Chapter 2
It was later than usual when Gabriel Hartley awoke.
It was not habit so much as necessity that pulled him from sleep at that hour, the same necessity that had governed his life for years. He chased rest, and though he preferred the quietness of the earlier hours, he had instead been taking advantage of the even earlier ones.
But he had work to do, and so he rose from his bed.
He dressed in the bright light of his room, the morning seeping through the tall windows as he fastened the last of his coat buttons.
When he stepped into the corridor, the house greeted him with its usual stillness, save for the low murmur of voices below the stairs.
At the landing, he paused. A house was never truly silent once one knew how to listen to it.
A steward’s folded note had already been placed on the small table near the stair rail.
Gabriel took it without needing to open it to know what its contents likely were: quarter accounts, or repairs being delayed again, or perhaps a tenant requesting relief on rent he could scarcely afford.
He unfolded it anyway. He half-read it once, then folded it again, placing it back where it had been found.
Farther down the corridor, a door stood ajar. It was the same door that he always looked at but never dared walk through.
It led to William’s rooms.
Gabriel did not enter. He did not need to. The quiet beyond that threshold told him enough—the restless night, the interrupted sleep, and the slow, stubborn illness that came and went without warning, refusing to let his brother rest for even a moment as he wondered when it would next arrive.
He stood there for a moment longer than necessary, one hand resting lightly against the polished banister, before turning away. There was always something else that required him before he could allow himself to linger.
By the time he entered the gardens, he was beginning to be pleased with himself for resting longer. Servants crossed courtyards with baskets and buckets, shutters were thrown open one by one, and the city’s pale stone was at its brightest thanks to the sunlight.
Gabriel walked without a particular destination at first. Ravenscourt lay behind him, but its presence did not truly recede; beneath it all, there was a sense of something unfinished in him that had never quite healed.
The rose garden was not far. He told himself he was simply passing through it. The gates were half-open when he arrived, and inside the petals were heavy with dew, the scent of roses hanging in the cool air. Gabriel moved through it without urgency, his hands clasped loosely behind his back.
It was then he heard the voice.
“It was this way, I am certain of it.”
Gabriel turned toward the sound and saw that, between two rose bushes, stood a small girl.
She could not have been more than seven, and her hair was tied back in a ribbon that had already begun to loosen.
One hand was planted firmly on her hip in a posture far too serious for her size, while the other was extended toward a particularly bold bee that seemed entirely unconvinced by her authority.
“I am not afraid of you,” she informed it sternly. “You are being rude.”
The bee continued its indifferent orbit. For a moment, something faintly absurd threatened to surface. It was not laughter exactly, he was too far removed from anything so light. But there was a loosening, as though the tension he had carried from the house had met its match.
The girl noticed him then. Her face shifted immediately from confrontation with the bee to her appraisal of a stranger.
“You are very tall,” she observed.
“So I have been told,” Gabriel replied, before he could quite decide whether speaking at all was wise.
The bee, apparently bored of the exchange, drifted away. The girl turned her full attention to him, entirely unbothered by propriety or hesitation.
“Are you staying here?”
“I live here,” he said.
“Oh, I see,” she replied.
The girl crouched slightly, peering at a bloom. Then, as if remembering something important, she straightened again.
“I am staying with my Great Aunt Beatrice,” she said. “She lives next door.”
Gabriel registered the name, and while he recognized her as a good neighbor of his, he did not recall her having much family to speak of.
“Mama is with her,” she continued. “We came from London.”
Gabriel looked at the child more closely, taking in the certainty of her stance, the serious gray of her eyes, and the way she seemed entirely at home among roses and strangers alike.
“What is your name?” he asked.
She hesitated only long enough to decide whether it mattered that he knew.
“Sophie.”
But Sophie’s attention did not linger long on introductions. Once she had decided Gabriel was not in fact a threat, she seemed to file him away as something far more useful, which was a source of information.
“Why is this one red and that one white?” she demanded, pointing with the solemnity of a judge.
Gabriel followed her gaze to the roses.
“They are different varieties,” he said after a moment, as though weighing how much detail a child might reasonably understand. “Some are bred for color, others for scent.”
Sophie nodded as if this confirmed something she had long suspected. She leaned closer, nearly nose-to-petal.
“And this one, what is it?”
“That one is an old damask rose,” Gabriel replied. “Very fragrant. It has been grown in England for centuries.”
“And those?”
“Alba roses,” he said.
Sophie seemed to accept this without protest, as though it matched some private logic of her own. She reached out, hesitated, then stopped herself just before touching a bloom.
“I am not supposed to crush them,” she said, half to herself.
“No,” Gabriel agreed.
He stepped a little closer, lowering himself slightly so he was nearer her height.
“If you want to hold one, you do it like this.”
He selected a rose carefully, one that was already slightly open, and guided her small hand beneath it, cupping it as though the flower were living and required space to breathe.
“Gently,” he instructed.
Sophie’s brow furrowed with concentration. The seriousness of her expression deepened, as though she were being entrusted with something far more important than a mere bloom.
Then, slowly, she smiled.
“I am doing it,” she declared, quietly triumphant.
“Yes,” Gabriel said. “You are doing well.”
And to his own mild surprise, he meant it. She held the rose as though it were an object of importance, turning it slightly to admire how the light gathered in its folds.
“It is prettier like this than when it is closed,” she decided.
“Roses usually are,” he said.
Sophie looked up at him. “Do you have names for them?”
Gabriel considered telling the truth, but then he felt a sense of mischief for what felt like the first time in years and could not stop himself from indulging in it.
“That one is ‘Charles Darwin,’” he said after a moment, indicating a deep apricot bloom nearby. “And that is ‘Madame Alfred Carrière.’”
Sophie frowned.
“Those are not proper rose names.”
“They are very proper names,” Gabriel replied.
She considered this again, then nodded as though reluctantly accepting his authority.
“I think they should have better ones.”
“I will inform them.”
This earned him a look of approval so serious it unsettled him more than it should have. They might have continued as they were indefinitely, but then a faint yet urgent sound carried through the garden.
“Sophie?”
The child straightened immediately. The sound came again, closer and threading through the ivy-covered wall at the far end of the garden where the timber had loosened and time had left its careless mark.
“Sophie! Come away from there.”
The voice struck something in him before he had even placed it. A second later, he knew why. He rose fully, and as he turned toward the opening in the wall, Eleanor Marbury came through it.
For a heartbeat, everything else fell away.
Eleanor stood framed in the gap, her breath slightly quickened from her haste, her hair not yet done. Her eyes found Sophie first, then inevitably shifted and landed on him.
The recognition that followed was not shown in words, but it did not need to be. Gabriel felt it too. It had not been softened by time, nor diminished, only reawakened. For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then Eleanor stepped fully into the garden.
“Sophie,” she said again, though her voice was steadier than before. “Come here.”
Sophie obeyed at once, hurrying across the gravel, the rose still carefully in hand. Eleanor knelt instinctively to take her, checking her quickly. Only once she had done so did she look up again.
Six years had not erased her.
“Mr. Hartley,” she said.
The formality was deliberate. Gabriel’s smile did not change immediately. When it did, it was minimal.
“Lady Marbury,” he replied.
The title between them felt unfamiliar in a way that had nothing to do with etiquette. Eleanor rose slowly, keeping Sophie close at her side.
“I am sorry if my daughter disturbed you.”
“Not at all,” he said evenly. “She was merely inspecting the roses.”
“He knows their names,” Sophie informed her mother proudly.
“I see,” Eleanor said.
“I did not realize you were in residence,” he said quickly.
“That is understandable. I have not made much of it.”
Neither offered more than was necessary, and Gabriel decided it was better that way. A breeze moved through the garden then, stirring the roses between them, carrying their scent into the space that words were failing to fill. At last, Gabriel nodded.
“If you will excuse me, I have rather a lot to do today.”
It was perfectly polite, perfectly distant, and entirely final. Eleanor’s fingers tightened around Sophie’s hand.
“Of course.”
Gabriel turned first, and walked back through the roses without looking again, even though he wanted to. He wished he had said more, or at least asked why she had returned, but he had not been able to find the words and so he had let the conversation die.
He walked the length of the rose garden, and the scent of roses followed him, too alive for something he had meant to pass through without consequence.
But it was too late, as the consequence had already taken shape.
He had seen her, not as a memory but as something immediate and unavoidably real.
Eleanor Marbury had been standing in his garden as though the past had found a way to step through stone and ivy and settle itself once more into the present.
***
By the time he reached the house, the morning had fully settled into motion.
Servants passed in the corridor, and the smell of bread and tea drifted from the breakfast room below.
Gabriel paused at the threshold of the stairs for only a moment before descending, having already returned to his habitual restraint.
He told himself again that it meant nothing. Six years had been enough to harden what had once been open. At least, it had been enough to teach him that questions without answers were best left unasked.
And yet, Eleanor had somehow found her way to him again, and the most foolish part of him wondered if that had been for a reason.
He pushed the thought aside before it could take root; he had allowed himself to believe in such flights of fancy before, and it had not ended well for him.
It was easier not to expect anything from anyone, so that he would not be disappointed.
But if that was the case, and he did not care, then why did he return to the garden that evening?
In truth, he did not know, but he was convinced that it had nothing to do with what had happened that morning. He hardly thought about it at all, instead wandering aimlessly until he was standing there once again.
And it was there, near the place where Sophie had stood, that something pale caught his eye among the greenery.
Gabriel stopped, then approached it to find a small shawl laying half-hidden beneath a cluster of roses.
He deduced that it had been caught lightly on a thorn, and then left there perhaps in the haste of her mother returning to take her away again.
He bent and retrieved it carefully, freeing it from the plant without disturbing the bloom.
It was soft wool, well-worn, scented with soap and morning air.
For a moment, he simply held it. It was an ordinary thing, and yet it anchored itself in his hand with an unexpected weight, as though it belonged not just to a child but to the entire unsettling proximity of the house she was staying in.
He folded it absently, and stood still longer than he meant to. Then, with a quiet exhale, he turned toward the house. He had just stepped inside when he heard voices in the breakfast room.
Cassandra was eating with her husband, and said husband William was grateful for the company.
“It is all Bath is speaking of,” Cassandra said.
“There is always something,” William replied mildly, though his fatigue was evident.
“This, however, is not idle gossip,” she continued.
“A widow recently arrived. She has taken refuge with Mrs. Pennington, if I am not mistaken—next door to us, in fact! The woman is accused of poisoning her husband. It has been in the papers. There have only been subtle insinuations thus far, but it has been enough to ruin a reputation in a week. They say she fled London with her child.”
“I thought we came here to avoid the scandal that London inevitably brings,” his brother sighed.
Gabriel smiled, but it quickly faded. The truth was that they had left London to avoid the questions about his health, but if William knew that, he gave no indication. A faint clink of porcelain followed as a cup was set down.
It was then that he realized just what his dear sister-in-law had said. The woman next door had apparently murdered her husband, and he knew her all too well.
Gabriel did not move, but the shawl in his hand suddenly felt heavier than it had any right to be.