The children were wounded. That much was evident. Ella had armoured herself in premature adulthood; Samuel had retreated into silence; and Rosie had curled about her grief like a small creature guarding an injury. They were not difficult children, whatever Lord Greystone might believe. They were simply children who had learned, through the cruellest of lessons, that love was not permanent, and that those upon whom one depended could vanish without warning.
Serena understood that lesson. She understood it far better than she would ever admit aloud.
She had been ten years old when her mother died—old enough to grasp what death meant, young enough to believe, in some secret corner of her heart, that if she were very good and very quiet and very perfect, she might somehow bring her mother back. She had been sixteen when her father followed, leaving her alone in the world with nothing but a modest education and the necessity of earning her own living.
Governesses, she had learned in the years since, occupied a strange liminal space—too educated to be servants, too dependent to be family. They were invited into households and then, inevitably, dismissed from them. They watched children grow and change and become people, only to see those children move on to lives that no longer required a governess’s presence.
She had loved the children she taught. She had loved them despite knowing she ought not to—that attachment led only to pain, that every farewell would tear away another small piece of her heart. And she had sworn, after her last position—after the Ashworth children had hugged her and cried and promised to write, only to cease after three months, as children invariably did—she had sworn she would not make that mistake again.
She would be competent. She would be kind. But she would not love.
It was the only way to survive.
Chapter Two
The night at Greystone Hall was quiet in a manner Serena had not expected. In her previous positions, there had always been noise, the bustle of servants, the sounds of a village or a city, the steady hum of a household in motion. Here, the silence was nearly complete, broken only by the occasional creak of old timber settling and the distant hoot of an owl somewhere in the gardens below.
Serena lay awake, staring at the ceiling, and tried to persuade herself to sleep.
She was only just beginning to drift when she heard it, a small sound, barely audible through the wall separating her room from Rosie’s. A whimper, perhaps. Or a muffled sob.
She was out of bed before she had consciously resolved to move, her feet finding the cold floor, her hands reaching for her wrapper. She paused at Rosie’s door, listening.
The sounds were clearer now. Rosie was crying, not the loud, broken sobs of a child’s tantrum, but something quieter and far more distressing. It was the sound of grief held inside for too long and no longer contained.
Serena opened the door.
The room lay in shadow, lit only by the pale glow of moonlight through the window. Rosie was curled in her bed,Marianne clutched to her chest, her small body trembling with the force of her tears.
“Rosie,” Serena said softly as she crossed to the bed. “Rosie, my dear, what is it?”
The little girl looked up, her face wet and stricken. “I want my mama,” she whispered. “I want my mama to come back.”
Something in Serena’s chest, that carefully guarded place she had sworn to protect, cracked just a little.
“Oh, sweetheart.” She sat on the edge of the bed, and when Rosie reached for her, Serena gathered the child into her arms without hesitation. “I know. I know you do.”
“She promised,” Rosie sobbed, her words muffled against Serena’s shoulder. “She promised she would always come back. But she didn’t. She went away and she didn’t come back and I waited and waited and she never came.”
Serena closed her eyes, holding the small, shaking body close. There were no words that could make this right. No comfort that could undo the cruelty of a promise broken by death. All she could offer was presence, the simple and insufficient gift of being there.
“I know,” she said again. “I know it hurts. It is the worst kind of hurt.”
“Did your mama go away too?”
The question was so innocent and so direct that Serena felt her breath catch.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “When I was a little girl. She went away too.”
Rosie pulled back a little, looking up at her with red-rimmed eyes. “Did you cry?”
“Very much.”
“Did it stop hurting?”
Serena considered the question with care. She could lie, could offer the comforting fiction that time healed all wounds and that the pain would disappear. But she had learned long ago that children recognised falsehood, and that even well-meant lies only deepened the hurt.
“It changes,” she said at last. “It does not stop, not entirely. But it changes. The hurt becomes softer, gentler. You learn to carry it, instead of letting it carry you.”
