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He waited. Then: "Make you feel what?"

She looked away. “I should have been angry. I should have felt scared, but…”

He took one step. “But what?”

“…You made me feel things I did not ask to feel. And then you walked away.”

The words hung in the dark kitchen. He closed the distance. His breath warmed her cheek.

"Is that what this is about? I left you wanting."

“I…” She looked up at him, forgot what she'd been about to say. His eyes held hers and would not let go. “I don’t know what I need.”

His hand came up. Slowly, as though the arm did not belong to him. His fingers stopped, a hair’s breadth away from her jaw. She could feel the warmth of them without the touch, a ghost of contact, and she watched his hand hang there in the space between them.

His gaze dropped to her mouth. He did not try to hide it. She saw his throat work, the swallow he could not suppress. The breath that left him after was slow and controlled.

He closed his hand. Drew it back to his side, fist clenching, the knuckles going white, and she understood with sudden, terrible clarity that the fist was not anger. It was the only thing keeping his hand off her.

"Go to bed, Audrey." His voice was rough and stripped.

She did not move. She could not move. The heat of him was still close enough to feel, and the place on her jaw where his fingers had almost landed was burning as though he had touched her after all.

He stepped back. One step. Then another. Each one cost him something. She could see it in the set of his shoulders, the rigid line of his back, the way his breathing did not steady. He turned away from her, and his hand found the edge of the table and gripped it. He stood there with his back to her, his head bowed, and did not speak.

She picked up her cane. She walked past him to the stairs, her hand over her mouth. When she reached the top of the stairs, she pressed her back against the wall and breathed.

Chapter nine

Marian’s Ghost

Better a truth that frightens you than a peace built on not asking.

— The Wicked Widow’s Rules

Audrey

It was on the first floor, at the end of the east corridor, behind a door so warped with damp that it had swollen shut and she'd assumed it was locked. It wasn't. The wood yielded to her shoulder on the fourth shove, scraping across the floorboards with a sound like a groan, and the room exhaled: dust and lavender and old paper and the faintest trace of tobacco, though Marian had never smoked. Someone else had sat in this room.

A desk by the window, buried under correspondence. A chair with a cushion worn thin in the centre. Bookshelves floor to ceiling on three walls, the spines foxed and faded. A candlestick with a stub of tallow still in it, the wax pooled across the desk in a frozen spill. On the mantelpiece, a small watercolour of a woman Audrey did not recognise: dark-haired, unsmiling, beautiful.

In the small parlour on her way here she had found Marian's spectacles on the arm of a chair, folded, the lenses dusty. Beside them, a teacup with a dried ring at the bottom. Marian had set them down and never come back for them. Audrey had picked up the spectacles and held them and sat in the chair and pressed them against her chest and allowed herself, for three minutes exactly, the luxury of missing the only person who had ever looked at her and seen someone worth keeping. Then she had put them back and kept walking.

Audrey closed the study door behind her and sat down at the desk.

She had not come here looking for answers about Kit. She had come because she could not bear another hour in the kitchen pretending he did not exist, and the study was the only room she hadn't entered. But answers were what she found.

* * *

The correspondence was dull. Quarterly accounts from the solicitor, receipts from a builder in the village, a dispute with a neighbour about drainage. Audrey stacked these aside.

Beneath the correspondence she found two things. The first was a slim notebook, unbound, covered in Marian's angular hand. The second was a bundle of letters tied with kitchen string, addressed to Marian in three different hands that were, on closer inspection, the same hand disguised.

She opened the notebook first.

It was not a diary. Marian had been keeping a log: dates, descriptions, movements. A record of strangers. She had written them the way a soldier marks enemy positions on a map: to track what was coming.

6 April. Two men at the inn asking after a young man at the abbey. K. went down before I could stop him. They left that evening. He would not tell me what he said to them. He came home with torn knuckles.