The Ravencliff Bride (9 page)

“Don’t worry, Nicholas,” she said, brushing past him into the corridor, scattering the eavesdropping footmen. “I shall be the soul of propriety, good manners, and grace. Now, I do not mean to be rude, but you really must excuse me. I need to prepare myself to attend to house business.”

Turning on her heel, she floated off and left him no less abruptly than he had left her in the study.

Nicholas didn’t join her for nuncheon, which was just as well. She hadn’t worked out the strategy of their next meeting yet. There hadn’t been time. Before the day was gone, she’d held interviews with Mrs. Bromley; Agnes Knott, who answered only to “Cook;” and both Searl and Robbins, the two footmen who presided over meals at Ravencliff.

Mrs. Bromley made suggestions for the menus, and gave her a list of Nicholas’s preferences and dislikes. The housekeeper also walked her through a room off the dining hall, where china and silver were housed in elaborate cabinets. There were breakfast, nuncheon, and dinner dishes, several different sets for each meal, one lovelier than the next, and silver to coordinate with each. Glassware was also housed here. The array was staggering. Grand parties were once held at Ravencliff, Mrs. Bromley told her. Some of the china hadn’t been used in thirty years. Well, it was going to be used now, Sara vowed. Nicholas Walraven was in for a surprise.

It was nearly dusk when she returned to her suite. Nell would soon come to help her dress for dinner. She set the tablet containing her menu notes on the writing desk in her
sitting room, and went to the window, studying the view through the mullioned panes. The seas were running high. White-capped combers crested far from shore; their sighing echo reached her where she stood. It was a soothing sound that could lull her to sleep if she’d let it.

Her gaze drifted toward the south. A figure was traveling the edge of the cliff in the soft semidarkness. It was Nicholas, and her heart tumbled in her breast following his long-legged stride as he paced along the seawall. There was no anger in his posture; something more akin to restless agitation moved him. This was a man wrestling with some demon yet to be named, and she longed to fly down the grand staircase, out through the great hall, over the sculptured grounds to his side, and make him tell it. This, of course, was a fantasy. She didn’t even know if it were possible to access the cliff from the circular drive. It hadn’t seemed so when she arrived. There had to be another entrance, one closer to the west side of the house and the sea.
I’ll bet Nero knows
, she realized.
He was soaking wet when he paid his visit
. She shrugged. Since the animal had no voice to tell, she made a mental note to inquire of the servants in the morning.

She was just about to leave the window, when Nicholas took a different direction. All at once, he broke his stride and began to climb down the cliff. The means of his descent was hidden from her, but she assumed it to be the stairs hewn in the rock leading to the strand. He had warned her away from those stairs. Was it just as he’d said, that it was unsafe to climb down, or was there something down there . . . something that he didn’t want her to see? She’d negotiated such descents at Dover and Lyme, and come to no harm—steep, treacherous descents, often slick from spindrift and backwash. She would do so here as well. When the time was right.

She couldn’t see Nicholas any longer, and she turned away from the window. The notes she’d taken during her interviews drew her to the desk. She’d been hasty in her boast;
three days really wasn’t nearly enough time to prepare for a houseguest, considering, and she began forming her notes into lists. She was still poring over them when Nell came to dress her for dinner an hour later.

“I think I shall have a tray here in my rooms,” Sara said, looking up from the stack of papers her notes had become. “See to it, will you, Nell?”

“Yes, my lady. Are ya feelin’ poorly, my lady?” said the abigail, studying her with knitted brows.

Sara responded by exhibiting a sheaf of papers. “No, no, I’m just bogged under with all this. We’re to have a houseguest Thursday week. There are menus to be worked out, accommodations—all sorts of issues to be addressed. I fear I shall be closeted here until the gentleman’s arrival.”

“Yes, my lady,” said the abigail. “Do ya want ta send your regrets?”

“Ah!” Sara cried, taking a piece of parchment and red sealing wax from the drawer. She scribbled a few lines, folded it, then took up a candlestick, and sealed it shut with a stamp embossed with a
W
in scrollwork. Indeed, she would send her regrets. She wouldn’t make that mistake again. The last thing she wanted was another late-night visit from Nicholas Walraven. “Would you see that his lordship receives this?” she said, handing it over. “Afterward, you may do as you please. I’ll dress myself for bed. I have all this to see to before I retire, and I don’t want to be disturbed again tonight.”

“Yes, my lady,” Nell said. She sketched a curtsy, and left as quietly as she’d come in.

The dinner tray arrived soon after, and Sara set a portion of her larded pheasant aside in case Nero should pay a visit. Once the tray was collected, the draperies drawn, and the fire stoked with fresh logs for the night, she left the foyer door open a crack, and went back to the stack of papers on her desk.

It was nearly midnight when she set the lists and menus
aside, and blew out all the candles except for a branch on the stand beside her bed. She was exhausted, but she’d chosen the china to be used at breakfast, nuncheon, and dinner during the doctor’s stay, and formed a workable menu plan that would cover meals for a sennight. The rest could be done at her leisure. At least she had an impressive accomplishment to submit to Nicholas in the morning. She would take it with her when she went down to breakfast. That should show Baron Nicholas Walraven just what sort of investment he’d made in purchasing a hostess. Thinking on that revived her, and she kicked off her Morocco leather slippers, and flopped on the bed to gloat over her success. She didn’t mean to fall asleep there, fully dressed on top of the counterpane, but she did. Her eyelids drooped then closed, and she drifted off almost as soon as she curled on her side and relaxed.

Her sleep was deep and dreamless, yet something woke her in the wee hours, something physical. The bedding beneath her moved, and her body moved with it, displaced by whatever phenomenon wrenched her eyes open. Dazed, she blinked awake. The candles beside the bed had burned down to nubs. One had gone out altogether, and wax frosted the shafts and shackled the candle branch to the mahogany stand with globs of unsightly tallow.

Blinking back sleep, she focused her eyes on what had awoken her. There, on the foot of the bed, sat Nero, like the Sphinx, licking larded pheasant grease off his jowls with his long, pink tongue, watching her. He looked just like a statue straight out of John Nash’s neoclassical Egyptian decor, so fashionable among the
ton
that season.

“Nero!” she cried. Scrabbling to his side, she threw her arms around his neck, and he rewarded her by licking her face all over. She giggled. He tasted of pheasant, and he smelled clean, of the sea. She ruffled his thick, shaggy fur, and planted a kiss on the top of his head. “I told you I’d have a treat for you the next time you came,” she said, hugging him again. “I see you’ve found it. Did you like it, boy?”

Nero whined in reply, and nudged her with his cold, wet snout.

His red-fire eyes almost seemed human, gazing at her in the semidarkened room. Aside from the glowing embers in the hearth that had colored those deep, soulful eyes, only one candle remained lit now, casting a halo of shimmering light about the animal’s body

“You’ve been outside,” Sara whispered. “I smell the sea on your coat. I taste the salt. You know how to get out there, don’t you, Nero? You’ll show me, won’t you? It’ll be our secret.”

There was such an expression of comprehension in the animal’s eyes, as though he’d understood every word. The fingers of a cold chill crawled up her spine, watching the closest thing to a frown she’d ever seen on a dog’s face manifest itself across Nero’s broad, flat brow. It was a fleeting look that turned feral in a blink. Whining, the animal sprang off the bed, streaked through the open foyer door, and disappeared down the shadow-steeped hallway before she ever got to the threshold.

So much for the answer to her question; when she reached the corridor all that met her eyes was the faintest shudder of suggested motion that might have been Nero’s bushy tail disappearing over the second-floor landing. She didn’t even stop to think or collect her slippers. Moving on feet that made no sound, she raced along the carpeted hallway, flew over the landing, and ran down the grand staircase to the green baize door. Nero was nowhere in sight, and she was just about to try the knob, when it turned, and she ducked beneath the bifurcated staircase and held her breath.

The door creaked open. One of the servants was entering the main house from the servant’s quarters below—a footman, or one of the hall boys. She couldn’t be sure from her vantage, flattened against the wall in the shadows. Whichever, a candle branch lit his way, and she stood there,
spine rigid, until the scuffling patter of his footfalls became distant, and the stairwell grew dark around her again.

Sara drew a deep, ragged breath, and slumped against the wall, but it wasn’t a wall, it was a
door!
It came open, supporting her no longer, and she backpedaled trying to maintain her balance before it swung shut on her escape with a heart-stopping
click
.

Falling was her last conscious sensation.

Sara groaned awake some time later in dank, cold darkness. The hard floor beneath her was slimy with dampness, recalling Fleet Prison. She screamed at the top of her lungs for help, but all that replied was the mournful echo of her cries drifting upward. Her head was splitting with pain, and vertigo starred her vision. The swirling white pinpoints before her eyes were the only light. There was a lump on her brow. She fingered it gingerly. By the swelling, she assessed it to be impressive. It wouldn’t be easy to hide. How would she explain it to Nicholas? First things first, she decided. She would have to find her way out of wherever she was to do that, and she drew herself up to her knees, and began groping the floor.

All at once something brushed her neck, and she cried out, swatting it away. It was only her Mechlin lace insert that had come loose in the fall, and she heaved a gushing sigh of relief trying to tuck it back in place. That, however, was impossible. The dress was torn at the shoulder, one of the puffed sleeves was hanging where the neck was torn, and there was nothing to tuck it into. It barely covered her breast.
That’s the
trouble with fashions today
, she thought ruefully.
They’re made too flimsy to be serviceable
. But then, one wasn’t supposed to go tumbling down stone staircases in them, was one? Which was what her fingers finally showed her—a narrow step, then above it another, and another. She staggered to her feet, climbed up, and found two more, then a wall. She felt it—every inch of it. Where was the door she’d fallen through? It wasn’t there!

Panicked now, she screamed with all her might for help, but the sound echoed back at her, ringing in her ears. The wall was granite rock, impenetrable, and she slid back down to the bottom, and began searching the blackness with outstretched arms, and hands carving circles in the damp, stale air. Several steps more and she bumped into another wall. This, too, was granite. If she could only see!

Inch by inch, she felt her way around the cubicle—scarcely larger than a closet—stumbling over what must have sufficed for a bed, and a pile of debris beside the stairs. That, she presumed to be what had broken her fall, since she’d come to in the midst of it. It had spared her a much more serious injury than the lump on her head that she’d evidently gotten on the way down.

On the other side of the narrow stairs, she tripped over a small chest against the wall. She felt the top of it, and her hands came away slimed with mildew, but not before she found a little drawer recessed under the carved edge. Dampness had all but fused it shut, and it took some time, but she finally worked it open. There was a candle, and a tinderbox inside. Did she dare hope the tinder was dry enough to burn? Praying that the little metal coffer had protected it enough, she worked the flint and anonymous flammable bits until they finally ignited and lit the candle. It was short and squat and she anchored it to the top of the chest with tallow drippings and turned to survey her prison. Her breath caught.
A priest hole
, could it be? If the house went back beyond the Norman Conquest, it was very possible. Such
things were common through the ages, and most old castles and houses had them. Ravencliff qualified in both cases.

All at once cold chills shook her body, and gripped her heart like a fist. She’d heard tales of men dying in such hidey-holes, of suffocation, and starvation—walled up inside and forgotten, sometimes deliberately. Their construction was inscrutable. The walls on this one had to be more than a foot thick. They would never hear her cries from above. Suppose no one thought to look for her here? Another glance around the room—at the heavy, undisturbed coating of mildew spread over everything—told her that it hadn’t been used in some years. Did anyone even know it was here? She could only pray that they did.

She looked in dismay at her torn dress. It was filthy with dust and slime from the bleeding dampness that clung to the place. Her hands and bare arms were black with it. She was cold, and she hugged herself for warmth, searching the room with anxious eyes for something she could use as a wrapper. They finally came to rest upon a pile of old linens in the corner, and she fished out a piece of cloth that might have at one time been used as bed linen, so old it ripped when she tugged it around herself. It would have to do.

She glanced at the candle. Its flame was tall and straight. No drafts. Her heart sank. That meant no air was getting in. It also meant she had to save the candle for emergencies. There was precious little left of it as it was. Besides, she dared not leave it lit and risk burning up the oxygen, and she quickly paced off the area, and committed the dimensions of the cell and its contents to memory.