An exorcist with a fortnight to burn out a haunting. A widow who is more afraid of the cure than of anything in her house.
A guild exorcist has fourteen days to clear a widow's haunted house, and the widow is the first client afraid of the cure, not the ghost.
Completed · 18 chapters · 2h 57m
WarmSensual tension; intimacy fades to black.Yearning · Angsty
Grief, Death of a spouse (past), Past emotional abuse (referenced, not depicted), Institutional coercion
No ratings yet
Dear Maeve,
I have let the whole county believe my house is haunted for a year and a half. The doors lock themselves. The library fire lights itself on cold nights. My sister-in-law was four hours in the linen room in November and has told every drawing room between here and Ambry. The physician says my husband fell on the stairs, and he did. Whatever is in this house has never once hurt me, and I am the only person alive who knows why I can say that with such certainty, and I am not ready to tell a second one.
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.
A woman came on Tuesday to burn it out, and I hired her myself. She has a case of instruments, a ledger she copies into exactly, and a way of asking a direct question on my own staircase, an hour after we met, that nobody has used on me in thirteen years. I told her she had thirteen days to earn the right to ask it again.
I did not tell her that I am more afraid of her cure than of anything in this house, or that I had already started counting the days.
From The House That Keeps Her
Read this if you want a gothic house and two women who ask each other direct questions.
Read this if you want the wait to be about who holds the pen.
Read this if you want the rule to be a professional oath.
Enemies, rivals and forbidden love
Slow burns where the waiting is the point
Completed stories you can finish tonight
No ratings yet. Be the first to rate this story.