The House That Keeps Her

Nell Hartigan has been in Wexhall eleven minutes when the drawing-room door locks itself behind her. Nine years a licensed guild exorcist, four years of her bond still owing, she reads a house the way she was trained to: cold first, light second, hands always. The cold in this house sits where no draught could put it. The east stairs, where the Duke of Vantreux died eighteen months ago, have kept nothing of him at all. And the door that will not open for Nell opens at once for the duchess, as though it had been waiting for someone it knew.

Héloïse Vantreux hired the guild herself, on a contract she rewrote in her own hand, because her sister-in-law was shut in the linen room for four hours in November and has told every drawing room in the county since. She wants her reputation back. She also wants it on the record that whatever is in her house has never once hurt her. She is courteous, exact, trained into stillness, and she is the first client in nine years who is not frightened of the thing in her house, only of what will happen if anyone finds out what it is.

The guild’s cure is final: it burns out root and residue, and it cannot tell a wound from a weapon. An inspector is coming on the eighth day to read Nell’s ledger, and when a resonance glass on the stairs at one in the morning gives her an answer she cannot write down honestly, the fortnight becomes a clock. What follows is a gothic mystery in which the clues are fair, a friendship that will not stay professional, and two women who each have to give up the only safety they have ever had before either can choose the other freely.