The Fall of Edenhurst
Several carriages and a crowd of people stood before the front entrance. They were the wagons of the village merchants Anastasia had occasionally seen passing along the road. She hid behind a tree and watched them. Raised voices clashed at the door while the butler and the remaining servants sweated to hold the throng back.
Why are they acting like this?
Pressed flat to the ground, Anastasia’s breath came short and fast. This was Edenhurst—the impregnable stronghold of the Lauderdales, her paradise. Never once had any uproar disturbed these grounds. So how could this be happening? A heavy weight seemed to drop straight through her chest, cracking every sense it struck; an icy dread raced along those fractures and flooded her entire body.
She knew the feeling. Long ago, when she had watched her father collapse face-down on a church floor, she had felt exactly this.
The trembling girl’s ears were pierced by the sharp edges of the crowd’s shouts.
“Let us see the Countess!”
“It’s been a whole month already! When do you plan to pay?”
“If you can’t pay, at least let us take goods in exchange!”
The relentless clamor bored into her ears—money, repayment, Lauderdale, ruined. One phrase cut sharper than the rest.
“I hear the match with Mikhail Sokolov has fallen through! How do you intend to pay now?”
At those words Anastasia, who had been curled tight, lifted her head in shock. Mikhail and Elizabeth were to marry; that was why he had come here in the first place. Yet the betrothal was broken?
The standoff between the crowd and the servants finally exploded into a scuffle. Ignoring torn clothes, the creditors shoved the servants aside and poured into the mansion. More unintelligible shouting rose from within; Anastasia clamped her hands over her ears.
Much later she watched the same people emerge again, laden with burdens. They were carrying the Countess’s most cherished treasures—pieces she had refused to sell even when the estate’s fortunes had already been desperate.
Precious things that had never once left Edenhurst were being roughly loaded onto wagons and driven away forever.
Meals simply stopped arriving. Anastasia finally mustered the courage to stop one of the maids and ask about food. The girl answered with icy contempt.
“Meals?”
Rage thickened the single word.
“You think you’ve got the leisure to worry about that right now?”
The maids had never been fond of her, yet for the sake of the Lauderdale name they had still called her “miss.” Now it was “you”? The shift was not merely unpleasant; it was frightening. Somewhere she could not see, something vast was changing.
“Out of the way!”
The maid shoved Anastasia hard and strode on. Only then did Anastasia notice the large bag in the girl’s hand—and that she was no longer wearing the household livery. The maid walked outside, joined other girls carrying similar bags, and climbed into a battered carriage.
“Everyone aboard? Then we’re off.”
Loaded so heavily it listed, the carriage lurched away from the estate behind two old horses. A short while later another wagon arrived, collected more departing servants, and left as well.
People were abandoning Edenhurst.
Anastasia hurried to the kitchen. She hungered less for food than for the servants’ talk that always filled the place. What was happening? How had things come to this? Peering inside, she saw at once that the kitchen no longer looked anything like itself.
What on earth…?
The kitchen had always bustled with maids. Water had always simmered on the hearth; every utensil had been scrubbed to a shine. The cupboards had held the family’s china in neat ranks, and the counters had been piled with carefully prepared ingredients.
Now only Cook Emma sat slumped in a corner, a brown bottle of liquor in her hand, fast asleep. Dirty cookware lay heaped in the sink as though it had not been washed in days. On the worktable, discarded scraps of food crawled with fruit flies. In all the time she had lived in this house Anastasia had never seen the kitchen like this—not even during the hard winter of the previous year.
She edged closer to the servants’ dining table. Mealtime was long past, yet the remaining men still sat there with grave faces, talking in low voices.
“When are you leaving?”
“I meant to go next week, but…”
“What about wages?”
“Don’t know. They keep saying they’ll pay, but Oliver never got a single coin and just went home empty-handed.”
“Damn it. Should we just walk out now?”
One of them scrubbed both hands down his face.
“What the hell is this? A little while ago everything looked fine…”
“Tell me about it. I even treated my friends to a big dinner because I thought wages would be several times higher once we moved to Sokolov. And now look. They say all contact with Mikhail Sokolov has been cut off.”
“That’s why the creditors went mad. Once the betrothal collapsed they figured there was nowhere left to squeeze the money from.”
Men who had dreamed of a rose-colored future could only stare at the wreckage of those dreams in hollow silence.
“Forget it. Let’s pack. We should take one last look for anything worth carrying off in place of wages.”
“Hell, I’ll even take the kitchen pickles.”
“The maids already cleaned those out this morning. I’m grabbing the garden tools.”
At the scrape of chairs Anastasia spun and fled back to her room. Rough rummaging sounds drifted in from outside. Even she, ignorant as she was, understood.
Edenhurst had fallen—utterly, far more completely than last winter. Yet something else terrified her more than the safety of the estate she had always prized above all else.
They said contact with Mikhail had been lost. That was why everyone was leaving.
“No…”
She remembered his words. Wait just a little while, he had said. He would return soon.
Edenhurst emptied in a blink. Stripped of both belongings and people, the mansion lay under a bleak, day-long silence.
A few remained, of course: the Countess, Elizabeth, Catherine, a handful of lifelong retainers too loyal to abandon the Lauderdale family—and Anastasia. That was all who still lived within its walls.
The Countess watched Catherine wailing from morning onward. Ever since the creditors had swarmed in and stripped every last saleable object from the house, Catherine had done nothing but cry.
“Can you not stop that noise?”
The Countess’s voice was raw, but Catherine’s sobs only grew louder. Pressing her throbbing temples, the Countess began,
“Housekeeper, my headache powder—”
She bit her lip, remembering that the housekeeper had been among the first to flee.
The past several days had been an unbroken nightmare. Creditors had descended on Edenhurst like crows, shrieking for their money. Every one of them said the same thing: they had heard the match with Mikhail Sokolov was broken. While they plundered the house the Countess ordered the butler to send word to Sokolov at once. When she was told it would cost a great deal of money, she flung one of her treasured rings at him without a second thought.
Three days later the messenger returned.
“Lord Mikhail was not in Sokolov. The men who came with him last time were gone as well.”
“You should still have brought back help! A cheque, at the very least!”
“Both the household and the company staff said nothing is possible without Lord Mikhail’s express permission. What more could I say? I did explain the estate’s plight and begged for the swiftest possible reply. But they told me Lord Mikhail has gone far out onto the central plains on a business inspection, so an answer will be delayed.”
The hired man left her with nothing but that unsatisfactory report and vanished back to the village. The Countess seethed while Edenhurst continued to hollow out around her.
Most galling of all, the housekeeper herself had been the first to go—slipping away among the departing maids on the very first carriage. The Countess later confirmed that several jewels she had refused to sell even in winter were missing.
She should have dragged the woman back for questioning, yet almost no one remained who would still obey her. The butler, too, had quietly walked out carrying a few pieces he had long ago hidden deep in the storehouse. Even the relatives who had once written so eagerly now fell silent—as cleanly as if a knife had severed every tie. Letters were returned unopened.
The total rejection felt excessive, almost unnatural. It had never been this absolute before. Why now?
Then a name flashed through the Countess’s mind.
Empress Irina.
“That woman…”
She clenched her teeth. She remembered what Mikhail had said when he last visited: that the Empress Dowager found the betrothal thoroughly unwelcome, and that every sort of pressure was already being brought to bear on his companies.
At the time the Countess had given the warning little thought. What could the Empress possibly do to her? She held no public office and never moved in the capital’s social circles; there seemed nothing with which to threaten her.
And yet she visits this humiliation upon me?
Everything that had befallen Edenhurst of late was a degradation the Countess had never endured in her life. Humiliation burned so hot in her gut that her old illness flared again—yet now there was not even medicine left to take.
She had hastily explored other matches for Elizabeth, only to receive the same absurd reply from every quarter: was not Miss Elizabeth already deeply involved with Mikhail Sokolov?
The Countess understood at last. No one else would take Elizabeth now—except Mikhail. Anyone who might still consider her would be some household that cared nothing for a woman’s past, a match that could never compare to him. The half-finished betrothal had branded her daughter for life.
“My lady.”
One of the few remaining maids spoke carefully.
“What is it?”
“The provision merchant has come.”
“Tell him we cannot settle the account just now.”
“He already knows that… He says he would like to take something else instead.”
“Something else?”
“Well…”
The maid hesitated, then answered.
“He’s asking whether he may take Miss Anastasia.”