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“Mrs. Roskelly, please.” Angelo stepped closer, lowering his voice. “I know about Isolde. I know she lives here, in the hidden passages. I have spoken with her, spent time with her. And I have … I have hurt her, though I did not mean to. I need to apologize. I need to explain. If you could only deliver a message⁠—”

“I’m sure I don’t know anyone by that name, sir.”

The words were final, implacable. Mrs. Roskelly’s face had closed like a door slamming shut.

“Per favore.” Angelo heard the desperation in his own voice and did not care. “She is … she is important to me. More important than I knew how to say. I made a mistake … a terrible mistake … and I cannot bear the thought that she believes … Please. If there is any way you can help me⁠—”

“Mr. Scott.” The housekeeper’s voice softened, just slightly. “If such a person existed, and I am not saying she does, I imagine she would need time. Space. The opportunity to … process whatever has occurred. Pushing too hard, too fast, might only drive her further away.”

It was not an admission. But it was not a denial, either.

“Time,” Angelo repeated hollowly. “And if she never forgives me? If she decides I am not worth the risk?”

Mrs. Roskelly was silent for a long moment. Then she sighed, something almost like sympathy flickering across her features before she suppressed it.

“Then that would be her choice to make, sir. Some wounds run very deep. Some cannot be healed by apologies alone.” She picked up a jar of preserves and turned away, signaling that the conversation was over. “Good night, Mr. Scott. I hope ye find the rest ye need.”

Angelo stood alone in the pantry for several minutes after she left, staring at nothing.

Some wounds run very deep.

He thought of Isolde’s face in the moonlight. The moment his thumb had brushed across her birthmark, she had frozen, waiting for him to recoil. He thought of her voice, trembling with old pain, when she had told him that people did not like her. He thought of decades spent alone, hiding from a world that had taught her she was unacceptable.

And he had confirmed it. With his clumsy offer of cosmetic creams and tinted powders, he had told her, however unintentionally, that her natural face was something to be fixed. Something to be hidden. Something that needed to be corrected before she could step into the light.

You fool, he thought savagely. You absolute, unforgivable fool.

* * *

At midnight he went down to the library.

The house held still but for the cliff-song. He took no candle. He had learned she kept to dark, that shade was her room. Memory and a little moon got him to the case.

He pressed the mark. The shelf opened without a sound.

Beyond, no lamps burned by the organ, and no music sounded. He went in all the same, shut the leaf at his back, and felt along until stone met his palms.

He sat with his back to the wall and his knees drawn up. The flags leached cold through his coat in a slow steal. Somewhere in the pipes a note seemed to wait, unplayed.

He waited.

Mirrors caught the scrap of moon from a high slit and threw it on and on. A thousand of him sat in a thousand empty halls, waiting on a woman who might not come. His own face looked tired in every pane. His hair was still uncombed, and the hangman’s cravat Nicholas had mocked still sat in its knot. He did not fix it. Vanity had no seat here.

Marco. The name came sudden. I wish he were in this county.

His brother would have known the next step. Marco had made a wreck of his own courting and found a road back with Molly. Angelo wanted what Marco could give: advice, or a confession of how he had done it, or simply a hand on the shoulder.

Marco was in London with a new wife. Angelo was in Cornwall with a house that would not open and a woman in its walls who thought herself unloved.

How do I mend this? he asked the dark. How do I make her know I see her as she stands? That I love the mark as I love the laugh and the music and that quick mind?

The gloom gave him nothing.

He sat in the Hall of Reflections into the small hours. No step came. No flicker moved in the glass. He thought he heard a mouse in the wall, and then not even that. At some point, weariness took him and his head tipped against a cold pane. The glass smelled of dust and old silvering.

He dreamed of Isolde.

He stood in a garden among flowers he could name. He noticed valerian not yet in bloom and thyme set in a line. She smiled, and the stain took the sun like church glass. She did not tilt her chin. She did not hide. She reached. He reached. Their hands met and the dream, cruel, ended before the warmth could travel up his arm.