It was late. Past the eleventh hour, closer to the twelfth, and the estate had gone completely quiet around me in the way that it only went quiet in the deepest part of the night, when even the staff who kept late hours had found their beds and the torches in the outer corridors had burned down to their final inches.
I was standing at the window of the private sitting room.
I had not planned to be there. I had been on my way to bed, had stopped to check the latch on the east-facing window that Eli had noted was not closing cleanly, and had found myself standing there in the dark looking out at the estate grounds instead of checking the latch and going to sleep.
