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Chapter 1
I. The Letter
They posted it in a creamy envelope, the sort that refuses to crease even when your hands sweat. A crest like an iron thorn twined with a glass rose, and beneath it a neat line of script: Thornglass, The Saltmoor Cliffs. It came in the wet of November, when all the trees along my street had entered their last contortions and the sky was as low as a thought you cannot shake.
My aunt Liza was dead. The solicitor’s hand had been careful, my name carefully squared: Miss Mara Ellison. There were particulars, inventories, conditions that squinted from their clauses. There was a key, heavy as an oath. It lay in the envelope’s gut, wrapped in tissue that smelled of lavender and something older, like the dust on the inside of a locket.
I had seen Thornglass only once, in a photograph that hung crooked in my mother’s room. A shape of black windows and storm, a long jaw of cliff undercut by restless sea. My mother never spoke of it except to say: It is not our house anymore. It was the way she said anymore, as if time were a hallway and she had simply forgotten the right door.
Still, the key pressed its impression into my palm as if I were already a lock.
I took the train east, then a smaller one north, then a bus whose driver had a voice like gravel poured down a chute. The road to Saltmoor ran between fields of winter-stubbled wheat and hedges that had gathered plastic bags like sad flags. The light was colorless and the distance flattened, as if the world had been painted on a stretched canvas.
“Thornglass?” the driver said when I named my stop. His mouth drew to a point. “You’ve a warm coat, then.”
I had the coat; I had my mother’s old scarf; I had the letter folded into my pocket. I did not have any of her answers.
