That night, Julia dreamed of Marian.
She stood alone on a cliff carved by the hands of time and tempest. The sky above was the colour of bruised flesh, heavy with storm clouds, the wind howling like a living thing. Marian's figure stood just at the edge—slender, spectral, soaked to the bone. Her dress clung to her legs, hem dark and dripping, the fabric a ruin of once-delicate lace now torn by brine and rock. Her hair—black as pitch—whipped across her face in wild, wet tendrils.
She looked the same and yet not. Not quite alive, not quite dead.
Her eyes… God, her eyes. They stared straight into Julia's, as if through her, and they held a look she hadn't seen since childhood. The same expression Marian wore when Julia broke the porcelain vase in Aunt Evelyn's parlour. That quiet, disapproving grief. As if she already knew what Julia had done. Or what she was about to do.
Julia tried to speak, but her lips wouldn't part. The wind sucked the breath from her lungs.
Marian didn't move. Didn't blink. Her bare feet were half-submerged in seawater, the tide licking at her ankles like greedy fingers. All around her, gulls shrieked and the sea roared, crashing against the jagged cliffs with a sound that felt like thunder inside Julia's chest.
And still, Marian said nothing.
Until she did.
The words came like sea-foam—soft, hissed, impossible, yet unmistakable.
"Don't leave me there."
A whisper. Just that. No accusation, no plea. Only the chill of those four syllables, slipping beneath Julia's skin like a needle.
She bolted upright.
Her body twisted in the bedsheets, heart hammering in her ribs, the thin cotton wrapped around her limbs like bindings. Her nightgown clung damply to her back with sweat. The fire in the hearth had burned low, casting long, restless shadows that danced across the chamber walls.
For a moment, she didn't know where she was.
London. Her flat. Not Blackwood Hall. Not yet.
She reached for breath as if surfacing from deep water. Her throat burned, dry as chalk. Her fingers shook. She could still taste salt—how strange—and the sound of crashing waves rang faintly in her ears, though the sea was miles away.
Rain whispered against the windowpane, soft and persistent. The kind of rain that didn't soothe. The kind that made old houses sigh in their bones.
She sat still, listening. To the tick of the longcase clock in the hall. To the wind pushing at the panes. To the silence.
It felt like someone else was in the room.
Don't be absurd, she told herself. It's just your nerves. You haven't had a dream like that in years.
But the tightness in her chest refused to ease.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood, barefoot on the cold wooden floor. The hearth's dying embers cast her shadow tall and warped behind her. She wrapped her shawl around her shoulders but didn't sit.
Instead, she turned to the mantel.
The letter was still there.
Black seal unbroken. Paper aged to ivory in the low firelight. It looked darker now, somehow. As if the ink had bled further into the parchment. As if it breathed.
She hadn't yet opened Marian's final letter.
The telegram had arrived yesterday, the words burned into her mind like a curse:
> REGRET TO INFORM STOP
MARIAN BLACKWOOD DECEASED STOP
SUDDEN FEVER STOP
ALISTAIR REQUESTS PRESENCE AT BLACKWOOD HALL STOP
She'd read it three times before she sat down. Five more before she'd spoken. Aunt Evelyn had been the one to confirm it with a curt nod and that hard, glassy stare she wore whenever the subject of Marian came up.
"I warned her," Evelyn had said, lips tight. "That family breeds madness. She didn't listen. Neither will you."
Julia hadn't argued.
What could she say?
She hadn't answered Marian's last letter. Hadn't read it. It sat unopened, because some part of her had known—deep down, in that quiet, flickering part of herself she didn't like to examine too closely—that something was wrong.
That Marian had been afraid.
But it was too late now. Marian was gone.
And Julia was going to Blackwood Hall in the morning.
The arrangements had been made. She would take the train from King's Cross by noon. Alistair Blackwood's letter had been precise in its request—formal, cold, almost eerily composed. But beneath the veneer of polite grief, there had been urgency. He wanted her there. Needed her, he'd written, to catalogue the art collection Marian had begun. To collect her effects.
To what end, she didn't know. But she was going.
Because she owed Marian that much.
Because she hadn't replied.
Because part of her—no matter how much she denied it—wanted answers.
The fire popped in the hearth behind her.
She didn't move.
The letter sat on the mantelpiece.
It looked darker now.
She didn't sleep again.
Evelyn cried when she left.
Not the kind of crying that came with wails or hysteria. No—Evelyn Harrow wept the way a woman did when something inside her had quietly broken. Her tears were soft, almost polite, slipping past powdered cheeks with the gentleness of resignation. They made Julia feel like a criminal walking to the gallows in silk gloves.
"I can't stop you," Evelyn whispered, voice trembling as she cupped Julia's hands in hers—hands that still smelled of violet water and old rose lotion, warm and perfumed like a memory of simpler days. "But promise me one thing. If you feel it again—the headaches, the fear—you leave. Don't let them pull you under like they did Marian."
Julia said nothing at first. The words lodged somewhere in her throat, sharp and unwelcome. It would be easier to argue, to scoff, to deflect with reason or logic. But instead, she nodded. A mechanical dip of the head, rehearsed and empty. A lie wrapped in civility.
Because if she told the truth, she'd admit that she had already felt it. The heavy, crawling dread. The whisper beneath her skin. The sense that something was waiting—not just at Blackwood Hall, but within her. Watching. Patient.
She stepped into the hired carriage without another word, skirts swishing across the damp cobbles. The door shut with a hollow thud, and that was that. Goodbye.
London loomed behind her like an indifferent sentinel—gray, wet, and disinterested in her departure. The chimneys exhaled their constant smog, painting the skies in charcoal strokes. The cobblestones glittered with rain, treacherous underfoot. Umbrellas bobbed past the window, black domes shielding faceless strangers who never looked up. Everything about the city felt tired. Drawn. As if the bones of it had finally begun to ache. Or perhaps she was simply seeing it through the lens of her own unspoken weariness.
She leaned against the velvet interior of the carriage, eyes trailing the blur of soot-stained streets. Her fingers, clad in leather gloves, fumbled once more for the letter tucked beneath her cloak. She didn't read it again. She didn't need to.
The handwriting—precise, slanted, undeniably his—had seared itself into her mind.
Julia,
I write to you not only as Marian's husband, but as someone who believes you are owed more than a formal notice of her passing.
There are matters that require your attention—personal effects, and the art collection Marian began to catalogue. She often spoke of you. I hope you will come.
—Alistair Blackwood
She had read those lines so many times, she could recite them backwards. It felt less like a letter now and more like an incantation. A summons.
She didn't speak of the sealed letter still in her writing desk drawer. Marian's last letter. Unopened. Months old. She'd told herself she was too busy. That she would read it when she had time. That it couldn't be urgent. But deep down, she knew—she had known—there was something in that letter she hadn't wanted to face.
The train station loomed ahead, blurred through the window by drizzle and fog. The iron arches were crowded, the air thick with coal smoke and the sharp scent of steam. Julia stepped onto the platform with her chin high, spine straight, the way she always did when she felt least steady.
She took her seat by the window, alone in a first-class compartment. Her hands folded neatly in her lap, the letter between them like a talisman or a noose—depending on how she chose to see it.
The whistle shrieked. The train shuddered to life.
With a metallic groan, the wheels began to turn.
Rain dragged its fingers down the glass, long streaks that shivered like tears. Outside, the city began to dissolve. Landmarks faded one by one into fog—bridges, chimneys, rows of houses huddled close like old secrets. Even St. Paul's lost its shape in the mist, shrinking into nothing.
And still, she watched.
Watched as London slipped away, street by street, brick by brick, into the wet gray ether.
As though she knew she'd never see it again.