He found the staircase with no trouble at all. And he found his way up it without mishap. He found his room without having to feel his way along the wall. He had done it in darkness on numerous occasions when he had sneaked out of the house and in again before daylight.
He turned the knob on his door and stepped inside the room. He hoped there were at least blankets on the bed. He was too tired to worry about sheets. But when he found the bed, he discovered that it was made up as if he had been expected—and he remembered his mother saying that she had left instructions with the biweekly cleaners that the house always be kept ready for the unexpected arrival of a family member.
He removed his coat and boots and cravat and lay down gratefully between the sheets. He felt as if he could sleep for a week.
Perhaps he would spend a week here, alone and quiet in these achingly familiar surroundings, unencumbered by any company other than Martin’s. That should be enough time to get his head firmly on his shoulders so that he could go back to Middlebury Park to live and not merely to drift onward.
He had given instructions that the carriage be hidden from sight without delay. He had told Martin to inform anyone who asked that he had come alone to visit his parents at the smithy and that his master had granted him permission to stay at Covington House. Martin would have to tell only one person and within an hour everyone would know.
No one would know he was here too.
It all sounded like bliss.
He fell asleep before he could fully enjoy the feeling.
2
Vincent’s arrival had not gone unobserved.
Covington House was the last building at one end of the main street through the village. To the far side of it was a low hill covered with trees. There was a young woman on that hill and among those trees. She wandered at all times of day about the countryside surrounding Barton Hall, where she lived with her aunt and uncle, Sir Clarence and Lady March, though she was not often out quite this early. But this morning she had woken when it was still dark and had been unable to get back to sleep. Her window was open, and a bird with a particularly strident call had obviously not noticed that dawn had not yet arrived. So, rather than shut her window and climb back into bed, she had dressed and come outside, chilly as the early morning air was, because there was something rare and lovely about watching the darkness lift away from another dawning day. And she had come here in particular because the trees housed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of birds, many of them with sweeter voices than the one that had awoken her, and they always sang most earnestly when they were heralding a new day.
She stood very still so as not to disturb them, her back against the sturdy trunk of a beech tree, her arms stretched out about it behind her to enjoy its rough texture through her thin gloves—so thin, in fact, that the left thumb and right forefinger had already worn through. She drank in the beauty and peace of her surroundings and ignored the cold, which penetrated her almost threadbare cloak as if it were not even there, and set her fingers to tingling.
She looked down upon Covington House, her favorite building in Barton Coombs. It was neither a mansion nor a cottage. It was not even a manor. But it was large and square and solid. It was also deserted and had been since before she came here to live two years ago. It was still owned by the Hunt family, about whom she had heard many stories, perhaps because Vincent Hunt, the only son, had unexpectedly inherited a title and fortune a few years ago. It was the stuff of fairy tales, except that it had a sad component too, as many fairy tales did.
She liked to look at the house and imagine it as it might have been when the Hunts lived there—the absentminded but much-loved schoolmaster, his busy wife and three pretty daughters, and his exuberant, athletic, mischievous son, who was always the best at whatever sport was being played and always at the forefront of any waggery that was brewing and always adored by old and young alike—except by the Marches, against whom his pranks were most often directed. She liked to think that if she had lived here then, she would have been friends with the girls and perhaps even with their brother, although they were all older than she. She liked to picture herself running in and out of Covington House without even knocking at the door, almost as if she belonged there. She liked to imagine that she would have attended the village school with all the other children, except Henrietta March, her cousin, who had been educated at home by a French governess.
She was Sophia Fry, though her name was rarely used. She was known by her relatives, when she was known as anything at all, and perhaps by their servants too, as the mouse. She lived at Barton Hall on sufferance because there was nowhere else for her to go. Her father was dead; her mother had left them long ago and since died; her uncle, Sir Terrence Fry, had never had anything to do with either her father or her; and the elder of her paternal aunts, to whom she had been sent first after her father’s passing, had died two years ago.
She felt sometimes that she inhabited a no-man’s-land between the family at Barton Hall and the servants, that she belonged with neither group and was noticed and cared about by neither. She consoled herself with the fact that her invisibility gave her some freedom at least. Henrietta was always hedged about with maids and chaperons and a vigilant mother and father, whose sole ambition for her was that she marry a titled gentleman, preferably a wealthy one, though that was not an essential qualification, as Sir Clarence was himself a rich man. Henrietta shared her parents’ ambitions, with one notable exception.
Sophia’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of horses approaching from beyond the village, and it was soon obvious that they were drawing some sort of carriage. It was very early in the day for travel. It was a stagecoach, perhaps? She stepped around the trunk of the tree and half hid behind it, though it was unlikely she would be seen from below. Her cloak was gray, her cotton bonnet nondescript in both style and color, and it was still not full daylight.