Chapter 10: Mrs. Pryce

The door swung open on Mrs. Pryce, candle in one hand, dressing gown pulled tight against the night's chill, her expression carrying none of the surprise Chloe had braced herself for.

"I wondered how long it would take you," she said quietly, stepping inside and closing the door behind her with a care that suggested she had no intention of alerting the rest of the house to this conversation. "I saw the light from the corridor. I should have known better than to hope you'd wait until morning."

Chloe stayed pressed against the wall a moment longer, heart still hammering, before she made herself straighten and face the older woman properly. "You knew about the cabinet."

"I've known about that cabinet for twenty years, miss. I was the one who helped your mother lock it, the week before she died." Mrs. Pryce crossed the room slowly, set her candle down on the small reading table, and looked at Chloe with an expression that had finally shed its careful, professional distance, something older and more tired underneath it. "I assume, given the hour, you've already read the letter."

"I watched her write it, in the end." Mrs. Pryce's voice caught, just slightly, before she recovered it. "Sit down, miss. You're white as the candle wax. This will go easier if neither of us is standing."

Chloe sank into the chair across from her, the folder and letter still clutched against her chest like something she wasn't yet ready to set down. "You knew about the letter too."

"I watched her write it." Something moved across Mrs. Pryce's face, grief held carefully in check by decades of practice at holding things in check. "She trusted very few people by the end, Miss Amber. I was fortunate enough to remain one of them, though I've spent every year since wondering whether I actually deserved that trust, given how little I've managed to do with it."

Chloe felt something in her chest loosen slightly, some tension she hadn't fully realized she was carrying. "Then you're not the one who wrote this." She pulled the newer note from where she'd tucked it back into the folder, holding it out. "This wasn't her handwriting. It's recent. Someone's been watching the succession question, making sure it stays unresolved."

Mrs. Pryce took the note with visibly steadying hands, read it once, and went very still, her expression shifting into something Chloe hadn't seen from her before: genuine alarm.

"This wasn't here," she said quietly. "Not when I last looked inside this cabinet, which was some months ago, when I finally worked up the courage to check on it myself. Someone else has had access since then. Someone who knew exactly where to look, and exactly what to say once they found it."

"Who?"

"I don't know." Mrs. Pryce set the note down carefully, as though it might do further damage simply by being handled too roughly. "But I have my suspicions, and I'd rather not name them aloud in a house with this many ears, even at this hour."

"My father."

Mrs. Pryce's silence answered the question more clearly than any words could have.

"He's not a monster, whatever you're imagining right now," she said finally, choosing her words with obvious care. "I don't believe he means you harm, not directly. I believe he's frightened, and has been frightened for a very long time, of what happens to this family's standing if the Ashworth name resurfaces publicly with you attached to it. Fear makes people do a great many quiet, deniable things they'd never admit to doing outright."

"That doesn't make it better."

"No. It doesn't." Mrs. Pryce lowered herself slowly into the chair beside the reading table, the movement of a woman whose knees had earned the right to complain after decades of standing at attention in this house. "Your mother knew what she was leaving behind when she married your father. She believed, for a long time, that she could build something new without the old world following her here. I think, by the end, she understood she'd been wrong about that. I think that's why she wrote the letter at all."

"What was she leaving behind, exactly? The letter mentions a name. Ashworth. It doesn't explain what that actually means."

"It's not my place to explain the whole of it," Mrs. Pryce said, and held up a hand before Chloe could protest. "Not because I don't trust you with it, miss, whatever changed in you this week, and something clearly has. Because I genuinely don't know the whole of it myself. Your mother kept the deepest parts of that history close, even from me. I know pieces. I know the shape of the silence better than I know what it was built to hide."

"What pieces do you know?"

Mrs. Pryce was quiet for a moment, choosing carefully. "I know the Ashworth family was significant enough that leaving it was considered, by the people she left behind, something closer to a scandal than a marriage. I know there were others in line, before you, who might have inherited what your mother walked away from, and that some of them were not pleased to learn a daughter existed at all who might one day complicate that arrangement further. Beyond that, I know only what any servant learns from standing quietly in rooms where important people forget she's listening. Fragments. Not the whole shape of the thing."

"And my father knew all of this when he married her."

"I believe so, yes. I believe that's rather why he married her, if I'm honest, whatever affection may have grown between them afterward." Mrs. Pryce's mouth thinned, an old disapproval surfacing briefly before she smoothed it away again. "Your father is not a cruel man, Miss Amber. But he has always understood, better than most, the value of a connection most people never see the full shape of. I don't think it ever occurred to him that the daughter born from that connection might grow up to want the truth of it for herself."

"Then who does know the whole of it?"

Mrs. Pryce considered the question for a long moment, weighing something behind her tired eyes. "There's a solicitor," she said finally. "A man named Aldous Fenwick, based some distance from here. He handled your mother's private affairs for years, quietly, separately from anything your father's own lawyers ever touched. If anyone still living understands the full shape of the Ashworth succession, and what it might mean for you, it's him."

"Is he safe to approach?"

"I couldn't promise you that with any certainty. I can promise you he was loyal to your mother, once, and that loyalty of that particular kind tends to outlast a great many other things." Mrs. Pryce rose, gathering her candle again, some decision visibly settling into place behind her expression. "I'll get you his direction. Quietly. It will take a few days to manage without drawing attention to it."

"Why are you helping me now? You could have told me none of this. Left the door closed, the way you clearly intended to for years."

"Because your mother asked me, the week she died, to watch over you as best I could, for as long as I was able." Something fierce and old moved briefly across Mrs. Pryce's composed features, the closest thing to open emotion Chloe had seen from her yet. "I've spent years telling myself that watching over you meant keeping this particular door shut, protecting you from a truth I was afraid you weren't ready to survive. I see now I had that backward. You've spent this whole week proving you're considerably stronger than I gave you credit for. I won't make the mistake of underestimating you again."

She moved toward the door, pausing once with her hand on the frame, the same instinctive gesture Kesworth had made two nights before, as though every person in this house who knew a piece of the truth couldn't help but hesitate one final moment before finally choosing to leave a little of it behind them.

"Lock the cabinet again before you go, miss. Keep the key somewhere no one else would think to look. And be careful, in the coming days, who you let see this new version of you too closely." Her eyes held something almost like warning, and almost like hope, in equal measure. "Not everyone in this house is going to welcome the daughter your mother actually raised you to become."

She left before Chloe could ask what, precisely, that meant, footsteps fading unhurried down the dark corridor. Chloe sat alone in the library a while longer, the newer note still resting on the table beside her mother's letter, the candle burning lower with every passing minute she didn't move to relight it.

She thought about Fenwick, a name she'd never once encountered in three readings of a novel that had apparently never thought her mother's history worth a single page. She thought about the unnamed people in line before her, resentful of a daughter they'd never met, and about a father who'd married into a silence and then spent twenty years quietly maintaining it, whether out of fear or convenience or some private calculation she still didn't fully understand. She thought, most of all, about her mother sitting in this exact room, writing a letter she must have known, even while writing it, might never reach her daughter in time to matter.

She locked the cabinet before she left, exactly as instructed, and carried the key back to her room pressed against her palm the entire way, understanding that the quiet, careful war she'd stumbled into had already been going on for years before she'd ever opened her eyes in this body at all. She was simply, for the first time, one of the people now allowed to know it existed.