Clara followed.
Up the narrow servants' stairs, past the third floor, up a second short flight she just discovered — and then a low door at the top that she had always assumed was storage.
The silhouette passed through it without opening it.
Clara tried the handle. Unlocked. She pushed it open and ducked inside.
The attic ran the length of the house — long and low-ceilinged, lit by two small windows at either end through which the pale November light came in at flat angles, illuminating dust that moved slowly in the disturbed air. It smelled of cedar and old paper and something faintly floral that had survived years of disuse.
The silhouette stood in the centre of the room and then, very quietly, dissolved — not dramatically, not all at once, but the way early morning fog dissolves when the light finds it. There, one moment. Then simply not.
Clara stood in the silence and looked around.
The attic was full.
Trunks — three of them, large, leather-bound, with brass clasps that had gone green with age. A wardrobe pushed against the slanted wall with its door slightly open, a sleeve of something dark trailing from it. Furniture draped in dusty white sheets. A rocking chair. A mirror almost the size of the wall.
And against the far window — a painting.
She crossed to it without meaning to, drawn the way she was always drawn to the things that proved the dead had belonged to someone. It was a portrait, formal and careful, in a gilt frame that had dulled with age. A man and a woman, seated, with the slightly stiff quality of people who had been asked to hold still for too long.
Her father had her uncle's jaw — broader, kinder. Her mother —
Clara looked at her mother's face for the first time in her conscious memory.
Eveline Peri had chestnut hair and warm ivory skin and eyes that were caught somewhere between brown and green, as though they had not quite decided. Clara had her mother's face. She had always known this abstractly, from her aunt's comments, from the particular way her uncle sometimes looked at her when he thought she wasn't watching.
She understood it now, standing in front of a painting in an attic she had never known existed.
Then she looked around properly.
One of the medium trunks first opened with some effort — inside, folded with the care of someone who had expected to return to them, her mother's dresses. Colours she recognised somehow, the way one recognises things from dreams. Beneath the dresses, her father's books, his pipe, a pair of leather gloves worn through at the right thumb.
A smaller trunk held papers — property documents, she saw, with Clara's name written in a formal legal hand. Land. A small estate in the eastern counties, held in trust until she was of age.
She had land. She had never known.
She filed this away carefully and kept looking.
In the corner, half-hidden behind the rocking chair, a wooden horse. Small, painted, the red worn off one side where small hands had held it too many times. She picked it up and held it for a moment and set it down very carefully.
As she removed another white sheet, shw found a small dark wood dresser with three drawers. The first held jewellery wrapped in cloth: a pearl bracelet, a cameo brooch, earrings she could imagine her mother wearing with the portrait dress. The second held folded handkerchiefs with an embroidered E in the corner.
The third drawer held a book.
Small. Cloth-covered. Dark green, with no title on the cover. Clara opened it.
On the first page, in handwriting that was careful and slightly uneven, as though the writer had been concentrating very hard:
This diary belongs to Eveline Peri, née Ashford. Written in her own hand, in the year of our Lord 1843.
Clara turned to the second page.
I have decided to write down the things I see. The transparent ones. The ones that look almost like people but are not quite — standing in corners, following me down streets, appearing at windows. I have never told anyone about them. Mother said it was an imagination. Father said it was nerves. But they are neither of those things, and I think if I write them down, they will feel less like something happening to me and more like something I can understand.
I do not know what I am yet. But I intend to find out.
Clara sat down on the attic floor with her mother's diary in her hands and read the same two paragraphs three times.
A rushed knock came at the attic door.
"Miss Clara?" Edmund's voice, slightly out of breath. "Mr. Vey is here. He says it is urgent."
She closed the diary carefully.
She held it against her chest all the way down the stairs.
Anthony was in the entrance hall, hat still on, with the look of a man who had walked quickly from somewhere and not stopped to compose himself on the way. When he saw Clara on the stairs, he came forward immediately.
"The Princess," he said without preamble. "She presented last night. Privately, before everyone else." His voice was steady, but his eyes were not. "Clara — Angelica has the birthmark. Behind her left ear. The physicians confirmed it. She has the age, she has the mark." He looked at her. "She is the true sacrifice."
Clara stood on the bottom stair with her mother's diary pressed against her chest and her mother's ruby at her throat and thought about a faceless silhouette leading her through a door she had never opened.
"She is the King's daughter," she said quietly.
"Yes," Anthony said. "She is."
They looked at each other in the entrance hall while the house ticked quietly around them, and neither of them said what they were both thinking.
They did not need to.