Chapter Thirty-Five
Eliza did not sleep.
Cold stone leeched through her skirt and shawl, numbing her legs long before midnight, but sensation had narrowed to other things. The small, bundled shape on the mourner’s bench. The pale, wavering flame of the candle. The slow, uneven rhythm of a child’s breath.
Wax and cold stone scented the air, the crypt holding every sound too closely, as though unwilling to let anything escape once spoken within its walls.
Sammy slept fitfully. Each time a draft slid through the crypt, he shivered and stirred. Eliza soothed him with a whisper or a gentle hand at his shoulder until he settled again, as though her voice alone could anchor him to rest.
Hours passed like that, slow and strangely suspended.
Above them, Hartleigh groaned in the wind. At intervals, a faint tremor ran through the stone floor, not violent, but deliberate, as though the house shifted its weight.
Eliza listened.
She had never kept a vigil like this. Not alone. Not underground. Not surrounded by names carved into stone. Yet it was not the dead who held her attention.
It was the living.
Rain began again just after midnight, hard and punishing sheets that struck the chapel above like fists.
The sound echoed through the crypt, magnified and hollow.
Eliza lifted her head whenever the storm intensified, straining for hoofbeats, for the scrape of iron on stone, for anything that might break the night open.
Nothing.
Sammy’s words returned again and again, unbidden.
“He said to say Mr. Grey brought me.”
Each repetition twisted inside her until the tension reached her throat and held there, sharp as a held breath.
“Come home,” she whispered into the dimness. “Please.”
Sammy muttered in his sleep and curled deeper beneath the blanket. Eliza fed the candle another stub from the alcove niche, shielding the flame from the draft until it steadied, its light drawing the shadows back into order.
Somewhere far above, a door slammed. Not in the chapel. Not in the crypt. In the house.
Eliza went still.
She rose and moved to the foot of the crypt stairs. She did not open the door. She rested her fingertips against the iron and listened, her pulse counting the silence.
Nothing followed. No footsteps. No voices.
Only the storm.
Still, the sensation lingered, an alertness, sharp and unignorable, as though Hartleigh itself had marked the sound and not forgotten it.
She looked back at the small figure on the bench.
“No one will take you,” she murmured. Not from this place. Not tonight.
*
The rain hit him sideways.
Thomas bent into the wind as his horse slogged through the lower road that cut across Hartleigh’s outer fields. The storm had delayed him far longer than he’d intended, but he could not leave the last task undone.
Ashwood had ordered him to inspect the cottages nearest the ravine. If Thornhaven had suffered damage severe enough to collapse a roof…
He had to know whether Hartleigh had endured the same fate.
But when he reached the cottage in question, the one nearest the line of old elms, he found it entirely intact. The shuttered windows held. The roofline remained true. The supporting posts he had reinforced in the autumn stood firm.
Not a single beam had shifted.
He dismounted, checked each corner by hand, inspected the roof angle, and even tapped the stabilizing joists with the heel of his palm.
Sound. Entirely sound.
His breath fogged in the cold air.
Someone had wanted trouble at Thornhaven.
Someone who knew where to apply pressure.
Someone who understood which structures were vulnerable, and which were not.
The realization did not flare. It settled.
Thomas mounted again and ran a hand along his horse’s soaked neck.
“Easy,” he murmured. “We’re going home.”
He nudged the horse forward.
The road stretched dark and slick ahead of them. Between the storm and the detour, he was already hours past nightfall.
And well past the hour he had promised to return.
*
The candle burned low.
Eliza blinked against the sting in her eyes. She had not noticed the passage of time until her body protested, stiff fingers, aching spine, a deep chill that would not lift. Still, she did not move away from Sammy.
Outside, the storm weakened. The rain softened. The wind eased to a restless sigh.
A faint but unmistakable sound reached her ear.
A hoofbeat.
Her breath caught. She rose without thinking, the motion stealing her balance for a moment before she steadied. She pressed her ear to the crypt door.
Footsteps approached. One set.
Boots she knew by cadence alone. Heavy with fatigue, the rhythm familiar.
Thomas.
Relief moved through her, warm and immediate, not loosening her resolve, but strengthening it.
Still, she did not open the door. Not yet. Not with Sammy hidden below and too many questions unanswered.
She slipped up the crypt steps and eased through the door, closing it behind her with care. The night air struck her face, sharp and cold, clearing the ache from her lungs.
She reached the chapel terrace just as Thomas crossed the courtyard from the stable, rain still clinging to him.
He was drenched, mud splattered to his knees, hair plastered to his brow. Exhaustion bent his shoulders.
Thomas slowed, sensing her before he saw her. He lifted his head.
Their gazes met across the rain-swept stones.
“Eliza?” His voice was rough. “Why are you—”
“There is something you must hear,” she said. “And you cannot go to your cottage.”
He stopped at once.
“Eliza.” His tone sharpened. “What’s happened?”
She stepped closer, her shawl damp, her hair loosened by the long night, her steadiness intact despite it.
“Come with me,” she said quietly. “Please. There is no time to lose.”
The wind lifted briefly between them, catching the edge of her shawl as though urging them forward.
Thomas did not hesitate.
He followed.