Over the grounds of the ancestral Knavesmire House, the air stayed frigid and biting long into the expected turn of the season. Spring was always slow and begrudging; the stale earth remained frosted over with a thick sheet of durable and unforgiving ice.

The house itself was erected on a patch of sunken land studded with a wall of oak trees that grew inward and formed a meagre shelter over the gabled roof, annexing the dwindling Love family in shadow. The home was the only piece of Mrs Love’s childhood that had not been ruined by the recent losses of her extended family members, and she clung to it though the winters here suffocated her. 

The smallest family member, Thomas, fancied himself better suited to ‘Tommy’ but hadn’t the friends to test it out with; company for him stretched between his parents and whichever woodland creatures he could catch sight of by remaining deathly still in the gardens. He was half as tall as his wiry mother, doubly as ashen-skinned and dark-haired as his father, and unlike both parents - and perhaps owing to his mid-December birth and a childhood suffused in snow - he adored the icy grounds on which he was raised. The cold weather and unruly grounds beyond the shield of oak trees lining his home kept the elder Loves in a heightened state of precarity and his mother in particular had developed a rather paranoid disposition.

Despite her familiarity with Knavesmire’s grounds, she had always found that the snow possessed an uncanny ability to obscure everything she thought she knew. Trees that had become safe points for her and her siblings’ childhood adventures would be rendered unrecognisable by a fresh layer of snow; the large pond shrouded by the treeline would blend right into the grass banks once the frost had settled and the murky water that they would swim in come August became an afterthought. 

On a Thursday morning in the limbo between residual Winter and belated Spring, the sun poured through the gaps in the intricate pattern of naked branches that had formed against the sky as the oaks wrestled for exposure. Thomas Love, who had woken with a chill in his bones that he had become accustomed to, studied the similarity between the spidery blue veins on his thin arms and the patterns in the frost that grew on the house’s windowpanes. He had drawn a hopscotch on the lawn yesterday using the thumb of his mittens that was already lost to the volatility of English weather. He loved when the rain melted the snow, and he loved when the rain froze all over again. 

Mrs Love was posed for her fifth sitting in front of the young portraitist when her son barrelled into the room with his characteristic crash, misjudging the vigour and volume of his movements. He was cheery and dressed for the cold; the large bag on his shoulder announced his exploratory intentions before he could ask for his mother’s permission. She adored his adventurous streak chief amongst his peculiarities, though the air of mischief and the twinkle in his eye of late had begun to worry her. Typically, she was trusting, but recently, her son had taken to murmuring into the mirror, a habit that instilled her with an uncomfortable nostalgia.  

She remembered a strange woman who lived in this house when she was a girl, a woman born of winter, a lithe and springy, blue-lipped creature with lank dark hair that appeared wet under the light. Mrs Love only ever caught her in glimpses, an airy form made corporeal when the light landed just so, illuminated by the cold sunlight. It had been years - perhaps decades - since Mrs Love had last imagined her. Mr Love’s imagination was limited and his mind narrow; he would not take notice of a girl gliding by in his peripheries. Thomas, however, was as observant and broad of mind as his mother had been, and she had no doubt that he had caught this stranger in the Admiral’s mirror that hung in the study, where she, on many occasions had seen her too. After realising the acquaintance between her son and the ghost of her childhood, Mrs Love began to dream only of ice and for the last several mornings, she had woken in blinding panics only to realise that the danger she was sure of was only imagined. She might have made her son stay inside, but to deny Thomas Love to roam was to deny a jackdaw to fly. 

As far as Thomas was concerned, he had finally made himself a friend. The friend was a trick of the light, a whisper of a century long past, and an emblem of the lasting Knavesmire winters. He could not hear the messages she tried to whisper to him - his sleep was too heavy for her to reach him there and his attention span was too short for her to haunt his days. Instead, she drifted behind him, patient and enduring. 

“Stay where I can find you,” Mrs Love said, watching her son poke the convex mirror as he stared at his distorted features. 

“Of course, Mother. I’ll be looked after!” he said, unaware of the chill he sent rippling down his mother’s spine. Were her ghosts hereditary? Was her fear catching? If he was seeing her phantom too, why was he so wholly unafraid? 

Had she always been afraid of the blue-lipped woman, or was she becoming more anxious with age? Had she once been as fearless as her boy? 

The portraitist asked Mrs Love to relax her features - her eyes had become glassy, and her forehead knitted with an evident concern. She strummed her fingers rhythmically against her book and tried to ignore the feeling of ice in her sternum and of snow beneath her feet, but she could not shake it and continued to stare after him out of the window. His feet had left tracks in the snow, but one small change in the weather would wipe away the evidence he had ever been there. 

The sun continued to shine, and a stray ray through the linen curtains shone on the mirror. Frustrated by Mrs Love’s distraction, the portraitist asked for a break and, taking his pipe, searched for her husband, whose own severe portrait hung completed on the mantel.

Mrs Love tried to tug the strain from the lines on her forehead, her face warped by the mirror’s illusion, moments before a hairline crack began to travel up the length of the mirror. It cut into the glass slowly and made a methodical, web-like pattern. She stepped back in surprise and considered calling her husband - Darling, it appears my face has cracked my great uncle’s mirror - but the pragmatism in his response would only irk her. This crack was not logical, so he would try to make it thus. 

Simultaneously, the windows began to frost, and the wind began to howl, but the sun remained bright. Mrs Love sensed her coming before she saw her cracked lips and darkened eyes in the mirror. 

“Do you hear?” the woman dressed in winter asked. Mrs Love heard her clear as day. The woman’s eyebrows were wet with frost, her skin blueish and her thin frame rattling with shudders.

“The ice is thinning. The ice is thinning.” Spring was near, this much was true; the Loves had noticed the overdue bloom to the flowers dressing their lawn, but in her fear, Mrs Love failed to hear the warning to her words. 

She shook all over and backed from the mirror as the crack grew larger. There was no malice on this woman’s face, no threat - it was something familiar that Mrs Love could not quite define. 

In the same moment she opened her mouth to speak, the woman had glided away, lost to the shadow of the corner of the room, and in her wake, something quite marvellous was born from the intersection of light and cracked glass - a rainbow thrown across the room onto the far wall, where a photo of her beautiful, peculiar boy became illuminated in colour.

Then, as quick and as inexplicably as it had come, the crack in the mirror sealed itself. 

The ice is thinning. 

Thirty-two years prior, Mrs Love had been Miss Pritchard, and the little Miss Pritchard had a brother whose name he shared with his nephew. One day he had strayed beyond the treeline and in his juvenile panic, had forgotten his route home and curled up beside an oak tree. The cold ravaged his small body minute by minute while his beloved sister sprinted through the woods calling his name. 

He had been minutes from death when she skidded to a halt at his side. A rainbow, incongruous above the winter-barren forest, shone bright, one end pointing directly to the oak tree he had sought refuge under. Impossibly, it led her straight to him. That was the first day she met the blue-lipped woman, who stood over her brother, arms shielded around his upper body. The little Miss Pritchard had taken her stance as a threat and tore the boy from her grasp, carrying him home to warm him by the fire with a strength and speed she had not known was possible. 

With horror freezing the blood in her veins, the now Mrs Love broke into a similar speed, flinging open the door and heading for the pond. 

Her boy could not swim. The water meant death. The ice was thinning. 

She followed his usual route between the gaps in the trees and ran to him. Her instincts were sharp, and her son was predictable. He came into view and her fear was actualised: Thomas was dancing wildly on the ice covering the old pond.

Knavesmire’s wintery woman was there at the edge of the ice. Mrs Love took just shy of a moment to watch her try to step onto the ice, only for her foot to plunge through it like it was already water. She looked to Mrs Love, willing her to understand the gravity of her son’s peril, willing her to understand she meant no harm but that she could not help him here.

Mrs Love watched the ice begin to crack around Thomas, but that same inhuman speed and – for the first time – a complete lack of fear sent her skating toward him. Oblivious, little Thomas spun in happy circles. The ice had thinned beneath the sun, and his growing body was heavy enough to break it.

She reached him a singular, dreadful moment before he could plunge into the water and threw all their combined weight to the edge, where the wintery woman waited to take them into her arms and push them lightly onto more solid ground. Here, paralysed at the edge of her invisible threshold, she seemed perfectly ordinary, utterly benign and perfectly Knavesmire, a sentinel of these icy grounds.

“Your friend warned me,” Mrs Love whispered into Thomas’ scalp as he shivered, sharing a look with their warden that – despite the anxiety that coursed through her frozen veins – only said thank you, thank you, thank you.

The wintery woman walked them home and left them at the door, pleased, no longer needing to appear in her human form. She had lingered a hundred years to forewarn Knavesmire’s new owners of the dangers that had caused her bitterly cold fate, and having assured herself that Mrs Love was a worthy protector, she took to the icy air around them. She was in the birds that Thomas fed and most recognisably, she was in the rainbow that formed later that afternoon when the sunshine prospered against the final, heavy spell of rain before Spring finally came to Knavesmire.