Jamie briefly brought them up to date with the now missing items, secret passageways and Cecily’s work looking through the broadsheets and library. He had no doubt she had stumbled upon something, if only he knew what.
“This place has been checked twice, has it?” Simon’s voice was sharp, his dark gaze thoughtful as he stared into the fireplace. He missed his wife already, but having spent most of the past several weeks with a teething baby, he had been looking forward to his first, peaceful sleep in some considerable time. Now though, it didn’t seem that it was going to be possible here either. Shaking his head, he turned his attention back to Jamie and the worry that was evident on his face.
Jamie was one of the Star Elite’s most mysterious men. Cool and unflappable, he was an expert knifeman and a keen shot. He could be counted on to remain cool and aloof even in the midst of some of the fiercest fighting. To see him clearly shaken with fear for Cecily was highly unusual. It gave Simon some indication to how the situation stood between his colleague and the woman they had come to question.
“How is Jonathan?” Hugo asked, wondering how long Jamie would leave it before escorting Cecily up the aisle. He was intrigued to meet the woman who had so quickly captivated a man like Jamie.
“He is fine. He has a lump to the head but refuses to give in,” Jamie sighed, relieved that his colleagues had finally arrived.
“Are you sure she hasn’t been hidden in any of the outbuildings? Have you checked the garden? After all, the gardens here are massive and it was dark outside when she was taken. It is possible that the watchmen missed her,” Hugo reasoned, and stared at Jamie thoughtfully. It was clear the man was deeply involved with Miss Tinsdale, and he wondered if he could persuade his wife, Harriett, to travel to Cumbria for the wedding. Hugo sighed at the loss of another good man. Still, he couldn’t begrudge the man his happiness. He shared a knowing look with Simon, who himself had encountered his own fair share of trials and tribulations with his wife, Francesca.
“I suggest we go and take a look,” Simon drawled.
With nothing else to do, Jamie stomped out of the side door to begin a thorough search of the gardens.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Cecily was stiff and in pain. Her arms ached from being cruelly tied behind her back. Her wrists were sore from the tight bindings, but it was the cloth in her mouth that made her gag. The material was relentlessly digging into the sides of her mouth, sucking all dampness from her mouth and throat. She used her tongue to try to prise it out of the way but it wouldn’t budge.
Tears gathered in her eyes but she refused to allow them to fall. Once again, as seemed to be commonplace during her time at Melvedere, she found herself alone, in the darkness, surrounded by cobwebs.
She had no idea where she was but it was cramped and dirty. Beams of wood were inches from her face and she dreaded to think what was digging into her back. She closed her eyes and wriggled forward, trying hard not to sneeze as the unsettled dust gathered under her nose.
She couldn’t see much of anything except boxes. Wriggling and twisting this way and that, she managed to inch further away from what appeared to be eaves, until she was sitting with her back to one of the boxes. All of her bindings were too tight to remove, so she was left with little choice but to work around them. Progress was painfully slow and she was panting by the time she awkwardly pushed to her feet.
She had no idea if she was still at Melvedere, but the dust seemed awfully familiar. If she ever became lady of the house the first thing she would do was clean out every inch of dust, and every cobweb, until the whole house positively gleamed. She hated dust. She would then make sure that each room had at least a box of candles, and the method with which to light them. If only she could see Jamie again and apologise for her behaviour, she would happily accept any offer he wished to make.
She eventually made her way toward the door. It took a long time for her to awkwardly turn the door knob with her hands behind her back but, luckily, the door wasn’t locked. She had to shuffle a bit, and use her feet to kick the door open but she was eventually able to peer into the corridor outside. She knew then that she was standing in the attics at Melvedere.
Deathly silence was all around her. She knew that even if she could remove the cruel gag from her mouth she was so far up in the house that nobody would hear her scream.
Her head pounded fiercely and she had to pause a few times to quell the sickness that threatened. She would surely choke to death if she was sick with the gag in her mouth. Willing herself to keep a firm hold of herself, she focused on the mental image of Jamie’s beloved face instead. She held it before her like a mantra.
Think like Jamie and you will be fine, she chanted, stumbling toward the door she fervently hoped would take her back downstairs. She wondered if he was at home yet and, if so, if he was in his study. She didn’t think she could make it all the way down to the ground floor. Her knees wobbled and the world swam alarmingly around her.
She blinked rapidly and willed herself to stop crying. She was struggling enough to see as it was without having water to contend with. Squeezing her eyes tight she breathed deeply and took a moment to compose herself. A tight knot of fear lodged in her stomach. What would she do if Jamie wasn’t back? What would she do if he had been hurt as well? She could feel something warm and sticky sliding down her face and knew she was bleeding from the cut on her head again. The top of her head felt incredibly sore and she wondered if this time the doctor would insist on sewing it. She had only just managed to persuade Doctor Richardson to leave it to heal on its own last time. If it was open again, the doctor would not be fobbed off from his apparently desperate need to have at her with a needle and thread.
Closing the stomach churning thought out, she valiantly ignored the urge to wipe the blood off her face. She carefully began to descend the stairs down to the old servants’ quarters only to sigh despondently at the sight of another door. Her shoulders drooped and she wished she had the strength to kick the door down the way Jamie had the other night.
Was that only a couple of nights ago? It seemed like a lifetime away.
“Where do you think you are going?” The cold, female voice came from directly behind her. Cecily turned and blinked as the world whirled and swam before her. Her stomach dropped to her knees as her eyes met the cold, ruthless stare of Miss Emstridge.
Cecily glanced up the narrow flight of stairs to the attics and knew that the woman had been up there with her. Why had she allowed Cecily to go down the stairs? What was she planning? Cecily merely stared at the older woman mutely.
There was no compassion in the woman’s hard gaze, or even any trace of humanity. Standing directly before her as she was now, Cecily knew that this woman wasn’t the one who had carried her upstairs. Glancing around the empty corridor, it was clear that nobody else was around. So who was Miss Emstridges’ accomplice?
“Time to go,” Miss Emstridge drawled and grabbed hold of Cecily’s elbow in a ruthless grip. Cecily dug her heels in, determined not to make it easy on the older woman, and received a slap across the face for her trouble.
“Get moving,” the older woman snarled. “You are going downstairs if I have to drag you by your hair.”
Cecily continued to dig her heels in and stared dispassionately at her captor. A strange sense of calm washed over her and she straightened her spine defiantly. She wanted to go downstairs. If and when Jamie came home, he would at least be able to hear her scream.
She stumbled, slipped, wobbled and was half dragged down the servants’ stairs to the rear corridor. She struggled to keep her feet under her as she was shoved roughly into the library. It was unclear whether Miss Emstridge was insane or angry.
The seat Cecily was pushed down into felt wonderfully sturdy in a world that was so unnervingly unpredictable that she almost sighed with relief. Her eyes remained glued on Miss Emstridge who began to bind her to the chair. Cecily tried to get up and was slapped again. The sudden jerking of her hea
d made it pound even more. Sweat popped out on her brow and she struggled to focus on anything. By the time she had recovered her senses her feet had been tied to the legs of the chair and it impossible to leave. She had no idea what she was being bound with but she couldn’t get up and walk anywhere without having to drag the chair with her.
Cecily watched as Miss Emstridge began to then pull books off the shelves at random and throw them around the base of the chair in a haphazard pile. Was this some sort of macabre game?
Once she was done, Miss Emstridge removed the bindings to her hands.
“It is alright, you can scream now.” Miss Emstridge whispered softly. “Nobody is going to hear you because there is nobody here.”
Cecily glanced at the door. The house was indeed deathly quiet. When she had walked down the servants’ stairs, she hadn’t heard the habitual banging of the pots and pans, or Mrs Nantwich or Sophie’s singing while they worked. Where was everyone?
“They have all gone outside, see?” Miss Emstridge informed her. “They have all gone to look for you. Ah, dear, they won’t find you though, will they?”
“Why are you doing this?” Cecily whispered. She watched the older woman scrunch up several sheets of parchment and shove it into the pile of books. “What have we done to you?”
“You are a mere pawn. It is nothing personal.” Miss Emstridge replied dispassionately.
“How can you say this isn’t personal?” Cecily cried, looking down at the books.
“Well, you are his whore, so you are just as bad as he is really.” The cruel grimace on the older woman’s face began to make Cecily tremble.
“What do you mean, as bad as he is? Do you mean Jamie?”
Miss Emstridge paused in the process of removing several books room from the shelving. Something suddenly changed in the woman and she suddenly turned and threw a random book at Cecily. It caught her painfully in the shoulder, but she refused to show any emotion, even when the second book caught her in her stomach. She glanced down at it. It was one of the fake ones she had found last night. She wondered where the ghost was, and whether he really had been a figment of her imagination after all. He wasn’t here now when it counted, that was for certain.
“Had you used to spend nights in his bed?” Cecily asked, almost too conversationally. The thought of Jamie spending his nights with this woman filled her with horror and she listened with sickening dread for the older woman’s reply.
Miss Emstridge scoffed derisively. “I’m not young enough, or pretty enough, for Mister Fancy Breeches. He prefers younger women, like you. When I took the job here, his father,” she nodded derisively toward the portrait of Michael, “was nice. We had a lot in common. We both liked books and spent many hours in here. All was going well, until Mister Fancy Breeches came home. Then everything changed. Michael remained in his study, spent his evenings with Mister Fancy Breeches, and hardly came in here. I waited and waited,” her voice turned softly reminiscent for several moments. “But, after that, whenever I went to his study, Michael was vague and distant. Mister Fancy Breeches had warned him off.”
“How do you know that?” Cecily argued. She struggled to think of this woman being enamoured with anyone.
“Because everything changed when Mister Fancy Breeches arrived,” Miss Emstridge spat. “Michael died several days after he left. When Mister Fancy Breeches came back, everything changed. He was upset. I tried to comfort him but he was cold, always cold.” Her voice petered out as she returned to her reminiscences.
“So you started to help yourself to the contents of the library just to spite him?” Cecily bitterly regretted the words when the older woman seemed to jerk and turned to glare at her.
“The money here is rubbish. Mister Fancy Breeches didn’t give a damn about the library. I was making lists of things, and for what? Nobody seemed to care what I did. All Mister Fancy Breeches cares about is strutting in and out of here, dragging his friends with him; drinking all of the brandy, eating all of the food before clearing off again. He would be gone for months without a care in the world.”
“But Melvedere is his house,” Cecily reasoned. “He has a right to eat all of his food and drink all of the brandy. He works hard enough for it.”
“Work! Ha! You have no idea of what it means to work for a living; you, with your soft young hands, and dresses bought by your lover. You are nothing more than a common whore.”
Cecily lapsed into silence. When she thought about it, she really couldn’t argue. By sleeping with Jamie, that is what she had turned herself into: a common whore.
“But Jamie owns the books you have been stealing. Did you not realise that one day he would notice? He may not spend much time in here but at some point the books would have run out, and then what?”
“Do you really think that I would be stupid enough to spend the rest of my days in this place? Stuck in this pit of paper and ink?” Miss Emstridge stood rigidly before her, thumping her chest with arrogant defiance. “We were very nearly at our target. We had it working well until you showed up with your lover boy.”
“We,” Cecily replied solemnly. Disappointment warred with hurt for Jamie at the realisation that someone in the house had betrayed his trust. He had considered everyone family, and ostensibly they had been. But someone had clearly decided that they preferred to set out on their own and create a new future for themselves, and used Jamie’s belongings to do it.
“Potter and I have been at it for years. He told me I was a fool for waiting around for Michael to notice me, and he was right. Together we hatched a plan to get our own back. Potter hates the family too. They think it is alright to work us from dawn to dusk and pay us pittance in return. Potter likes the beer, but cannot afford to pay for it on the ridiculous amount of money he gets paid. So he started to help himself.”
“You have been helping yourselves to the ornaments, silverware, books and pottery to furnish your new lives somewhere else,” Cecily sighed wondering what the mess with the books all around her was about.
“He can afford it,” Miss Emstridge snapped, her voice calm. “Unfortunately for Mister Fancy Breeches, we are clever. It is best not to do things like that on your own doorstep. Potter makes a very good burglar, when he is sober.”
Cecily lapsed into silence and realised then that Potter had been the one who had been stealing from the houses in the area and hiding the goods in the secret room.
“So it was Potter who found the door to the secret passages.” Cecily wondered how Jamie would take the news that his groundsman had been the one who had betrayed him.
“Of course. Potter works in the gardens, and was working around the trellis one day and saw the handle. Why do you think the trellis was put in front of the doorway?”
Cecily shook her head. It was something she had never considered before. The roses on the trellis had been pruned recently and someone had put the trellis there. The door behind the trellis was wooden. It made sense that the gardener, or whoever pruned the rose bushes, would notice the doorway and investigate.
She mentally cursed herself for not having realised that earlier. She wondered how long they had been steadily stealing from the locals and amassing their fortune. Taking a breath to ask she froze, her eyes growing round at the sight of the lit spill in Miss Emstridge’s hand.
“Time to go,” the older woman announced flatly.
Cecily screamed, as long and as loudly as she could. She watched in frozen horror as the older woman walked steadily toward the chair, and knew that any moment now she was going be brutally murdered.
Jamie was walking back across the lawns with Hugo when he heard the awful scream coming from the house. He didn’t need to hear it again to know that it came from Cecily.
“Jesus,” he whispered and took off at a run. He didn’t stop to look, but knew from the heavy pounding behind him that Hugo was right behind. Simon appeared around the side of the house at the same time. He paused at the sight of Hugo and Jamie, then doubled back and disa
ppeared around the front of the house.
“Wait!” Hugo gasped, staring at the movement of shadows from inside the room.
“Not likely,” Jamie snarled, his fists curled into tight balls of fury. Hugo knew that Jamie’s reasoning had gone.
The closed door to the library was no barrier to Jamie. One booted foot made the door burst inward with a resounding bang. Glass shattered everywhere but that was of little consequence to him. His eyes landed on the chair positioned in the middle of the room, and the glossy, if once again dusty, head of Cecily visible over the back. His eyes flew to Miss Emstridge who stood beside her with a lit spill in her hand.
Miss Emstridge paused and glared at him. The spite in her eyes was clear and Jamie knew without speaking to her that the woman had lost her grip on reality. Her eyes were wild, almost feral. Jamie froze, his gaze flicking to the area around the chair. Books and parchment lay everywhere. If Miss Emstridge lit the spill, the parchment would catch alight. With as old, dry and dusty as the books were, the whole place would go up within minutes, and that included Cecily, who was sitting in the middle of what appeared to be the contents of three of the shelves.
“Put it down, Emstridge.” Jamie struggled to keep his voice calm and reasonable when he really wanted to knock the stupid woman off her feet, and pound her to within an inch of her life. He had been brought up to treat a woman with respect and gentility, but this person before him was no woman. This – person – was beneath contempt.
Jamie didn’t even blink at the sight of Simon slowly creeping into the room from the main body of the house, and hoped that Cecily would have the sense to ignore him too.
He was desperate to catch a glimpse of Cecily’s face and at least make eye contact once. He slowly moved around the chair, aware that Hugo had moved to block the door leading to the gardens.
Although Jamie’s face remained calm and impassive, he silently cursed the sight of the blood covering half of Cecily’s face again. He could tell from the slightly dazed look in her eyes that she wasn’t completely aware of what was going on, and for that he could only be entirely grateful. He glanced warningly at Simon who had raised his gun to take aim. If Miss Emstridge dropped that spill, they would all be in trouble.
Lord Melvedere's Ghost Page 22