Chapter 2

I woke in my own bedroom.

Not the servant's cell with the ivy pressing the glass - the east wing corner room with the bay overlooking the river, papered in faded peonies I had chosen at seventeen, furniture under dust sheets, the air tasting of rain and old wood.

I knew it was mine. That was the horror of it. For two years the wing had been "under restoration," locked, and I had dusted that hall door once a week without understanding why my chest ached when I touched the handle.

I sat up. My arm throbbed at the injection site. Outside, fog lay on the water like wet wool.

Both doors were locked. I tried them quietly, then with my shoulder. Nothing.

I found the locket in my apron pocket and held it under the gray window light. E.H. in worn filigree. The bent clasp. Memory kept coming back in pieces with edges on them.

Then I turned and saw the piano.

The Steinway had stood in that room since my mother died. It was under a sheet and badly out of tune, but my fingers found middle C anyway. Six notes. The phrase she wrote the spring she got sick, the one she played every night until she couldn't lift her hands - the little turning figure that climbs and doesn't come back down where you expect.

My hands went. They had never forgotten it. They never would.

I played it four times.

Then I knelt and opened the piano bench.

Sheet music, mostly, and a broken metronome, and my old practice notebooks with my name written inside in a girl's round hand. Under the bottom of the stack, in a legal folder tied with string, was the will my father signed the year I turned twenty-five.

One page and a codicil. Witnessed by Warren Sills and by a neighbor who was now dead. Leaving Harrowgate, the orchards, the boathouse parcels and the trust that held them to his daughter, Evelyn Margaret Harrow, outright, with no guardian and no executor beyond the family attorney.

I had watched Grant burn a version of that document in the library fireplace two winters ago. I remembered the smell. I had been standing in the doorway with a silver tray of coffee, wearing a cap, and he had not looked up once.

I folded the will into the front of my dress.

The dumbwaiter ran from the east wing service pantry down to the kitchen. I had scrubbed that shaft with a rag on a pole. It was narrow and loud and the rope was frayed, and every foot of the descent creaked like a coffin lid. I was thin in the way two years of hunger makes a woman thin. I had stopped being afraid of falling a long time ago.

Tessa caught me at the bottom. The kitchen maid who had pushed bread and cold chicken into my hand every night for a year looked at me and went white.

"I heard," she whispered. "The whole staff heard."

"Tessa. I have to go."

She gave me boots that didn't fit, a wool coat, and the key to the scullery door. She pressed four dollars into my palm. Her mouth shook so badly she could barely get it out.

"You come back with the deed," she said. "Because I can't work for those two."

I walked out into the fog with my father's will against my ribs and my mother's locket in my fist and no name the law would honor.

Grant had the doctors and the lawyers and the sheriff and every story this valley wanted to believe.

He did not have my feet.