Beatrice barely acknowledged the servants who greeted her at the door, already moving toward her study. She dismissed Lisa at the threshold and asked not to be disturbed.
Her hand hesitated over the drawer's carved handle before she pulled it open. She sifted through the papers inside until her fingers caught on velvet.
Something tightened in her chest as she lifted the letter out.
It was strange, the difference a few weeks made. Once, the mere sight of it had left her feeling suffocated. Now her hands weren't quite steady as she reached for the letter opener.
She cut it open in one clean motion, unfolding the paper, her eyes already searching for a name.
There wasn't one.
Your Admirer.
She stared at the words a moment longer than she meant to. Her heart sank slightly — was this someone's idea of a joke?
Her eyes narrowed, and she began to read.
Miss Cornwell,
Forgive the boldness of a stranger's hand. I have turned this letter over in my mind more times than I can count, and still no phrasing feels adequate to what I mean to say.
I have watched you from across rooms I doubt you noticed me in. Your hair catches the light like molten metal just beginning to cool — that particular shade between fire and stillness. I find I cannot look away from it when you turn your head.
Your eyes are a green I have not found anywhere else. Not in gardens, not in gemstones. The deepest part of a forest, perhaps, where the light doesn't quite reach and something in you wants to go looking anyway.
I have seen you walk through a garden at dusk, and I confess I have thought of little else since. There is something in the way you carry yourself — unhurried, certain — that most people spend a lifetime failing to imitate. Under moonlight, I am told a woman's beauty is softened. Yours is not softened. It sharpens. I do not know what to do with that thought except to keep it.
Your voice, when I have been near enough to hear it, has a quality I cannot adequately describe — measured, and yet it stays with me long after the room has emptied. And your smile, on the rare occasion I have seen it directed at someone else, is the kind that makes a man understand exactly what he is missing.
I did not intend to feel this deeply, Miss Cornwell. I have tried, more than once, to set the feeling aside as inappropriate, or premature, or simply inconvenient. I have failed at all three. Each time I am near you, or hear your name spoken in a room, the feeling only deepens.
I do not expect a reply. I ask only that you know someone sees you — truly sees you — even when you believe no one is looking.
Your Admirer
Her chest fluttered, warmth rising to her cheeks before her stomach dropped just as fast.
She had never spent enough time in society, or been close enough to anyone, to be described like that. And this admirer had seen her walking in the garden at dusk? It had to be a prank of Herrace's. But she thought back to his face that day, the day he'd handed her the suitor list and let his eyes drift to the unopened letter on her desk. There had been nothing calculating in it. Just amusement — the kind that came from watching her flinch, not from savoring a scheme of his own making.
Chills crept down her spine.
Her eyes moved to the window before she could stop them. The curtains were still. Nothing there but her own reflection, faint against the darkening glass. She looked away too quickly.
The letter felt heavier in her hand than paper had any right to.
She read the line again. I have seen you walk through a garden at dusk. Her skin prickled, differently this time. That was her garden. Her evenings, spent alone by the gazebo she couldn't bring herself to step inside, with no one watching but the dark — and, apparently, someone who was.
She set the letter down and didn't pick it back up.
Her hand had gone cold. She pressed it flat against her thigh, willing the feeling away. It didn't listen. The room, familiar as it was — her desk, her books, the fireplace she'd stared into a hundred evenings — felt suddenly less hers, as though the walls themselves had been watching alongside whoever wrote this.
She stood, then felt foolish for it. There was nothing to stand for. No one to face. Still, she crossed to the window and looked down at the darkening garden, half-expecting to catch a shape moving between the hedges.
Nothing moved.
She exhaled, unsatisfied by the emptiness of it. This wasn't something she knew how to stand against. Just the creeping certainty of having been watched, closely and often, by someone who had never once let her look back.
She drew the curtains shut, all the way this time, and sat back down. The letter stayed on her desk. She didn't touch it again that evening.
Sleep did not come easily.
She lay in the dark long after Lisa had put out the last candle, the shape of the letter still sitting behind her eyes despite it being locked in the drawer. Her mind kept returning to it the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth — unwilling, and unable to stop.
Past midnight, she gave up trying to sleep and let herself think instead. It was easier than lying still. Fear had nowhere to go except her chest, where it sat and made her cold. Thinking, at least, gave her hands something to hold.
Who had access to the grounds after dark.
She went through it the way she went through ledgers — one line at a time, nothing skipped. The guards kept to the perimeter, their rounds timed closely enough that slipping past them would take either luck or familiarity with the schedule. Most staff retired by evening, save the few on late duty. Guests came and went at Cornwell Estate often enough, but they rarely stayed past sundown, and fewer still had reason to cross her path at all — most came for Herrace now, as they once had for her parents. She was rarely so much as introduced.
Which left two possibilities, and she disliked both.
Someone within the household. Or someone who had been received at the estate before, briefly, in passing — someone she might not have even properly seen, while they'd had every chance to see her.
Her mind went, unwillingly, to Aldric.
She turned the thought over, then set it aside just as fast. He'd only been introduced to her a fortnight ago, at the banquet. This letter had been sitting in her study long before that — since the day Herrace returned from Thornvale and dropped a stack of suitors' names on her desk, calling it brotherly concern.
Someone had been watching her before Aldric Bachour ever learned her name.
She stared up at the canopy of her bed, unmoving. If not him, then who. A servant seemed unlikely — little reason to risk her displeasure over something like this, and less opportunity to compose a letter in that hand, on paper that fine. A guest, then. Someone let through the gates for Herrace's sake, not hers. The list would be longer than she wanted it to be, and she wouldn't recognize half the names on it.
She would need the visitor record from Sir Brauss. Without having to explain why
It wasn't an answer. But it was a place to start, and a place to start was more than she'd had an hour ago.
She closed her eyes. Sleep, when it came, was thin and unrestful.