The letter came on a Tuesday, in an envelope the color of weak tea, and it changed Elspeth Drummond's life before she had finished reading it.
She was twenty-four years old, a dressmaker in Edinburgh, and she had spent the last three years sewing hems in a workroom above the Grassmarket, where the light was bad and the pay was worse and the mistress took the credit for every stitch. The letter was from a house she had never heard of, in a place she could not have found on a map, and it offered her more money in a month than the workroom paid her in three.
*Dunmire House requires a dressmaker,* the letter said, in a hand so neat it looked printed. *A young woman of good character, able to cut and fit mourning dress, plain and fine alike. The post is live-in. The house is remote. The wages are thirty shillings a month, with board. Apply by return of post to Mrs. Bain, Housekeeper, Dunmire House, by Glenfalloch, Perthshire.*
Elspeth read it twice. Thirty shillings. Live-in. She read it a third time, looking for the catch, and found none, unless the catch was the remoteness, which did not frighten her in the least. Edinburgh had never been kind to her. Her mother was dead two years, her father gone to Canada and silent since, and the room she rented above a baker's shop smelled of yeast and damp no matter the season. Remote sounded, to her, very much like peace.
She wrote back the same day. She was careful with the letter — her best hand, her best paper, her best self folded into an envelope — and she said that she could cut mourning dress and fit it, that she had good character and could provide references, and that she was not afraid of hard work or of quiet places.
The reply came in four days. *Come at once,* it said. *The train to Glenfalloch, then the carrier's cart on Thursdays. Bring your shears and your thimble. Do not bring a mirror. There are no mirrors at Dunmire House.*
Elspeth read that last line twice. *Do not bring a mirror.* She laughed, a little, because it seemed like a joke, and then she stopped laughing, because nothing else in the letter was a joke. She packed her shears and her thimble and her best black dress, and she did not pack a mirror. She had never owned a good one anyway.
The train took her north, out of Edinburgh, past fields and lochs and hills that grew taller and wilder with every mile, until the towns gave up entirely and there was nothing but moor and sky. At Glenfalloch the station was a single platform and a shed, and the carrier's cart was a flat wagon drawn by a horse the color of wet slate, driven by a man who did not speak except to tell her to climb up and mind the wheel.
They drove for two hours, up a track that was hardly a road, through rain that came and went like someone changing their mind. The house appeared all at once, the way houses do in the Highlands — one moment there was nothing but moor, and the next there was a long gray house with tall chimneys, standing against the sky like a ship at anchor.
Dunmire House was bigger than Elspeth had expected, and quieter. No dogs came out. No one stood at the door. The driver set her bag down on the step, touched his cap, and drove away without a word, and Elspeth stood alone in the rain, looking at a house that did not seem to know she was coming.
Then the door opened, and a woman stood there. She was perhaps sixty, tall and straight, with gray hair pulled back so tight it looked painful, and eyes the color of river water.
"You are the dressmaker," the woman said. It was not a question.
"Yes, ma'am. Elspeth Drummond."
"I am Mrs. Bain. I keep this house. Come in, child. You are wet through."
Inside, the house smelled of beeswax and peat smoke and something else underneath, something cold and clean, like air from a room that has been shut for a long time. The hall was dark — the windows were small and the day was gray — and Elspeth saw at once that the letter had been telling the truth. There were no mirrors. Where a mirror should have hung above the hall table, there was a rectangle of darker wallpaper, and a nail, and nothing else. The shape of it was so plain that Elspeth found herself staring.
"You will have a room on the second floor," Mrs. Bain said, leading her up a staircase that creaked in a way that sounded almost like speech. "The mistress will see you at six. Until then, you may rest. Supper is at seven. The workroom is at the end of the passage. You will find everything you need there, except a looking-glass, which you will not find anywhere in this house, and which you are not to bring in."
"May I ask why, ma'am?" Elspeth said. She had meant to keep the question to herself, but it came out anyway, the way questions do when you are tired and wet and far from home.
Mrs. Bain stopped on the stair. She turned. Her river-water eyes looked at Elspeth for a long moment, and Elspeth had the feeling, sudden and certain, that the woman was deciding something about her — not whether she could sew, but something else entirely, something she had not been asked about in the letter.
"Because the mistress does not wish it," Mrs. Bain said at last. "That is reason enough in this house. You will learn, Miss Drummond, that Dunmire House has its customs, and that the customs are not to be questioned. The letters, for instance. Every letter that comes into this house is opened before it reaches its owner. That is the custom. Every letter that leaves this house is read before it is sealed. That is also the custom. You will not mind it, I hope."
Elspeth did mind it, very much, but she was twenty-four and alone in a house on a moor in the rain, and she needed thirty shillings a month more than she needed her privacy. "I will not mind it, ma'am," she said.
"Good," Mrs. Bain said. "You will find the house is not unkind. Only particular."
Elspeth's room was small and clean, with a narrow bed, a washstand, a chest for her things, and a window that looked out over the moor, where the rain was coming down in long gray curtains. On the wall where a mirror might have hung, there was a small framed print of a ship in a storm. She unpacked her bag — her shears, her thimble, her black dress, her nightdress, her Bible — and she sat on the bed, and she listened to the house.
It was the quietest house she had ever been in. No clocks ticked. No voices came up the stair. The rain on the window was the only sound, and after a while even that seemed to grow tired and stop.
At six, Mrs. Bain came for her, and took her down to the drawing room, where the mistress of Dunmire House sat by a fire that was too small for the room.
Mrs. Dunmire was not what Elspeth had expected. She had expected someone old, perhaps, or stern. Mrs. Dunmire was neither. She was perhaps forty-five, with dark hair going gray at the temples and a face that had once been beautiful and was now only tired. She wore black, head to foot, black without a single relief of white, and her hands, folded in her lap, were the hands of a woman who did nothing all day and had forgotten how to do anything at all.
"So you are the dressmaker," Mrs. Dunmire said. Her voice was soft, and slow, as though each word had to travel a long way to reach her mouth.
"Yes, ma'am."
"My husband died three years ago," Mrs. Dunmire said. "I have worn black ever since. The black wears out, Miss Drummond. That is why you are here. I require new mourning dress. Two dresses, to begin. Plain, but well cut. Can you do that?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Good." Mrs. Dunmire looked into the fire. "My sister-in-law, Miss Verity, also requires dresses, though hers need not be black. She is not in mourning. She is, in fact, not in anything at all, which is its own kind of trouble. You will meet her tomorrow. She keeps to her room in the evenings."
Elspeth waited, but Mrs. Dunmire said nothing more. She only sat, and looked at the fire, and after a moment Mrs. Bain touched Elspeth's arm, and Elspeth understood that the interview was over.
That night, after supper — which was taken in silence, in a dining room where the three women of the house ate at three corners of a table built for twelve — Elspeth went to the workroom to look at her tools and her cloth. The workroom was at the end of the passage, just as Mrs. Bain had said, and it was a good room, better than the workroom above the Grassmarket: a long table, a window that caught the last of the light, shelves of cloth, and a dressmaker's dummy in the corner, wearing nothing but a length of black bombazine pinned to its chest.
And on the shelves, among the bolts of cloth, Elspeth found the jars.
There were dozens of them, perhaps a hundred, set in neat rows on every shelf that was not holding cloth. Glass jars, of every size, each one stoppered tight, each one with a paper label tied around its neck in faded ink. Elspeth lifted one down, carefully, and held it to the light.
Inside the jar was nothing but air, as far as she could tell. Clear air. But the label said, in the same neat hand as the letter that had brought her here:
*Rain. 14 March 1909.*
Elspeth put the jar back. She took down another. The label said:
*Wind, north-easterly, with hail. 2 November 1910.*
Another:
*Snow, lying deep, no thaw. 19 January 1911.*
Another:
*The great storm. The night the master died. 7 October 1911.*
Elspeth stood in the workroom, with a hundred jars of weather on the shelves around her, and she felt the skin on the back of her neck rise, the way it had when she was a child and had heard a story she did not like.
Behind her, in the passage, a floorboard creaked. Elspeth turned, and there was no one there. The passage was empty, and dark, and the house was quiet, and the rain had begun again on the window, and she thought, for no reason she could name, of the letter that had brought her here, and of the line she had laughed at and then stopped laughing at.
*Do not bring a mirror.*
She went back to her room. She bolted the door. She took out her Bible and put it on the chest, and she laid her shears beside it, because shears were the nearest thing to a weapon she owned, and she sat on the bed, fully dressed, until she fell asleep sitting up.
In the morning, there was a letter on her breakfast tray.
It was addressed to her, in the neat hand she was already learning to know. It had been opened — the seal was broken, the flap lifted and pressed back down — and inside was a single sheet of paper, with four words written on it, in a hand she did not know.
*We have been expecting you.*
Elspeth turned the paper over. On the back, in pencil, was a date.
The date was yesterday.
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