The small, stubborn circle of people the nocturne has failed to outwait.
Keeper of the Vale's largest candleworks and Lucien's oldest friend. She is the only person who teases him to his face, the only one who has seen him laugh helplessly, and the only one permitted to tell him when he is being insufferable. Their friendship is forty years old and shows no signs of resolving into anything simpler.
A weathered, near-silent man who tends the manor's rookery and, by extension, its message network. He and Lucien communicate largely in nods. It is the most efficient friendship in the Vale.
Keeps the clocktower (the tale) and considers Lucien a charming menace to punctuality. Their rivalry is conducted entirely in excruciatingly polite letters, each more courteous and more pointed than the last. The Vale reads them aloud at gatherings.
Not a person: a vast black moth, wingspan of a dinner plate, that lives in the library and follows Lucien from room to room. He insists it is "merely a moth." The staff have seen him read aloud to it.
Once a decade, more or less, a traveler arrives at the manor with no luggage and a story that doesn't quite hold together. Lucien always takes them in, always listens, and never asks the question he wants to ask. The staff have a betting pool on who the Stranger really is. Lucien pretends not to know about the pool.
Lucien loves the way old houses stand: by staying. He does not make friends quickly — a decade is a reasonable courtship for his trust — but his attachments, once formed, are load-bearing. The tragedy of his circle, such as it is, is arithmetic: he will outlive most of it. He knows this. He keeps the candles lit anyway.