Hartwell was seriously beginning to dislike the way Mary could make him feel like a schoolboy again.
***
EIGHT
Mary escaped to the library, looking it over with newly-awakened eyes after sending the sullen Mrs. Durham back to bed.
Ever since her father’s illness, Mary had lapsed in the care of the library. It was her domain. She had long ago ordered the servants to tend the fireplace and candles only. She, on the other hand, cared for the books. When she entered the library, knowing Hartwell had waited there at least half an hour, she was past feeling dismay—she felt ashamed.
Her books were coated with dust, those on the low bookcases and those stacked on the side tables. The eight buttoned, fringed, and tufted chairs, deep-seated for snuggling beneath a blanket while reading, frayed at the upholstered edges. The mirror running the length of the wall opposite the windows was tarnishing. The windows were gray-green with winter grime. The fireplace was sooty to the point of being dangerous.
“You’ve let a few things slide, haven’t you, then?” Trentwood said, lifting a book cover with distaste.
Mary wasn’t certain how to respond, or what to respond to first. He was right; in the face of his illness she had lost track of the everyday matters. Rather than responding to that nitpicky topic, however, she realized she had never actually seen Trentwood move anything since his death. His previous talents had only included appearing out of thin air and walking through solid objects.
Not that either talent, if one could call such abnormalities talents, had been very easy to adjust to, only... he had showcased them from the start.
No, this was too much to absorb. Better stick to safer topics.
Mary pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and began dusting the pile of books nearest her. “Things were a bit hectic, if you remember.”
Trentwood shrugged and took a seat nearest the fireplace, though no fire burned and wouldn’t warm him anyway.
“I don’t suppose you could help me? Maybe you could float to the top shelving and dust?” Mary smiled at his affronted expression. She had never dared speak to him in such a fashion when he was alive, and she didn’t know what inspired her to take such a tone with him now. But oh, how delicious it felt to speak her mind without fear of censure.
“Just who do you think I am?” Trentwood demanded, leaping to his feet.
All right, so there was still some residual censure. Her mouth seemed to have a mind of its own as she retorted, “To be honest, I’ve thought you a nuisance. So I’m very glad to have found a task for you to do.”
Trentwood’s mouth dropped open. “What did you say?”
“If you’re going to haunt me, make yourself useful, if you please. I’ve enough to worry about without your meddling.” Mary slapped her handkerchief at the pages of the book in her hand and coughed at the cloud of dust she dislodged. “What do you know about Hartwell, for instance? You’re a ghost, can’t you spy on him? Confirm he is who he claims to be?”
“You would have your own father spy on a guest in his house?” Trentwood fumed, a blue vein popping in his forehead.
Mary rubbed her forehead in empathy. Talking back to the ghost was almost more trouble than ignoring him. “No, I wouldn’t. I’d have my father’s ghost spy on a guest in my house. Or did you not leave the house to me?”
Trentwood’s mouth thinned to a furious line, but he couldn’t refute her, and she knew it. “I refuse to do anything so underhanded. Now what do you think about that?”
Mary lifted the pile of books and replaced them on a sagging shelf. She made a mental note to have Pomeroy look at stabilizing it. “Suit yourself. If you won’t help me dust and you refuse to be underhanded, you can take your questions elsewhere.”
“Really, we must stop meeting like this,” Hartwell said from the doorway.
Mary dropped the book she was inspecting.
“Ah yes, the youth from the tomb,” Trentwood said, sidling over to Hartwell. “What do you think happened to him?”
Mary opened her mouth to snap at Trentwood, but the words fell away upon seeing Hartwell’s face. He kept his hair long and brushed to the side to hide his pinched skin. Mary moved closer. His eyes were very dark—almost black. So dark, she couldn’t read any expression in them. The left eye had a collection of little scars that cut through the brow, down over his eyelid, and onto his cheek. The scars pulled on his eyelids, dragging the upper to meet the lower before it ought, and pulling the lower to reveal the inside of his eye socket. In total, the scar had the odd effect of making his eye look lazy when it was not.
When Hartwell shifted his weight, Mary realized she was staring. She cleared her throat.
“I have decided,” Hartwell announced firmly, “you are doing it on purpose.”
Mary paused. “I’m sorry, doing what on purpose?”
“Being contrary.”
“Contrary?” Mary exclaimed.
Trentwood chuckled. “Whoever this chap is, let’s keep him a while, shall we?”
Mary scowled.
“Oh, yes,” Hartwell said, warming to the topic. “Talking to yourself, telling me to play your footman when I’ve inspected your house and know quite well that you haven’t any footmen, admitting you knew I was listening to you and your aunt—”
“Ah!” Mary pointed an accusatory finger at Hartwell. “I knew you were listening!”
Hartwell grinned. “This is all an act, Miss Contrary Mary, and heaven help me, I’m curious.”
“Careful, Mary,” Trentwood cautioned, “do you know what you’re dealing with?”
Mary shifted her eyes from Hartwell to Trentwood and back. She couldn’t help it—she stole a glance at Hartwell’s scars again and flushed in response to his embarrassed flinch. She stepped back to retrieve the book she had dropped. Startled when Hartwell swooped in to pick up the book for her, she swallowed a gasp.
“Mary Wollstonecraft?” Hartwell said, turning over the book in his hand. “Your father let you read such texts?”
Mary snatched it from him, but it was too late, Trentwood had found her out.
“I told you to throw that trash away!” Trentwood snapped.
“My father didn’t come into this room; this was my library,” Mary said, hugging the book to her chest.
Hartwell chuckled. “You are, without a doubt, the most contrary person I’ve ever met, myself excluded.”
Trentwood snorted.
Mary backed away from them. What could one say, after having been found out to have read—and absolutely loved—A Vindication of the Rights of Women? Nothing, really. She inhaled slowly and waited for the tirade she was certain to receive. She waited to be labeled a menace, a suffragist, a pain. That was what Trentwood called such groups of women, and while Mary had no inclination to wrestle the vote from British men, she had liked Wollstonecraft’s words. She liked the idea of having her sense of reason acknowledged.
Trentwood paced the room deep in thought, though he glanced at Mary now and again as if trying to decide just what punishment he would most enjoy meting out.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” was all Hartwell said. He rubbed his chin as he pondered Mary.
“You are a highly irregular man,” was all she thought to say.
Hartwell laughed, really laughed this time, and it sent a pleasant chill down Mary’s spine. “This coming from the woman who talks to herself. I respectfully claim the term ‘irregular’ is relative.”
Mary scowled. “In any case, I don’t understand why you insist on speaking to me in such a familiar manner. Calling me Contrary Mary, of all things!”
Hartwell nodded with heartfelt understanding, smoothing his hair back from his face and behind his ear. “My mother complains the same. She never could cure me of it. Does my familiarity bother you? I can try to stop, but you’d only laugh at my attempt.”
Mary gave him an odd look. “It’s not really in my nature to laugh,” she admitted.
“That is the saddest thin
g I think I’ve ever heard, Mary Trentwood.”
At this, Trentwood disappeared, his voice whispering in Mary’s ear, “I like him, don’t you?”
Mary twitched away. “No.”
“No? What? No what?” Hartwell said.
Mary faltered. “No... I suppose you are right. My mother used to laugh a great deal.”
***
NINE
There were few tasks Pomeroy would not do for the Trentwoods, and many he did without their knowledge. Snooping through Hartwell’s satchel, for instance, was in no way a part of his duties in normal or extenuating circumstances. Pomeroy’s mother, God rest her soul, had always said, “What’s done is done,” and had taken great pains to ensure this was his philosophy.
So when the house had settled for the night, and Pomeroy took a letter from his breast pocket, the well-worn one he had found in Hartwell’s satchel, he felt all the proper emotions as his mother had taught. His hands were sweating, his head ached, and he suspected he was developing an ulcer. Guilt was felt deeply in the Pomeroy family, being the closet Catholics they were, and the butler Pomeroy at the manor house of Compton Beauchamp was no exception.
Pomeroy had locked himself in the silver room, which was sadly barren of the family silver. It was more of a closet than a room, with drawers and shelves made of wood darkened from years of sweating hands sliding the silver in and out of place. Pomeroy shook his head every time he had the misfortune to enter; it just wasn’t right, to leave one’s only child, one’s only daughter, with a pile of debt and naught else.
But that was neither here nor there.
Pomeroy flipped the letter over, having settled his candelabra on a shoulder-height shelf. Puzzling how the letter lacked an address. Perhaps Hartwell had never sent it? Unfortunately, Pomeroy had only enough time to snatch one letter from the satchel, and this one was the easiest to access without disturbing anything else. What a wasted opportunity, he thought dourly, until he began to read its contents.
The handwriting was erratic, scrawled across the page by the writer in a violent emotion. The writer never named the recipient, nor did the writer sign his—or her—name.
Not that Pomeroy blamed the writer, as the letter reeked of blackmail. It was dated four months ago, which was around the time Mrs. Durham had moved to the manor house as Trentwood’s days drew to an end.
“You have been naughty,” the blackmailer accused. “I know it. Would that your husband knew the depths of your betrayal. Rest assured, one day his name will be cleared of your cuckolding.”
Pomeroy folded the letter, following the careworn creases. He tapped the letter against his temple. Mrs. Durham had been very quick to eject Hartwell from the house that morning. And Hartwell had been more than pleased when Mrs. Durham didn’t arrive for dinner, having begged off with the insufficient claim that she suffered a monstrous headache.
Now, one could find reasons, of course. One had to be blind not to see the interest in Hartwell’s eye and expression when speaking with Mary. Therefore, Hartwell could have been glad Mrs. Durham hadn’t joined them for dinner because he wanted to talk to Mary more. It was certainly plausible.
And Hartwell’s initial concern that Mrs. Durham was the mistress of the manor house? A logical reaction to having the door slammed in his face.
Neither of these points excused the final one, however, the fact being that no one seemed to know who he was, or why he was at the manor house but for Mrs. Durham.
Pomeroy sighed and rolled his shoulders free of the kink in his neck. As if there wasn’t enough to concern him and Mary already when it came to all things with Mrs. Durham. He checked the time on his pocket watch, glowering at the hands as they ticked past midnight.
Blackmail at the manor house. What was the world coming to?
Pomeroy ruffled his white hair with a low grumble. He blew out his candle and slipped from the empty silver room, tucking the letter into the breast pocket above his heart.
The matter could rest until morning, surely. He would let Mary sleep. Her day had been far from normal, and that was considering abnormal had become the norm over the last month. Yes, Mary should sleep. When she woke feeling rested, she would see sense in his suggestion that they call the authorities before Hartwell became any wiser.
Pomeroy yawned behind his hand. In the morning, Mary would be her logical self and follow his suggestion and the manor house could go back to its quiet mourning. Really, it was an excellent plan.
“Hartwell? Blackmail?” Mary’s smile stretched across her face and her lips quivered in the traitorous moves of laughter. She sat on the floor in the library, sewing together the ripped open seam of one of the chair armrests. Her curved needle glinted in the daylight, which shone brightly through the newly scrubbed windows. “Pomeroy, really.”
That had not been the reaction he had expected. Pomeroy drew to his full height. He looked down his long nose and said in his stiffest tones, “I have evidence, Miss, which supports me.”
Mouth still trembling, Mary held out her hand. “I think you’ve been indoors too long; you ought to take a walk now and again,” she said, accepting the letter.
Pomeroy shifted his weight as Mary read the short missive, noting with smug—if silent—satisfaction how her brows furrowed together, her mouth down-turned, and her shoulders hunched in embarrassment.
“He didn’t write this,” Mary said, flinging the letter at Pomeroy.
“How can you know, Miss?”
“I can’t,” Mary admitted, accepting Pomeroy’s help as she stood. She brushed her hands down the front of her working apron and threaded the needle through the apron’s hem. “I’ve only known him a day, but I doubt the laughing man I ate dinner with last night is a blackmailer. The handwriting seems… feminine, somehow. And Alex is a barrister, his occupation is to uphold the law, not circumvent it!”
Pomeroy’s smile was far too kind, making it drip with pity and condescension. “Be that as it may, Miss Mary, he wouldn’t have to be a good sort of barrister, now would he?”
Mary wrinkled her nose and crossed her arms over her chest. “What is your suggestion, then?”
“Call for the authorities at once, of course.”
She nodded slowly. “And what then? Have the gossip-mongers on my lands, harassing my tenants, wanting to know all about how the hermit Miss Mary Trentwood was harboring a blackmailer? Thank you, no.”
Pomeroy’s jaw set as he mimicked Mary, crossing his arms over his chest. “What is your suggestion then?”
Mary paused a moment, her attention caught by something at the window, or through the window, Pomeroy couldn’t tell. She frowned at whatever it was that had caught her attention. Pomeroy cleared his throat. He raised his brows when Mary lifted her hand in the ever familiar motion that asked for silence. “Really, Miss...”
Sighing, a slow smile spread across Mary’s face. “We won’t call the authorities, not until we have more information. I’ll write to my father’s solicitor for word of Hartwell and any disreputable dealings attached to him. In the meantime, wouldn’t it be safer if we kept him here where we could prevent his mischief?”
Pomeroy’s mouth sagged open and his hands fell to his sides.
“I see we are in agreement. Excellent.” Mary clapped her hands and smiled. “Now then, shall we have breakfast and welcome our potentially-blackmailing-guest to Compton Beauchamp?”
Unbelievable.
Oh, this was rich. Stupendous. Excellently timed. Mary couldn’t keep the smile from her face as she led Pomeroy from the library. She didn’t care if Hartwell was a blackmailer or not; the fact was she had a bit of information on him that he didn’t know she had.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Mary didn’t want Hartwell to be a blackmailer. She rather liked his warm smile and delighted in the way his laugh, when triggered, sent a chill up her spine. Though she would never admit it, dinner with Hartwell the night before had been, easily, the highlight of the past year.
Mary ha
d woken that morning smiling, for heaven’s sake, for no reason at all. It hadn’t been the weather, as the day was dull and threatened rain. Again. It hadn’t been her industriousness, as she had broken two needles while repairing the chair arms in the library and poked herself often enough that her thumbs were numb.
No, Mary suspected the reason she rose from bed with an amused smile had everything to do with Hartwell taking Mrs. Durham’s position as her dining companion.
That, and the loveliness of having an evening with someone her age, or if not her age, around her age, interested in talking about books and culture and music—interested in talking with her.
If Trentwood had haunted her last night, Mary never noticed.
That was enough to make Mary smile for days.
Mary entered the dining room alone. Pomeroy had left her without calling attention to himself, though she probably wouldn’t have heard him, what with all of her thoughts bouncing around her mind screaming for her notice. Hartwell and Mrs. Durham had yet to emerge from their bedrooms, leaving the modest buffet free for Mary’s less-than-thrilled perusal.
Roasted tomatoes, again, with burned toast, jam and clotted cream, fish leftover from dinner, and coffee. It was enough to send anyone’s appetite away, shrieking bloody murder.
Mary knew better than to complain. Mrs. Beeton was doing the best she could with the supplies at hand. Mrs. Beeton was, in fact, doing exactly what Mary asked, which was use everything in the stores until it was absolutely necessary to send out for more. That Mrs. Beeton was sticking to this order, even when Mary wanted to renege with a passion, was one of the many reasons why she had been kept on, while other servants had been let go.
Mary’s thoughts continued to wander. Hartwell came to the forefront quickly. Blackmail? She tried to imagine him in a dark, dank room smelling of grease and polluted with the sounds of children’s screams, penning that awful letter with a vicious smirk plastered across his face. Even with his scar, it didn’t seem to fit.
Haunting Miss Trentwood Page 5