Jealousy, that was all it could be. He’d done nothing other than become a friend to the king. More of a friend than some other parties who had been trying for years to flatter their way into the monarch’s inner circles. It was just bad luck that Mr. Jasper was in a position to make trouble for him.
When he closed his eyes, he could still see the man’s sneer. The way he turned his ring around on his finger, flaunting it—the symbol emblazoned on it was supposed to be a threat, he supposed. As if Peter feared the man simply because he was a member of one of those ridiculous fraternal orders that claimed ancient roots.
Insurance cooperatives, that’s all most of them were. No more than a few decades old, no power to accomplish anything aside from negotiating medical costs. No matter how important-sounding their Latin names, Peter had no desire to be one of them—someone had approached him a year ago, offering membership—and he had no fear of them. Jasper could twirl his ring about all he wanted.
But “secret” societies aside . . . would jealousy really lead the man to make accusations of espionage? That wasn’t a small thing, a silly thing. That was a life-or-death thing. He could be imprisoned or even killed over such an accusation.
His chest went tight, and he gripped another stone without throwing it. He would keep praying. And God would hear. He would see Peter through it. Somehow.
He stood and dusted the cliffside soil from his trousers. Locryn was not a man of faith. He had suffered as a child, had turned from his mother’s teachings. He ran all around the world searching for what was always waiting within his own heart. But the quest itself could teach the reader. The quest, and Locryn’s aging friend.
He would have to work Thomas into the cave scene. At the end of the last book he had headed back to London, leaving Locryn alone within a day of arriving in South America from Africa. Necessary, at the time. But Thomas definitely needed to be there now. How, though, to bring him back without it feeling contrived?
Peter turned back toward the path that would lead home. In this direction, the sky was cloudless and blue and stretching on forever, the sun smiling down on Kensey Manor. Thomas had gone home because his father was dying. He wouldn’t have had time to get there yet, tend to matters, and come back.
A bird cried overhead and flapped its way to a slab of granite. The father had passed away—the readers didn’t even know him, they would not mourn the loss. But it would leave Thomas with an inheritance that would make him no longer reliant upon Locryn James—definitely necessary. The critics were all beginning to complain about that, and they had a point. Locryn didn’t need a lackey, he needed a friend.
He could have gotten a telegram on the ship. Saying his father was gone, everything left to him. He wouldn’t then have to hurry home, if the estates were neat and tidy. He could change ships at a port in the Caribbean and turn back around. Be there outside the cave when Locryn stumbled his way out again.
He would symbolize the truth, then. That blinding, Socratic truth. There could be beauty in that.
Peter meandered his way around a granite boulder, eyes on the path through the scrub to keep his feet from stumbling over any wily stones. Or to give his legs a message to pause, even when it took him a moment to sort through his brainstorm and realize what he was seeing.
Cigarette butts. And not just one that would indicate a stray wanderer who had happened over his property or a hired hand slipping away for a few minutes’ break—though Peter knew of no one on his staff who smoked much. There were at least a dozen butts snuffed out amid the stones, half-kicked beneath the bell heather. Someone had stood here for quite a while. Or came here frequently.
He hadn’t noticed the collection yesterday. Of course, he’d been talking to Gryff when he’d walked this path yesterday. Even so. They stood out, being white and human among the green and brown and natural.
Well could he imagine someone standing here, crouching down behind another huge slab of coastal granite. Looking . . . Peter drew in a breath. From right here, someone would have a fine view of Kensey. Or the back of Kensey, anyway. One could see the kitchen, the back garden. The cottage.
He may not have thought anything of it. Except that last night someone had tossed a rock through his drawing room window.
Withdrawing his handkerchief from his pocket, he gathered up the refuse. He would check this spot each day. And if more appeared, he would know if it was one at a time, or in a mass like this looked. And if the latter . . . then it meant someone had stood out here for quite a while, watching his home.
Or . . . or watching the cottage. Though he couldn’t imagine why anyone would have followed Miss Gresham here to spy on her while she cleared out his library.
He pocketed the rubbish and kept on the trail. There could be no knowing. Not yet. But he would keep an eye on it. His fingers still itched to do something when he considered that shattered window, the rock sitting on his desk. But what? He could storm into the village and demand to know who had done it.
That would go well. He knew the words he’d want to say—“I am as English as any of you. I have lived here all my life.”—but he could hear himself now, stumbling and stuttering and getting out no more than an “I—I—I . . .” amid the laughter of his neighbors.
And even if he got it out, their rebuttals would be quick. His father may have been raised in England, may have become English when Opa had appealed to become a subject. But his mother . . . She had never relinquished her German citizenship, and she and Father had in fact taken steps to preserve it. To give Peter options, she had said. So that he would be both German and English until such a time as he could decide for himself which he preferred.
He sighed and sidestepped a jutting rock when his feet took him too close to the side of the path. He had decided when he was eighteen—but apparently the world didn’t care about that. Or at the very least, Mr. Jasper didn’t. He was determined to make Peter out to be a villain.
Villain. Maybe Thomas shouldn’t be there right when Locryn came out of the cave. That may be too on-the-nose. Perhaps . . . perhaps it should be the villain instead. Peter clapped a hand to his hat to keep a particularly ambitious gust of wind from snatching it away and let that idea simmer. He didn’t quite know who the villain was yet—should he revive Masters from This Mad Caper? Masters had been a villain the readers had truly loved to hate. Or Williams from The Final Journey? Come up with someone new altogether?
His eyes strayed to the cottage again. Perhaps a woman this time. That could get interesting. A bit of a love interest—not that Miss Gresham was a love interest. And not that it would please any female readers seeking romance if she ended up the villain. Still. He certainly hadn’t done that before.
Yes, yes, that was it. Thomas could be waiting in town, but it could be a young woman who was there outside the cave. This could work. And if it did, he would owe Miss Gresham a very vague thank-you. A bonus, perhaps, when she finished the library.
If she finished the library. He ought to go and check on her. Make sure none of the stacks had collapsed on her while he was out-of-doors. She could be gasping for her last breath under a hundred tomes on medical science and no one would ever know it.
He picked up his pace a bit as he trod the rest of the litter-free path through the heather and gorse and granite, emerging into Teague’s Italian garden with a smile. Though he highly doubted Miss Gresham had really been buried alive in books, his fingers were ready to find their home on his typewriter keys again.
He chose a side door to enter through—one not quite in sight of the broken window, which would just irritate him and distract him from caves and adventurers and South America—but near enough that he wouldn’t have to sidestep Kerensa, who would be busy cleaning the main floor. He slipped inside, mind conjuring up ideas of what kind of flora might be found at the cave entrance.
“Oh!” Mrs. Teague leapt out of his way, a luncheon tray in her hands. “Gav dhýmm.”
Peter quickly closed the door that had nearly
struck her, offering a sheepish smile. “No, no, ex . . . excuse me, Mrs. Teague.”
Her reply was a smile all warmth and fondness. “Think nothing of it, Mr. Holstein. Did you have enough to eat? We’ve berries in the kitchen. And you really ought to have some greens. Or the shortcake Grammy made last night, perhaps.”
He started with a nod and changed it to a shake of his head as the list began. “I am . . . I am fine. Really.” Though his gaze took in the many dishes on the tray she carried, and the empty state of them all. Miss Gresham had apparently quite enjoyed Grammy’s cooking. Though how she managed to tuck away so very much, he couldn’t fathom. She was as thin as a whisper. Jenny, if she didn’t scare Miss Gresham all the way back to London tonight, would have quite a bit to say about his guest’s figure, which went beyond fashionable in its slenderness.
Not that he had particularly noticed her figure. Beyond what was expected of a man who made his living observing people and putting words to them.
Mrs. Teague was no slouch in the observation department either. She too looked at the cleaned-up tray. And sniffed in that way she did. “She apparently has no qualms about taking full advantage of your hospitality. I don’t think she left so much as a crumb.”
Peter chuckled and angled toward his study. “Grammy will be p-pleased.”
Unable to argue with that, Mrs. Teague sighed. “If you ask me, Mr. Holstein—not that anyone has, mind you—a young woman who shows up to a house uninvited is no lady, and not meant to be trusted.”
“You sound like . . . like Gryff.” He waved it off—it had been no secret that he’d been looking for a librarian, after all—and headed for his study door, which stood shut and inviting. He decided the empty luncheon tray was proof enough that Miss Gresham still lived among the stacks of books and followed the siren song of his typewriter.
Until he stood before his desk and saw that folded piece of paper on it, anyway. Then his muscles coiled. His neck went so tight a headache blossomed at the base of his skull.
It wasn’t that no one was allowed in his study—they were. It was just that no one ever entered without getting his permission first. No one. Even Mrs. Teague would leave the becrumbed plate and cup with the dregs of his morning coffee until he either left the door open for her or she tapped upon it and had express leave to enter.
True, he always put his manuscript away before he left the room. Or opened the door. Or, really, as he wrote it—the drawer remained open by his side while he was at the desk, and each sheet he pulled from the typewriter went directly into it. That way he never needed to do more than remove the one he was typing upon and slide the drawer shut to give someone leave to enter. And he always locked it before he left the room.
But still. Someone had been in here. Without permission. To leave him a . . . note?
He reached for it much like Locryn would soon be reaching for the pit viper guarding the entrance to the cave. Flipped it open, sent his eyes to the signature.
And frowned. Rosemary. Rosemary? His gaze darted to the door, shut, between him and the library. What kind of young lady signed just her first name on a note to a gentleman she didn’t know? It was forward and familiar and not at all what was done.
And she had come into his study to leave it here. On his typewriter.
Gryff and Mrs. Teague might be right about her after all.
He loosed a huff that sounded, in his own ears, like Father always had when something went wrong. A chuff of breath, quick and hard. Which, in turn, made him remember Mother’s chuckle in the face of it, and how she would say, “Are you a locomotive, Aksel? Will you whistle next?”
A bit of his mood seeped out as he recalled how Father would smile. And whistle, just to make Mother laugh.
Four years had done nothing to dispel their echoes. It had been heartbreaking enough to lose Father to that cancer, but then when Mother succumbed to fever within five months of him . . .
Peter eased down into his chair and smoothed out the crease in the paper so he could set it back on his typewriter keys and read while he unlocked his manuscript drawer. His brows drew together.
A response to his note, that was all. But that was so very odd. She was right there, beyond the door. If she wanted to tell him about her family, she could just tell him. Like everyone else always did at Kensey. That was the way it had always worked—stymied by his tongue, he would write everyone his thoughts. But they knew they didn’t need to write back to him, not when they could simply seek him out to give him the answers to his questions far more quickly.
But then, Miss Gresham had no way of knowing that was how things were always done here.
He leaned back in his creaking wood-and-leather chair and read it again, more slowly. Actually paying attention to what she said this time, rather than just noticing she said it.
Her hand was atrocious—he had thought it appalling in school that the teachers would bind the left arm of students to their sides and make them learn with their right, whether they were predisposed to that or not. He thought it no less ridiculous now.
But terrible handwriting aside, there was a certain charm to her words. Light, informal, but by no means too familiar, aside from that signature. He touched a finger to afraid of the dark and then folded the missive back up and slid it into the top-right drawer, opposite the one that held his manuscript. His lips twitched. Perhaps in London, fear of the dark could be mitigated by streetlamps and electric lights everywhere one went. Miss Gresham may be in for a surprise out here in the country, where the night seemed endless and untouched as soon as one stepped outside the house. The library would be the least of her concerns.
But it couldn’t be too terrible a fear if she admitted it so readily to him. She would get along all right.
Better than Locryn would in that cave, and he’d had no phobia going in.
He chose a fresh sheet of paper from the stack and fed it into the typewriter, scrolling it up until he had a perfect inch margin at the top.
Within minutes—hours?—he’d put words to the scene. Darkness and snakes and a torch that wouldn’t stay lit. Air so heavy that it nearly suffocated Locryn James as surely as it did his flame. The search, the quest burning him with its intensity, that need to know pulling him onward. Deeper into the darkness until his skin began to crawl with it.
Peter brushed an imaginary cobweb from his shoulder, reached for the cup that he forgot was empty until he lifted it to his mouth and got nothing out of it but a whimper. Not taking his eyes off his paper, he stretched behind him for the bell cord that would ring the kitchen. He needed more coffee. Or tea. Or something. Grammy would know what he needed, she always did.
Knock, knock, knock.
Locryn, however, had spilled his canteen some indeterminate amount of time ago—what did time really matter when one was in a primordial cave?—and his thirst was growing uncomfortable. He may be feeling a bit of claustrophobia too. Especially when his torch gave one last sputter and then died.
Knock, knock, knock.
Darkness. Thick, sour darkness. Heavy with humidity. Light on oxygen. Locryn was getting dizzy. He—
Knock, knock, knock.
Peter blinked, then blinked again to clear the darkness from his eyes. The door. Mrs. Teague with his coffee. Or tea. Or whatever Grammy had concocted. He pulled the unfinished page from the machine and put it in the drawer, then closed and locked it. Hurried his way toward the door to the hall.
No Mrs. Teague stood there, tray in hand. Nor Kerensa the housemaid. Nor even Grammy, who occasionally brought him something out herself, if the others were busy. No one at all. But he had heard a knock, he was sure of it.
There it came again—from the door to the library. Of course. “Idiot.” He closed the hall’s door and spun to the library’s, pasting on a smile that still felt a bit cluttered by cobwebs and darkness.
Miss Gresham scarcely glanced up to notice. She surged into the room, a book in her hands, open. To this was glued her gaze.
“Do pardon the intrusion, Mr. Holstein. I don’t mean to bother you and will be out of your hair again in a flash. Only this was too interesting to pass by. This, here. Do you see this photo?”
She had stopped just a few steps inside and stood right where she was, pointing at a glossy photograph page in some enormous tome. Her hair was slipping from its chignon and sticking to her neck. The jacket of her suit had vanished . . . as had her glasses, though there remained red marks on her nose to show where they had been.
He had to step closer to be able to see at what she was pointing.
Not that she had stopped talking while he realized this. She tapped the photograph. “The caption says Wilhelm Holstein. I have no way of knowing, of course, if it’s someone in your family, except that this page was marked. Which is, of course, what drew my attention to it as I was moving the book. I can see a bit of a resemblance to you too, I think. Or perhaps I’m convincing myself of it.”
And had she stopped talking at Wilhelm Holstein, he could have answered that with a single nod. He offered said nod now, but it only made her brows draw together.
“I’m convincing myself?”
Peter sighed and shook his head. “Wilhelm is . . . was m-my . . . my opa.” Though to be sure, he’d never known him when he was as young as he appeared in that photo, as he stood beside . . . Queen Victoria? Now Peter’s brows drew together. Opa had never mentioned an acquaintance with the queen.
“Excellent! I hoped it was, perhaps, your grandfather. I read a bit of the pages surrounding this photo and didn’t see any mention of him . . . but then, with the photographs all lumped into the middle like this, it’s unlikely the mention, if there is one, would be right beside it. I’ll have to read more of it, I suppose.”
The scent of lemon teased his nose as she shifted. Coming, he supposed, from her hair. Peter eased away a step, back to where he’d been. Focused again on the question at hand.
To be sure, Father had known King Edward and sometimes even called him Bertie—a relic from the days before the king had changed his name upon taking the crown and was still Albert. So Father must have known him when he was a young man, which meant he had likely met said young man’s mother, Victoria. It ought not to be surprising, then, that Opa had as well.
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