Gilmore Manor, North Yorkshire
Late Summer, 1951
I have lived my entire life among books, and books, as Father says, do not mind if you are quiet.
The library takes up the whole west wing of Gilmore Manor—an endless maze of oak shelves, rolling ladders, and narrow aisles that smell of dust, beeswax, and old secrets. Sunlight only reaches the highest windows in midsummer, and even then it is thin and watery, as though the glass is reluctant to let the outside world in. Most days the lamps burn from breakfast until long after the rest of the house is asleep.
That is how I like it.
My name is Deseo Beolle, and I am seventeen years old. I was born on the second of February, 1934, in the small room behind the catalogue desk where Father still keeps a truckle bed for nights when the reshelving cannot wait. My mother died when I was barely a year old—Spanish flu, they said, though no one in the manor caught it but her. Since then it has been Father and me and the books. The servants call me the library ghost. They curtsy if they see me in the corridors, then hurry away as though I might vanish through the wainscot.
I do not mind. Ghosts are left alone, and being left alone is a kind of freedom.
I know every corner of this place. I know which floorboard outside the poetry section creaks, which ladder wobbles if you climb past the third rung, which atlas has the most beautiful map of Siberia (Jäger once fell asleep with it over his face and drooled on the tundra). I can find any volume blindfolded by the feel of its spine or the smell of its pages. Father taught me the manor's own variant of Dewey before I could properly spell my own name.
Most days I wear the same thing: a cream blouse with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons and a long pleated skirt the colour of moss or claret, both rescued by Father from trunks in the attic. They are thirty years out of fashion, but cloth is cloth, and no one sees me anyway. My hair—tea-brown and thick—lives in a single plait that reaches my waist. At the end of it, tied in a perfect bow, is a length of crimson satin ribbon.
The ribbon is new. Six months new, to be exact.
I touch it often—when I am thinking, when I am nervous, when I am happy. Three different touches, each with its own meaning. There is someone who has learned to read them the way sailors read clouds.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
On the afternoon everything began to change, I was perched on my little set of steps between the zoology shelves, trying to decide whether a 1789 treatise on wolves belonged under 599.74 or 398.24 (natural history or folklore—both seemed equally true). The ribbon brushed my wrist as I reached upward, bright as a drop of blood against the dusty gloom.
That was when the door opened.
No one opens the library door without knocking first. Not the maids, not the footmen, not even Mrs. Hogg the housekeeper, who believes books harbour moths and moral danger in equal measure. Only two people in the entire manor ever simply walk in: Father, and—
Heavy boots on the rug. A faint smell of pine sap and coal dust drifting between the stacks.
I did not need to look down to know who it was.
"Deseo," Jäger said from the doorway, voice low the way it always is when he is tired. "You eat today?"
I finished sliding the wolf book into place before I answered. When I turned, he was standing just inside the threshold, tall enough that the top of his head nearly brushed the lintel. His black servant's jacket was smudged with sawdust, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and his hair—wet bark colour, clipped brutally short at the sides—stuck up in its usual defiant tuft.
His hand, as always, drifted to his collar. Two fingers checking the edge was straight, the knot centred. The small, constant ritual that meant he was still on the human side of the line.
"Not yet," I admitted. "I was waiting for the sandwiches."
He nodded once, satisfied, and crossed the room in that silent way of his. From behind his back he produced a greaseproof paper packet, edges folded with painful neatness into perfect corners.
Corned beef and mustard, cut into exact triangles.
I climbed down the steps and took it from him. Our fingers brushed—only for a second—and I felt the small new scar across his knuckles, still pink from yesterday's work with the billhook.
"Danke schön, Jäger," I said softly.
He flushed to the tips of his ears and tugged his collar again. "Is… good. You read now?"
I smiled. This was our ritual too. When the day's labour was done and the house settled into evening quiet, he came here. He would fold himself onto the cushion I kept hidden behind the Encyclopædia Britannica, rest his head on my lap if he was truly exhausted, and listen while I read aloud. Sometimes Dickens, sometimes the shipping forecast from the wireless in the servants' hall, once—even—an ammunition table from a 1942 artillery manual because the numbers soothed him.
Tonight I chose a volume of Yorkshire folklore. I thought the chapter on wild men of the woods might amuse him.
He listened without moving, eyes half-closed, breathing slowing. At some point his hand found the end of my plait and settled there, thumb resting lightly on the crimson bow. A quiet claim: this is mine to recognise.
I read until the lamp flame guttered low and the house beyond the door was silent.
Only then did I close the book and look down at him properly.
In the lamplight his face was younger than his nineteen years, the sharp bones softened, the pale grey-green eyes hidden behind lashes that were unfairly long. There was a smudge of coal dust on one cheekbone I had not noticed earlier.
I wet my thumb on my tongue and gently rubbed it away.
He stirred, murmured something in German too low to catch, and turned his face into my skirt like a child seeking warmth.
I sat very still, heart thumping against my ribs in a way the books had never quite warned me about.
Outside, an owl called across the dark grounds. Inside, the library breathed around us—millions of pages holding their secrets the way I was trying to hold mine.
I did not know yet that in less than two months a new maid with quick hands and a sharper grin would walk off with the ribbon that anchored him to me.
I did not know that I would follow her into attics and public houses, that I would learn the mathematics of cheating at cards, that I would watch Jäger step into a smoky room with an axe in his hand and murder in his eyes to bring me home.
All I knew in that moment was the weight of his head on my lap, the steady brush of his thumb over crimson satin, and the fierce, aching certainty blooming under my ribs:
This boy—this wild, collared boy who still slept on stone floors to guard a duke's door—was mine to keep safe.
And I would fight the whole world to do it.
I leaned down and pressed my lips to his hair, just once, so lightly he would never know.
The ribbon glowed between us like a promise.
For now, the thread held.