by Jean Barrett
“I married Sybil after I left the order because she’s a Warley descendant. But you know that now, don’t you? Sybil was a connection to the Madonna, you see. That was a mistake. There was no solace for me in the marriage. I found that only in my regular retreats to Warley where the Madonna never failed to restore my faith.”
Until you learned it was to be sold.
Jennifer thought the words were something she said to herself. But she must have nervously expressed them aloud, because Roger looked at her as if he was pleased that she could relate to his absolute devotion to the Madonna.
“That’s right. You understand why I was outraged, don’t you?”
“What I understand is that you murdered Guy,” she said, finding the courage to accuse him.
Unwise though her reckless charge might be, she needed to know. All she cared about was Roger’s admission of guilt.
“Spalding refused my appeals to let me return the Madonna to Warley where she belongs,” he said plaintively.
“And so you killed him, didn’t you?”
“He was angry that I’d misrepresented myself as a wealthy collector interested in buying the Madonna. I knew it was the only way he would let me come to his shop that night. He laughed at my proposal when I got there. I had every reason to kill him for that, but I didn’t. Not then. Not until he committed the unpardonable.”
“By?”
“Telling me that the Madonna would be tested for authenticity. Daring to suggest that she might not be a product of the true cross.”
“And you couldn’t allow that.”
“I was livid, and the loaded dueling pistols were right there on his desk.” He lifted his shoulders in a little shrug. “I had no choice. It was the only way I could save the Madonna from that sort of humiliation. The only way I could take her and bring her home.”
He had continued to unconsciously stroke the robe throughout his confession. Now, aware of his action, he left the cupboard and moved toward the fireplace with the garment still over his arm. Jennifer shrank back as he approached her.
“I was wearing this under my coat when I met Brother Anthony in the courtyard. It seemed appropriate somehow. And, as it turned out, also useful.”
Jennifer shuddered as he slowly fingered the cord at the waist of the robe. She understood now why the sight of it in the wardrobe had made her so uncomfortable. The cord must have served as a garrote when he had strangled Brother Anthony.
The fire was still burning in Roger’s eyes as he leaned toward her with a kind of sickening intimacy.
“Brother Anthony was here in the old days,” he said. “We were monks together. He knew of my deep devotion to the Madonna, which is perhaps why it occurred to him when he learned of Spalding’s death that I… Well, he slipped a note to me in the chapel during laud asking me to meet him in the courtyard when he took his exercise there. It was the one place where we could speak privately. He was willing to break his vow of silence for me. Touching, isn’t it?”
“Because he suspected you murdered Guy,” Jennifer said rashly.
Roger smiled that sad smile again. “Brother Anthony was naive, I’m afraid. Unwilling to expose someone who had once been a fellow brother in his order until he could be certain. There seemed to be no use in denying it when he asked me if I’d killed Spalding and taken the Madonna. I promised him I would confess if he would pray with me before we went to Father Stephen. There’s a little shrine there in the courtyard. Possibly you noticed it. Saint Joseph, a favorite of Brother Anthony’s. I like to think he died seeking spiritual guidance from Joseph.”
As though lost in some insane dream, he stared down into the fireplace at the smoke that continued to rise from the remnants of the vanity case.
“He died because you executed him with that cord,” Jennifer said, unable to prevent her anger. “It was the weapon you used, wasn’t it?”
“What?” Roused from his reverie, he glanced at the cord he was still fondling. “Oh, you mean this. Yes, you’re right, and that’s why I have to burn it together with the robe. I was convinced they could never be connected with Brother Anthony’s death, and so I kept them. But then it struck me that with today’s police technology… Well, it’s best to dispose of them, don’t you agree?”
With a sigh of regret, he cast the robe and the cord into the fireplace. They lay there on the grate for a moment over the bed of hot coals. Tiny flames began to lick at them, slowly at first and then building rapidly into a blaze.
Roger watched them until he was certain they were being entirely consumed along with any lingering evidence of the vanity case. Then he went back to the wardrobe, withdrawing a winter coat and putting it on. When he joined her again at the fireplace, where he transferred the pistol into an outside pocket, there was a decisive expression on his face and in his voice that sent her heart plummeting.
“And now, my dear Jennifer, it’s time for you to make yourself useful to me. You’re going to help me get the Madonna—oh, yes, the whole monastery knows she’s been recovered and locked away in the strong room—and then you and I are going to put her where she will never be found again.”
RETRACING HIS ROUTE, Leo stopped in the chapel to speak to Brother Michael. “Have you seen Ms. Rowan?”
Brother Michael had not seen Jennifer.
Maybe she found what she was looking for in the library and went to tell Father Stephen about it, Leo thought.
He hurried off to the abbot’s office, wanting to believe that’s where he would find Jennifer. But he was worried in earnest now. He had a bad feeling about this whole thing.
The door was closed when he reached the office. He rapped on it. Not waiting for an answer, he opened the door and stuck his head inside. There was no one there.
He started to retreat when he heard a muffled thumping in the direction of the strong room. Swiftly crossing the office, he laid his ear against the iron banded door. The low pounding continued from the other side, accompanied by shouts that the thickness of the door made incomprehensible.
He tried the door. Locked, of course, and no key in sight. Nor would he waste his time in searching for it, because he wouldn’t find it anywhere in the office. Whoever had locked the door would have taken the key with him.
Leo knew this with the same desperate certainty that he knew Jennifer needed him as he sped back to the chapel where Brother Michael was still working on the rail.
“Is there another key to the strong room?” he demanded, not bothering to lose time with an explanation that could wait.
The startled monk gaped at him.
“Man, don’t just stand there looking at me. It’s urgent. Someone has been locked inside the strong room, and the key is gone.”
“Father Stephen has all the keys, but the prior keeps a duplicate set for everything in the monastery.”
“Find him. Tell him to hurry with those keys!”
Leo raced back to the office and tried to communicate with whoever was trapped inside the strong room, wanting to assure them help was on the way. He got a muted response, but it was nothing he was able to understand.
Waiting and worrying about Jennifer had him ready to tear the door down with his bare hands by the time the prior arrived with the spare keys. Several excited monks followed him, crowding through the doorway.
Finding the right key, the prior unlocked the door and flung it open. Father Stephen stumbled out into the office. The monks started forward with the intention of supporting him, but he waved them back.
“It’s Roger!” he said, steadying himself after drawing a deep breath. “He has a gun and is holding Ms. Rowan hostage! He threatened to shoot her if I didn’t give him the Madonna! He’s gone mad!”
“Where are they?” Leo demanded. “Where did he take her?”
The abbot shook his head. “That I can’t tell you.”
One of the monks was the young Brother Luke. He spoke up with a swift, “They left the castle by the postern. I had a glimpse of them from the ref
ectory window headed down the footpath to the valley. But I had no idea—”
Leo sharply cut him off. “Show me the way to the postern.”
Brother Luke led him out of the office and along the gallery in the direction of the great hall. Leo damned himself as they negotiated a series of passages leading to the castle’s back door.
How could he have let himself be fooled by Roger Harding’s innocent devoutness? He had messed up by overlooking the obvious, because only someone thoroughly familiar with Warley Castle would have discovered the existence of that hiding place in the gatehouse tower. Someone like Harding.
Jennifer. The bastard had Jennifer, and if he hurt her—
Leo was out of his mind with fear and rage long before they reached the postern. He had to find them wherever they had gone, had to get Jennifer away from that lunatic before it was too late. Because there was something else he knew. Something he hadn’t fully acknowledged to himself until this minute. Jennifer meant everything to him.
He couldn’t lose her and live with himself, he thought fiercely. He couldn’t.
Chapter Fourteen
Jennifer was disheartened to see that the thaw was so far advanced not a trace of snow remained on the steep path that wound its way to the valley below.
There would be no footprints for anyone to follow. Nor was there the possibility that she and the man at her side would leave any traces of their passage on the rough trail. It was all rock and gravel.
The Madonna was inside a canvas bag the shocked abbot had provided for its protection. Roger had ordered her to carry the relic so that he could make quick use of his pistol if it became necessary. The bag had grown heavy by now.
Pausing to shift the weight to her other hand, she used the opportunity to look quickly over her shoulder. But there was no hope there. The castle on its craggy height was already out of sight behind them.
Leo, she thought. Where was he? She missed him desperately, reproached herself for having pushed him away in anger. Oh, Leo, Leo, I’m so sorry. Now she was on her own because no one had seen Roger and her leave the castle. No one would know where they had gone. The man she loved so deeply wouldn’t be able to follow or help her. She was alone out here with a madman.
Jennifer had no illusions about her survival after Roger finished using her as his hostage. He couldn’t afford to let her live once she learned the final destination for the Madonna. That she had managed to save Father Stephen’s life was her only consolation. She’d made it clear to Roger that, if he harmed the abbot, she would refuse to help him, no matter what he did to her.
“Go on,” Roger ordered, prodding her impatiently in the ribs with the gun. She caught a glimpse of a band of wild moor ponies off in the distance, but otherwise there was no sign of life.
She had no choice but to continue their descent. A chill mist had developed, rising from the deep hollows of the moors where great brown patches on the upper slopes had emerged from the melting snow. The mist thickened as they neared the valley. Another disappointment for Jennifer, but it suited Roger.
“No one can find us in this,” he said. “We’re safe now.”
Safe? She was anything but safe, but she wasn’t ready to surrender. If she could somehow manage to get away from him…
How? She didn’t know, but it might be useful to learn where they were going.
“Where are you taking me?”
Roger didn’t immediately answer her, but then he must have decided it wouldn’t matter if she knew. Not if he planned for her to never leave their destination, but she wasn’t going to let herself be defeated by that realization.
“To an ancient place suitable for the Madonna. The Romans once mined lead there, but the diggings were abandoned and forgotten centuries ago. There is no entrance now. It was buried long ago. All but a very narrow opening hidden behind gorse and rocks and just wide enough to squeeze through.”
They reached the bottom of the valley where the trail divided into several paths.
“There are peat bogs out there,” he said. “Dangerous places. Sheep sometimes wander into them and are sucked down. But I know how to avoid them. I walked these moors when I was a monk here, but we’ll need to be careful in this mist. We go this way.”
He led the way along one of the footpaths.
“I know now,” he went on with a chilling rapture in his voice, “the divine hand that guided me to the opening in the mine all those years ago did so for a purpose. I was meant to place the Madonna deep in one of its tunnels until some far day, when it’s safe, another true believer will be led to her, and he will return her to the castle where she will be honored as she deserves.”
Jennifer knew it was useless to argue with him. He was beyond all reason. All she could do was silently hope that he did know where he was going. She had lost all sense of direction in this confusing maze where the paths themselves seemed firm enough, but the ground on either side of them was so soggy that one false step could land them in a bottomless mire.
Finally, when the fog became so dense it was impossible to proceed, Roger halted them on the edge of a solid slope. “We’ll wait here a minute until it clears a bit.”
There was a dark pool a few feet away from them, swollen from the melting snow that fed it. Jennifer could hear a slow trickle of water. Otherwise, the silence was absolute. They didn’t talk as they waited, but she was aware of her captor watching her with an exultant half smile on his face.
She didn’t know what was more terrifying, the clammy fog that hid the lethal marshes all around them or being trapped here with Roger Harding and his taunting smile. In the end, unable to endure the eerie silence, she began to ask him questions whose answers she no longer cared about. Anything to relieve the tension. Anything to preserve hope. Because there was the chance, unlikely though it was, that if someone should be out there and heard their voices…
“You had to have discovered the Madonna was to be sold,” she said. “How was that possible?”
“Why, Geoffrey, of course. We became friends on my last two retreats. Geoffrey feels the same about the Madonna as I do. I suppose being a novice is the reason why he wasn’t told about its sale until he learned of it from Brother Anthony on their trip down to London.”
And if Geoffrey had registered any alarm about that news, Jennifer thought, it would explain why Brother Anthony had been troubled. Why he’d cautioned Guy in London that the sale of the Madonna might be opposed.
“Geoffrey phoned me in London between trains to let me know what was happening. That was when I contacted Guy Spalding.”
Like a flow that, once started, couldn’t be stopped, Roger talked on, telling her everything. How he’d managed to smuggle the Madonna back to Warley inside his luggage without his wife’s knowledge. How, when they’d reached the castle, he’d been unable to place the Madonna in the mine until the storm cleared.
With Geoffrey’s help, Roger had hidden her temporarily inside the flue of the unused fireplace in the great hall. But Geoffrey had failed him. His conscience had resulted in those episodes of sleepwalking that would have led Jennifer and Leo to the great hall, if Roger hadn’t arrived on the scene at the last moment and managed to cut the generator.
So it wasn’t concern for his father, or any misgiving about taking his final vows, that accounted for Geoffrey’s sleepwalking, Jennifer thought. It had been guilt.
“You and McKenzie were a considerable nuisance to me with your eternal prying,” Roger said.
He went on to tell Jennifer how, after he’d transferred the Madonna to a chest inside one of the empty guest rooms, he’d tried to sabotage their investigation by luring them onto the dangerous stairway in the great hall. When that, too, failed, he’d realized the Madonna needed to be moved again. This time it would have to be a place far more secure than anything inside the castle with all its risks.
That was when Roger had remembered the hollow under the window seat in the gatehouse tower. But on this occasion it was Sybil who h
ad interfered with his plan.
“I’m sorry to say that my dear wife and I have been a disappointment to each other,” Roger said unhappily. “What with our marriage having deteriorated through the years, and her inheritance dwindled…
“Really, I should have known from the way she kept looking at me and how she was drinking more than usual that she was suspicious. Unfortunate she should have followed me out to the gatehouse, and that I had to deal with her when she found me with the Madonna. I suppose she thought that, if she could get her hands on the Madonna, prove that as a Warley descendant she was entitled to a share of her sale… Ah, well.”
Roger had continued to watch her throughout his explanation with that intense, burning gaze. He stared at her now, as if eager for her approval.
“You can understand now why everything I did was necessary in order to keep the Madonna where she belongs. That only here at Warley can she work her miracles of healing and soothing.” He leaned in close to her, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Can’t you, Jennifer?”
What she understood was that everything he had done was despicable. And all because of his blind, maniacal dedication to a piece of wood.
He sighed in regret when she had no response for him, stood back and looked around. “I think it’s beginning to thin a little,” he said, his voice flat now. “We can move on.”
He started to lead them away from the pool when there was a thunderous noise off to their right. Jennifer had no idea what she was hearing. Nor from the alarmed expression on his face did Roger. The two of them stood there in dismay.
Then, before they could get away or the animals become aware of their presence, a half dozen of the wild moor ponies burst out of the fog and came racing toward them.
The band had probably come down to the pool to drink. Whatever the explanation for their arrival, Jennifer realized this was the opportunity she had been praying for. The ponies were suddenly on them, pushing toward the water, their shaggy bodies dividing her from Roger.