The air was thick with the scent of damp moss and the faint, acrid tang of charred wood when Ivy first crossed the threshold of Holton Manor. It was the autumn of 1887, and the wind carried the brittle rustle of maple leaves, as if the earth itself whispered secrets too fragile to hold. She stood in the grand doorway, a slight figure dwarfed by the towering stone arch, her gray dress frayed at the hem, clinging to her like a second skin worn thin by years of toil. In her hands, she clutched a tattered cloth bundle—her entire world reduced to a few scraps of linen and a cracked comb. The manor loomed before her, its windows like dark, unblinking eyes, and she felt the weight of their gaze settle into her bones.

The housekeeper, a wiry old woman named Mrs. Grayson, led her through the echoing corridors with a gait as sharp as her tongue. Portraits lined the walls, their painted faces frozen in haughty judgment, their eyes following Ivy as she passed. She kept her head low, her chestnut hair falling in a tangled curtain over her face, but her mind buzzed with a quiet defiance. She had scrubbed floors and mended stockings in a village where the air reeked of coal and despair, daughter to a washerwoman and a drunkard, but she had never bowed willingly. This place, with its vaulted ceilings and glittering chandeliers, was a foreign kingdom, and yet it stirred something in her—a pulse of longing she could not name.