Page 8 of The Heir’s Return

It was also quiet.

Of course, there were the familiar sounds of wildlife flitting through the gardens—the rustling of leaves beneath scurrying feet, the chirps and twitters of birds flitting from one branch to the next—but that was all. There were no voices of servants as they worked, no singing as the wash maids hung the laundry, no calls from the kitchen for certain produce for the meal. The house wasn’t abandoned—it would have been in far worse repair if it had been—but something was wrong. Mina felt it in her gut like a leaden weight.

It only worsened when she knocked on the door to the steward’s residence and there was no answer.

Mina knocked two more times before testing the latch and finding it unlocked. Pressing it open, she stepped into the steward’s home.

“Papa?” she called again.

Still, there was no answer.

The air was stale, as if no one had yet bothered to open the windows following winter’s end. Dust covered the table beside the entryway; the bannister leading to the bedchambers was unpolished. The floorboards beneath her feet were scuffed and dirty from months of mud and bits of detritus carried in on boots.

This was not how she was used to seeing her home.

Her father had impressed upon her from an early age the importance of tidiness. He always kept meticulous records, and, to this day, she arranged her desk in the manner he’d instructed. Her memories of him involved neat stacks of parchment, impeccable columns of figures, organized ledgers and account books organized so neatly that even she, as a child, could locate the precise information he requested. The incongruity of the space in which she now stood, and the father she remembered, was disconcerting.

Gingerly, Mina stepped over the worst of the mud smears on the floor to reach the nearest door—her father’s office. The door was ajar, so she pushed it open with her fingertips. She did not find her father there seated at his desk, or reading through papers in the chair before the hearth.

No.

The grate was cold, and the room was still. Every surface was covered haphazardly in sheaves of parchment. Ledgers were open and stacked atop one another in precarious towers. The careful organization she recalled from his shelves was nonexistent.

“What has happened here?” Mina posed the incredulous query to the empty room.

Suddenly, the creak of shuffling footsteps approached from the hallway, accompanied by gruff, incoherent mutterings. Her startled heart hammering, Mina spun on her heel to find an elderly man wearing nothing but a stained nightshirt that hung too large on his frail frame. His hair was whiter than snow—the kind of colorless that happens as one fades from this earth, gradually relinquishing substance and vitality. The man’s face was deeply lined, but still familiar to Mina when he looked up and stopped speaking to himself.

Pressing her gloved fingers to her lips in shock, Mina took a hesitant step forward. Her voice was a pathetic squeak when she said, “Papa.”

CHAPTER 5

“Oh, Papa…” Mina cradled her forehead in her hands, knowing it was futile to wish all she’d just read had been a dream, but doing it all the same. How had her father allowed this mess to occur? Worse, how had he allowed it to carry on for so long? And how had she not noticed any of it?

She’d been sent away from Ravenshire Manor; that was how.

Following her father’s arrival in the study, Mina had instantly realized that the elderly man who stood before her was not the father she knew. He was little more than a shell of his former self, lost in his internal musings, muttering absently, wandering specter-like through the rooms of the steward’s cottage. Even their reunion—the first time they’d been in the same room since Mina’s wedding day—was…wrong. There was no other way to describe the awkwardness, the way his cloudy eyes shifted as he tried to disguise the fact that he did not recognize her.

“You cannot be my Mina,” he’d denied. “My Mina is a girl, off scrounging up whatever trouble she can find.”

“But I am, Papa.” She’d taken his bony hand in hers, trying not to note the prominent knuckles and bruises beneath the skin thinner than parchment, as she did her best to make him look into her eyes. “It has been far too long, but I have come home at last.”

He did not answer, merely focusing over her shoulder at something only his mind could interpret.

“Where has Mrs. Lange gone?” she’d asked after she finally realized the musty odor in the air was coming from her father—a man who had once dressed himself with such precision and scolded her whenever she’d arrived for her lessons with smudges on her cheeks and dirt collected on the hem of her skirt.

“Hm?” Her father had asked, a powerful frown deepening the creases in his face.

“Mrs. Lange,” Mina repeated. “The woman hired to keep house for you.”

“Bah!” her father had grunted with a wave of his hand. “Couldn’t keep her. Waste of money since I manage well enough on my own.”

Something churned deep in the pits of Mina’s gut, telling her that it would be very wrong to point out that it, in fact, did not seem as if her father was handling himself well at all…and had not been for quite some time, if the cobwebs, foggy windows, dust, dirt, and the state of his clothing were any indication.

But why hadn’t any of the other staff noticed a problem? Why hadn’t anyone notified her of her father’s decline?

“What about Blythe and Mary? Lilly and Jane?” She’d begun spewing names of other Ravenshire Manor employees, growing more and more disheartened when her father simply continued to shake his head. “Sanderson?” she’d squeaked, hoping at least the butler remained.

“Sanderson?” Her father had tilted his head and looked up from toying with the frayed cuff of his nightshirt. “What does he want now?”