Chapter 14: The Question of What Four Hundred Years of Damage Looks Like

The morning after Lydia's disclosure was grey and unhelpful, the sort of November sky that offered neither the drama of a proper storm nor the honesty of clear cold, but merely sat above Hertfordshire in a condition of undecided damp that matched, Cecilia thought, the present state of her own reasoning rather more precisely than was comfortable.

She had slept four hours. She knew this because she had heard the long-case clock in the hall mark each of them individually, each stroke landing with the particular self-satisfaction of a clock that had no concerns beyond its own accuracy and therefore found the night entirely restful.

She was in the library by seven, before her father had come down, before Mrs. Hartwell had done more than turn over once with a sound of general domestic satisfaction, before the housemaid had done more than lay the fire and look startled to find it already occupied. The fire was the only source of warmth and the only source of light, and Cecilia had pulled the reading chair directly adjacent to it and opened the notebook on her knee and was doing, with methodical and somewhat grim efficiency, what she always did with a problem she had been given time to absorb: she was writing it down properly.