The entrance hall of Rosemere was large enough that the sound of the front door closing did not reach the ceiling before it gave up and dispersed. Stone floor, dark wood panelling on the lower half of every wall, a staircase wide enough to drive a cart up. The portraits began at the foot of the stairs and continued up the wall alongside it: twelve women, Henrietta counted, each in a different decade of dress, each with the same dark hair and the same serious face and the same quality of looking out of the frame as though the frame were a formality they had agreed to only reluctantly.
She counted twelve and then saw the empty hook. Oval shape on the wall, slightly less faded than the plaster around it where a frame had hung for a long time. Recently removed or recently lost. She filed it.
Oz had stopped at the foot of the stairs.
He was looking at the portraits. Not quickly. He took each one in for a moment, moving up the row, and Henrietta watched his face and saw nothing she could read except attention, which with Oz was always the same regardless of what was producing it.
"How far back do these go," he said.
"The oldest is from 1786," Eleanor said. "My six-times great-grandmother, Margaret. They're all the women of the family. One per generation."
"All with one daughter."
Eleanor paused. "Yes. As far back as the records show."
Oz looked at the empty hook. "Who was there?"
A beat. "My grandmother. Victoria. I took it down after she died. I couldn't — " She stopped. Managed the stop neatly. "I haven't decided where to put it yet."
Oz looked at the hook for another moment. Then he turned and walked toward the dining room.
Edmund had laid the table for three at one end, which was the right instinct in a room that seated twenty. He was forty, give or take, with the contained competence of a man who had been managing a large household for long enough that the management was invisible. He poured the wine and withdrew to the sideboard and Henrietta noted that he kept his eyes off Eleanor with the deliberateness of someone practicing a policy rather than following a natural inclination. She noted also that when she thanked him for the wine he met her eyes briefly and without problem. He simply would not look at his employer.
She put a small mark in her notebook under his name.
Eleanor waited until Edmund had left the room before she began.
"The first death was ten weeks ago," she said. "My head groundskeeper, a man called Fen. Sixty-three years old, in good health for his age. He was found in the kitchen garden at dawn by one of the stable boys. No wounds. No sign of struggle. The physician attributed it to exposure and age."
"What temperature was it that night," Oz said.
Eleanor looked at him. "Cold. But not extreme. We have had worse winters and Fen worked through them without difficulty."
"What had he been doing in the days before."
"That is what I keep coming back to." She set down her glass. "He had been distracted. Not ill, not in any way I could point to. He kept losing track of conversations. The stable boy said he found him once standing at the edge of the kitchen garden at night, looking toward the east wing. When the boy spoke to him he came back to himself and said he had been checking the drainage. At midnight."
Oz said: "The second."
"Nell Graves. A lady's maid. Twenty-two. Seven weeks ago, found in the linen corridor on the second floor. The physician called it a cardiac event." The way Eleanor said it made clear what she thought of that conclusion. "She had been with the household since she was sixteen. No family history of any heart condition."
"Same pattern beforehand?"
"Yes. Distracted. Absent. She came to dinner service three nights running without completing half her work and could not account for where the time had gone. She told the kitchen maid she had been dreaming while she was awake." A pause. "She was found twenty feet from the door to the east wing corridor."
Oz put his fork down. Not dramatically. He set it on the plate and looked at Eleanor. "And the third."
"Thomas Wick. A footman. Eighteen. Four weeks ago. Found at the base of the servants' stair by the kitchen maid at six in the morning." Eleanor's voice was even and had been even throughout and the evenness was clearly costing her something. "The kitchen maid told me afterward that in the three nights before his death she had seen Thomas standing in the corridor outside the east wing door. Not moving. Just standing there, facing the door, for an hour at a time. She had not told me when it was happening because she thought he was sleepwalking and did not want him to get into trouble."
The dining room was quiet. Outside, the wind moved across the Thornshire moorland and found the gaps in the old stonework and made its small sound through them.
"The east wing," Oz said.
"Sealed since my grandmother's time. She sealed it the year before she died and told me never to open it." Eleanor looked at him steadily. "She did not explain why. I was seventeen and I did not press her. I have not opened it."
"What's in it?"
"I don't know. I have never been inside. There is no inventory of its contents that I have been able to find and none of the staff who were here in my grandmother's time are still employed."
Oz picked up his fork again. He ate for a moment in silence. Then: "Your grandmother. What did she die of."
Eleanor set her glass down very carefully. "She died in her sleep. The physician said her heart simply stopped. She was fifty-three."
Oz said nothing. He looked at the far end of the dining room, through the open door to the entrance hall, where the east wing corridor entrance was visible as a dark opening in the far wall. He looked at it for three seconds, which Henrietta counted, and then he looked back at his plate.
She knew what he was thinking because she was thinking it too. Nell Graves had been found twenty feet from the east wing door. Thomas Wick had been standing outside it for three nights before he died. Fen the groundskeeper had been looking toward it from the garden. And Victoria Veldacre, who had sealed the wing and kept the secret of it, had died at fifty-three in her sleep.
The same hour. She would bet on it. She would bet on the same hour.
Edmund appeared to clear the plates with the quiet efficiency of a man who had timed his return carefully. Henrietta watched him move around the table and confirmed what she had noted earlier: he kept his eyes off Eleanor. He looked at the plates, at the table, at the middle distance between objects. He did not look at Oz either, which she had expected, because most people needed a moment to decide where to put their eyes around Oz. But Edmund's avoidance was different in quality from the usual adjustment. It was practised. It was old.
After Edmund left, Oz said: "I'd like to see the east wing door before we turn in. Not to open it. Just to see it."
Eleanor nodded and stood.
The east wing corridor was on the ground floor, behind the main staircase, reached through a door that looked like a cupboard door until you opened it and found a stone-flagged passage beyond. The passage was cold in the specific way of spaces that had not been heated in a long time. Three lamps bracketed to the wall, none lit. Eleanor carried a candlestick and the light moved with her.
At the end of the passage, the door.
It was heavy, built for the original house or close to it, iron-banded and iron-locked. No key in the lock. The wood around the keyhole had been scored. Not damage, not age. A deliberate pattern: small lines, precise, crossing each other at specific intervals, following the edge of the lock plate and the door frame in a design that was almost decorative except that it was too careful and too purposeful to be decorative.
Oz crouched down and looked at it closely. He put his hands on his knees and leaned in to within a few inches without touching the wood.
"How old is this," he said.
"The door? It is original to the current building. 1523."
"The scoring."
Eleanor looked at the marks. "I don't know. I noticed it years ago and assumed it was old damage."
"It is not damage." Oz stood. "It is maintenance. Someone has been refreshing this regularly. The cuts nearest the lock are newer than the ones at the edges of the frame. Decades of work, but not all from the same decade." He looked at Eleanor. "Your grandmother."
Eleanor said: "I think so. Yes." Her voice was steady. The steadiness was the same kind he had heard in Henrietta when she gave bad news she had prepared for: not the absence of feeling but the management of it.
He looked at the door once more. Henrietta watched him look at it the way she had seen him look at the bodies in Pembrook's surgery and the river on the first night at Ashenmere: flat, precise, reading something she could not read.
He said: "What is she protecting in there. Or what is she protecting from."
He said it to himself more than to Eleanor. Eleanor heard it anyway.
"I have been asking that," Eleanor said quietly, "since she died."
Oz turned from the door. "All right. We start properly in the morning. Tonight, nobody comes near this corridor." He said the last part looking past Eleanor's shoulder, and Henrietta turned and saw Edmund standing at the corridor entrance, apparently having come to escort them back.
Edmund said: "Of course," and looked at a point above Oz's head.
When they had filed out and Edmund had preceded them back toward the main house, Henrietta paused at the corridor entrance and looked back the way they had come. Edmund had been standing at this end of the corridor. He had not come from the main house. The main house was behind her. He had been in the corridor itself, or at its far end, when he appeared.
She wrote it in the margin of her notebook as she walked: Edmund. Already in the east wing corridor. He did not come from the main house direction.
Her room was on the first floor, east-facing, which she noted. Through the window the east wing roof was visible below and to the right, flat and dark, no skylights. She looked at it for a moment and then drew the curtain.
She sat at the desk and opened the notebook to a fresh page.
She wrote the three names in a column: Fen. Nell Graves. Thomas Wick. Beside each she wrote what she knew: age, where found, when, condition in the days before. She wrote the pattern that connected them: all found in the early morning, all showing the same distracted absence beforehand, all drawn toward the east wing.
She wrote: The scoring on the door is maintained work. Victoria kept the seal on the east wing for years, possibly decades. She is dead. The seal is old. Something is finding the gaps.
She wrote: Edmund was in the corridor.
She looked at that last line. Then she drew a box around it and moved on.
She wrote one more entry, at the bottom of the page, in the private section: He looked at the door the way he looked at the Maren the first morning in Ashenmere. Fifteen seconds on the embankment steps, reading something. He already knows more than he has said. He will tell me when he is ready or he will not tell me and I will find it myself. Both outcomes are fine.
She closed the notebook.
Through the wall the house made its sounds: old timber, old stone, the wind finding the places it had always found. Nothing else.
She went to bed.