What Cyrus Knew

Rosalind Thorncastle was not what I expected.

I'd pictured someone like Sebastian, or worse, like Gideon — polished and unreachable. Instead I found her in the gallery café the next morning, alone, stirring a coffee she wasn't drinking, looking like a woman who'd had a very bad week and knew there was a worse one coming.

"You're the one asking about Lot Forty-Seven," she said, before I'd even sat down. Not an accusation. Almost relief.

"I am."

"Good. Because nobody in my family will tell me anything, and it's my house too." She pushed the coffee aside. "We're selling because we're broke, in case that isn't obvious from how fast Gideon showed up. I don't care about a hundred-year-old scandal. I care that my uncle looks like he's seen a ghost every time someone says the word 'maid,' and I want to know why."

So I told her. All of it — Agatha, the diary, the boy who flinched, the page cut cleanly from the binding. Rosalind went very still.

"Cyrus was my great-grandfather," she said. "Everyone always said he was the kind one. The one who softened the family."

"Maybe he had to learn how, first."

She didn't answer that. She just stood up, decision already made on her face. "Come with me tonight. Sebastian keeps old estate papers at the house — nobody's cleared them out in decades. If there's anything left to find, it's there."

We went that evening while Sebastian was at a board dinner. His study smelled of old paper and pipe smoke. Rosalind went straight for the locked bottom drawer of his desk, working a hairpin into it with the ease of someone who'd broken into it before.

Inside, beneath a stack of unremarkable correspondence, was a single folded letter, ink brown with age, addressed to no one. Rosalind unfolded it, read three lines, and went white.

"Tamsin." She turned it toward me, her finger under one sentence. The maid must never be believed, whatever she claims to have seen. The family's silence is not shame — it is protection, and it must hold for as long as the name Thorncastle holds.

It wasn't Augustus's handwriting. It was Cyrus's.