The drawing room smelled of beeswax and rosewater, and Lady Cordelia Ashvane had arranged herself on the chaise like a painting she expected someone to admire. Across from her sat the stranger, a gaunt man in a coat too plain for the company, with hands that trembled slightly, though whether from cold or hunger she could not tell.
“So tell me, supposed time traveler,” she said, and a giggle escaped her before she could stop it, bright and cruel as a struck bell. “What advice do you have for my life?”
The stranger looked at her for a long moment. Outside, rain ticked against the tall windows, and somewhere below in the kitchens a bell rang for tea that would arrive, as it always did, without her ever having to think about where it came from.
“Just this,” he said, and there was no humor in his voice at all, only a kind of frustrated pity, the look of a man watching someone walk toward a cliff edge while admiring the view. “You might want to learn how to feed yourself. How to light a fire without asking. How to mend a hem, boil water, recognize which roots in a forest will keep you alive and which will stop your heart. You rely on servants for survival, my lady, and you have never once had to wonder if that reliance might end.”
Cordelia’s smile faltered, then resolidified, brittle. “How dramatic. Are you predicting some revolution, then? Should I fear the guillotine?”
“No,” the stranger said. “I’m not here to tell you what happens to the world. I’m here because I watched what happened to you.”
The rain ticked on. The fire in the grate, which Cordelia had never in her life laid herself, popped and settled.
“There is a winter,” the stranger said quietly, “twenty-three years from now, when the roads flood and do not clear for eleven weeks. The house staff, all of them, even old Marsh, who you think will outlive the house itself, are caught on the far side of the river when it rises. They do not come back for a long time. By the time they do, it will not matter to you anymore.”
“That’s a vile thing to say to someone,” Cordelia said, but her voice had lost its mockery, gone thin and careful.
“I know it is. I’m sorry. But I am telling you because nobody else will, because nobody else will dare, and because I have stood in that cellar.” His hands were not trembling from cold, she realized. “There was grain there. Sacks of it, enough to last the winter twice over. There was a stove, and dry wood stacked beside it, and flint, and a larder of preserves that would not spoil for years. Everything you needed was eleven steps from where you sat and froze, my lady, and you did not know how to use a single bit of it. You did not know how to start a fire. You did not know which sack held wheat and which held seed corn that would have made you sick. You sat in the dark in a house full of food and warmth, and you starved by candlelight because the people who knew how to turn flour into bread were stranded on the wrong side of a river, and you had never once thought to ask them to show you.”
For a long moment Cordelia said nothing. The fire popped again. Somewhere below, the tea bell rang a second time, and was answered, as it always was, by footsteps she had never bothered to count.
“You’re lying,” she said, but it came out smaller than she meant it to.
“I wish I were.” The stranger stood, and for the first time she noticed how carefully he moved, like a man conserving strength he wasn’t sure he’d be given more of. “I’m not asking you to give up your house, or your title, or your chaise by the window. I’m asking you to go down to the kitchens tomorrow morning, not to inspect them, but to stand in them. Ask Cook to show you how the stove is lit. Ask Marsh how the cellar is organized, and which sacks are which, and how long the preserves keep. It will take an afternoon. It cost you nothing. And then, whatever else happens to you in this life, there will be one winter, decades from now, where you are not sitting in the dark wondering why no one came.”
He bowed, not deeply, not mockingly, just enough, and left her there, with the rain and the fire and the tea she had not yet thought to pour for herself.
Cordelia sat very still for a long time. Then, for the first time in her nineteen years, she rose, crossed the room, and lifted the heavy iron poker from its standby the hearth. It was colder and heavier than she expected. She turned it over in her hands, studying the way the firelight caught the soot along its length, and, slowly, experimentally, she pushed at one of the burning logs, just to see what would happen.
It rolled. The fire flared brighter. She did not call for anyone.
It was a small thing. But it was hers.
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