Eleven gilt frames of identical dimensions, evenly spaced with the precision of a cataloguing system, each showing a young woman in the same dress. Cream silk, seed pearls, high collar, long sleeves. Eleven different painters across three centuries. Eleven different hands.
And every bride was smiling.
Not the same smile — these were eleven different smiles, rendered by eleven different hands, and they were all identical in quality, the same curve of the mouth, the same light in the eyes. The expression I had seen on Annabel's face in the sketch she drew of herself and labelled, in her small, precise handwriting: the expression the house gives you.
Beside the eleventh portrait, the plaster was different. A faint discolouration, the kind I'd seen in archives where a document has been removed and the wall remembers what hung there by the light it blocked. The brass picture hook gleamed, polished, positioned at the exact height and interval for a twelfth frame. Eleven brides had married into Aldermere Hall. None had ever left it. And the twelfth hook had waited, empty and patient, for me.
The sketchbook in this passage was hers. The Fifth Bride — the prequel novella to the Rootbound trilogy — is yours, free.
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