Elspeth did not sleep the night after the letter, and she did not eat the breakfast that came with it, either. She sat on her bed with the paper in her hands, reading the four words over and over, as though repetition might make them mean something different.
*We have been expecting you.*
The date on the back was yesterday. She had arrived yesterday. The letter had been written — if the date was to be believed — before she had ever set foot in Dunmire House, and yet it had been waiting for her on her breakfast tray, opened, read, and delivered as calmly as a bill.
She dressed in her black dress, pinned her hair, and went downstairs with the letter folded in her pocket. She had decided, in the night, that she would ask Mrs. Bain about it directly. She was twenty-four years old and she had crossed Scotland for this post, and she would not be frightened out of thirty shillings a month by a sheet of paper.
She found Mrs. Bain in the kitchen, kneading dough with the steady rhythm of a woman who had done it ten thousand times.
"Ma'am," Elspeth said. "A letter came for me this morning. It was already opened."
Mrs. Bain did not look up. "All letters are opened in this house, Miss Drummond. I told you that yesterday. It is the custom."
"But the letter says you were expecting me. And it is dated yesterday, before I arrived."
"Then it was written yesterday," Mrs. Bain said. She folded the dough, turned it, folded it again. "The post is slow in these parts, Miss Drummond. A letter written yesterday may arrive today. There is nothing strange in that."
"Who wrote it?" Elspeth asked.
Mrs. Bain looked up then. Her river-water eyes rested on Elspeth's face, and Elspeth had again the feeling that she was being measured — not for a dress, but for something else, something she could not name.
"The mistress writes many letters," Mrs. Bain said at last. "She writes them and does not send them. Sometimes they find their way to the people they were written for, and sometimes they do not. It is not for me to say which this one was. Now. You have work. Miss Verity is waiting for you in the morning room. She requires a dress, and she requires it to be blue."
Elspeth went to the morning room with her shears and her measuring tape, and there she met the third woman of Dunmire House.
Miss Verity Dunmire was the late master's sister, and she was nothing like her sister-in-law. Where Mrs. Dunmire was still and silent, Miss Verity was all movement — a small, sharp woman of fifty, with bright eyes and restless hands and a voice that came at you like a flock of birds.
"So you're the new girl," Miss Verity said, before Elspeth had finished closing the door. "Good. I need a dress. Blue. Not mourning blue, not navy, not anything funereal. Blue like the sky on a good day, which we do not get many of here, God knows. Can you do blue?"
"Yes, ma'am," Elspeth said. "If you have the cloth."
"There is cloth. There is always cloth. This house is full of cloth no one has worn in years." Miss Verity stood, arms out, while Elspeth took her measurements, and talked the whole time, the way some people talk when they have been alone too long. "You have met the jars, I suppose. Everyone meets the jars. Mrs. Bain will have told you nothing, and my sister-in-law will have told you less. So I shall tell you, because someone should, and it might as well be me."
"The jars in the workroom," Elspeth said. "With the weather in them."
"Weather," Miss Verity said, and laughed, a short laugh like a door closing. "Yes. Weather. My sister-in-law keeps it. She began after my brother died. She says the weather is the only honest record of a life. A letter can lie, she says. A memory can lie. But the weather on the day a thing happened — that was what it was, and no one can change it after. So she keeps it. Rain from the day we were married. Snow from the day my brother was born. Wind from the day he died. It is a kind of diary, you see. Only instead of words, it is weather."
Elspeth wrote the measurements in her notebook. Twenty-eight, twenty-two, thirty-six. Her hand was steady. She was proud of that.
"And the mirrors?" she asked, before she could stop herself. "Why are there no mirrors?"
Miss Verity's hands, which had been fluttering like birds, went suddenly still.
"Because my sister-in-law does not wish to see herself," she said, quietly. "She says that when a woman has lost her husband, she should not have to look at the face grief has made of her. That is what she says. What I say is that she is afraid of what she might see behind her, in the glass. But then, I say a great many things, and no one in this house listens to me, which is why I am telling you."
"And the letters?" Elspeth said. "Why are they all opened?"
"Because Mrs. Bain opens them," Miss Verity said. "She has opened every letter in this house for thirty years. She says it is to protect my sister-in-law from bad news. What it protects her from, in truth, is the world. Nothing reaches this house unopened, Miss Drummond. Nothing leaves it unopened, either. If you write home, Mrs. Bain will read it first. If your father writes to you from Canada, Mrs. Bain will read it first. That is the custom, and the custom is not to be questioned, and I have just questioned it, so you must not tell anyone I said so."
Elspeth finished the measurements. She folded her tape. "I understand, ma'am," she said, though she did not understand at all.
That afternoon, she cut the blue dress, and while she worked, she thought about the jars. A diary of weather. Rain from a wedding day. Snow from a birth. Wind from a death. It was strange, and it was sad, and it was, in its way, the most honest thing she had heard since she arrived.
But there was something else, something she had not told Miss Verity, and had not told Mrs. Bain, and had barely admitted to herself. The jar she had lifted down the night before — the one labeled *The great storm. The night the master died. 7 October 1911* — had not been empty. The others, so far as she could tell, had held only air. But that one had held something else. She had not been able to see it clearly in the poor light, but when she had tilted the jar, something inside it had moved. Something small, and dark, and wet, like a thing that had once been alive.
She had put it back on the shelf, and she had not touched it again. But she had thought about it all night, and she was thinking about it now, as she cut the blue cloth, and she knew that before the week was out, she would take it down again, and look at it properly, in the daylight.
She did not have to wait until the end of the week. She did not even have to wait until the end of the day.
That evening, after supper, Mrs. Bain came to the workroom with a letter in her hand. It was addressed to Elspeth, in the neat hand. It had been opened.
"This came in the afternoon post," Mrs. Bain said. "I have read it, as is the custom. You may read it now."
Elspeth took it with both hands. She opened it. Inside was a single sheet of paper, and on it, in her own handwriting — her own handwriting, the hand she had used in her diary since she was a girl — were the words she had written in her diary the night before, word for word, line for line, down to the last full stop.
*The house is quieter than any house I have known. The jars frighten me. The one for the night the master died is not empty. I think something in it is still alive.*
Elspeth looked up. Mrs. Bain was standing in the doorway, watching her, and for the first time since she had arrived, Elspeth saw something in the housekeeper's face that was not calm and not cold. It was fear.
"Where did this come from?" Elspeth whispered.
"I do not know," Mrs. Bain said. "It came in the post. It was addressed to you. I opened it, as is the custom, and I read it, and I did not understand it, and I do not understand it now. Miss Drummond — did you write this?"
"Yes," Elspeth said. "Last night. In my diary. In my room. With the door bolted."
Mrs. Bain was silent for a long moment. Then she said, very quietly, "Then someone in this house has read your diary. And someone in this house has copied it, and posted it, and had it delivered back to you, through the post, like any other letter."
"Why?" Elspeth said. "Why would anyone do that?"
"I don't know," Mrs. Bain said. "But I will tell you this, Miss Drummond, because you are young and you are far from home and you deserve to know it. There are three women in this house. I open the letters. Miss Verity talks. And the mistress — the mistress writes letters she does not send. But there is a fourth person in this house, and I do not know who it is, and I have never seen them, and the letters they write arrive by post, and they know things they should not know."
Elspeth put the letter down on the worktable, next to the blue cloth. Her hands were shaking. She did not try to stop them.
"Then I will find out who it is," she said.
Mrs. Bain shook her head. "Do not go looking," she said. "The house does not like it when people go looking. The last person who went looking was the master. Look what happened to him."
"What happened to him?" Elspeth asked.
Mrs. Bain looked at the jars on the shelves, at the hundred labels in faded ink, and she said, very softly, "He went out into the great storm, on the night of the seventh of October, 1911. And he did not come back. And the mistress put the storm in a jar, so that she would never forget it. And the jar is not empty, Miss Drummond. I have never told anyone that. The jar is not empty, and none of us knows what is in it, and none of us will open it."
That night, Elspeth did not bolt her door. She left it open, a crack, and she lay in the dark, listening, and at midnight she heard it — a sound so soft she thought at first she had imagined it, the sound of a pen moving across paper, somewhere in the house below, writing and writing and writing, as though the writer would never stop.
She got up. She went to the door. She looked out into the passage, and the passage was dark, and empty, and at the far end, where the workroom was, she saw a light burning under the door, and she went toward it, one step at a time, in her bare feet, and she put her hand on the workroom door, and she pushed it open.
The workroom was empty. The lamp was burning. The jars stood in their rows on the shelves. And on the worktable, next to the blue cloth, was a sheet of paper, still wet with ink, with a single sentence written on it in her own handwriting.
*Do not open the jar.*
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