Mrs. Holland opened a door at the end of the corridor. Despite the dimness behind her, the room Julia stepped into was suffused with light. The curtains had been drawn back, and a bright fire crackled as if the flames themselves wished to welcome her.

  The room was larger than all of the space she had rented from Mrs. Cochran, and even twice as large as the bedroom she had shared with her husband at the vicarage.

  “I will leave you to wash up and settle your things how you would like them. Miss Halberd is in the nursery, and you may attend to her as soon as you are ready. Dinner will be served at five o’clock, though I am sure you will be comfortable taking it in the nursery with Miss Halberd, as that is where she has most of her meals when her father is not at home.”

  And that was all before Mrs. Holland stepped out of the room, shutting the door behind her.

  “Well.” Julia turned around slowly, surveying the room again without Mrs. Holland’s gaze upon her. She walked to one of the windows — because there were two windows to choose between, such extravagance! — and looked out across the grounds. She knew the dips and hollows of the land, the streams that threaded through the trees and flowed between the various fields stretching off into the distance towards Barrow-in-Ashton. They were the unchanged borders of her world, her life for the previous dozen years.

  Yet amid all that sameness, so much of her life seemed to be in constant flux. She had come here as a new wife, had spent her years at the vicarage attempting to run a household and build a family. But the family had never arrived as planned. And then her husband had been taken from her. For the next five years, she had scraped through her existence, renting her small rooms and teaching her small class every week at the schoolhouse. And here she was, over four decades into her life and at the start of another change; now a governess, set to mold the life of a little girl into what society would expect her to be. A wife. A mother. And little else.

  Julia exhaled slowly, her breath blasting onto the glass and leaving a cloud of vapor behind.

  So, what of her, then? What of Mrs. Julia Benton? She was no longer a wife. She had brought no living children into the world. Had she failed as a woman?

  She was not young anymore, either. Especially not according to the standards of local society, a sort that prided itself on pink-cheeked maidens and lusty young farmers. But she was still here, with the same hills fading from green to blue in the distance, the same rocks worn smooth by the same run of water tumbling over them. Should she have been allowed so many chances in her life? Or was it rather a symptom of having made so many mistakes that fate would not cease giving her opportunities to rectify them?

  She pushed away from the window, her eyes blinking away a burning at the edges she wouldn’t allow to progress into any further show of emotion. She saw her trunk sitting at the foot of the bed, but she had no desire to unpack yet, to sort through her meager things and scatter them about the room to mark it as her own. Later, she told herself, before she opened the bedroom door and went off in search of her charge.

  ***

  Zora was not to be found in the nursery.

  Julia had no wish to alert any of the servants about the girl’s sudden talent for invisibility, so instead she granted herself leave to wander through the house, checking under furniture and dust cloths and inside closets in case Zora had taken to hiding away somewhere. Then, she remembered the kitten in the stable, and so Julia donned a shawl and went outside.

  But she didn’t have to go as far as the stables. Julia spotted her not far from the house, just beyond one of the outbuildings. In a tree. Dangling upside-down with her legs hooked over a branch, her skirt bunched up around her knees.

  Julia said nothing as she approached. But Zora saw her, and with the wiry strength of her arms and torso alone, she pulled herself up to grab the branch and swung herself down to land in a heap of skirts and pinafore on the mossy ground between the tree’s roots.

  “Mrs. Benton.” Zora straightened up and executed a flawless curtsy, as though she was being presented at court and not standing in the dirt, her gown and her face streaked with mud and grass stains. “Papa says you’re to be my governess now?”

  “Yes, Miss Halberd.” And she bit her lips. “Zora,” she corrected, and watched the girl’s face lighten with a smile. “Your father has declared that you are grown too old for a nurse. You’re to begin a proper education, one better suited to your status and future prospects.”

  Zora shifted her weight, her body twisting from side to side while her feet remained planted on the ground. “You mean, that I’m to grow up and marry a rich gentleman and converse with him in French while I paint a watercolor of a barn?”

  Julia choked on her next breath. She covered it with a cough behind her hand, then cleared her throat and moved further beneath the tree. “What makes you say such a thing?”

  Zora shrugged as she plucked a small twig from the ends of her hair, curling dark and tangled over her shoulder. “I hear them talk about me. The servants, I mean. And Mrs. Holland.”

  Ah, the precarious existence of a child, to be spoken about as though one was nothing more than a mere piece of furniture in a room, rather than a living, thinking person.

  “That is one future you could have, yes.” Unless she wanted to grow up to be labeled as a spinster or cloister herself away in a nunnery, marriage to a rich gentleman would be the first choice foisted upon her once she came of age. And so Julia tried to think of other lives Zora could lead, anything more than the slow whittling away of herself until she was shaped into the young lady society would expect her to be.

  Julia lowered her head, a rush of warmth flooding her cheeks at the fear she was allowing her own experience with marriage to color her opinion of the union in general. She knew there was happiness to be found there, for some people. Her own mother and father had been content enough together. Though if contentment was the most a couple could aspire to, she wondered why marriage had proliferated in as many cultures as it had.

  “Will we begin today?” Zora did not look up as she asked, instead bending down to watch the progress of a caterpillar on one of the tree roots at her feet.

  The rapid change in subject left Julia reeling for a moment. “Tomorrow, I think. After breakfast.” There were no benches or seats beneath any of the trees, so she drew her skirt forward around her legs and sat down on the thickest patch of moss she could find. “Though we could make a bit of a beginning now, if you’d like. You can tell me something about yourself, something you believe I might not already know.”

  “And will you tell me about yourself, as well?”

  And there was the rub. “Of course!” Julia smiled, despite the tightening in her abdomen as she considered what truths an eight year old girl might wish for her to divulge. “As much as is polite to share,” she added, hoping to stake some boundaries around their impending conversation.

  Zora walked in circles around the base of another tree, one hand gripping the trunk, her arm stretched taut as she moved. “Will there be lots of reading? I don’t much care for reading. At least not any of the books Miss Trask used to give me. All of them lessons about naughty children being pinched and scolded and set up as an example against all of the naughty things they’d done.”

  Julia raised her eyebrows but did her best to hide her smile. “And what would you prefer to read about?”

  “King Arthur and his knights,” came the reply without hesitation. She had begun to walk faster around the tree, nearly spinning around the entire trunk in only a single step. “Lancelot and Guinevere. The Lady of the Lake. Oh, and Merlin, of course.”

  “Of course,” Julia nodded.

  “I quite like birds, as well,” Zora said, now grasping the trunk with both hands and arching backwards to peer up through the branches. “Have you ever climbed a tree to see a bird up close? A baby starling in its nest or a robin’s egg when it’s about to hatch?”

  “Not since I was about your age,” Julia admitted. She looked up at the tree under which she sat, eyeing the spindly branches near the top with no small amount of trepidation. “I’m afraid most trees would fail to support me now.”

  “And I have drawings, too. Do you draw?” Zora stood up straight again and studied Julia from the other side of the trunk. “I hope you do.”

  “A little,” Julia confessed. Though what she did not confess was that she had not picked up charcoal or paint since Frederick had died. Those things had all been packed away and then lost in the move from the vicarage to Mrs. Cochran’s house, and she had not since found herself in a strong enough financial position to see them replaced.

  “Oh, that’s what everyone says.” Zora let out a sigh as she knelt down and began plucking at rocks where they were lodged between the roots of the tree. “They draw a little or play a little or speak a little French or Italian. You’ll have to show me what you’ve done and then I can tell if you only draw ‘a little’.” She picked up another small rock and tossed it up above her head, snagging it out of the air again with a practiced snap of her hand. “But I’ve done a sketch of an owl, one I found up in the hayrick. They’re difficult to hear, you know, when they’re flying? They have soft feathers all down their legs and along the edges of their wings, all so they can come out at night and hunt without being heard by their prey.”

  Julia listened with interest as Zora continued on with the subject of owls before she leapt to a tale about a sheep that had stranded itself in a stream a few weeks before, the rescue requiring her father and a half dozen other men to wade in and coax the poor, frightened animal out again.

  A curious mind, that was what Zora possessed. And one that bounded from subject to subject at a dizzying pace. She would be a bluestocking in no time if left to her own devices, though Julia couldn’t decide if that would be a hindrance or a help to the girl’s future success in life.

  Because success for the daughter of a gentleman would no doubt be measured in the quality of husband she could obtain, in how many children — sons, especially — she could provide. Whether or not the daughter in question was knowledgeable about nocturnal birds or King Arthur’s Court was irrelevant. Only her potential for breeding along with her fortune would be taken into account. As though she was an animal sent to market for purchase.

  “We can begin with studying birds, if you would like,” Julia ventured to say when there was finally a lull in the conversation. “Perhaps there are even some books in your father’s library that would help us with our studies.”

  Zora began circling the tree again. “What sort of stories did you like when you were a girl?”

  Julia tucked her ankles further beneath the edge of her gown and pulled her shawl more tightly around her shoulders. A breeze shivered through the branches above them, and while Zora did not seem to notice the chill, Julia felt it sinking into the muscles of her thighs and lower back. “Any stories that had to do with horses,” she said with a light shrug. “I was absolutely obsessed with them for a time. I even went so far as to beg my father for a pony — an extravagance we could not afford — and when my dream was thwarted, I began to paint and draw and read about them as much as possible, as though I could will one into being with the combined strength of my imagination and my watercolors.”

  She laughed at the memory, at how simple one’s desires could be at such a young age. “I was also determined to learn to ride. And I did, when I was older. But our only horse was an old mare fit for little more than plodding walks and pulling a wagon laden with hay or wood for the fires.”

  “Do you still ride?” Zora had ceased her spinning again, but her fingertips continued to slide over the bark in small whorls.

  “No, not since—” Not since she was married, she stopped herself from saying. “Not since I was younger,” she amended lamely.

  “You should begin riding again,” Zora told her, wholly unaware of Julia’s discomfort with the direction the conversation had taken. “Papa has more horses than he would ever need, so I doubt he would care if you were to take one out. And he’s hardly at home since we came back from London, always out visiting his farms or working with his manager. I hardly see him most days now that we’re at Langford again.”

  Julia pounced on the opportunity to change the subject. “And do you wish to see him more?”

  “I don’t know.” Zora wrinkled her nose and pushed a dark lock of hair behind her ear, only to have it slip out again as she bent forward to watch the progress of a beetle on the ground. “Sometimes I think he doesn’t like to see me. And then other times I think he wishes he could spend an entire day at home playing toy soldiers with me.”

  “Well.” Julia blew out a breath and tried to conjure up a response that wouldn’t make the conversation as uncomfortable for Zora as it had been for herself only a short while before. “Perhaps he—”

  “I think it’s because the house reminds him of Mama,” the girl went on. She straightened up, her expression solemn. “I think I remind him of Mama. It’s why sometimes he wants to be with me and sometimes he doesn’t.”

  Oh, the utter frankness of a child. Julia pushed her hands down the front of her skirt, smoothing out the fabric from her hips to her knees. She could have sat there for hours and mired herself in parsing out the similarities between Mr. Halberd, Zora, and herself, all of them tangled up with a single accident that had irrevocably changed their lives forever.

  “Come along.” Julia stood up, brushing a few leaves from her shawl that had fallen from the branches above. “You must show me to your room, hmm? I would love to see it.”

  She held out her hand to Zora. Without pause, the girl slipped her small, warm fingers into the curve of Julia’s palm.

  “I can show you my doll, Polly. She was a gift from my Mama, you know. I’ve had her since before I can remember.”

  Julia tightened her grip on Zora’s hand as they walked back to the house. “I very much look forward to meeting her.”

  Chapter Five

  * * *

  It took three slices of cake with currants and orange peel, two stories from a book of Celtic myths found in the library, and a fictitious tale about a dragon with a heart of coal Julia created out of thin air before Zora finally closed her eyes and fell asleep.

  She had fallen asleep on top of the covers, and so Julia carefully tucked her in, shifting the pillow beneath her head and sweeping the dark reams of hair back from her cheeks and forehead. There was a moment, as she reached towards the nightstand to turn down the lamp, that the shadow’s flickered across Zora’s face, throwing the girl’s profile into sharp and familiar relief.

  Julia blinked at that, something in the curve of the child’s jaw making her breath catch, as though she had traced that same curve with her gaze a dozen — no, a hundred times before. And then she looked again and… there. It was gone. A mere trick of the light. A crumb of anxiety triggered by this sudden change to her life. Shaking her head, Julia gave the corner of Zora’s pillow a last, gentle plumping and turned away from the bed.

  It took her a few minutes to tidy up the nursery before she retired to her own room for the evening. There were drawings scattered on the table, and little dolls whittled out of pegs that bore tufts of cotton wool for powdered wigs on their heads. Tomorrow, Julia planned to begin proper lessons with her. There would be reading and arithmetic and geography, French and piano and sewing…

  There was an excitement that bristled through her at the prospect, of teaching someone new, introducing them to a broader world of knowledge. She was limited in her instruction of the girls at the schoolhouse, by time and by the support — or lack thereof — from their families at home. It was a victory if she could instill in them the rudiments of reading and a little bit of writing, perhaps even some finer needlework beyond the basics of mending and a foundation in arithmetic for the girls who attended week after week and did not disappear again after only a few months of instruction.

  But with Zora, she had access to an entire library of books, to materials for writing and drawing and music she had never been able to afford for her other pupils. And now with an income that wouldn’t go towards paying for a roof over her head and other essentials, she could begin to purchase new things for the schoolhouse — new books, actual paper for them to write on, maybe a globe so they could see just how large the world around them really was — and no longer worry about straining her own budget to breaking.

  She took the small oil lamp from the nightstand and carried it with her into the corridor. Her own room was two doors down from the nursery, and she counted them just to be certain, her unfamiliarity with the house and its layout especially strong with only the shifting glow of a lamp to guide her. But she would learn her way around soon enough. She would have to, as this was to be her home now for the next…

  Oh. Years, at least.

  Her room was warm and quiet, illuminated only by a low fire burning behind a painted screen. She set down the lamp, adjusted the wick to give herself enough light by which to read, and picked up a book she’d fetched from the library only a few hours before.

  And then there was a knock at her door. With a sigh, she returned her book to the nightstand.

  It was only a few paces to take her back to the door, but in that time she wondered if it was Zora, already awake again and in need of something. Or perhaps it was Mrs. Holland, come to sneer at her in thinly veiled disdain.

  “Oh,” was the sound that dropped out of her mouth at the sight of Mr. Halberd in the hall, framed by the darkness behind him.