Character · Blackmoor

Agnes Thorne

A paid companion, newly arrived at Wintering House

Agnes Thorne is nine-and-twenty, without family or fortune, and has spent her adult life being paid to be pleasant company to other women’s mothers. She is clever, watchful, and proud in the particular way of people who have had to be grateful too often — a pride she keeps folded away beneath excellent manners.

What she wants (and needs)

• Wants: a place — to belong somewhere, to matter to a household, to stop being a hired pleasantness passed hand to hand.
• Needs: to see clearly and refuse a comfortable lie, even when belonging depends on believing it.

The flaw that costs her

Her hunger to belong makes her willing to not-notice. Agnes is sharp enough to see the wrongness of Wintering House at once — the warm room, the missing mistress — but her longing to be kept, to be family at last, tempts her to explain it away, to be the good companion who does not ask. That temptation is exactly what the house, and the family, rely upon.

Voice

Formal, watchful, interior; excellent manners over a proud and lonely heart; notices what she is not meant to. First person, past tense.

Appears in

• The Wintering House novella