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Warmth went through her chest, sweet and unsafe. When had anyone seen her? Papa had loved her. Love mixed with duty and sorrow. Mrs. Roskelly cared, with a housekeeper’s fierce, careful heart.

Angelo had seen work and named it competent. Had praised it without knowing he ought to make room for a mark. Had spoken as one student of plants to another.

It went to the head faster than wine. To be valued for what she knew, what she could do, and not pitied for a stain.

She put her palms to her hot cheeks and felt the birthmark under one of them. The mark that killed beauty. That turned liking to shock. That kept her on the far side of any ordinary warmth.

And still he wanted to talk again. Had asked for tomorrow night. Had looked … glad? Hopeful?

His face in the moon had been open. Interested. None of the blank politeness she knew by heart. Then, he had not seen her entire. Had not learned what the shadow hid.

No. Kindness. Curiosity, at most. The hour he saw her properly, the hour he understood the face she carried, that interest would turn. Pity. Or worse.

It always did.

The vicar’s wife. The boy with the pointing finger. The small cruelties that had taught her walls. Taught her that the mark would be the first thing and the last.

Angelo would be no different. Could not be, however kind the mouth, however true the words about yarrow.

But for tonight, she could keep his voice. Warm. Unforced. Keep the way he had spoken of her garden as if it counted. As if the knowing in it had weight.

She could let herself picture, for a few stolen breaths, another life. A face without a sentence written on it. Stepping into light without flinching. Standing before him as a woman, not a warning. Mind and skill first. Not the devil’s ink.

The picture was so sweet it hurt. So impossible it made a bruise under the ribs. She knew the cost of pictures. She had paid it in childhood, standing in a church porch while a woman of God named her the devil’s. She had paid it every year since, each time an errand boy caught the marked side and forgot his manners. Wanting was a tax. She paid it anyway, standing in a passage that smelled of lime and old wool, and the wanting did not make her smaller. That was the new part. That was the part that scared her.

She pushed off the wall and went deeper in, toward the tower, where she could be alone with wishes that had teeth.

She would not go tomorrow. Could not. Better to cut it now, before hope put down a root that reality would only tear out.

Even as she named the vow she knew it for a lie.

She would go. She would find a reason.

Because for the first time in six years someone had looked at a thing she had made and called it beautiful in the only way that mattered. Not a face. A garden. Rows she had dug until her palms blistered. Bells she had mended with Elias’s twine. Knowledge Papa had poured into her when the world would not take her in. Angelo had named that knowledge as if it were gold. She could live a week on the sound of it. She suspected she would have to.

She was not strong enough to refuse that.

The passages took her like old friends up the spiral. Here the face did not count. Here she was only Isolde, keeper of Grimsfell, holder of a father’s charge.

Tonight, for the first time she could name, the charge felt less like a calling and more like a lock.

She did not know whether to blame Angelo Scott for the feeling, or thank him for showing her what it was to want a larger life.

In the tower she did not light a candle. Moon was enough. It laid a pale bar across the floorboards and stopped short of the bed, as if even the sky knew where her face would be. Isolde sat with her cloak still on and pressed her marked cheek to her own shoulder, a child’s comfort she had never quite put away. Tomorrow, the library would fill with hunters. Tomorrow night, the garden might fill with him.

She whispered the name once, to test the danger of it, and then she did not sleep for a long while. When she did, she dreamed of rosemary crushed under a slipper and a man who stopped when she asked him to, as if her voice had weight in the open air. That, more than the praise, was the piece she turned over until dawn.

CHAPTER 7

“The strain was solemn and affecting; it spoke in sounds more than in words, and affected not only the ear, but the heart.”

Ann Radcliffe

* * *

February 16, 1822

Angelo lay in his bed, staring up at the ceiling he could barely see in the darkness, listening to the wind sing over the cliffs. The haunting sound had become a familiar companion in this strange house. Sometimes eerie, sometimes almost beautiful, always present, like the breath of the building itself.