The woman pacing in the garden looked perfectly alive.
That was the worst part, always. Not the ones who came trailing shadow and rot — those were easier to recognise. Those announced themselves with sight and smell.
No, the ones that made Clara's breath catch were the ones who simply stood there, solid and coloured and specific, looking exactly as they had on the last morning of their lives.
This one was young. Twenty, perhaps twenty-two. She had a housemaid's face — practical, a little tired, the kind of face that belonged to early mornings and cold water and work that left no trace of itself. Brown hair pinned neatly. A blue wool dress, the colour still bright. Hands clasped in front of her, and the third finger of her left hand — Clara noticed this the way she noticed everything, quietly and at a distance — still wore the faint indent of a ring recently removed.
She had been pacing the same three steps for three days.
Clara stood at the edge of the hedgerow with her herb basket and watched a footman walk directly through her.
The footman continued toward the kitchen entrance without breaking stride. The dead woman did not flinch. She simply continued her three steps — forward, turn, forward, turn — as though the intrusion had not happened, as though she existed in a world that ran parallel to the living one and occasionally, terribly, intersected.
Clara looked away before anyone could catch her staring.
She was very good at looking away.
Inside, the house smelled of beeswax and her aunt's particular perfume — something floral that had always struck Clara as slightly aggressive, as though it were competing with the rooms rather than inhabiting them.
She set the herb basket in the kitchen and went upstairs to change her gloves, passing her aunt on the landing.
"You've been in the garden again." Her aunt did not look up from the letter she was reading. She had a talent for delivering observations that were not quite accusations — statements stripped of warmth, dropped precisely enough to bruise. "Your hem."
Clara looked down. A faint streak of mud along the dark wool. "I'll see to it."
"You'll give it to Martha to see to it. That is what Martha is for." A pause, deliberate, the kind her aunt had perfected over years of managing a household full of people she considered beneath her patience. "Though perhaps you feel that sort of thing is beneath the distinction."
She moved past before Clara could answer. She usually did.
Clara stood on the landing for a moment. Through the window at the end of the hall, she could see the east garden below — the hedgerow, the gravel path, and the young woman in the blue dress, still pacing her three steps.
She went to change her gloves.
Dinner that evening was the particular kind of quiet that had texture.
Her uncle sat at the head of the table — a large man, grey at the temples, with the look of someone perpetually braced against inconvenience. He had kind eyes, Clara had always thought, though she had spent considerable effort over the years trying to reconcile those eyes with the rest of him. He noticed her when she sat down and gave a small nod — the nod of a man who was trying, in whatever limited way he permitted himself, and knew it was not enough.
Her step-sisters, Cecily and Dora, occupied the middle of the table in the easy way of girls who had grown up assuming they belonged wherever they sat. Cecily was seventeen and pretty and knew it precisely. Dora was fifteen and still deciding what to do with herself. They had their mother's talent for speaking around Clara rather than to her — not with cruelty, exactly, but with the particular thoughtlessness of people for whom someone else has always simply been there.
"Lady Hargrove's daughter is being presented in March," Cecily said to no one in particular.
"Her dress allowance is obscene," said Dora.
"Everything about the Hargroves is obscene. It's half the appeal."
Clara ate her soup and said nothing. A candle near the centre of the table had burned at an angle all evening, wax pooling on one side. She had been watching it drip. Nobody else had noticed.
She was used to noticing the things nobody else did.
Later, helping herself to bread because the footman had neglected her end of the table, she caught her reflection in the dark window glass — a girl with chestnut hair dressed simply, warm ivory skin going slightly golden in the candlelight, hazel eyes that looked brown in this light and something closer to green in others, as though they had not quite decided. Her mother's ruby sat at the hollow of her throat. She touched it without thinking.
She had her mother's face, her aunt had said once — not as a compliment. She had said it the way one might note an unfortunate inheritance. You have your mother's face, and then a silence that completed the sentence without words.
Clara had looked at herself in the mirror after that and tried to see what her aunt saw. She still was not sure. She only knew that the face looking back at her was the one she had been given, and she intended to keep using it.