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Because of me. The knowledge turned her stomach. I did this. I sent him off.

The passage seemed to tip. All the justifications, the clean anger, the surety that she had been wronged, went to dust. Angelo was leaving. If he left he might never come. She might live out her years with Papa’s charge and Mama’s absence and the wind’s old mock, wondering what an hour of listening would have bought.

Perhaps I made a play of it, she thought, and the thought hurt. Perhaps I ought to have let him speak.

She saw the hours in the tower, turning his sentence until it grew horns. To soften the look of— But what had he meant? That she wanted fixing? That her face would not do? Or had he only offered a tool, a choice, a way to walk in a room if she wished it?

She had not let him say. She had run, as she always ran, into shade rather than stand still for the terror of being seen.

I have lived in these walls too long. Papa’s charge sits in my ears. Loneliness has settled in the bone. I am a little mad with it. And I have driven off the one soul who made me feel awake.

She had to stop him. She had to reach him before the coach took the road. In her life, people came to Grimsfell. They did not come again.

She spun and ran. She took the known turns down toward the kitchen. Mrs. Roskelly would know. Mrs. Roskelly could catch him.

The hidden leaf into the pantry gave on an empty room. The hearth held only a low red, and she heard no hum of work. The housekeeper was elsewhere at her tasks, and Isolde had no minutes to hunt her through a house this size.

Think.

She went back into the walls and took them at a tear. A cobweb caught her mouth. She spat it and kept on. Her breath came ragged. Her shoulder grazed stone at every turn she took too fast. She passed grate after grate. The morning room stood empty; a cup still sat on the table with tea skin on it. The dining room was empty too, the chairs pushed in as if a meal had never happened. Lorenzo’s chamber held only a folio open on the bed and no Lorenzo in it. Time leaked while she hunted a gray gown and a set of keys.

Then, through the grate in Nicholas’s room, she saw Mrs. Roskelly’s gray shape bent over the bed with an armful of clean linen.

“Mrs. Roskelly!” Isolde hissed, face to the iron. “Quickly. Please.”

The housekeeper gave a cry that would have been comic on another morning and clutched the sheets. “Mercy! Miss Isolde, ye’ll put me in the ground yet, coming out of stone like a tale.”

“I am sorry. Come here. Please.”

Still muttering, Cornish that Isolde suspected was not a blessing, Mrs. Roskelly shuffled to the grate and peered into the dark. A sheet trailed. She hiked it up. “What is it, child? What’s gone wrong now? Ye look as if the house itself has gone against ye.”

“Angelo. Mr. Scott. Where is he going? I heard him speak of Truro and botanists. He is leaving. You must learn his plan. You must stop him before⁠—”

“The younger Mr. Scott?” A crease formed in the weathered face. “The one who’s been at me two days, begging a line carried to some mystery woman in the walls?”

Isolde’s heart clenched. “He … he tried to send word?”

“Aye, and I did as ye’ve always bid. Gave him nothing. Not a nod. Not a name. Played the dull housekeeper who hears mice in the walls and calls them mice. Though I’ll say this.” The next line came softer. The linen crackled in her arms. “I’ve not seen a young man look so cut down. Stood in my pantry with his hat in his hands like a boy at a back door. Near broke my heart, watching him ask.”

Cut down. He had begged. And she, in pride and hurt, had told Mrs. Roskelly to give him nothing but her walls.

Fool.

“I was wrong.” The words scraped. “So wrong, Mrs. Roskelly. I let fear drive. I let a drawing-room slight and a handful of hard looks sink into me and stain more than my cheek. And now …”

She stopped. She put a hand at her mouth because a sob was waiting.

“Now what, child?”

“Now I have sent him off.” The voice broke. “If I cannot give him even a scrap of trust, if I cannot take the smallest risk, how do I ask him to stay? He has tried. I have given him quiet. And he is going, and I may not see him again.”

Mrs. Roskelly was still a while. Then, slow, she put work-rough fingers through the grate and patted Isolde’s cheek.

“Then maybe,” she said, the edge gone out of it, “it’s time ye left these walls and went to him yerself.”

The words landed like a clap.

Go to him. Leave the ways. Step into day.