The revelations from the strongbox lay upon Elara's soul like a geological stratum—a dense, dark layer of history that had suddenly thrust itself into the fragile topsoil of the present. For two days, she moved through Hazeldene in a state of heightened awareness, seeing not just the house, but the weight of its secret history in every stone. The Dust remained active, a silent confederate to her newfound knowledge. She avoided the walled garden, unable to bear the sight of the weeping handprint, now dried to a permanent, shadowy stain.
On the third morning, as a thin, persistent rain needled the moors into a thousand silvered pools, a second foreign carriage arrived. This one was darker, heavier than Lockwood's, drawn by powerful, Flemish horses. From it emerged two figures who seemed conjured from a different century altogether.
They were announced as Monsieur Valère de Brissac and his sister, Mademoiselle Solène de Brissac, of Paris. They stood in the foyer, shedding rainwater like sleek, dark birds. Monsieur de Brissac was a man of perhaps sixty, with hair like swept-back iron and eyes the colour of a winter Seine, sharp and impossibly discerning. His bearing was not of the lawyer's aggressive utility, but of an antiquarian's weary authority. His sister was younger, her face a pale, intelligent oval framed by severe black braids. Her eyes, a lighter grey than her brother's, held a stillness that was both penetrative and unsettlingly patient. They wore mourning, but of an old, faded kind, and they spoke English with a precision that held the ghost of French cadence.
"Mademoiselle Vance," the man began, his voice a low, cultured baritone. "We apologise profoundly for this intrusion. Our business is with Monsieur Thorne. We understand he is abroad. But as our time in England is… constrained… we hoped to wait upon his return, and to pay our respects to his household."
There was an old-world formality to his speech that felt both disarming and deeply suspicious. Unlike Lockwood, they did not assert; they insinuated.
"You are acquainted with Mr. Thorne?" Elara asked, directing them to the drawing-room where a fire fought against the damp.
A faint, complex smile touched M. de Brissac's lips. "Not directly. Our acquaintance is with a… shared point of reference. A collection. One of certain unique properties."
His sister, who had been observing the room with the quiet intensity of a cataloguer, spoke for the first time. Her voice was softer, yet cleaved the air with its clarity. "Your home has a remarkable atmosphere. Une présence. It sleeps in the stones, does it not? Not a violent sleep, but a deep, remembering one." Her gaze drifted to a corner where the Dust had formed a particularly intricate, frond-like pattern. She did not look surprised.
Elara's senses prickled. These were not here about mines or money. "I am afraid I do not understand, Mademoiselle."
M. de Brissac intervened smoothly. "My sister has a sensitivity to such things. Forgive her. Our interest is scholarly. We are… collectors and students of the anomalous. Of objects and places that retain memory in ways not yet explained by science." He steepled his long fingers. "Some years ago, an item of singular interest passed through the auction houses of Europe. A 'memory box', of sorts, purported to be from a monastic order in the Cevennes that studied such phenomena. It was said to act as a catalyst, a focal point for… residual echoes. We traced its final purchase to a young English gentleman of fortune, touring the continent after university. A Julian Thorne."
The air in the room seemed to grow still. The fire crackled, a hollow sound.
"We believe," Mlle. de Brissac continued, her eyes now fixed on Elara with unnerving empathy, "that such an object, if brought into a place already imbued with potent emotion—with grief, or guilt—might not merely record memory. It might… amplify it. Give it a kind of agency. It might provide a shape for sorrow to wear."
The Dust. The sentient, pattern-forming Dust. The weeping stone. Elara's mind reeled. They were not describing superstition; they were providing a horrifying vocabulary for the plague that had infected her home. Julian hadn't just inherited a house of ghosts; he had, in his youth, unwittingly purchased their conductor.
"You think this… box… is here?" Elara managed, her throat tight.
M. de Brissac spread his hands in a graceful, Gallic gesture of uncertainty. "It is a theory. We have long wished to study it. Our recent correspondence with a legal associate in Boston, a Mr. Lockwood, regarding the unfortunate Thorne-Locke history, mentioned the… atmospheric peculiarities… of Hazeldene. It seemed too poignant a coincidence. Grief from the New World, a catalyst from the Old… and a house that breathes with the memory of both." His winter-river eyes held hers. "Where does one put a box meant to hold echoes, Mademoiselle? One puts it in the strong room. The heart room. The study."
The strongbox. The iron box that held not just papers, but the very essence of the tragedy. Had it, itself, been the amplifier? Had Julian, in his guilt, locked the evidence of his sin inside the very object that would give that sin a voice and a form?
"Why are you truly here?" Elara whispered, the elegance of their speech failing to mask the chilling implication of their visit. "To study it? Or to contain it?"
The brother and sister exchanged a glance, a silent communion of profound understanding. "To understand," Mlle. de Brissac said gently. "But understanding, in such matters, is the first step to containment. The echoes, you see, they grow tired of being mere echoes. They begin to want… resolution. Or restitution. The man from Boston seeks one kind. The house… it seeks another. We feared Monsieur Thorne might be caught between."
They were offering not a threat, but a diagnosis—and a terrifying one. The American lawyer was the mundane vengeance. The Dust, potentially focused and empowered by Julian's own cursed artifact, was the supernatural reckoning. And Julian was trapped between the jurisprudence of this world and the hungry justice of the next.
The French visitors took their leave shortly after, promising to call again when Julian returned. They departed into the rain, leaving behind not legal threats, but a metaphysical chill that penetrated deeper than the Yorkshire damp.
Elara stood alone in the silent drawing-room. The fragments of the horror were now assembled into a monstrous, coherent picture: a youthful mistake, a deadly consequence, a purchased relic, and a festering guilt, all converging in the lonely moors of Yorkshire. The two French figures, like elegant physicians of the uncanny, had shown her the disease's probable origin. The strongbox was not just a repository. It was an engine. And she had opened it. In seeking to understand Julian's battle, she feared she might have inadvertently armed the very forces besieging him. The storm was no longer approaching; it was within the walls, and its eye was a small, iron box sitting heavily in the silent study.