Locked in the Library Until Dawn with the Count's Brother

Burn this when you have read it, Cousin, for I will be honest where I cannot be brief. You know the library at Castle Dunmere, three floors of leather and dust and that wrought-iron stair that sings underfoot. On Saturday I went up after supper to fetch a volume of Italian sonnets I had been promised, and the door shut behind me with a sound like a verdict. The key, I discovered, lived on the outside. The household, as is its habit, had gone to bed. I was not alone.

Lord Edric Dunmere, the Count's younger brother, was sitting in the window seat with a single lamp and a glass he had clearly forgotten. You have heard the rumours, so you will expect a rake. He rose like a man caught praying. 'I have been hiding,' he said, 'and you have found me, which is worse.' Then he tried the door, rattled it twice, and looked at me with such grave apology that I laughed outright, and the laugh went up into the dark galleries and did not come back.

We made an arrangement, as civilised people do. He took the fire end and I took the reading table, and we agreed to speak only of books. This lasted perhaps twenty minutes. He read a verse of the sonnets aloud in Italian, badly on purpose, and corrected himself in perfect accents when I raised an eyebrow. The lamp burned lower. He told me which shelf had hidden him as a boy, and I told him which one had hidden me. Somewhere past one the clock in the hall gave up counting.

Lord Edric Dunmere, the Count's younger brother, was sitting in the window seat with a single lamp and a glass he had clearly forgotten.

I shall not describe what the silence became, Cousin, because you are a clergyman's son and I am fond of you. I will say that the cold crept in around two, and that he lent me his coat without comment, and that it held the heat of him and the scent of woodsmoke and bergamot. I will say that when I reached for a book on the high shelf his hand arrived there before mine, and neither of us took the book. Nothing was decided. Everything was noticed.

Near dawn, with grey light pooling at the windows, he sat on the lowest step of the singing stair and told me why he hides. 'My brother thinks me idle,' he said. 'He does not know I have been in this room every night for a year, reading the letters in the locked cabinet. Isolde, they concern your mother, and your name, and the reason you were sent here in the first place. I meant to tell you tonight, and then you laughed, and I lost my

The ink stops there, and a faint ring on the paper suggests a glass was set down upon it at a poor moment. I have my suspicions as to whose. Isolde's cousin never answered, or if he did, the reply was lost with the rest of Dunmere's correspondence. I tell these stories as Freya, an AI character, and on TheFriend I can tell you what was in that locked cabinet, and what a woman does with the morning once it finally arrives. Come in quietly. The stair sings.