A Man Of Many Talents

by Deborah Simmons

  He studied the screen with a critical eye. Although the carved wood looked sturdy enough, he wondered if he ought to have Alf fetch him a ladder, if only to placate his hostess. But even as he stared upward, considering his options, something nagged at the edge of his awareness. What?

  While he struggled for an answer, he heard a noise behind him and whirled, his body tense and alert. It might simply be Alf or… Christian was pleasantly surprised to recognize the drab skirts of his hostess. Had she actually sought him out? That heady conjecture was quickly tempered by her expression, which made him certain he wasn’t going to enjoy this encounter.

  The Governess was back in full force. Fighting an urge to straighten up and check his hands for cleanliness, Christian smiled graciously, a waste of good teeth, no doubt. The Governess halted several yards away.

  “If I may have a word with you?” she asked.

  Christian made a show of glancing around. There was no one else in the hall. “Certainly,” he said, tempted to throw up his hands in exasperation. Or throw her over his shoulder and then stop her mouth with his—before she could say anything annoying.

  Too late. “I hesitate to interrupt you,” she said. That old tone was in her voice, intimating that he was frittering away his time simply gawking at the ugly hall. “But I’m afraid that I’ve received some disturbing news.”

  Uh-oh. Had Smythe broken under pressure exerted by the mistress of Sibel Hall, telling all? Christian tried to look suitably innocent. “Oh?” he asked in a casual voice.

  “Indeed,” she answered, her hands behind her back, as though preparing for a good, stiff lecture. “It seems Cousin Mercia was quite startled by a rather… unsavory person wandering through our private rooms.”

  Mercia startled? From what he had heard, it was the other way around. The old woman had scared poor Alf, probably tormenting him with tales of ghostly sightings and paranormal activity.

  As if she could tell he wasn’t appropriately serious, the Governess pinned him with a gimlet eye. He wondered if misbehavior warranted a spanking, and then grew positively warm at the thought. Lud, his tastes were becoming bizarre. Next he’d be begging her to take a switch to him in some sort of de Sade business. The tutor and the naughty boy? Christian nearly laughed aloud at the notion of the upright Miss Parkinson participating in any such nonsense.

  “I hardly know where to begin,” the Governess said.

  Me either, Christian thought wickedly. He arched his brows slightly, which made Miss Parkinson’s lower. She drew a deep breath. “Since Mercia does have a tendency to… embellish, I hesitate to accuse you of any… poor judgment,” she said. And yet wasn’t that exactly what she was doing? And it wasn’t the first time. Christian nearly shook his head in amazement. He couldn’t recall anyone ever having the temerity to find fault with him, and now he seemed to be getting more than his due.

  “Well, I see I shall have to speak plainly,” she declared in a huff. “Cousin Mercia claims you are employing one of the village ne’er-do-wells in some sort of personal capacity. Considering the situation here, do you really think it best that you introduce someone else into my household, especially someone of ill repute?”

  Christian didn’t miss her emphasis on my, and he wondered if Miss Parkinson weren’t perhaps a devotee of de Sade after all—at least the dominance part. She certainly tried to lord her meager power over him. Did she treat everyone that way, or was he alone privileged to receive that treatment? If so, why? Perhaps he ought just to submit and find out.

  His pirate blood made submitting a bit difficult, though. No matter how tempting he found his hostess, he wasn’t about to ask permission to hire his own people. Nor did he feel the need to explain that “unsavory” Alf was just the type he needed for his rather furtive operation.

  Christian affected innocence. Studious innocence, he hoped. “Well, I thought it might be wise to have some assistance.”

  Her look told him she thought him ineffective enough on his own. “Surely there is someone already within the household who would prove more… reliable?”

  “I thought it better to employ an unbiased party,” Christian said, trying to sound scholarly.

  “But surely there are far more suitable people among the local populace,” she protested.

  “Ah, but I had my reasons for picking Alf,” Christian said, assuming a thoughtful air.

  Miss Parkinson lifted her brows, and he was hard-pressed not to grin. “I had to choose a fellow who wasn’t afraid of ghosts,” he confided.

  That one stumped her, and for a moment he thought she might actually give way, but he should have known better.

  She opened her mouth to argue further, prompting Christian to step forward and lean close. “If he lifts any of the silver, I’ll pay for it myself,” he assured her.

  As always, Miss Parkinson seemed flustered by his nearness and pulled away even as he reached for her arm. He caught a whiff of lilacs and then heard something fall to the floor. He hoped it wasn’t anything he would miss, like his good sense… or his heart.

  They both leaned over to retrieve the dropped item and bumped heads. Not exactly the body part he would have hoped to rub up against. Reaching out a hand to steady her, Christian found himself gazing into her face, open and suddenly vulnerable. Had he actually hurt her? He opened his mouth to ask, only to watch her eyes widen and her gaze drop… to his lips.

  Heat flooded him, along with a sort of wildness that was startling. He wanted to seize her, slide over her, and take her on the medieval tiles, here and now. Not trusting himself to move, Christian knelt there, staring, as she met his gaze. For one heady instant he felt as though she might agree, might even meet him in a headlong rush to passion. But then she broke away, and the moment passed. Like the one earlier this afternoon, it was gone forever, a chance not taken.

  Miss Parkinson straightened, and Christian could do nothing else but rise as well, pummeling all his reckless impulses into a pose of civility, if not studiousness. She held something before her like armor, almost as though to fend him off, and he nearly laughed. If she thought a book would stop him, she was sadly misguided.

  “I found this on a side table in the gallery, and I didn’t know whether—”

  Christian cut her off with an exclamation of delight. “The book!” he cried. Recognizing the volume that he had so recently found in the library and put aside in order to greet Mr. Smythe, he reached out with unfeigned eagerness. Indeed, so intent was he upon the tome that he nearly forgot to don his spectacles. Thankfully, he remembered when the pages fell open, and he reached into his pocket for them.

  Moving with deliberate care, Christian made the donning of the lenses into a slow, sensual act that sent his own pulse kicking, while Miss Parkinson practically swooned. Biting back a smile of triumph, he assumed his most serious expression as he leafed through the volume, seizing an excuse to inch closer to his hostess when he found the page that had so interested him earlier.

  “See this notation?” he said.

  “Y-yes,” she answered, and Christian was pleased to see she was not as unaffected as she might pretend.

  “ ‘Blocked off after the tragedy,’ ” she read aloud. “What tragedy?” she asked, turning her head. She was so near that he could feel the brush of her breath.

  “I was hoping you might tell me,” Christian said. And that wasn’t all I was hoping…

  She broke away yet again, her gaze sliding from him even as she stepped back, and Christian was hard-pressed not to groan in disappointment.

  “What kind of tragedy would cause you to block off part of a building?” she asked.

  Christian glanced down at the printed words, trying to find an answer in the accompanying text, and then it suddenly leapt out at him. “That’s it!” he cried. Slamming shut the book, he strode toward the fretwork, staring up at it in excitement. “That’s how it was done!”

  “What? How what was done?” Miss Parkinson asked, sounding a little alarmed at his enthus
iasm.

  Christian brandished the volume, but couldn’t even attempt to appear studious. “They walled up the way to the minstrel’s gallery!”

  “What is the minstrel’s gallery?” Miss Parkinson asked, her brows furrowing.

  Christian pointed. “The fretwork hides a balcony where musicians once played for the lord of the hall. And I’m betting that’s how our ghost managed to float through thin air!”

  As Christian watched comprehension dawn on his hostess’s lovely features, he had to fight an urge to spin her around in celebration of his discovery.

  “If it is walled off, how did anyone except Sir Boundefort himself find a way up there?”

  “That is what we have to determine. But I have a feeling that once we open up the minstrel’s gallery, Sir Boundefort’s haunting days will be over.”

  Snatching up a lantern, Christian headed behind the heavily carved wood, his hostess close at his heels. He held the light high, but as he suspected, its glow did not illuminate the upper reaches of the wall, where the gallery must lie, hidden in shadow. The space was simply too dark and narrow.

  Thankfully, the door that led to the cellars still stood open, and Christian stepped inside. He had never really examined the room thoroughly, having been intent upon finding the cellars at the time. Bad lapse, that, he scolded himself. He was really going to have to pay more attention to detail if he expected to rout this troublesome specter.

  Now he did so, walking the perimeter slowly, holding the lantern high, then swinging it low, inspecting one wall and then the other, peeking behind objects but moving nothing as yet, gauging the size of the space and the placement of the walls. Beside him, his companion kept blissfully quiet, and he was again reminded that despite all her annoying habits, when it came right down to it, Miss Parkinson could be counted upon to behave in just the right manner—unlike any other female he knew.

  They had nearly gone round the entire room when Christian paused at a telltale sign at his feet. He knelt to examine scratches in the tiles, as if something heavy had been moved, then glanced up to see an ugly old painted coffer that might once have held medicines or stored herbs angled before him. Straightening, he pushed the monstrosity away from the wall, and there it was: an opening, dark and ragged.

  Christian lifted a hand to one rough edge. Obviously, someone had cut through the plaster that blocked the way, perhaps with the very same tools that lay in the cellars. Lifting the lantern high, he stepped through the hole to find a set of stairs curving upward. Despite his excitement at the discovery, he made his way carefully, lest he meet some pitfall, either accidental or intentioned by the specter or its minions.

  The swish of skirts behind him told him that Miss Parkinson followed, game as ever. Of course, there was no point in telling her to wait behind, and that knowledge, instead of irritating him, filled him with a kind of exhilaration as they marched onward together into the thick of adventure—or as close as one could come to it in rural Devon.

  The steps opened onto a narrow balcony along the wall behind the fretwork. Without the lantern, it would have been black as pitch, and even with the light, the space was thick with shadow. Christian didn’t know what the flooring was like, so he reached a hand out to his companion.

  “Careful here. Watch your step,” he warned. When the old wood held their weight, he released her and searched the space, hoping to find… he had no idea what. But though he swung the lantern high and low, there was nothing to be seen except the clean-swept planks and the dark expanse of carved wood a few feet ahead of them. Although Christian ran a hand along the surface of the stone wall, he could discover no signs of any other egress, and his initial sense of triumph began to fade as he realized that the proof he had expected to uncover wasn’t here.

  The mystery of the specter remained.

  Abigail watched the play of light upon the old plaster and wood as the lantern swung this way and that and tried to look for some sign of Sir Boundefort. But her attention kept straying to the flesh-and-blood man at her side, more real and far more compelling than any ghost. Indeed, it seemed to her as though Lord Moreland was even more handsome in the near darkness than he was in the broad light of day, a truly spectacular feat, considering that his visage always was breathtaking.

  Right now he was frowning, his brows drawn together in a rare display of displeasure, but it did nothing to detract from his appeal. In truth, Abigail was seized by a sudden urge to smooth that brow with her own hand, a most disturbing impulse. Deliberately, she looked away and tried to catalogue all his failings.

  After all, hadn’t he just unleashed some miscreant upon the household without even consulting her? But his explanation was so reasonable, she could hardly fault him. Still, he might have shared his thoughts with her. She owned Sibel Hall, and after long years of standing by powerless, she wanted to be apprised of everything. Now that she finally had a measure of control over her life, she was loath to relinquish even a bit of it.

  “Come!” Abigail barely had time to draw a startled breath before her hand was seized in a firm grip, the object of her musings pulling her after him like so much flotsam. Her irritation at this type of manhandling was overwhelmed, much to her dismay, by the delicious heat of his fingers holding hers, a sensation that should not, by any means, be quite so delightful.

  “What on earth are you doing now?” Abigail asked when she managed to catch her breath at the bottom of the narrow stairs. She snatched at her skirts with one hand while her companion helped her through the opening—a rather nasty, gaping hole, in her opinion. Once through, she watched while he pushed the cupboard back into place and tried not to mourn the loss of his touch.

  “I’m tired of wasting my time hunting for missing records and plans. I’m going to take a look at the outside of the building myself and see if I can find any hides,” he said, striding down the passage toward the door to the old kitchens that now led outside.

  “I assumed you had already searched for such things,” Abigail said a bit peevishly. It seemed to her that the man had accomplished awfully little during his time here.

  “Not the right way!” he answered over his shoulder in a getting-down-to-business tone that sent an unaccountable thrill through her. Abigail told herself she was simply pleased that he was finally doing something.

  That knowledge alone was enough to prompt her to return to her work and let him go about on his own. Mounds of paperwork awaited her in the study, and she had other pressing duties to tend to as well, including soothing Mercia’s ruffled feathers about the interloper from the village.

  Even without all those responsibilities, Abigail knew she ought not spend time alone with Lord Moreland, unchaperoned. Indeed, since his arrival, she had done her best to avoid him. Yet somehow she continued following him down the corridor. Considering his tendency to become distracted, she reasoned that perhaps she ought to keep an eye on him, just in case he stumbled across more wine or something of that nature.

  “And just what way is the right way?” Abigail asked as he led her outside. She was determined to concentrate on the matter at hand, but the change from the dank darkness to the fragrant breeze made her pause, and she drew in a deep breath. The air was fresh and clean, the old courtyard overgrown with plants that had once been neatly arranged. Abigail suddenly realized she had never even explored the grounds.

  Once she had loved to walk and study nature, but years pent up inside with her godmother had dimmed that joy. Now it seemed that she was still tied to habit and duty and must work to recover that delight. Perhaps when she had her own little cottage, with its own small garden, she would be able to treasure such moments again, she thought wistfully.

  “The right way, barring any written record, is to walk around the outside of the house looking for discrepancies, like unexplained stretches of blank wall. Or try to envision what the place would look like without one of the walls. The chimneys are good indicators of the locations of interior walls,” Lord Moreland said.
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br />   Abigail tried to follow his directions, but her attention wandered instead to the man himself. His voice had altered subtly, and there was something about his stride, suddenly so purposeful, that engaged her. And the way he stared up at the house, with the discerning eye of an expert… why, he was actually studying the building, she realized.

  “The chimney stacks are usually in projections along the outside walls, and there’s probably an internal wall between one stack and the next. Staircases are most often located in projections too, and may be indicated by smaller or staggered windows. The current central stairway here, with its open area, is clearly a later addition,” he observed.

  Abigail listened to his casually tossed words in growing astonishment. She could only gape as he pointed toward the side of the house not far from their recent exit. “You can tell the great hall is there because the house was originally built around this courtyard. In such arrangements, the hall is at the back, with the kitchens on one side and the family apartments on the other. Of course, that initial design has been added on to several times over the years, with disastrous results.

  “And yet those additions are just the place for us to find surprises,” he noted, flashing a smile at Abigail that in itself was enough to make her heart race.

  Turning to walk in another direction, he pointed at an outcropping. “The timber-and-plaster framing here makes it easy to add, subtract, or alter partitions without much reference to windows or chimney stacks. And even the original roof space will have taken repairs over the years, at which point false ceilings may have been inserted.