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She was sleeping alone. In an unfamiliar bedchamber. And she could hear a sound that was like howling.
She turned over and put her pillow over her head, trying to drown out the haunting sound, sleep tangling with reality until she was on the moors running from a ghost, rather than safe beneath the bedclothes.
When she woke her eyes felt swollen and she felt gritty and bruised.
She took breakfast in the morning room, and did not see Briggs.
She had a small meeting with Mrs Brown, standing in the hall nearest the entry, and made arrangements to plan the menu for the week.
Beatrice had to admit she found that cheering, and hoped that she found the food at Maynard to be to her liking. It was not as if she was fussy, but she enjoyed nice foods rather a lot.
Her pleasures in life had been small, always, but very deeply enjoyed.
She went into the library and found a copy of Emma, which she had read before but had quite enjoyed. She tucked it under her arm and there was an attractive illustrated compendium of birds, and she added that too.
She took them back to her room and looked around the space. It was elegant, the walls a blue silk, with matching blue silk on the bed, trimmed with gold. The ornate canopy had heavy curtains, though she couldn’t see why she should need to draw curtains back in this isolated room that only ever contained herself or her maid.
She deposited the books at the foot of her bed and went back out into the hall.
And that was when she saw him for the first time.
The boy.
He had unruly brown hair and slim shoulders. He was very slight, his expression sulky.
William.
This must be William.
The boy turned and went back down the hall. Towards the sound of the late-night howling, she realised.
* * *
Over the next few days she spotted the boy in the house a few times, but never Briggs, who seemed to ensconce himself in his study at the early morning and not...un-ensconce himself until well after she was ready to retire for the evening.
And sometimes at night, she heard that howling.
One word came to her each time she saw that child.
Loneliness.
She knew it well. She was living it now.
When she crawled into bed on her fourth night at Maynard, her fourth night as a wife, she tried to read Emma. And could not.
Because in those words she looked for any...anything she might be able to recognise. Longings, feelings. She could not...find herself in those pages.
Briggs did not want her. Not really. He did not care if she was here or at Bybee House.
She felt no giddy joy over marriage and could not care at all about the marital prospects of the silly girls in the novel.
She set it aside and stared at the ornate ceiling of the canopy, her eyes tracing the lines of the gold crest there.
Was this to be her life? Not any better or altered than that life at Bybee House?
No. She would...she would not allow it.
And that was when the howling started.
