Chapter 15: Vordescu Tells the Truth, Selectively

Thornfield Abbey received her at half past three on a Thursday afternoon, which was not the hour Cecilia had specified in her letter and was also not, she reflected, an hour at which a sensible young woman ought to be arriving unaccompanied at the residence of a creature she had catalogued in a private notebook as not alive in any conventional sense. She had told Lydia she was walking to the lending library. Lydia had looked at her green wool dress and said nothing, which was its own variety of commentary.

The gates stood open. She had not been certain they would.

The gravel was raked with Continental precision, the borders bare in the way of late autumn but deliberately bare, the emptiness composed rather than neglected. Cecilia walked up the drive at a pace she classified as purposeful and did not revise to hurrying, and told herself that the slight unsteadiness in her chest was the cold.