The knock at the front door came at 10:00 past the hour. She heard it from upstairs. One sharp knock, deliberate, not hesitant.
She heard the stir of the night footman roused from his chair, the slow approach of footsteps, the groan of the front door on its hinges. She heard a voice, low, male, impossible to distinguish from this distance.
She heard the footman’s voice in response. She was already at her bedroom door, already in the corridor, moving toward the landing before she had decided to move.
She looked down the staircase. He He was standing in the entrance hall of Whitmore House and he had no hat. She saw that first, the absence of it, the way his hair was disordered as though he had come on foot and come quickly.
He had no gloves, either. He was still in his evening clothes from wherever he had spent the first part of the night. And there was about him an entire absence of the careful composure that had been his most consistent feature in all the weeks she had known him as an adult.
He looked up. She was standing at the top of the stairs in her dressing gown with her dark hair loose around her shoulders and a candle in her hand and she was 20 years old.
And she was also 10 years old in a corridor. And the two things existed in the same moment without contradiction. He stared at her.
She watched him take a breath that seemed to cost him something. I remember everything. His voice carried up the staircase without effort.
Low, rough, entirely unguarded. The corridor. The candles. You told me not to stand by cold windows or I’d catch a chill.