December 3

My good fortune with the weather as Evie and I visited Lord Carroway deCourt's magnificent home, unusual as it was for the season and the country, was quickly reduced to something rather ill indeed. I, being largely banished to my own room when not eating, was forced into close proximity with the window, and that damnable window did nothing to keep the cold out. As quickly as the sun had set on our lovely jaunt amidst horse pastures, so soon did the clouds remember their duty and the wind find new purpose in smashing itself about the walls. By the time Atticus was proficient in his vowels, the panes all around the house had fully frosted shut, making any dreams of escaping through one of them impossible.

Along with the cold, my health also suffered. The tightness in my lungs prevented me from walking downstairs for even breakfast most days (much to the annoyance of the near-mute old maid, who turned her thick eyebrows up in such a way as to suggest disappointment, though it was really hard to tell). Almost fully past his alphabet, Atticus would read to me from the newspaper as he brought my breakfast up, sitting in the window as though he could not feel the touch of winter. Though he was still an irritable sort, and mocked me at every available turn, he did seem to appreciate my teaching him, an appreciation I suspected went further than feeding me every day. How mad would I have gone, had I been trapped indoors for my entire life without the boon of being able to read or write! Even with the company of only the news, Atticus appeared much healthier himself. At least he could find some perspective on the world outside the morose walls of the doctor's house. As for myself, the goings-on of the world outside any of my given homes (here, I must wonder how my house on the cliffside is holding up) has never held any interest for me. What reason should I have for caring about the daily news when I am hardly ever able to entertain society? No, I needed to read and write of my own worlds, which were possessed with fanatics and fear and mysteries between every page. 

Having spotted my writing when I shared the letters (which I shall also make mention of - Atticus and I have employed the maid in leaving a letter for Evie to join us in reading these letters, as the newlywed took back to haunting her bedroom after our brief reconciliation), the cook's son made sure to bother me nearly every day about my fiction. I would have been angry about the bother, but the constant talk of it soon reached the doctor's ears, and in keeping with his generous nature, as Atticus often says with a snort, I found a new writing desk in my room after a rare excursion for breakfast. How the desk had snuck its way up a curving and complicated flight of stairs without so much as a thump was beyond me, but after extracting promises that neither of my friends had anything to do with it, there was nothing else to do but believe the doctor was somehow responsible for the presence of the desk. 

It was a handsome thing, built of a dark brown wood I won't pretend to know the name of. It possessed drawers on either side, handled with a little shiny bronze bar. In the centre of the desk was a groove for papers and books, and just in front of that was a sort of sliding surface where even more paper, or perhaps emergency pens, could be stored for quick use. 

It was a far greater gift than such an insolent, stubborn nobody such as myself deserved, but as Atticus pointed out, it most assuredly came with a price. 

"I've only received a gift once or twice myself," he had remarked with a dark look to the looming structure, "and each time found myself tasked with some peculiar chore that came with no explanation, only a severity of demand and time."

"Such as? Were you asked to bury body parts, or dig graves in the night?"

"You're not far off," was the solemn response. Seating himself at the desk, Atticus tapped at each little cubby and hiding place, perhaps looking for a secret in the drawers. "I've never told anyone this - though, mostly out of a lack of interested people to tell - but a few years ago, back when we had a different maid from Spain, I think - "

"Get on with it!" 

"Right, right..." He coughed, obviously unused to having a story to tell. "Right, the maid. No, not the maid, but the digging." Suddenly uncomfortable, with what I suspected was bringing to light details no doubt distressing enough to be glad of having no one to tell about it, Atticus coughed and pulled on the sliding drawer repeatedly. "Dr. Radcliffe, he'd given me a new pair of shoes. Nothing special, nothing unique, but being born of decidedly no money, new shoes mean my toes won't freeze off when it gets cold. Spilling hot water for his precious' tea won't burn my feet. New shoes." He coughed again, and I felt myself growing impatient and uncomfortable for the cost of this gift. If the task designated for the cook's son was something as bland as washing the carriage, I was sure I would hurl him from the window. 

"That night, I found him, waiting by my bedroom door. My father and I live behind the kitchens, so to see the master of the house there... A grave thing indeed." I leaned forward on the bed, pulling the blankets tighter around me.

"What did he want?"

"For me to accompany him. He had business in Dorset, wanted me to go along and mind the carriage until the time came for him to call on me. I went, of course, didn't have much of a choice there, and stood by the damn horses for nearly an hour until I heard his voice. He was attending on a house, the front door open and... off. A looming sort of shadow seemed to come from inside, as though no lights had ever been on in there. The smell... by God, Winnifred, the smell was worse than the kitchens after dinner for those fancy fucks, the ones where we have to cut up pigs and hold on to the parts nobody eats. It's too busy to throw them out, so the uneaten parts just rot until all the snobs leave, until even the doctor goes up to his room. It sits in the kitchen for hours and hours, the heat and the water we've been boiling all damn night fill that fucking pig with the worst smell in the world... That's what that house smelled like."

I trembled, my nose flaring at the vivid description. "What did he want you there for? Did you see what caused the smell?"

"No," he replied, but the way he shivered, fearsome and angry Atticus, too proud to say thank you to much as his own shadow, told me he knew in his heart what the smell was. "I did not see it, but he had me dig for hours and hours, far deeper than even a person should have been tossed into the earth, and then carry a bag he'd brought forth to fill the hole with."

"What did the bag feel like?'

"Bones. Fresh ones, at that, but I couldn't tell... if they were human or animals. They were sharp, I could feel, and wet, but he wouldn't let me open the bag. We drove back in the night and he never mentioned it to me again. "

We sat and contemplated. Distracted momentarily with the strength it would require for one to dig more than six feet straight, I pondered what sorts of bones the doctor could want to bury in the middle of the night. 

"It was a person, most likely."

"No doubt."

"They must have died earlier that day, given the smell."

"My thoughts exactly." 

"A patient?"

"A young one; they didn't weigh too much."

"And a secret."

"Secret patient, or secret death?"

Standing up and frowning out the window, Atticus rested his hands on his lower spine and sighed. "Don't go anywhere with him, Winnifred." I preferred being called little lady - there was no such grim meaning as was attached to my name when uttered from his lips. 

"What if I have no choice in the matter?"

"Pretend to faint. Do that thing with your breath, when it comes out all ragged and thin. Piss on yourself, I don't know!" He turned around and gave me a pained look. "I begged you to keep Evie safe when you left for that odd lord's house, and I'm begging you now to keep yourself save." 

I sniffed, crossing my arms as best as my covers would allow. "Just how am I supposed to keep myself save when I can't even walk up the stairs without assistance?"

"Don't put yourself in stupid situations!" 

"Just what is a stupid situation?" The door had swung inward during our conversing, and Evie peered curiously into the room, her eyes half-lidded with the melancholic stare of a woman deprived of all her previous joys. Having jumped at her presence, we waited tensely. Would she approve of a servant speaking with, although not a lady, still the protected guest of the house? Would she catalogue the event to later tell her hawkish husband? Fortunately for the both of us, she merely closed the door behind her and set the candle she'd been carrying down on my desk (giving it no strange looks or second glances, I noted). She turned back around and looked surprised to see both Atticus and myself blushing furiously at her presence. Why Atticus was red  I did not understand, though I assumed this was due to Evie being the wife of his employer, and the impertinence of him being closed up in a room with an unmarried woman. 

Blinking, Evie settled in the chair at the desk and let her hair down, shaking the auburn locks loose across her pale face. "Do go on; I've had a horridly dull day." The redness of our collective cheeks deepened at the unconscious flair of her simple beauty and we stuttered for a moment before Atticus had the sense to gain control of his thoughts and explain his warnings to me. 

"It isn't safe here," he said after telling of his nighttime favour to the doctor. "Everything he would have us do has some ulterior motive, and everywhere you go is a place that can be watched."

"This isn't a point of view derived from having grown up under the heel of his boots, is it?" Evie's response startled him into silence - he did not know whether to be offended or in agreement with her. 

"He's brought the very thing you lean on in here your husband has," I said by way of rescue. I had never seen Atticus at a loss for words, and felt highly uncomfortable with the gaping of his lips. "Why? What have I done but irritate and annoy, that I should deserve such as handsome instrument as this?" 

Evie turned her head and regarded the desk with little interest. Her fingers twisted around one another, leaving me to wonder if she had any hobbies in her newfound position that gave those hands something to bother with. I doubted it highly. "What of it? It is no secret that you enjoy writing, and your bed is hardly a place to scribble works of importance. I see nothing suspicious in the act. Is it a dangerous gift to buy you or your father a set of spoons?" She gave me and then Atticus a bemused look. "You're bored and looking for sensation where there is none." 

Nudging me in the side with an elbow, Atticus gave me a meaningful look, still unable to speak to her. I rolled my eyes at his meekness and addressed Evie with a question that the sharp elbow had asked.

"You are married to him. What is he like behind closed doors, when none of those he seeks to impress can see? Is he as nefarious as he seemed upon our initial meeting of him, the man who stole your freedom and took you from your father and your brothers and your sweet sister?" 

"Dramatic, I tell you! You are both as sensational as the woman in town when they wait on their men to finish with real work."

"I am no gossiping woman!" Atticus said at last, though the outburst was followed with a bowing of his head and the reddening of his ears, now. I suspected he would fall over from a lack of blood if he kept up the blushing! 

"I said you were like one, boy. My husband is to me as he is to you. I hardly ever see him." This bade me gasp, and I pressed her further. 

"Surely, you must!"

Scowling, she waved a hand in the air. "I ought to know, Winnifred, how much I see my own husband! I tell you, he is almost never around. You and I have about as much the same time in his presence, and he is just as mysterious and odious as he was in Dorset."

"Dorset!" At the mention of Evie's hometown, Atticus gave me a horrified look. "You... you were in Dorset?" Rolling her eyes at me, Evie asked if I had not already told this to him, to which I replied I was almost certain I had. "Nay, not a one of you told this to me before. I... surely, not Dorset." 

Turning as pale as Evie, Atticus stood and bowed his head at the both of us. "I... I have to go," he mumbled, fingers shaking the wood of the door as he pulled it open. "I should not be in here." Before I could implore him to stay or demand an answer for his suspicious state, he was gone, leaving Evie to raise an eyebrow at me.

"What was that about?"

"The digging we told you of... he said it was in Dorset." I would not have been surprised to learn that Evie thought the very same thing that I had - that house was likely the very same I had been living in, and the previous owner had been the writer of the miserable letters in the attic. Looking down at her hands, Evie mumbled something to the knuckles and the nails before looking back up at me and letting a tear fall from her eye. 

"It would seem Atticus and I share something in common, after all. I always wondered why your garden grew so beautifully with the same common soil as anywhere else."

Fearing for every detail in my life since arriving in England,

Winn