Vanessa Ives

Vanessa Ives, coming home late at night -- she lowers herself slowly from a hansom cab, wine-red skirts gathered up for safety from the muck that already soaks through their hems, and the thought of home lies uneasily beneath her skin. If she had ever wanted a home on earth, it would not, she thinks, have been Grandage Place; but nothing else has so deserved the title. She belongs in such a place, half-rotting, clinging onto gentility through its name and nothing else.

And she lives there with Sir Malcolm Murray, and on that... on that she keeps her own secrets, even from him. She's been out in his place tonight -- tracking down a man rumored to have certain abilities beyond the worldly -- and she had hoped, not for his sake, to bring him better news.

Her bootheels strike across the creaking floor as she lets herself in, and she shivers; the night is cold for early autumn, and the house colder still in its open spaces.