by Gaelen Foley
For his part, he could hardly wait to teach that blackguard a lesson the likes of which he would never forget.
She shrugged, veiling the cauldron of emotion in her eyes behind her lashes. “So I started packing.”
No wonder it was hard for her to trust him, Alec thought. He wouldn’t trust anybody, either, if he were in her place.
“How’s that feel?” she murmured, staring at her work.
He made a vague mumble in answer, more concerned with her tale, but he was glad to see that the bleeding had stopped. “Continue, please.”
She tore a fresh strip off her petticoat. “After Mikhail’s threats, I knew that I had to get to safety quickly, but I feared my cousin might retaliate against any of my neighbors who agreed to give me aid. Also, it would have been very easy for his men to seize me if I stayed nearby. So I resolved to retreat to the next town where I could take a room in a lodging house and hide until I had worked up a plan to get that monster out of my home and his Cossack brutes away from the village.”
“But you said he locked you in.”
“Yes. So he thought.” Carefully wrapping a strip of cotton around his biceps, she slipped him a wry smile. “The house is riddled with secret passageways that have been there since the days of Queen Elizabeth and Bloody Mary—there’s even a priest-hole behind the great hall’s hearth. Mrs. Whithorn herself thinks the secret passages are just an ancient rumor, and Mikhail certainly doesn’t know they exist, but I explored them often as a child.”
“Aha. Good girl.”
“In any case, since my cousin had threatened to tear the Hall down, I didn’t dare leave my most valuable possessions behind.”
“This ruby?”
“No, I had not yet learned of its existence. My father’s navy medals and Mama’s love-letters to him. They were stored in the attic. I knew I had to sneak up there and retrieve them before I could possibly leave. . . .”
It had been years since Becky had gone into the Hall’s secret corridors, but fortunately, she still remembered the whole procedure. Moving with brisk efficiency, she lit a small lantern and marched past the windows into the narrow dressing room adjoining her bedchamber.
At once, she crossed to her large oak wardrobe—empty now, since all her clothes were packed—and opened the doors. Reaching inside, she ran her hand along the right inner corner until her fingertips found the little latch in the back panel seam. With a wary glance behind her, she turned the latch and then pushed the wardrobe’s back panel forward. It creaked and opened into a yawning black hole in the wall, just large enough for an average-sized person to slip into.
Becky raised her lantern and did just that.
Thrusting her lamp and an exploratory foot through the dark hole first, she stepped down gingerly into the narrow space. Ducking her head as she entered, all was exactly as she remembered from childhood—the shivery darkness, the same clammy draft moving like a ghost down the pitch-black corridor. Before proceeding, she pulled the doors of the wardrobe shut behind her, then glanced left and right, got her bearings, and headed for the attic stairs.
Cobwebs tickled her face while many-legged crawling things fled before her lantern’s beam. She followed the passageway with silent steps, took a right turn, and continued until she came to the ladder leading to the upper levels of the house. Grasping the dust-coated rungs, she began to climb. She passed the openings that gave access to the third and fourth floors, mounting upward until she reached the fifth and topmost level of the house. Just when the sense of claustrophobia was beginning to oppress her, she emerged from the secret passageway through another disguised door hidden behind an ancient flag hung on the wall.
She came out into the hallway near the short wide stairs that led to the attic. As soon as she pried the attic door open, a wave of stale, musty air rushed out. She turned away, wrinkling her nose at the smell and coughed. Then she stuck her head through the door and peered in, lifting her lamp. Please, no bats. Nervously, she glanced around. If the creatures were there, she did not see any, not by her lantern’s glow nor by the wan daylight filtering in through the single dirt-clad window. Satisfied, she went in.
Up in the attic, time had stood still. Beneath its slanted ceilings and exposed beams stood towers of bins and trunks and boxes with a slim path cleared between them. Becky tiptoed down this path, her wonderstruck gaze traveling over the eccentric array of objects stowed here: a pair of old whicker panniers, abandoned toys, odd-shaped snowshoes.
Odd pieces of a rusty suit of armor were strewn across an old table, steely gauntlets and a fierce-looking helmet with a black horsehair tassel. There were moldy old court robes where a clan of mice proliferated, a broken chair, a rolled carpet leaning upright in the corner. Though anything of real value had been removed years ago for storage in her grandfather’s Berkshire mansion, the attic still held remnants of a few hundred years’ worth of world travels by various Talbot diplomats. Faded paintings. Exotic vases. A dusty model of the Coliseum.
Her roaming gaze stopped on the massive bombé dresser against the wall. That’s what I want. The huge Baroque piece stood taller than she did; its bowed belly easily contained two hundred tiny drawers. The question was, in which drawer had she put Papa’s medals? Mama’s love-letters would be with them, tied with a faded ribbon.
Setting her lantern down, she began searching the miniature drawers for her prized possessions. Each one held some odd, whimsical treasure: weird looking keys, old invitations to a Hunt Breakfast, a tiny book of illustrated Bible stories for children, a small whistle whittled out of wood, a thin forget-me-not bracelet made from someone’s braided lock of hair, a tiny silver bird figurine. One drawer she opened contained a thriving colony of strange insects. She shut it quickly, and soon thereafter found the items she had come for.
Simple curiosity made her open one last drawer that she had not explored, though her lantern oil was running low, which meant that she must hurry. Pulling it farther open, she peeked inside and found a very old-looking wooden box small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. She lifted it out of the drawer and, after blowing away a puff of dust, found a name carved in the fine wooden lid: Agnes Mariah Talbot.
Why, that was Lady Agnes in the portrait at the foot of the great stairs! The ghost she had seen as a child. With her heart beating faster and gooseflesh rising on her arms, Becky opened her Tudor ancestor’s little trinket box.
Inside, it was lined with cream velvet. It had clearly been designed to hold something precious, but all it contained at present was an ancient-looking piece of paper folded in a square. Gingerly, she unfolded the two-hundred-year-old note.
A seal with faded colors at the top of the page marked it as some official sort of document. Dark, jagged handwriting flowed across the page, the language fraught with Shakespearean-style spellings that slowed down her efforts to decipher it; but she soon discovered that the paper explained the origins of the great ruby brooch that Lady Agnes wore in her portrait. Apparently, it had been a gift from a Ceylonese prince to one of the Talbot diplomats who had made a perilous journey to the East Indies some two hundred years ago in order to promote trading ties with the Spice Islands. Becky was startled to learn that the intrepid Lady Agnes herself had gone on this journey and had charmed the ruling despot from whose ruby mines the jewel had come; henceforth, the Rose of Indra was to be passed down through the female line of the Talbot family.
Which meant that it would now be hers.
For a moment she pondered this in awe, then could not help but feel a twinge of bitterness that such a treasure should have been lost. She had no other inheritance. Why, if she could get her hands on that ruby, it would surely be worth enough to buy Talbot Old Hall from Mikhail.
As she scanned the document, a postscript scrawled across the bottom of the page in a clearly different hand gave a tantalizing hint of what might have become of the Rose of Indra. The spellings were more modern and the words appeared to have been hastily penned: The Roundheads are comi
ng and soon shall besiege us. The Rose has been hid amongst the lilies.
So, she mused, some quick-thinking ancestor had managed to hide the jewel from Cromwell’s forces during the Civil War. No doubt it would have been confiscated, along with any other valuables that were found. In those days, the Talbots had sided with the Cavaliers. The lilies? She turned the oblique message over in her mind. If there had once been lilies planted at Talbot Old Hall, they had long since withered, but then her eyes widened. No, no—of course!
The old gatehouse.
Over the years, the approach to the Hall had been changed; the gatehouse sat at the end of the overgrown place where the old driveway had once joined the country road. It was a squat stone outbuilding covered in ivy and crumbling with age, but atop its little mansard roof, as a nod to the first Talbot lords’ Norman origins, the fortified gatehouse was topped with a copper finial in the lily-shaped form of the fleur-de-lis.
Amongst the lilies . . .
Could the Rose of Indra still be hidden somewhere inside the gatehouse? How wonderful if it were true, she thought, her pulse racing with excitement, her eyes agleam at the intriguing possibility. If the jewel was still hidden somewhere in the gatehouse, and if, with all her good luck, she could find it, then maybe, just maybe, she could work through a trustworthy bank to buy the Hall and oust Mikhail from the premises forever.
It was a very long shot indeed, but right now it was the only hope she had, and if it worked, she could make everything better, not just for herself, but for all of Buckley-on-the-Heath. She had to try.
Tonight.
“Well, you obviously managed to find it,” Alec said after a long silence.
Tucking the end of his bandage in securely around his biceps, Becky nodded, avoiding eye contact. She detected his closer scrutiny; she could feel his shrewd gambler’s gaze reading her face.
“You saw something in the gatehouse that you did not expect to find.” His blue eyes flickered with intrigue. “Something you were not supposed to see?”
She swallowed hard and nodded. Something terrible. Turning away in hesitation, she gazed at the statue of the archangel battling the serpent.
“Becky?” he murmured, drawing back her attention with a gentle caress on her arm.
She turned with a tumultuous stare, her heart clenching as she gazed at him. “If I tell you the rest, you can’t back out anymore.”
“I don’t want out, Becky.” He took her hand. “I’m on your side,” he said softly. “Everything you’ve told me makes me all the more committed to helping you.”
She leaned closer and pressed a lingering kiss to his cheek. “Thank you.”
He nodded, and then she related the conclusion of her dark tale. . . .
The night was eerily still as she slipped outside and hung back for a moment, clinging to the shadows as she scanned the area for Mikhail’s guards. The Cossacks were nowhere in sight. Becky prayed they had not returned to the village to cause more trouble.
Satisfied that the coast was clear, she darted toward the thicket where the gatehouse was obscured, her small bag of supplies bumping against her side as she ran. It held little more than a candle and tinderbox for light and a small digging spade.
Sprinting through the kitchen garden and across the carriage drive, her footfalls made quiet crunches on the gravel before she reached soft turf again and raced on.
Once more she had used the secret passageways to exit the house unseen, waiting until full darkness had fallen. Now all her thoughts were focused on finding the Rose of Indra. Among the lilies . . .
Ahead, the woods loomed, indigo-shadowed, mysterious; above, ragged clouds wound around the crescent moon.
She braced herself as she entered the woods, but had to slow her pace, fighting her way through vines and brambles. It was so very dark that she almost missed the humped roof of the gatehouse slumbering under its ivy blanket. Changing course, she picked her way toward it, climbing over a fallen log, then jumping when an owl hooted from somewhere nearby.
At last she crept up to the stone gatehouse, moving cautiously around the outbuilding until she found the side that had once faced the road. Her gaze pierced the night’s gloom to home in on the door. She walked toward it, her heart beating faster.
Inside, it was pitch-black, probably untouched for a hundred years except for her childhood explorations over a decade ago. She lowered her bag to the floor and bent down to take out the tinderbox. Feeling for the flint in the darkness, she managed to strike a flame and quickly transferred it to the candle.
Cupping the teetering fire with her hand to protect it from the gentle draft she felt upon her face, she lifted the light and gazed at her surroundings. The front room was quite bare, with naught but a fireplace and a steep flight of rotting steps leading to the loft above. But as her gaze continued to travel around the room, her confidence grew as she scanned the frieze adorning the interior of the gatehouse: white plaster lilies on a purple ground. Surely the ruby was still hidden in here somewhere.
She followed the frieze around the room, searching for any more clues about where the jewel might be hidden. As her gaze traveled around the heights of the room and over the elaborate cornices, it came to rest on a modest roundel situated between two small high windows shaped like fleurs-de-lis. The barest silver glimmer of moonlight shone through them. Below the frieze, the roundel was only about as large as a dinner plate and bore the Talbot family crest. Something drew Becky to it.
She crossed to a large old storage trunk by the wall and climbed up onto it, setting her candle on it beside her. Then she stood on tiptoe and reached up with both hands to see if she could remove the roundel from the wall.
It was a struggle, and bits of plaster dust fell into her eyes, but she blinked them away and pulled hard. The roundel came off the wall. Steadying herself from the sudden jerking motion, she set it down, leaning it against the wall near her feet, then peered up at the circle of plaster she had exposed, hard and brittle and ivory with age.
Nothing.
She poked at it with her hand, but there was no secret hiding place, no tiny vault where a jewel could be stored. Blast. Determined to continue her search, she got down off the trunk, but her toe kicked the roundel and it rolled away like a discus. As she picked up her candle again, she glanced at the errant roundel and something caught her eye as it made several swirling passes a few feet away and landed on the floor, faceup.
Furrowing her brow, Becky picked it up and slowly turned it over. A hushed gasp escaped her lips. A small leather pouch was attached to the back of the roundel, fixed there by a little hook driven into the wood and tied in place by two suede strings.
Her heart began beating impossibly fast. With shaking fingers she untied the strings and opened the pouch, emptying its contents into her hand.
The fat, bloodred ruby slid out of the pouch and fell into her waiting palm.
She stood there, openmouthed, staring at it. It was real! The Rose of Indra! Somehow, finding it exceeded her wildest imaginings. She let out a tiny screech of glee and twirled once on her heel in sheer joy, but then heard a noise.
A low, animal sort of groan.
She froze and held her breath, listening. It came from the adjoining chamber. Gooseflesh crept down her arms as she realized that someone—or something—was in there. Perhaps a wounded animal, for she sensed a creature in pain. Perhaps one of the barn cats had been in a fight and fled there to lick its wounds.
But the scraping sound that followed could not have been made by a little cat. Oh, Lord, she thought, her heart pounding. Perhaps some aged vagrant had taken shelter in here to escape the workhouse, for hard times besieged England. If so, he had nothing to fear. She could offer him something to eat.
Steeling her courage, Becky approached the door that connected the two small chambers and lifted the light.
“Hullo?” she called softly, but immediately upon opening the door, she smelled stale urine and the faint tinge of blood. A stirring
in the corner drew her frightened glance. “Wh-Who’s there?”
“Aidez-moi,” came a parched, raspy whisper.
“Show yourself!”
Her knees turned to jelly as a human silhouette unfolded itself in the shadowed corner and rose with a pitiful movement, stepping cautiously toward the light. Becky beheld a barefooted man in torn trousers and a loose white shirt hanging off him, much stained, with ruffled sleeves.
A gentleman’s shirt.
“Dear God.” She laid her hand across her mouth and stared, her eyes wide.
He had dark hair that had gone shaggy; he was tall and powerful of frame, but badly underfed. His face was gaunt, hollows under his high cheekbones, just above the edge of his rough beard.
His dark eyes filled with terror as he glanced toward the window, then again at her, imploringly. “Aidez-moi, s’il vous plaît, mademoiselle.”
She recoiled against the door. “You’re a Frenchman!”
“Non, non! Je suis Russe. Je suis Russe.”
“What? Roose? Your name is Roose?” She heard the shrill note of alarm in her own voice, but she couldn’t help it. Her heart was pounding wildly.
He struggled to make her understand. “Non! Rooseeah. Je suis de Rooseeah.”
“Roose-ee-ah?” she echoed in bewilderment. “Russia? Oh! You’re a Russian?”
“Oui! Je suis Russe!” More babble.
Becky shook her head frantically, understanding none of it. “What are you doing in my gatehouse?”
He rattled off two or three silky-smooth paragraphs in French, enough to convince her by his lordly bearing that he was no commoner, but she could not understand a word.
He fell silent at her blank expression, then dropped to his knees with an anguished stare and bowed his head, half weeping, needing no further language to make it plain that he was begging for her help. It was then that she realized the man’s hands were chained behind him.
Appalled comprehension filled her mind. So, this was what Mikhail was hiding. This was why her cousin had lingered so long in Yorkshire. Why the prince was holding this man prisoner in the gatehouse, she could not fathom, nor did she care. The foreigner could be dangerous, but it was a chance that every instinct bade her take.