Chapter 1
Miss Rose Tregarth had never in her life been accused of lacking in confidence or a fiery sense of purpose. Even her late mother, who had organised her father’s parish with unstoppable determination, had sighed over Rose’s more grandiose and implausible plans ...
But no one in her family had ever doubted that she would fight to carry out those plans with full conviction. So, Rose had to confess that it was genuinely shocking – and more than a bit shameful – that even now, thirteen months after she had lost both of her parents, the firmly titled and double-underlined new Grand Plan for the Future in her commonplace book was still terrifyingly blank. Even the act of forcing herself to look at it filled her stomach with sinking dread.
This morning, for the third day in a row, Rose had sat down in her cousins’ cosy family parlour with the firm intention of finally planning out a new future for herself: a future full of significant, meaningful goals that would help the world and, even more urgently, ensure that she would no longer remain a burden upon the distant relatives who had welcomed her into their home seven months earlier.
For better or worse, though, whenever more than one member of that particular family gathered together, it was only too easy for Rose to be distracted ... and her cousin Beth’s sudden, tearful announcement as she burst into the parlour shattered Rose’s willpower entirely.
“What do you mean ‘we’ve been overrun by terrifying monsters’?” Rose demanded, setting down her quill pen.
“Oh, never mind Beth’s latest nonsense!” Rose’s favourite cousin, twenty-year-old Georgiana, sprawled across the battered couch beside Rose’s chair, attired – as was customary when only family was present – in a well-worn gentleman’s riding jacket and breeches. Georgie grinned with mischievous intent as she crossed her long, booted legs and settled even more comfortably against the couch’s frayed and faded cushions. “She always gets spooked by the shadows in the buttery, and they always turn out to only be mice. I want to hear a more exciting story. Let’s have Serena’s latest theory about our mysterious new neighbour!”
As Rose’s sweet, anxious, fifteen-year-old cousin, Beth, launched into an impassioned protest of Georgie’s heartlessness (“You won’t be laughing tomorrow morning when you wake up to find that your toes and fingers have been nibbled off while you were sleeping!”), Rose’s outrageously romantic oldest cousin, Serena, launched into an even louder accounting of why their closest neighbour – whom none of them had ever met – was so deliciously sinister and, in fact, very probably a ghoul.
Georgie shamelessly egged on both of them while the family’s scruffy, long-haired, brown-and-white dog, Cwtch, ran back and forth across the ancient carpet, yipping an excited accompaniment to their debate. Meanwhile, Aunt Parry ignored them all as she bent over her writing desk, caught up in a storm of creative invention and all-too-clearly sealed apart from the noisy world around her ... including her own youngest child, Rupert, who was currently finger-painting the wall beside her with strong tea, humming happily as he worked.
As she looked upon the chaotic scene, Rose swiftly sealed her inkwell and set aside her commonplace book with a feeling of guilty relief. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to find a new purpose, of course; it was simply too absurd for any reasonable being to sit back and ignore this sort of tangle when she had the ability to put it right.
... And ever since Rose had first arrived at her romantically crumbling new home seven months ago, it had been clear that no one else would ever bother.
The truth was every newly met relative in Gogodd Abbey was perfectly darling, from Rose’s passionate scribbler of a wild-haired ‘aunt’ – really a second cousin twice removed – and her sweet hermit of a soft-voiced, scholarly ‘uncle,’ all the way down to her astonishingly energetic youngest cousin, who exhausted even his long-suffering nurse on a near daily basis. Still, their ancient and beautiful abbey-cum-manor house, deep within a lush Welsh valley, had already half-tumbled into medieval ruins. More and more bits of Gogodd Abbey chipped away before Rose’s sight every day, even from the most relatively modern of its sections.
It was only too easy for her to imagine the moment when the rest would inevitably collapse upon her relatives’ adorable heads, without any of them thinking to take even the slightest of precautions beforehand.
Rose knew exactly how it felt to lose a beloved home. The least she could do, before she finally sorted out her own shining new future full of purpose, was to make certain that the relatives who’d offered her safe harbour wouldn’t be crushed by dangerous masonry after she left. And when it came to an infestation of pests, just as the first visitor her shy uncle had ever invited was finally expected to arrive ...
“I’ll investigate for myself,” she murmured to Georgie as the battle continued to rage around them. “I expect you’re right and it was only a mouse that startled Beth, but if my fingers and toes are nibbled off, you’ll have to be the one who feeds me from now on.”
“Naturally.” Georgie’s agreement was solemn. “Beth would sob into your food if she did it, and then the taste would be ruined.” One dark eyebrow quirked as she tilted her head. “D’you want me to come along and protect you from the monsters, coz?”
“Hardly.” Rose snorted as she stood, twitching the twice-mended skirts of her pink morning gown into place. “First of all, I don’t require anyone’s protection. Secondly, if there were any real monsters, you’d only start a fight with them for fun. Then I’d be left to clean up all the blood as you peacocked about the house afterwards!”
“Undeniably true.” Georgie winked. “But just imagine how dashing I’d look as I did it! Why—”
“Silence, everyone! This is urgent.” Aunt Parry ripped off her spectacles and waved her quill pen for attention, black ink spattering with abandon, until the room went obediently still. Even Rupert abandoned his careful tea-painting to gaze up at her expectantly. “If you were a villainous dark knight in ancient times, intent upon seducing an innocent young heiress after a desperately brutal joust, which emblem would you carry on your shield? A broken tulip or a wolf?”
“Both,” Rose said decisively, and left the rest of the company to argue passionately over the medieval details.
Still, she found a smile tugging on her lips as she strode through the low-roofed maze of familiar, scruffy rooms towards the abandoned buttery where poor Beth had, in her own telling, been ‘very nearly attacked’ and had ‘escaped only just in time’. The skirts of Rose’s inherited gown swished purposefully about her legs as she passed through every dark, wooden door along the way, and she felt like a medieval knight herself, setting out to battle a mysterious new menace in defence of her family’s honour.
She might not have any interest in the approaching visitor whose academic brilliance her uncle so admired, but she had every interest in keeping her new family safe, happy, and well-regarded. Uncle Parry had been bursting with unmistakable agitation for well over a week now, peering out of the windows at all times of day and night, bemoaning his promised visitor’s increasing number of delays, and pacing through the house like a restless ghost as he’d fretted over whichever intellectual puzzle had led him to summon such urgent scholarly assistance.
The least Rose could do was keep his long-awaited visitor from being frightened away at the door by marauding rodents.
Also, she had to confess it was quite satisfying to have a goal that didn’t require any uncomfortable soul-searching on her part, unlike the abandoned Grand Plan in her commonplace book. Ever since she had been ripped apart from her sisters, each of them granted sanctuary by a different branch of their family, Rose had often felt wrapped in a distancing white fog that blocked every milestone from view. That fog felt far thinner nowadays whenever she was surrounded by her relatives, even if they weren’t the beloved sisters with whom she’d grown up. Actively working to make her new family safe and happy made the fog nearly disappear.
All that she had to do now, as she stepped into the cluttered and shadowy buttery, full of broken furniture and other long-abandoned items, was establish the facts, devise a simple strategy, and—
“Oh!” Rose startled back, heart flying into her throat, as something hurtled over her moving feet and flashed past her. It was gone before she could get a proper look, absorbed into the deeper shadows behind the heavy-looking oak armoire that stood along the closest wall.
Not a mouse after all! It was far too large even to have been a rat. She’d caught only an impression – sleek, long, dark, fast – as it had tangled with her skirts in the shadows, and yet ... if she hadn’t known better ...
“Don’t be absurd.” Rose stiffened her spine and quelled her rioting imagination with the image of her invariably sensible older sister. What would Elinor say if she were here? “Oh, Rose. You know this isn’t one of your silly novels!”
Even Rose had to admit that she had been rather prone to falling into romantic flights of fancy when she was younger ...
But somewhere across this hard and fogbound last year, she had learned not to believe in impossibilities anymore. “Be sensible,” she whispered to herself.
