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“Thank you.” Viola blinked. “You are the butler, I think?”

He nodded, his gaze resting just past her shoulder. “Mr. Phillips, at your service. Welcome to Stoneleigh House. Might I present Mrs. Roberts, the housekeeper?”

A woman stepped forward, graying hair drawn into a chignon, eyes that found Viola’s face directly and held it. Viola’s stomach knotted. Were the servants as uncertain of all this as she was?

“Good afternoon,” she managed, and introduced Hannah to them both.

“The household remains as Lady Warrington arranged it, Miss Trent.” Mrs. Roberts rose from her curtsy. “Though everything is at your disposal, of course. Your rooms have been prepared, and — ”

“Oh, I shall not be residing here.” The words came out before the housekeeper could finish. “For the present, I will stay with my sister.”

A short silence.

“Very well.” Mr. Phillips spoke first, his voice gone thinner. “The documents pertaining to the house are held at the solicitor’s, including the papers for the most recent repairs.”

Viola nodded, feeling she might drown in all of it.

“I think my sister and I shall take a turn about the house, and then sit to tea.” Hannah laid a hand on Viola’s arm — a rope to hold, something to keep her upright. “We will not stay long today.”

“Might I show you the rooms myself?” Mrs. Roberts offered a smile that did not quite reach her steady eyes.

Hannah glanced at Viola, who gave a small nod and kept her hand fast on her sister’s arm. Mrs. Roberts led them from room to room, and each one undid Viola a little further. The dining room, where a table ran the length of a country church and a great branched candelabrum stood ready for a company she could not imagine summoning. The parlor, hung in pale silk that alone would have dressed her for ten Seasons over. The portraits ranged along the hall in their gilded ranks, generations of a family not her own, watching her pass with painted, patient eyes. Everywhere was more than she could hold in her mind at once — more silver, more silk, more quiet evidence of a life lived at an ease she had only ever read of — and all the while a band drew tighter about her chest, until each breath came harder than the last.

“Several of the staff have been in service many years,” Mrs. Roberts said. “Some have no other place to call home. Lady Warrington was always good to us. Those who gave their years of service were cared for, every one.”

There was no accusation in it. It struck Viola with force all the same. The housekeeper expected the same of her, the same kindness, the same generosity, and it was not that Viola did not wish to give it. It was that she had never run anything larger than a single household purse, and that only by counting every penny twice.

“Lady Warrington kept several charitable obligations besides,” the housekeeper went on. “There are widows in the parish, and families who depended on her through the winter for their coal.”

“How very considerate.” Hannah said it warmly. Viola only murmured something and pressed on, the weight settling heavier upon her shoulders with every door.

As they turned from the gallery, a woman came along the passage toward them — not in the manner of the staff, who had each appeared and bowed and given their office, but easily, as one who belonged to the house and had done for years. She was perhaps fifty, in mourning black — well-made, the gown of a gentlewoman rather than a servant — her face soft and her eyes steady, and she stopped a little distance off, as if she would not press herself forward uninvited.

“Forgive me. I did not mean to intrude upon your tour.” Her voice was low and unhurried. “I am Mrs. Hartley. I had the keeping of Lady Warrington’s house through her last years, and her company through the worst of them.” Something moved in her face at that, gone before it settled. “You will be Miss Trent.”

“I am.” Viola’s own voice came thin. She did not know what one said to such a woman, in such a house, with the weight of it all pressing the breath from her.

Mrs. Hartley looked at her a moment, not the searching look the others had given her, weighing and wondering, but something plainer and kinder, as though she saw the panic well enough and did not think the less of her for it.

“It is a great deal to take in at once,” she said. “It was a great deal for her ladyship too, when first she came to it. I have always found the house wears more gently than it looks at the first.” A small pause. “Whatever you should need to know of how it is kept, Miss Trent, you have only to ask me. There is no hurry in it.”

It was kindly meant. Viola felt the kindness of it land somewhere beneath the panic and could do nothing with it — could only nod, and murmur her thanks, and feel the band about her chest draw tighter still, for the woman’s very steadiness seemed to measure how far Viola herself was from steady.

Mrs. Roberts paused at the foot of the stairs. “If you wish, I would gladly show you the rooms above. Lady Warrington’s — that is, what would now be your own bedchamber.”

Viola shook her head. “No. I thank you.” She could not. “Tea, I think.”

“In the drawing room, Miss Trent. I shall leave you to it — ring, should you need anything at all.”

Viola watched her go, then turned to Hannah, the tears coming before she could stop them. “I do not think I can even sit for tea,” she whispered. “This is too much. How am I to run such a household, when I have no notion of what it requires?”

“You will do very well.” Hannah’s certainty was a thing Viola did not share. “You are astonished. That is not the same as being incapable.”

Viola pinched the bridge of her nose. “Charities to consider, papers to read, servants to think of, a whole life to set up here — ” A tear slipped to her cheek. “This is not at all what I expected, Hannah. I thought I would be given something small, if anything. And instead — ” She looked up at the high, gilded ceiling and felt herself shrink beneath it. “I do not think I can do any of it.”

“And yet you must.” Hannah gripped her hand and made Viola meet her eyes. “I am here. This is a gift, truly it is.”

“It does not feel like a gift.” Her voice cracked. “It feels like a burden I am not ready to carry.”