Chapter 3 #2
“Just the three of you?” The words escaped before I could smooth them with tact. “But the gardens alone must require a full staff.”
“Dr. Ambrose does most of it himself,” she replied, already moving to my trunk and opening it. “And Hawthorne helps, of course. He’s surprisingly good at growing things.”
I moved to assist her, taking the dresses she handed me, and hanging them in the wardrobe. “Still, it must be a great deal of work.”
Agnes gave a small shrug. “It’s been this way for as long as I can remember. Well,” she amended, almost as an afterthought, “since Hawthorne came to be with us, anyhow.”
“And how long has Hawthorne been here?”
I seized the opening, trying to draw a direct answer from her about the strange servant.
Agnes looked up at me then, her features wary. “Just over a year or so.”
I opened my mouth to press further, but she turned away, already moving the conversation elsewhere with the ease of someone who had closed this door many times before.
“You’ll find Dr. Ambrose keeps unusual hours,” she said. “He’s often in the greenhouse well into the night. You’ll learn his patterns soon enough, I suppose.”
“I see,” I said, hanging one of my dresses in the wardrobe. “Is there anything else I should know? About Dr. Ambrose, I mean. His moods or preferences? I would rather not make myself a nuisance to him.”
She paused, holding one of my gowns loosely in her hands, and regarded me with an expression that was both gentle and serious.
“Dr. Ambrose is a kind man when he remembers to be,” she said at last. “But like most men of brilliance, he’s… obsessed with his work. Single-minded, one might say. There are times he forgets to eat or sleep when he’s in the midst of something important.”
She smoothed a crease from the fabric, her attention drifting. “He’s also…” She hesitated, weighing an internal matter before continuing. “He’s a widower. The loss was not too long ago and the grief is still quite fresh, I’m afraid.”
My chest tightened unexpectedly. “I am sorry. That must be very difficult for him. For you as well, I imagine.”
“Yes, well.” Her features softened. “Best to be patient with him if he seems distant or short-tempered. It’s not personal, dear. He’s simply… carrying a great deal.”
Carrying the dead, I thought.
Aren’t we all? The voice responded, and the way it said it suggested that I was the thing being carried rather than the one doing the carrying.
I bent to retrieve one of my nightgowns from the trunk, glaring, though I doubted it cared.
To Agnes, I said only, “Of course.”
She set my father’s journals on the desk, then paused over the tintype, studying his face with the quiet respect of someone who understood what it meant to lose a person you had organized your entire life around. She placed it gently beside the journals.
“He’s fortunate you are here. It’s been lonely for him, I expect, since—” She stopped abruptly.
The silence closed over whatever she had been about to say. There was a protectiveness in her posture that made me reluctant to push at it.
She finished helping me unpack quickly after that, filling the silence with practical information about meal times and household routines—avoiding any further mention of Dr. Ambrose’s late wife, and steering our conversation firmly away from his personal life.
“I’ll leave you to settle in properly,” Agnes said, moving toward the door. “When you’re ready, you’ll find Dr. Ambrose in the greenhouse—the one attached to the study. There’s a door just beyond the shelves on the right. I’m sure he's expecting you.”
“Thank you, Agnes.”
She smiled, the gesture reaching her steely eyes. It made my chest ache, and I wondered whether kindness left a different shape in the body after death, whether a gentle woman’s heart would look softer in the hand than a cruel one.
“You’re very welcome, dear,” she replied, closing the door behind her.
After she left, I returned to the window and looked out at the greenhouses once more. Glass tombs, I thought, shielding life from an almost certain death.
I touched the velvet at my throat, feeling the phantom pulse beneath it that I had grown accustomed to. At times, I might have sworn something moved there, pressing against the inside of my skin, though I knew such a thing was ridiculous.
It was only my imagination.
The sadness arrived without warning, stronger this time, cresting over me before I could brace for it.
It was a deep grief that held no face attached to it, no name, no memory I could hold up to the light and examine.
There was only the emotion itself, vast and sourceless, pulling at my chest until it hurt.
I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and held it there until the ache eased enough to carry.
Weeping won’t help us, the voice said, clipped with impatience.
“I know,” I said aloud, to no one in particular.
Forcing myself to turn from the window, I moved to the washstand and freshened up before leaving the room.
The corridor was silent as I made my way toward the stairs, pausing briefly as I passed the door with the brass rose-handle. Did it belong to the late Mrs. Ambrose? Was this her room, left exactly as she had last occupied it, a shrine to a love that refused to acknowledge death’s finality?
I shook the thought away and continued down the hall. It did not matter. I was here to work, not to pry into my employer’s private grief, nor to disturb whatever things he had hidden behind intriguing doors.
But as I descended the stairs and made my way toward the study and the greenhouse beyond, a low, mournful creak echoed somewhere above.
I paused and glanced back up the darkened stairwell.
There was nothing except the walls settling around me, old timber contracting in the cold—the ordinary sounds of an ancient house.
I continued downward, pushing away the unease that gathered beneath my skin, and tried very hard not to think about doors that opened on their own or about the way dead things sometimes refused to stay buried.
I knew that from experience.