The lost Heiress

The Portrait Gallery

Wren was given a room on the second floor, in the west wing, with tall windows overlooking a garden gone slightly wild with the neglect of an old man's illness. That first night she did not sleep. She lay in a bed too soft, beneath a ceiling too high, and listened to a house full of strangers who might, if Mr. Marsh was right, be her family — and might, if her instincts about Julian Ashcombe were right, be something considerably more dangerous.

At two in the morning she gave up on sleep and went walking, a candle in hand, down the long gallery that ran the length of the west wing, where three centuries of Ashcombes looked down from their gilded frames with the same pale gray eyes, generation after generation, an unbroken thread of inheritance that had, apparently, snagged and nearly severed on the night a nursemaid carried a four-year-old girl out into the dark.

She found the portrait near the end of the gallery. A young woman, golden-haired, seated with a swan-embroidered shawl across her lap, her face turned three-quarters toward the painter with an expression of such open sweetness that Wren felt something twist in her chest before she had even read the little brass plate beneath the frame.

Margaret Ashcombe, 1868–1897. Beloved wife and mother.

Her mother. If any of this was true — if she was not the victim of some elaborate mistake, some solicitor's wishful arithmetic — this woman, dead these twenty-four years, was her mother, and had died, Wren now understood with a lurch of grief for a stranger, only a year before her own small daughter had vanished into the Bristol night.

"She died of a fever," said a voice behind her, and Wren turned to find not Julian but a girl of perhaps eighteen, red-haired, dressed in the plain gray of a lady's companion, standing at the gallery's entrance with a candle of her own. "I'm sorry — I heard someone walking and thought I ought to see who. I'm Nell. Nell Hartley. I'm companion to Lady Ashcombe, for my sins." She said this last with a wry twist of her mouth that Wren liked immediately, instinctively, the way one sometimes likes a person before any evidence has accumulated to justify it. "You're the heiress everyone's whispering about."

"I don't know what I am," Wren admitted.

Nell came to stand beside her, looking up at the portrait. "She was kind," Nell said. "Or so the older servants say — the ones who remember her. Old Simmons, the groundskeeper, he cried when he heard you might be found. Said Miss Margaret would have wanted nothing more in the world."

"And Julian? What does he want?"

Nell's expression sobered. "Julian," she said carefully, "wants what he has had for six years and has begun to think of as his own. I'd be careful, if I were you, Miss Calloway. Careful of the tea he pours you. Careful of the stairs he walks behind you on. I don't say this to frighten you. I say it because someone should, and I doubt Lady Ashcombe will trouble herself."

"That's a strange thing to say about your employer's nephew," Wren said, though even as she spoke the words she found she believed them less than she wished to.

"It's a strange house," said Nell, "and it has held a strange secret for seventeen years. I don't imagine it's grown any less dangerous for having been dug up again."

They walked the length of the gallery together, candles held low, and Nell told her, in fragments, her own story — a clergyman's daughter from Somerset, left with nothing when her father died in debt, taken in by Lady Ashcombe six years before out of what Nell suspected was less charity than a wish for company that would not challenge her position. "She is not a warm woman," Nell said, "but she is not a cruel one either, whatever her nephew may prove to be. I think she has spent so many years guarding herself against disappointment that she has forgotten how to want anything openly. Watch her closely, Miss Calloway. I think she wants to love you. I think she is simply afraid of what it will cost her if she does."

"And you?" Wren asked. "Why tell me all this? You scarcely know me."

Nell considered the question with the same wry honesty she brought to everything. "Because someone in this house ought to be on your side without wanting anything from you in return," she said. "And because I have watched Julian Ashcombe for six years, and I do not like the way he has begun, these past weeks, to look at the clock as though it were an enemy."

They parted at the gallery's end, and Wren returned to her room with the strange, steadying sense of having found, on her very first night in a house full of strangers, the one ally who might actually keep her alive to see a second. She lay awake a long while afterward, turning the day's revelations over in her mind — a solicitor's rain-soaked visit, a dead mother's kind eyes staring down from a gilded frame, a cousin's smile that did not reach his own — and thought, before sleep finally claimed her, that whatever else Ashcombe Hall might prove to be, it would not, at least, be dull.