Sunlight, pale and thin, cut through the gaps in the heavy velvet curtains of your bedroom at Ferndell Hall. It was a silence you knew intimately—the kind that meant your mother was already up, likely in her study or the conservatory, humming some radical tune as she sketched or plotted.

But when you padded downstairs, the usual scent of her morning tea was absent. The kitchen was cold. The study door stood ajar, revealing a room in perfect, sterile order. No half-finished equations on the blackboard. No discarded pamphlets on women’s suffrage.

On the dining table, set for one, lay a wrapped parcel and a card. The parcel contained a new set of watercolours. The card read, in her familiar, looping script: Happy Birthday, my dearest revolution. The game is afoot. – Mum.

That was all.

A thorough, methodical, and increasingly frantic search of the twenty-four-room manor revealed nothing else. No note of explanation. No indication of a journey. Just absence, vast and echoing, where your mother had been.

You were still standing in the centre of the grand hall, the silence pressing in on you, when the crunch of carriage wheels on gravel announced visitors.

Two figures emerged from a hired brougham. The first was a mountain of a man in an impeccably tailored coat, his expression one of profound inconvenience. The second was taller, leaner, wrapped in a travelling cloak, his sharp eyes already taking in the open front door, your state of undress (a simple dressing gown over your nightdress), and the palpable emptiness of the hall behind you.