The Governess of Ashmoor House

The Cart Left Hollowmere at half past two, and by three the town was gone.

What replaced it was not emptiness, exactly. The moor had presence. It pressed close on both sides of the track, a low dark country of bracken and peat and wind-bent grass that moved in sheets under the November sky. There were no trees. There had been trees for a while after the station, thin birches along a stone wall, but those had fallen behind a mile back, and now there was only the moor, and the track, and the sky, which sat low and grey and unbroken from one horizon to the other.

Vivian Thorncastle held her bag on her lap and watched the country pass. The cart was open, a flatbed with a bench seat, and the wind cut through her coat and found the gaps in her gloves. Her trunk sat behind her, roped to the boards. It held everything she owned that mattered: two dark dresses, a grey wool, her books, her husband's watch, the reference letters that were all she had to recommend her to a household. She'd packed it in York that morning with the efficiency of someone who had packed and moved too many times in four years to be sentimental about it.

The driver was a man from Hollowmere, hired at the station. He'd taken her money and her destination without comment, but something had shifted in his face at the name. Not alarm. Something more practised than that. A small pulling-away, the look of a man who'd heard the name before and learned not to ask about it.

"How much further?" Vivian said.

"Two mile. Maybe three." He didn't turn. "Road's not much past the next rise."

It wasn't much before the next rise, either. The track was rutted and soft where the peat crept in from the edges, and the cart jolted hard enough to make her teeth ache. She gripped the bench and looked ahead. The moor climbed gently toward a ridge, and beyond it the sky darkened in a way that might have been cloud or might have been rain coming in off the higher ground.

"Is there a village nearer than Hollowmere?" she asked.

"Nowt between here and the house. There's a farm or two on the Keld road, but they keep to themselves."

He said it without apology. Out here, keeping to themselves was not a judgement. It was the condition of the place.

They crested the rise, and Vivian saw Ashmoor House.

It sat below and to the north, in a shallow depression where the moor dipped toward a stream she could hear but not see. A large house, grey stone, two storeys and attics, with a central block and two wings spreading unevenly from it. The proportions were wrong in a way she couldn't name at first. Then she saw it: the left wing, the north wing, was shuttered. Every window on both floors was dark, the shutters closed and uniform, giving that side of the house a blinded look, as though half the building had turned its face to the wall. The rest of the house showed light, faintly, the dull amber of oil lamps behind curtained glass, but the north wing was black against the moor behind it.

The grounds were spare. A gravel drive curved from a gate to the front door. A low wall marked what might once have been a garden, though nothing grew in it now but dead stems and brown grass. Beyond the wall, the moor resumed, running north and east without interruption. There was no other dwelling in sight.

"That's the house," the driver said, unnecessarily.

He took her as far as the gate and stopped. The gate was iron, heavy, standing open on a stone post, and past it the gravel drive ran straight to the front steps. Perhaps a hundred and fifty yards.

"I'll not go further," he said.

Vivian looked at him. "The drive is sound."

"It's sound enough. I'll not go further, though." He was already reaching back to untie her trunk. "I can set your box here at the post."

She considered arguing. It was late afternoon, the light was going, and the trunk was heavy. But the man's face was settled, and she'd learned in four years of dependent employment that arguing with someone else's reluctance cost more than it gained.

"Thank you," she said. "Set it down."

He did, and she paid him, and he turned the cart without another word and drove back the way they'd come. Vivian watched until it dropped below the rise and the sound of the wheels faded into the wind. Then she was alone.

The trunk had leather handles. Vivian was strong enough to drag it, though not gracefully, and the gravel was loose enough to make the work slow. Twice she stopped to rest her hands and flex the cramp from her fingers. The second time, she stood upright and looked at the house properly.

It was larger than she'd judged from the ridge. The central block alone would have housed a substantial family, and the two wings doubled it. But the proportions resisted comfort. The windows were narrow and deep-set, the roofline irregular, and the north wing, the shuttered wing, sat slightly forward of the other, as though the house were turning slowly in that direction and had been caught and stopped. The grounds offered nothing to soften it. No hedge, no ornamental planting, no shelter from the wind that came across the moor in long, flattening gusts. The house sat in its hollow and endured.

The wind carried the smell of wet peat and something colder, something mineral, like stone that had been closed away from the air for a long time. She bent to the trunk again and dragged it the last fifty yards to the front step.

The front of the house was plainer than she'd expected. No portico, no flourish. A wide stone step, a heavy door with an iron knocker shaped like a ring, flanked by two narrow windows that showed nothing of the interior. The stonework was old, darkened by years of moorland weather, and the mortar between the blocks was crumbling in places. The house had not been unloved, exactly, but it had not been renewed. It wore its age without apology.

Vivian lifted the knocker and let it fall. The sound was flat in the open air, swallowed almost immediately by the wind. A wait. Thirty seconds. A minute. Her hand was rising to knock again when the door opened.

The woman in the doorway was tall, spare, and grey-haired, her hair drawn back and pinned with a severity that suggested long practice. She wore a dark dress, plain and well-kept, and at her waist hung a ring of keys, heavy enough that Vivian could hear them when the woman moved. Her face was composed, watchful, not unkind but not welcoming either. She looked at Vivian the way one looks at a delivery that has arrived on time but without enthusiasm.

"Miss Thorncastle."

"Mrs. Thorncastle," Vivian said. "I wrote to Mr. Vane regarding the position."

"Yes. We expected you today." The woman stepped back from the door but did not fully open it. "I am Mrs. Halloway. I keep the house."

"I'm pleased to meet you, Mrs. Halloway."

Mrs. Halloway's mouth made a brief movement that was not quite a smile. She looked past Vivian to the trunk on the gravel.

"I'll have the trunk brought in. You'd better come through."

The entrance hall was stone-flagged and cold. An oil lamp burned on a side table, casting a pool of amber light that reached the near wall and stopped. Beyond it, the hall extended into shadow. The ceiling was low for a house of this size, and the air smelled of cold plaster and lamp oil and, faintly, of something older and less identifiable, damp wool, perhaps, or the particular staleness of rooms that are cleaned but seldom used.

Mrs. Halloway walked ahead, her keys shifting at her hip. Vivian followed, taking in what she could. A staircase, broad but uncarpeted, rising into dimness. A corridor to the left, lit by a single lamp. A corridor to the right, darker, with a closed door at the end. No gas. No electricity. The house ran on oil and candle and firelight, which meant it ran on the labour of whoever filled the lamps and laid the grates, and that meant Mrs. Halloway, and whoever worked under her.

"The house is lit by oil throughout?" Vivian asked.

"We've not had gas put in. Mr. Vane has not seen the need." Mrs. Halloway said this without inflection, as though the question and its answer were equally unremarkable.

"And the staff?"

"Myself, Mrs. Fenton the cook, a housemaid, and Mr. Greaves who keeps the grounds. The house is not large in its current use."

In its current use. Vivian noted the phrase. A house with a sealed wing was, by definition, not in its full use. Mrs. Halloway had acknowledged that fact and closed it in the same breath.

They climbed the stairs, which turned once at a landing where a tall window looked out onto the moor. The glass was old, slightly warped, and the view through it rippled as though seen through water. Vivian paused for half a step and felt the cold radiating from it. No curtain. No rug on the landing. The house did not waste warmth on its passages.

They turned right along a corridor. More oil lamps here, spaced widely, the shadows thick between them. The floorboards were bare and old, and they sounded hollow underfoot in a way that made Vivian conscious of her own steps. A draught moved along the floor, though she couldn't see where it entered. The walls were papered in a pattern she could barely make out in the low light, something dark and floral, faded past its original colour. Mrs. Halloway's shoes made almost no sound. She had the walk of someone who'd learned to move through this house without disturbing it.

"Your room is here," Mrs. Halloway said, stopping at a door near the end of the corridor. "The schoolroom is on the floor below, east side. Meals are taken in the small dining room at half past seven and half past twelve. Supper at six. Mr. Vane keeps separate hours."

She opened the door. The room was small, simply furnished: a narrow bed with a white coverlet, a washstand, a chest of drawers, a chair, a writing desk by the window. A fire had been laid in the grate but not lit. The air was cold enough that Vivian could see her breath in the lamplight.

"I'll have the fire started before evening," Mrs. Halloway said, though she made no move to do it now.

"Thank you." Vivian set her bag on the bed and crossed to the window.

The view struck her. Not its beauty, though there was a kind of beauty in it, the moor running out under the November sky, the light already softening toward dusk. What struck her was the north wing. From this window, she could see it plainly. It extended from the main house to her left, its shuttered face close enough that she could count the windows. Eight on the first floor, six on the ground, all of them closed and dark. The stonework was the same grey as the rest of the house, but the shutters gave it a different quality. Closed eyes. A face that had deliberately stopped looking.

She could see something else, too, though she almost missed it. The stonework on the ground floor of the north wing was not uniform. At one point, perhaps two-thirds of the way along, the colour and texture of the stone changed. Slightly newer. Slightly cleaner. As though a section of wall had been rebuilt or filled in, a long time ago, but not as long ago as the rest.

"Which wing is that?" Vivian said, though she already knew.

Mrs. Halloway had remained in the doorway. She followed Vivian's gaze to the shuttered windows, and for a moment her expression held something that wasn't part of her careful composure. Then it passed.

"The north wing has not been in use for some years," she said. "There's nothing in it that concerns the household now."

She waited, as though the answer were a door she was holding open just long enough for Vivian to walk through it in the right direction.

"Supper is at six," she said again. "Miss Ashmoor will join you. I'll send word when your trunk is up."

She left. Her footsteps retreated down the corridor, and the sound of her keys faded with them, and then the house was quiet.

Vivian stood at the window and looked at the shuttered wing. Sixteen windows, all of them dark. The newer stonework she'd noticed from inside was visible from here too, a patch of slightly different colour on the ground floor, unremarkable if you weren't looking for it.

The driver wouldn't come past the gate. Mrs. Halloway's answers were each shaped like a closed door, complete enough to end a question and too precise to invite another. And the phrase not in use could mean anything from empty to forbidden, but Mrs. Halloway had offered it as though it were self-explanatory.

The shuttered windows of the north wing faced her room. Whatever the house had turned away from, it had put her directly in front of it.

The fire grate was cold. The bed was made with precision but no generosity, one thin pillow, sheets pulled tight. The writing desk had a single drawer, empty, and a candle in a brass holder, unlit. The room had been prepared for someone expected to stay, but not someone expected to matter.

Vivian unpinned her hat, set it on the desk, and began to unpack.