Rose started taking Charles into the gardens, the ones Eleanor had once tended herself, now overgrown and forgotten. She did not ask permission. She simply began pulling weeds beside him, teaching him the names of flowers his mother used to grow. Slowly and quietly, she restored small routines nobody else remembered: a Sunday walk to the pond, a bedtime song hummed just off-key, and leaving the nursery window cracked open for the morning birds.
Duke Sinclair watched all of this from a distance, unsure what to make of it. He told himself he was merely observing his son's progress, but he found himself lingering in hallways longer than necessary, listening for Charles's laugh and for the voice that seemed to summon it so easily. One afternoon, he caught Rose teaching Charles to skip stones at the pond, the exact spot, though he said nothing of it, where Eleanor used to take him as a baby. Charles smiled every time Rose clapped for him.
It unsettled the Duke how effortless it looked.
The household began to whisper. The cook remarked that the manor breathed differently since the new governess came. Even old Mrs. Pratt, the housekeeper who had watched the hopes of three governesses die in the past year, admitted she had never seen the boy attach himself to anyone so quickly.
But Rose carried something she showed no one.
Each night, once Charles was asleep, she slipped out a side door and crossed the frozen grounds to the manor's abandoned chapel, the one nobody had opened since the funeral. She lit a single candle at the Duchess's grave and laid fresh flowers, always the same kind: white lilies, Eleanor's favorite. She never stayed long. She never explained it to anyone, and she made certain no one saw her go, or so she believed.
One night, the Duke could not sleep. He noticed a light moving across the dark lawn and followed it out of curiosity, staying well behind the trees so as not to be seen. He watched Rose kneel at his late wife's grave, arranging the lilies with careful hands, her head bowed. He almost stepped forward and asked why a governess he had hired only weeks ago would grieve his wife as if she had known her.
Then he heard Rose speak so quietly he almost missed it. The words carried faintly on the winter air.
"I promised I would protect him."
The Duke went still. Protect him, not care for him, not watch over him the way any hired governess might speak of a charge. Protect. As though it were a vow made long before she ever set foot in Blackthorne Manor.
He wanted to step out from the trees and demand an answer, but something stopped him. Perhaps it was the same instinct that told him not to trust too quickly. Instead, he watched her rise, brush the frost from her skirts, and walk back toward the house without ever knowing she had been seen. The Duke stood alone by the chapel for a long while afterward, staring at his wife's grave.
For the first time in a year, a new kind of question kept him from sleep. Who exactly was Rose Winthrop?