She realised she was staring again and abruptly turned to admire the vast space instead, her face hot. “Does this go under all of the house?”
“Not quite, but nearly.” He didn’t seem to have noticed her awkwardness and motioned towards the ceiling. “There are no furnaces for the staff areas except, of course, the gardens. The house’s footprint is a bit larger than this. It was designed almost as an extravagant waste of money. So much space, so much effort, just to make the floor in a room warm. I believe it was installed to create a luxurious experience for any guests. Since the family doesn’t winter here, we almost never use the furnaces. The normal fireplaces work faster and are easier to control.”
“I guess sometimes people have things just so that they can say they have them.”
“Precisely.” He slipped his shirt on and buttoned it up. That was a relief and a disappointment all at once. “I’m about done here for now. Would you like to go back to the gardens? Or I could take you to your room.”
Awed by the space and the massive brick structures, Clare had almost forgotten about the figure she’d seen outside the hothouse. She guessed that had been Dorran’s intention: to talk until she didn’t feel scared anymore. It had worked.
She looked down at the jar of seeds. “We still have more work to do in the garden, don’t we?”
“I can take care of it later if you prefer.”
“No. I want to help. Just as long as you stay with me.”
He dipped his head. “Of course I will. Let me help you up the stairs.”
The rest of the day passed quickly. Dorran didn’t leave Clare alone again. When he went to make lunch, she followed. When she needed the bathroom, he waited outside the door, where she could still hear him.
By the time they returned to the bedroom, they had planted dozens of rows of seeds. Some of the plants that had sprouted would grow quickly. Others wouldn’t be ready to harvest for four or five months. Even though they likely wouldn’t need them by that point, Dorran had wanted to plant them anyway as a precaution.
Clare slept well that night. Occasionally, she thought she heard scraping, scrabbling noises chasing her through her dreams. But whenever she woke, she found Dorran not far away—either sleeping on the other side of the bed, pacing near the windows, or reading in one of the wingback chairs.
He kept the fire hot through the night. When Clare got up the following morning, she didn’t feel how cold the day was until she approached the windows. The bite of winter still seeped through, hard and angry. She thought the temperature might still be dropping. Snow continued to fall from heavy dark-grey clouds.
They slipped into something like a routine. Dorran was unbelievably patient. Clare didn’t think she would have had the stamina to revolve her life around another person, but he did it almost automatically.
They alternated their time between the garden and the bedroom. There were dozens of rooms in the house that Clare wasn’t familiar with—libraries, ballrooms, smoke rooms, and parlours—the kinds of spaces that rarely existed in modern houses but seemed perfectly natural at Winterbourne Hall. Their excursions into those other areas were infrequent, though. With just two of them, there wasn’t the time or any reason to try to heat the whole house. If Dorran wanted to pick up a new book from the library, they would don their jackets, leave the warm, safe rooms, and brave the near-freezing temperatures in the rest of the house for the shortest amounts of time possible.
Clare still saw the phantoms and still heard them. They followed her in her mind if not in reality. She could hear their soft, patient scratching whenever she listened, as well as their rasping, gasping breaths. And sometimes, especially when she was tired or confused, she would look up and see the shadows lurking in the hallways or hidden in the rooms’ corners, watching her.
She never said anything to Dorran, but she thought he guessed. He’d developed a habit of distracting her whenever she stared at one of the clumps of darkness for too long. He would pull her attention to something solid and concrete, such as a book, a task, or even just easy chatter.
And he kept the lights on for her. Wherever they went, he turned on lights, chasing out the shadows and leaving the space bright and clear. Clare tried to argue. There was no room for wastefulness when they needed the fuel to power the hothouse. Dorran’s response was always the same. “It isn’t a waste.”
She could see worry in his eyes. Desperation, even. She hated being a burden. He never said or did anything to make her feel like one, but she knew what she was. The poison’s effects were slow to recede. She grew tired easily and couldn’t handle long flights of stairs without becoming breathless.
Clare did what she could to be useful. She chopped herbs while Dorran diced and fried the frozen meat to mix into the soup. She matched him in tending to the garden, monitoring humidity and heat levels, and holding his ladder steady when he needed to replace a blown bulb. When she grew too tired to do that, she would sit and read for Dorran while he worked. The days almost always ended the same. She would doze off in the seat in the room’s corner and wake up later that night in her bed, with the book—its place marked with a bookmark—lying on her bedside table, and Dorran within reaching distance.
The weather outside varied. Some days, sleet would pound at the house and leave a frosty coating over the chilled stones. Other days, snow fell. Twice, there were more thunderstorms and even a small smattering of hail, though it didn’t grow as large as the day they’d been trapped in the cottage. She preferred the days with sleet. It tamped down the snow, reducing the drifts and making it look almost possible to walk over the field again.
There was only one clear day that week. Sunlight glittered off the endless blankets of white. Clare had the impression that the sun felt a bit like she did—dazed and disoriented. It warmed the air’s temperature enough to start melting the snow, but more dark clouds rolled in that afternoon to undo the effort.
On the sunny day, she broached the idea of trying to reach the car again. Dorran crossed to the window and stared across the field of white for several minutes. Clare, sitting by the fire, knitted her hands together while she waited.
After an agonising pause, he said, “I don’t think we can risk it again yet. You’re not well enough to travel that distance. Not safely.”
She bristled. “I’m doing better.”
“You are.” He turned back from the window and smiled. “I’m happy. But those snowdrifts are going to be challenging, even for me. And if we’re caught out by another storm…”
She understood. The weather had been unpredictable, bordering on insane. One minute, the air outside the house could be still and silent. The next, freezing, screaming gusts swept through, catching up flurries of snow and assaulting the already-damaged manor.
“I could try to go alone.” Dorran scratched the back of his neck. “But even that’s risky. If something happened to me out there, you would be trapped here alone.”
She stood, crossed the space, and rested a hand on his arm as she tried not to laugh. “If something happened to you… I’d be lonely? That’s what you worry about? Not the fact that you’d be—you know, dead?”
She could feel his chuckles reverberating out of his chest. “All right, that wouldn’t be good either.”
“You worry about me too much.”
“I’m more selfish than you give me credit for.” He patted her hand. “I think being alone could be worse than death in some situations.”