and Uncle.
She tried to keep thoughts of them from her mind, of what they would do when they discovered she had gone. It brought a fresh wave of panic that clenched her stomach in nausea. She slowed, putting a hand to her stomach, fighting down the feeling of sickness that was all too familiar in the last few months.
Disturbingly familiar.
