Mia Marlowe (17 page)

Lyttle noticed that the steward didn’t say prayers were answered. Only heard.

“An’ ye dinna mind me asking, what d’ye intend to do?”

Alexander climbed the stone staircase and stumbled toward his room. He plucked a torch from the wall and lit his own way. Damned if he’d ask one of those pathetic souls in the hall to do it for him. They all looked as if they’d drop over dead if he so much as crossed his eyes at them.

To his amazement, the first door he tried turned out to be the correct one. His valet had laid out his banyan on the foot of the big bed, though the servant himself was nowhere to be seen.

The chambermaid had left a banked fire in the grate. Alex stubbed his torch out into the fireplace and dropped it there. The pitch spit sparks up the chimney and the blaze roared back to life, banishing the chill in the room. Then Alex plopped into one of the rustic wooden chairs and started tugging off his boots. His head pounded.

Tea only, tomorrow,
he promised himself as the first boot came free.

Finally, after much twisting and pulling, he yanked off the second boot and stretched out his legs. He shrugged out of his jacket and waistcoat. He removed his waterfall neck cloth. Then he unbuttoned his shirt. He forgot to take off his cufflinks before he started stripping. The sleeves became hopelessly hung up at his wrists and in frustration he ripped the shirt when he stomped a foot down on it to yank himself free.

In his current foxed state, that simple activity wore him out. He leaned back in the chair, wishing it was of a more comfortable design. If it were a tufted wing chair, for example, he might not even have to rise and stumble toward the heavily timbered bed where the counterpane had already been drawn back. Alex leaned his head in his hand, covering his eyes.

He’d behaved abominably in the Great Hall and he knew it. Once he started, he couldn’t seem to stop. It was almost as if he were watching himself from outside his own body, saying all those horrible things, acting like a complete ass, and not able to do a single thing to end his diatribe.

He sighed. Lucinda had every right to hate him. He hated himself.

His breathing slowed. The crackle of the fire faded and even the tick of the ormolu clock on the mantel seemed to stop. He skimmed the surface of sleep, dipping beneath its deep blackness long enough for dream fragments to rise in his mind.

Before the pounding line of horsemen met the opposing force, the images, sounds, and smells faded, blending into an entirely different scene.

In a swirl of silk, the vision faded along with the spicy jasmine of the woman’s perfume. In its place came a dimly lit chamber.

The wood in the fireplace shifted and popped. Alexander startled in his chair and jerked awake, wondering for half a blink where he was.

Across the room, a man stepped from the long mirror. Not from behind it, but
from
it. The silvered glass wavered as he passed through and then coalesced behind him in shimmering circles, like a pond disturbed by a pebble.

I’m still asleep
, Alex decided.

“Good evening, my lord,”
came a soft Scottish burr.

Alexander knuckled his eyes and recognized the man as Farquhar, his long-absent steward. “It took you long enough to present yourself, man. Have you waited till I’m totally ape-drunk to show me the estate ledgers?”

Farquhar moved to the window with a surprisingly smooth gait for one of his advanced years and looked down into the bailey.

Alex hauled himself up and joined the steward there. Since this dream didn’t seem to be fading or melting into another one like the others had, he figured he might as well become engaged in it. Strange as this night phantom was, with people popping in and out of looking glasses and such, he was grateful that at least the weeping woman was gone.

Below in the bailey, all the denizens of the keep were pouring across the snow-covered courtyard and into the well-lit chapel.

“Midnight service?” Alex asked.

“Aye,”
Farquhar said in his papery, thin tone.
“To celebrate the birth of Our Lord and to pray a bit for the new laird of Bonniebroch as well.”

“I didn’t ask them to.”

Alexander’s ears burned. Once again he was struck by Farquhar’s unservant-like demeanor. He was more like a tutor or an elderly uncle. Or a confessor.

It was time to change the subject.

“If you’re not here to demonstrate the efficacy of your stewardship, why are you in my chambers instead of down there in the kirk with the rest of them?”

When Alexander gazed at the steward full on, he looked like any other aged Scot, wiry and tough, if a bit more diminutive than most. But viewed from the corner of his eye, Farquhar seemed frailer, as if Alex could actually see through his slight frame to the room beyond.

There.
Wasn’t that the coal hod showing clearly through the tail of Farquhar’s old-fashioned frock-coat? And didn’t the thistle pattern that framed the wall tapestry continue unabated along the edge of the floor through Farquhar’s white stockings?

Alex closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose.
Drunk and dreaming. A bad combination.

“I may no’ attend services with the rest, but dinna fret about the condition of me soul, my lord,”
Farquhar said, his voice so soft, Alex strained to hear it.
“The Almighty and I talk with each other plenty. I simply prefer to do it when He and I are alone.”

It had been a long time since Alex had conversed with God. So long he wouldn’t know where to begin. He scrubbed a hand over his face. He didn’t want to think these thoughts. It was as if they weren’t even his, as if Farquhar had planted them in his head.

Even if he hadn’t, the steward had a bad habit of changing the subject when the current one didn’t suit him. Alex turned to Farquhar in irritation.

“You still haven’t answered my question. Why are you here?”

Something hidden always pricked his interest. Against his will, Alex was intrigued. “What sort of secrets?”

“There are many of them. More than ye can bear at the moment, but for tonight, we’ll start with the privy passages that lead to and from this room.”
Farquhar moved smoothly to the fireplace.
“Come, yer lordship.”

Alex ambled over, nearly tripping over his own feet. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m in no condition to wander far.”

There was only one stone figurine on the thick slab of oak, so Alex reached for it. Surprisingly, he couldn’t lift it off the mantel. Its base was attached at one side so he could only tilt it like a lever. As he did, the faint rasp of stone on stone came from beneath the tapestry that featured a trio of hunting dogs harassing a bristly-backed boar.

“Now, pull back that tapestry,”
Farquhar ordered.

It occurred to Alex that his servant was doing the commanding and he was doing all the obeying. Not what he expected when he became a “by-God Scottish laird,” but he couldn’t come up with a cogent argument against it at the moment. Alexander lifted the heavy tapestry and a blast of cold air whooshed by him, raising a raft of gooseflesh on his bare arms and chest.

It also cleared his head. His vision was honed to knife-edged sharpness, but without benefit of additional light in the dark corridor he couldn’t see beyond ten feet.

There was a tin sconce inside the passage with tinder and flint in a wall-mounted container situated a respectable distance away from the sconce. Alex lit the candle, which threw a cheery circle of light. Now he could see that the passage was studded with sconces at intervals as it disappeared into darkness. The candles would banish the black, but did nothing for the cobwebs that draped over his head like lacy bed curtains.

“I take it you didn’t give the previous Lord Bonniebroch this tour?”

“Nae. He wasna the right laird. No heart. No honor. We all kenned it from the start. T’was a mercy when Sir Darren
MacMartin
decided to lose the estate to the first man daft enough to engage him in a game of poque. Oh!”
Farquhar seemed to realize he’d just insulted his new laird and had the grace to look chagrined for a couple blinks before he hurried on.
“I do beg yer pardon. We like to think Providence had a hand in ye being the daft man, ye see. All’s well that ends well. At least, that’s the hope. Now, if ye please, let us proceed.”

Alex was too intent on the secret passage to waste time over his servant’s unintentional slight and ham-handed apology. He moved down the narrow way. He didn’t hear the steward’s footfalls behind him but the old man’s voice tickled his ear, admonishing him not to turn off the main passage. A set of stairs going up disappeared to the right.

“Does that lead to the battlements?” Alex asked.

“When what?”

Farther along the passage, another staircase led downward. “I suppose that leads to the deep dark dungeon,” Alex said with a laugh. As if there still were such things in this thoroughly modern Year of Our Lord 1821.

“Aye, it does,”
Farquhar confirmed.
“But ye dinna need to trouble about that for another few days or so. What bides there is still contained. Mostly.”

Alex jerked to peer over his shoulder at Farquhar, but the passage was too dim, as if someone had guttered the candles behind him so they nearly winked out at that precise moment. Alex couldn’t see the old man clearly. He decided not to ask for an explanation of that cryptic statement. Farquhar wouldn’t tell him any more unless he wanted to in any case.

He stopped before a doorway outlined in faint light seeping through the cracks. “What’s behind this door?”

Treasure? Alexander had never thought himself the sort to be motivated by gain, but his heart quickened at the adventure of finding a trove. He turned the knob and pushed the door open slowly.

The room was lit only by the banked fire, but his vision had become sharpened even further by his sojourn through the dark passageway. No barrels of coin or upturned, gem-encrusted goblets greeted his eyes. This was no dragon’s hoard, no pirate’s buried treasure.

It was a bedchamber.

He took a few steps into the room, his stockinged feet making no sound. Then there was a soft creak and the latch snicked behind him. He turned to see that the secret doorway had no knob on this side, no visible evidence that it even existed.

And no evidence that Farquhar had followed him into the room either. Which was just as well, because if he had, Alex would have had to toss him out the window.

The sleeping form in the big four-poster belonged to Lucinda. Alexander couldn’t bear the thought of another man being in her chamber while she slept, not even a decrepit old soul like Farquhar.

She was only for him.

Lucinda was buried under a mound of coverlets, but he still knew it was her. Her soft lilac scent teased his nose and set all his senses on edge.

Somewhere along the dark tunnel, Alex had realized he wasn’t dreaming. Starting from Farquhar’s unorthodox entry into his chamber through the mirror, to Alexander’s passage through the strange tunnel with its upward and downward staircases he was admonished not to take, to this moment of indecision in his wife’s bedroom, not much of this benighted night made logical sense.

But he knew clear to his bones that all this was real.

For one thing, if he’d been dreaming, he wouldn’t have hesitated. He’d have joined his phantom Lucinda on the thick feather tick and made sloppy-drunk love to her. He’d have spread her wide and plunged in, wallowing in the mindless animal joy of rutting.