The girl’s mouth puckered. It was a thinking face. And then she nodded once, as if she had arrived at a decision, and she tipped her head to one side and said, “I’m Zora.”

  “Zora? That’s an unusual name. I like it very much.”

  “It’s not my real name,” the girl stressed, leaning forward and lowering her voice to a loud whisper that carried farther than everything she had said before. “My mother named me Isadora, but when I tried to say it — when I was really very little, still a baby, I think—” she hastened to add, “all I could manage was Zora. And so that’s now what I am.”

  “Zora,” Julia repeated, and smiled. “It’s lovely. May I call you Zora?”

  The girl — Zora — nodded.

  “Excellent.” Julia took a step back and quickly unbuttoned her pelisse. Before Zora probably even knew what was happening, she wrapped the coat around the girl’s slender shoulders, dragging the collar up high enough so that it protected the back of her head from the worst of the rain. “There. That’s much better. Now, do you know where your mother is?”

  Another pucker. This one accompanied by a brief wrinkling of Zora’s nose. “Yes.”

  “Should we go and find her then? She might be wondering where you are.”

  “I don’t think so,” Zora said, while her fingers fussed with the buttons on Julia’s coat. “She’s dead.”

  Oh. “At this moment? I mean, when did she…?”

  “I don’t remember her.” And that was enough to answer the question Julia hadn’t been able to finish.

  “We should get you home,” Julia said, and held out her hand. “Do you know how to find your way back?”

  Another nod. The girl was made of nods and puckers and blunt statements of fact presented in a way to knock the wind out of someone’s lungs.

  Julia was about to prod further and ask if Zora would allow her to accompany her home, but without another word the child slipped her hand into Julia’s and tugged her along.

  The rain did not let up. Julia was thankful for her bonnet and gloves but grit her teeth to keep from shivering at the loss of her pelisse. Zora trudged onward, dragging Julia out of the town and along the road that led them past fields lined with jagged stone walls and copses of trees that dipped down into hollows where small streams burbled out of sight. If it had been a fine day it would have made for a pleasant walk, but as they began a steady trudge uphill Julia noticed the heavy wetness of her gown, the loose tendrils of hair clinging like icicles to the back of her neck. And her toes… well, if she was capable of feeling them, no doubt they would complain to her of their discomfort inside her sopping boots. (And thank goodness she’d thought to put on her sturdiest pair of shoes before heading out, for anything less would have been shredded to ribbons a half mile behind her.)

  It was just as Julia began to worry that Zora was leading her to the middle of nowhere when she spotted twin stone columns flanking a set of gates, and beyond that a long gravel lane leading to the right and away from the road.

  “Langford,” Julia whispered, and she cleared her throat and spoke again. “You live at Langford?”

  Zora only led her onward, cutting across the lawn and towards the main house, a sprawling two storey-edifice made of crenellations and diamond-paned windows hidden behind layers of ivy thick enough to fool Julia into believing the land was in the midst of reclaiming the place for its own.

  “Over here,” Zora said, pulling Julia around the side of the house and towards a stable that opened onto a cleared, fenced-in area beyond. A few servants milled about in the rain, none of them remarking on Zora’s appearance there, as though it was only a matter of course for her to stride determinedly past them all in a borrowed pelisse and soaked through to the bone.

  They ducked inside the building, Zora finally letting go of Julia’s hand to race towards a ladder and begin scurrying up it, as nimble as a mouse.

  Julia stood at the bottom of the ladder, gazing upwards as the girl shimmied out of sight. The smell of animal and hay was strong, despite the chill in the air. “Zora?”

  The child’s dark head peeped out over the edge of the loft. “Come up, Mrs. Benton! Come and see my kitten!”

  Julia looked at the ladder, eyeing it as she would a challenge. There was no one else in the stable, at least no one else she could see at the moment, and so she tugged on the hem of her gown and set her foot on the first rung.

  The wood let out an ominous creak. She was not as slender as she had once been — and she had never been what one would describe as ‘willowy’ — and she could only hope the ladder wasn’t infested with some kind of rot or woodworm that would turn it to sawdust as she climbed upward.

  “Isn’t she darling?” Zora announced as Julia arrived at the top of the ladder and stepped into the loft with greater grace than she would have expected of herself. The girl held a small puff of orange fur that mewed helplessly, while Julia unwound her skirt from around her knees and plucked damp bits of hay from her sleeves. “Here!”

  Julia reached out as the girl passed the warm, blind ball of kitten into her hands. “Goodness. It’s so easy to forget how helpless they are when they’re first born.”

  “I’m to have her when she’s weaned,” Zora said, and pushed her shoulders back with parental pride. “I’ve not thought of a name yet, though. Maybe Ellen? She was a Celtic goddess, you know, with three heads! Or perhaps Boadicea, but I don’t know if that one would suit her as well. Does she look brave enough to face a Roman army?”

  The kitten’s fur was short and still damp in places where its mother must have cleaned it only moments ago. “Perhaps you should wait and see. Not all cultures name their young at birth. You might have to give her time, allow her to earn her name rather than foist one upon her, hmm?”

  There was a step on the floor below. The strike of boots on swept wooden boards. Julia assumed it was one of the servants coming to check on something, but Zora’s posture underwent a subtle change, her shoulders rounding forward again as the happiness that had illuminated her face a minute before turned her mouth into a flat line.

  “Isadora?” came a voice from below. A man’s voice, deep and laced with a sternness that made even Julia’s breath catch at the sound of it. But she recognized it, no matter that it must have been years since she had last heard him speak. “Isadora, come down here at once!”

  “Oh, no.” Zora returned the kitten to its hay-lined crate. She picked up Julia’s abandoned and dripping pelisse and held it out to her. “Papa’s home,” she said. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Benton. I hope you don’t get into trouble, too.”

  Chapter Two

  * * *

  Zora climbed down first. Or rather, she slid down, her shoes propped on the rails as she bypassed the rungs entirely and landed with a soft flump at the bottom.

  Julia slung her wet, mud-streaked pelisse over one arm and hoisted up her skirts again. The ladder was twice as treacherous on the way down as it had been going up, her boots threatening to slip and her hands gripping the sides with white-knuckled strength. She couldn’t pause long enough to consider how she must look, her damp hem pulled up to show off stockings no doubt snagged with runners and clinging bits of hay. At the bottom, her feet again on solid ground, she turned around and looked steadily at Mr. Alexander Halberd.

  He was taller than she remembered. A silly thought, as he couldn’t have grown since she’d last seen him, only that her memories had proved faulty. There was gray in his hair that hadn’t been there before, streaks of silver starting at his temples and weaving through the dark waves that threatened to curl at the ends from the humidity.

  “M-Mr. Halberd,” she said, her teeth chattering. And then she swallowed. Loudly.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Not the most pleasant or polite of greetings, but Julia couldn’t fault him for his dereliction of etiquette when she had just climbed down a ladder in his own stables while also sharing a close resemblance with a drowned thing lately rescued from the nearest pond. “Your daughter,” she said, holding her arms tight to her sides, the pelisse tucked against her. “I came upon her in town and I offered to accompany her home.”

  “Mrs. Benton,” he said, as though he was already several beats late in the conversation. “I beg your pardon. I confess I’d not expected you of all people to be traipsing about in my stables.”

  You of all people… What on earth did that mean? Though before she could decide if she should take offense at it, she understood why he had said it. For what connection did she have to him, aside from occasional greetings and the trading of mundane pleasantries when she had still been installed as mistress of the vicarage?

  Oh, only the fact that their respective spouses — her husband, his wife — had both died on the same night, in the same carriage accident five years before.

  Since then, she had hardly seen him. Rumor went that he had taken his daughter to London and had spent most of his time there, only returning to Langford a few times a year to make certain the place hadn’t crumbled to pieces in his absence. Since then, he had abstained from church and the general events of the town while they had both carried on with their roles of widow and widower.

  So what was the proper greeting when happening upon one another after such circumstances? Perhaps he did not wish to see her at all, considering the very sight of her might do nothing more than remind him of the death of his wife, the loss of the mother of his child. It was why everyone said he’d escaped to London, to try and run from the grief that lay over Langford and Barrow-in-Ashton like a heavy fog.

  “I was showing her my kitten, Papa,” Zora spoke up, her voice reduced to little more than a whisper now that she stood in the presence of her father.

  “You’ve driven the entire household to distraction with your disappearance,” he said, though the scold was delivered in a manner that sounded to Julia as if he’d made the speech at least a time or three before. “But we shall speak of that later.” He slipped out of his coat and draped it over her shoulders, the garment nearly drowning her in its layers of wool. “Now, back up to the house with you and put yourself in order. Go!”

  The girl darted away, her damp hair streaming out behind her in inky ribbons. Julia watched her depart, suddenly wishing she could shuffle away in her wake. She did not want to be there alone, alone with Mr. Halberd, trawling her mind for something to say to him that would not sound as though she was doing everything in her power to avoid speaking of the only thing she knew they had in common.

  “I’ll have the carriage made ready for you,” he said, his eyes giving nothing away. Or perhaps there was nothing to give away. Perhaps seeing her there did nothing to dredge up memories of his wife, of what he had lost the same night she had lost her husband. “Why don’t you come inside and warm yourself by the fire while you wait? You must be freezing.”

  “No, I…” But her arguments faltered to nothing when she realized that she was, indeed, freezing, and there was no need for her to risk her health for a show of pride or an overwhelming desire to escape his presence. “Thank you, yes. That would probably be best.”

  He caught the attention of one of the men in another part of the building and ordered a carriage to be prepared. After that, he began to lead her out of the stable, but when they arrived at the door he stopped short, so suddenly she almost ran into his back. “Hmmph,” he said, or something very much like it, and shrugged out of his jacket.

  Julia didn’t understand what his intentions were at first, until he gave the jacket a brief shake and held it out to her. “It’s raining harder than before,” he said, as though she couldn’t see the puddles forming in the yard in front of them, couldn’t hear the raindrops striking the roof above their heads.

  She blinked at it. At him. Standing there in his shirt and waistcoat, all of him slightly damp around the edges, like a wilting neckcloth in need of some starch and a hot iron. “But you’ll get wet,” she told him, while in the back of her mind she wondered why she felt the need to fight against this one simple kindness.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “And yet I will still not be as drenched as you are. Please, Mrs. Benton,” he added, when she continued to hesitate.

  It wasn’t the please that swayed her. It was the look in his eyes. No, not quite that. It was the way he looked at her. His jaw was set, carving out defined hollows beneath his cheekbones. A deep line cut a fissure between his brows. But his eyes — a brown like honey and chocolate swirled together — held no pity in them. He didn’t look at her as though all he could see were her failures. Instead, he saw her. A woman, cold and tired and quietly dripping, in need of a jacket and short spell before a warm fire.

  “Thank you.”

  He placed it around her shoulders, raising the collar so that it would protect her neck. His fingers brushed her jaw as he worked, a quick touch of skin against skin that he probably didn’t notice. She noticed, though. And so she closed her eyes and held her breath until he dropped his hands and took a step back from her.

  Julia tugged at the edges of the jacket, pulling it closed around her. It was still warm from him. She turned her head into the collar, breathing in the mingled aromas of soap and sweet cherry tobacco.

  “Come along,” he said, and gestured for her to follow. He didn’t offer his arm. She didn’t have a spare arm to accept such an offer, cocooned inside his jacket as she was. She ducked her head as she walked, only looking up again as they went indoors, through a back entrance of the house that led them past the kitchen and several other rooms set aside for the servants and the general running of the household.

  She wasn’t familiar enough with the layout of the house to know where he was leading her. She had been here only once before, nearly a decade ago, to a Christmas party to which she and her husband had been invited. But a Christmas party had only allowed them access to a few of the more publicly-oriented portions of the house, not the kitchen nor the servants’ stairs nor the book-strewn study into which he brought her.

  He turned an armchair towards the fire, a crackling blaze that almost made her forget about the ice and the rain currently assaulting the outer walls of the house. “Sit.” He gestured to the chair. “At least see if you can warm yourself before I have to send you out again to the carriage.”

  She sat. She was still wrapped up in his jacket, the bundle of her pelisse and her reticule shoved into the chair beside her. He made no move to relieve her of her things and she did not trust the shudder of her fingers to tussle with even the knot of her bonnet’s ribbons. Behind her, there was the clink of glasses before Mr. Halberd reappeared at her side, holding out a crystal tumbler filled with-

  “Sherry,” he said. “To stave off the worst of the chill.”

  “Oh.” She took the glass from him, unsure of whether or not to tell him she did not make a habit of imbibing spirits. Not from any religious or moral standpoint, but merely because fine alcohol was not something one could indulge in when one adhered to a budget of only forty pounds a year.

  The first sip seemed to go directly up her nose and lodge there, but she breathed slowly and allowed the next sip to settle on her tongue, to lend that subtle burn to the back of her throat as she swallowed and filled her stomach with a pleasing warmth.

  Mr. Halberd stood in front of the fire, a glass in his own hand, though he seemed more content to stare into its depths rather than raise it to his mouth and take a drink.

  “Thank you,” she said again, just as he said-

  “I’m sorry for the trouble my daughter has put you through.”

  “It’s no trouble,” she assured him, and took a third sip. She wondered what would happen if she let herself drink the entire glass, and the imagined possibilities made her clutch it between both hands and lower it to her lap instead. “I was already out on an errand for Mrs. Cochran, fetching her post for her, and…” She cleared her throat. What would Mr. Halberd care about Mrs. Cochran and her letters? “I came across her just after it began to rain. I offered to escort her home, though I will admit I…” She glanced down at her glass, reconsidering whether or not she should have that fourth sip. “I failed to recognize her, at first.” Or at all, but she would not say that. “There was something familiar in her looks, but I did not put it together until she brought me to Langford’s gates.”

  Mr. Halberd sighed and scratched at the groove between his brows with the side of his thumb. “Zora is…” But whatever she was, he did not seem capable of shaping it into words. “This is not the first time she’s escaped from the house. Though, I will admit it’s less worrying when she does it here than in London.”

  “Escaped?” She knew he did not mean it as it sounded, as though the child was locked away in a prison or an asylum and had managed to slip past her guards. But still the word put a stutter in her thoughts, and she watched his own expression crinkle as he realized what he had said.

  “She has a tendency to wander,” he explained, and set his untouched glass of sherry on the mantel above the fire. “It’s not deliberate. She simply loses focus on her surroundings, I think. If one does not keep a close eye on her, she’ll venture halfway across the county without pausing to look back.”

  Julia ducked her head and hid a small smile. “Children can be like that. To be honest, I suspect many adults still possess the same trait, only we have more freedom to roam around as we please and no one thinks anything of it.”

  “Perhaps you are right.”

  He made no move to further the conversation after that. Julia kept her attention directed towards her knees and the floor, where the hem of her skirt had begun to send up small tendrils of vapor as the fire drew up the moisture from the fabric.

  A light knock on the partially open door broke the awkward silence that had sprung up between them. A manservant stood there, looking only at Mr. Halberd, as though Julia was not even present in the room. “The carriage, sir. It’s ready.”