From the corridor came the faint scrape of a music stand.
For a moment, her concentration slipped.
Vanessa noticed.
“Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“This is my wedding. I shouldn’t have to manage the help.”
Elena cleaned the last streak, collected the broken coffee cup, and stood.
Only when she reached the service landing did she let herself breathe.
Her phone vibrated once.
A message from Ruth Bell.
We’re here. Take your time.
Elena stared at the screen.
For twenty-one years, time had belonged to the people upstairs.
They had used it to bury names, destroy records, polish reputations.
Now she had less than an hour.
She typed:
Is she all right?
The answer came slowly.
Frightened. Determined.
Elena closed her eyes.
In her other pocket, the brass key pressed against her thigh.
Maxwell had not wanted to marry at Halcyon House.
He had said so once, months earlier, while standing in the east corridor with Vanessa and her mother.
The ballroom had been restored. The gardens replanted. The old conservatory rebuilt in glass and pale stone.
Nothing smelled of smoke anymore.
That was supposed to make a difference.
“Your mother loved this house,” Eleanor had told him.
His mother had loved the kitchen at dawn, the overgrown path to the sea, the crooked apple tree behind the servants’ cottages.
Maxwell could not remember her loving the house itself.
“My father wanted the wedding here,” he had answered.
“And now he won’t live to see it.” Eleanor touched his sleeve. “Give him this.”
Philip Anderson had been dead for seven weeks.
Even from the grave, he remained difficult to refuse.
So Maxwell had agreed.
He had agreed to the white roses, though their sweet smell made him uneasy. Agreed to the guest list, which contained more business partners than friends. Agreed when Vanessa suggested removing his mother’s photograph from the memorial table because it made the arrangement look “unbalanced.”
Marriage, he had begun to suspect, was mostly the management of small surrender.
Then, forty minutes before the ceremony, he heard a violin.
Not the quartet rehearsing in the ballroom.
A single instrument.
Three rising notes, a pause, then a fourth that seemed to turn back for someone left behind.
Maxwell stopped outside the service corridor.
Nobody had played that melody for him since the night his mother disappeared.
He followed it.
At the bottom of a narrow staircase stood a maid holding a dark amber violin.
Her bow hovered above the strings.
“How do you know that?”
She looked up.
For one strange second, she seemed more frightened of him than he was of her.
“Someone taught me.”
“Who?”
Footsteps sounded above them.
Elena glanced toward the landing.
