The clock on Mr. Ezra Holland’s wall read half past one in the morning, but sleep eluded the young man.

Doctor Alcorn prescribed laudanum for the persistent pain in his hip, but Ezra’s growing reliance upon the drug had caused him to develop a tolerance to it, so that the dose had to be raised by degrees, from fifteen drops to thirty just for him to feel the slightest relief from his pain. His increasing reliance weighed heavily on his conscience, for the dangers of opium addiction were well known to him. Its continuous use brought on such side effects as mental haziness, which he loathed, and dizziness and nausea besides.

Tonight he left off the drug, stubbornly determined to bear the pain and retain some semblance of the man he’d been before the accident three years earlier which had nearly crippled him. But it was agony.

The winter storm which had begun during his walk earlier in the evening now blew white flurries past his window, the fallen mercury levels in the barometer a testament to the pain which was not likely to improve while the storm persisted.

As to his wish for remaining lucid, Ezra was aware the brandy was hardly a suitable alternative to laudanum, and he stopped drinking somewhere around midnight to simply stare into the fire, watching the wild, dancing shapes of the flames through the smoke that curled up from his pipe with half-lidded eyes.

The tick of the clock, the crackling of the fire, blasts of wind occasionally rattling the window—these noises filled the silence of Ezra’s dark room. Time passed slowly, and his hip continued to throb.

At two, the clock chimed, waking Ezra from the doze he’d only just slipped into. He rose stiffly to add wood to the fireplace, then felt his pockets for his tobacco pouch before recalling it was empty. Like his pipe. In fact, he recalled with a quiet curse, he was completely out of the stuff, for there was none in this room, nor in all the house, save for a single pouch he kept stored in the billiard room. This left him with a considerable conundrum: to lug his aching body down the stairs through the freezing house to retrieve the tobacco, or to do without it and try to sleep.

He considered his bed a moment, considered the tingling sensation in his left leg and the throbbing in his joint. He considered the servants’ bell. Benedict was away with the rest of the servants for the Christmas holiday, and would not return until the day after tomorrow. At this hour, there was no one in the house to ring but Mrs. Agate, and not even the young master of Holland House was bold enough to dare rouse the formidable old cook from her repose.

He would have to get it himself.

With his dressing gown securely knotted around his waist and lantern and cane in hand, Ezra opened the door to his room and stepped into the dark hallway, stopping short at the sight of an unexpected shape lying just a few feet from him. Indeed, the sight was so unaccountable that he stared for nearly half a minute before the figure—for indeed, it was a person—stirred, wakened by the light he carried, and sat up bleary-eyed to squint at him.

“Miss Green?”

She rubbed her eyes sleepily, still squinting, as thoroughly perplexed as he was, he thought, to be looking at him as he was to be looking at her. Then, after a few seconds of this, she started, gasped and scrambled to her feet, evidently having returned to her senses.

Ezra stared in bewilderment at her profoundly frantic figure as she curtsied to him again and again.

“Forgive me. I muth’ve…startled you.”

“Well, yes,” he admitted. “What the devil were you doing sleeping in the hall?”

Miss Green looked up at him, eyes wide and fearful. She looked to his light, then her eyes flitted briefly to his before settling on his feet. And he understood.

He’d left her alone out here without a light, without a single servant in the house to show her to her room. Damned inconsiderate of him, he must own to that. But—to the girl, he asked:

“Why didn’t you knock to ask for a light?”

Miss Green did not answer, only bit her lips together and shook her head fiercely.

Ezra sighed. Timidity in one of lesser status had its place to be sure, but such an excess of it, where his own lack of good manners was concerned, embarrassed and therefore irritated him. And now he should have to walk up an extra flight of stairs to show the girl to her room on top of it.

“Get your things.”

Quickly Miss Green scrambled to gather her effects while he led the way. She could hardly struggle to keep up with him, he reasoned, when he moved like an old man.

“This is the stair to the attic.”

He climbed laboriously, and Miss Green followed. When they reached the landing he tried the door on the right, the room on the southwest corner of the house, the nursery he and his younger siblings had used in years past.

“It’s more of a storage room, now,” he murmured, finding the stub of a candle on the fireplace mantel and lighting it for her benefit. “As far as I’m concerned, you may make use of anything here. There, against the wall, Esther’s old bed,” he gestured to it with his chin. “You aren’t too tall, a child’s bed should serve you well enough at present. And if there’s anything else you require…”

Ezra stopped to find Miss Green watching him intently, her wide eyes reflecting the lantern light with solemn gratitude.

“I thank you kindly…Mr. Holland.” She said his name after a pause, with a particular gravity and care, the cause for which he could not surmise. He grunted a response, and turned to go.

“My father is an early riser. If you have any complaints as to your care, you may direct them to him. Though I wouldn’t trouble him with an account of my own dismal behavior,” he added with a smirk. “I daresay on that subject, you will find the old man quite unshockable.”

Leaving Miss Green to her devices, Ezra made his way slowly back down the stairs to the second floor and then to the first where he retrieved his tobacco pouch. By the time he had climbed back up to his room on the second floor, he was drenched in sweat and shaking with pain.

Laughing at the futility of his earlier stubborn resistance and his own miserable, pathetic state, he dosed himself with thirty-five drops of laudanum and collapsed into bed where shortly he fell into a heavy, restless sleep filled with fragmented, bizarre dreams.

Meanwhile on the floor above him, Miss Green worked uncovering the bed Mr. Holland had pointed out to her earlier. It had been stacked high with old elementary school books, but in short order she had removed and carefully placed them along the wall. Having very little light remaining from the candle Mr. Holland had supplied her with, Afton left off making any other alterations to her room, and made her bed on the short mattress, which was decidedly more comfortable than the floor where she’d been sleeping before, though no less cold without a blanket to cover herself on this icy December night.

Curled up, content to huddle inside her traveling cloak, she shivered alone in the dark for a good hour before sleep came for her at last, and relieved her a little from her present suffering…

~~~

Dawn brought light through Afton’s cloudy window. As before, when she was wakened, for some time she felt only bleary confusion. She had always been slow to rise, and generally useless in the first ten minutes after waking. 

But, sitting up in her little bed, having looked around the cluttered nursery for a minute, it all came back to her. Her journey to Holland House, her strange, neglected arrival, all of it seemed a very funny dream now. And her reality, even stranger than that.

Before she could even allow herself to begin to adjust to it, however, before she could even properly get her bearings, she was startled by a fierce pounding on her door, so aggressive she could only cry out in alarm at the sound. Jumping up, she ran to throw open the door only to be met by a scowling, overweight red-faced woman, winded so that the strands of hair that had strayed from beneath her bonnet flew this way and that with her heavy breathing.

“Well, here you are,” she huffed, hands on her hips. “Our own resident princess, it would seem, who hasn’t the courtesy to come down when she hears the breakfast bell, and would rather make a poor old woman climb two flights of stairs to fetch her.”

“F-forgive me! I—”

“Oh, never mind, girl,” the cook, Mrs. Agate, waved Afton’s apology away. “It’s Mr. Holland’s fault, sending all the servants home for Christmas, leaving one cook to do the work of half a dozen people. But he’s got another thing coming if he thinks he can ask me to climb the stairs again today—I’m not twenty anymore!” 

“No, indeed, Ma’am,” Afton said, thinking it wise to agree with this woman. In response, Mrs. Agate drew herself upright with considerable effort, and gave her an appraising look.

“Well? What do you call yourself, girl?”

“Afton Green, Ma’am.”

“Afton? Strange name. From the Bible, I suppose.”

Before Afton could correct her, she’d already begun her next sentence.

“All kinds of strange names they come up with in the Bible. I knew an Abednego, when I was a girl. Died choking on a herring bone, he did. Left his old widowed mother behind, and her with a sheep farm to look after and all. Well, I suppose this is hardly the time to stand around chatting, when breakfast is getting cold. Go ahead and make yourself presentable, Miss Green, and come down straightaway to breakfast with Mr. Holland.”

Without stopping to inform her of which way the dining room was, Mrs. Agate left Afton and marched back down the stairs, leaving her quite alone once again.

Finding herself thus summoned, the young girl did her best to make her appearance suitable, though with the time constraint there was only so much she dared attempt. It was, she hoped, enough to don a fresh, plain gown of pale gray, and to re-pin her hair, which was generally straight and of an unremarkable mousy shade. Fortunately, the room young Mr. Holland had provided her with last night came furnished with a small wall mirror, so Afton stopped in front of it before heading down, pausing some several moments, and moving her lips very carefully.

“Mr. Holland,” she practiced with particular attention to every syllable. “Mr. Holland.”

It was through careful attention and practice like this that Afton had conquered the childish lisp which had once so humiliated her, and forced her into isolation as a young girl. Unfortunately, it still had a way of resurfacing, especially when she was distressed, overwhelmed or very tired. She was anxious it should not present itself this morning, on her first meeting with her benefactor, Mr. Holland.

I must make a good impression, she thought to herself as she made her way down the stairs. I must show myself sensible to my situation, and take every pain to show my gratitude in every possible way.

After all, she knew very well, without this man’s approval, her stay at Holland House might be very short indeed…