Lady Highlish

Scotland, 1862

Let me tell you what is never said in drawing rooms. Being a countess means nothing when the man you bury has made of you a field of ruins. You may believe that grief erases humiliation, that six feet of earth are enough to bury tyranny. But Greygory imprinted his cruelty so deeply upon me that I wear it now like a second skin, and that skin, no coffin can carry away.

From him, I inherit a secret of which he never breathed a word: High Heather Castle, an estate lost in the heart of the Highlands. The name echoes within me like a forgotten melody.

Why did he conceal this place from me while he lived?

I left London for these distant reaches. And what I found at journey's end was not peace, but a prison of eternal winter, of rock and shadow.

Within these walls, I try to survive, surrounded by Edna and Ramsay, my servants, my only allies in this place.

But something lurks.

In the silences. In the walls. Upon the moor.

And then there is this man, this vagrant who appeared out of the storm...

When I met his gaze, I understood that the fever which had torn a part of my life from me was not mere forgetfulness of the flesh, but perhaps a truth my heart had refused to see.