“Otherwise nothing,” Felicity tried to reassure him, if not herself. “A stranger broke into my estate. What other reason could he possibly have, if not to aid Landrigan’s schemes? Tomorrow, we’ll get to the truth. And once he admits to being our culprit, I’ll march the girls up to meet their ghost and put an end to this Dark Raven nonsense once and for all.”
Clooney chomped on his pipe. His lower lip jutted out—an expression Felicity had grown fond of over the years. He often pouted when he was feeling fatherly. “That crashing glass was ear shattering. We don’t need the Royal Irish Constabulary sniffing around.”
“You well know the RICs never patrol out this far. We’ll have the stable hands escort the man back to town before they get wind of anything.”
Clooney took out his pipe and thumped its bowl against his chin. “You have doubts. You have doubts he’s working for Donal, or you would’ve already had Tobias and Fennigan dump him out in the forest to bleed to death.”
“You truly think me so heartless? Perhaps had he been Landrigan.” She feigned a wry laugh. “No. I assume this man was an ingenuous pawn. That even if he isn’t innocent, he was misled.”
Her mouth dried on the words. She wasn’t prepared to tell Clooney the real reason the wounded man deserved the benefit of the doubt … how she’d recognized him when she released the hanky and saw his face in the moonlight. The earring, the beard, and his brawny build had thrown her at first. But his features…
She’d been eighteen at the time, and he couldn’t have been much more than two years younger than her. For these seven years hence, she’d fantasized of him … playing out his kindness and bravery behind closed eyes. Even drunk to the gills as he’d been, he still managed to be a hero. Now, those features were indelible in her mind. An unmistakable beacon in a past otherwise filled with bleakness and despair.
But Clooney wouldn’t see him as a beacon. He’d see him as a threat to her identity and would insist they send him away. Though a part of her shared this concern, a bigger part knew she owed this man shelter and nurturing, at the very least.
“Donal.” Clooney spat the name again, narrowing his eyes and pointing the pipe’s stem her way. “He’ll be here at week’s end for his monthly call.”
Felicity regrouped her thoughts. “Yes, and the good dowager will be ready for him as always. Should be interesting to see his reaction when he finds I’ve out-maneuvered him once again.”
The longcase clock in her room began to strike midnight. Her gaze made a sweep to the shadowed and cobwebbed stairway on her right—the one that led to the castle’s highest turret.
“Are you feeling one of your headaches coming on?” Cloony asked, his attention following hers to the stairs.
“No.” Her nights hadn’t revolved around said headaches for some time. Ever since she’d finished writing that romance novel with young Emilia Thornton and put a stop to their correspondences. As incapacitating as those megrims had been, and as confusing as the missing time was, some part of her felt incomplete without them. “Are you going up?” she asked.
“Aye,” Clooney answered. “My final check before bed.”
Felicity stepped backward across her threshold. The smoky beginnings of a fire crackled in her hearth—set into play by her maid who was now retired for the night somewhere within the servant’s confines on the first floor.
The clock’s sixth gong sounded.
“I suppose since you’ve captured our factitious ghost and your headaches no longer plague you, you can catch up on your sleep now,” Clooney said before walking away.
Without answering, Felicity shut the door and strode to the window to study the black landscape beyond the castle’s stone walls, though couldn’t see a thing for the fog clinging to her panes.
Clooney was mistaken. She wouldn’t sleep so easily. For this man who slumbered in a chamber two stories above hers was in fact a genuine ghost—from a past as dark and binding as the clouds which had swallowed her beloved estate whole.
Felicity awoke to the crack of dawn and a clap of thunder.
She rolled out of bed still bleary, having wrested insomnia and bouts of restless dreams over the past several nights.
Their wounded trespasser had been here for three days, yet had not fully awoken once. Clooney was keeping him in a valerian haze so he wouldn’t damage his leg further by moving too much. It had been no easy task keeping her nieces out of the room, but Felicity had managed with the help of the servants. Today, however, Clooney planned to wean the man off the sedative so he could answer for himself, and Felicity needed to prepare for the altercation.
She stretched her cramped muscles and twisted her waist length hair into a bun at the back of her neck.
Looking down at her gown, she reminisced of those nights in the past, when she used to awaken each morning wearing the same clothes as the night before, with the pen in her hand and her lantern still burning. Each time she’d find herself at her rosewood desk, head craned at an awkward slant, cheek flat against the parchment spread out upon the surface.
The lapses in her memory when writing to Emilia had started some months after their initial correspondence about butterflies. Felicity fell asleep at her desk trying to respond to a letter. When she awoke, the letter was answered, though not in her handwriting. However, she did recognize the script, for it was as familiar to her as her own would have been. She’d seen enough of her brother Jasper’s scientific scribblings to know his hand.
As she tried to decipher the messy words, her head had started to pound. Due to the uncomfortable sensation, she couldn’t read what she’d written at all. Yet, a compelling force enticed her to mail the response to Emilia, and she deigned it best to obey, lest the headache return. The routine continued on a nightly basis, the megrims hitting at midnight. She tried twice to break the cycle by not going to her bedchamber or by opening the chapter before the clock struck twelve. But such rebellion only resulted in a horrendous head-splitting buzz that caused bouts of vomiting and incapacitated her for hours.
Felicity tightened her jaw on the memory. She’d heard of people with dual personalities living within them; dark, disturbed individuals who had lost their sense of self due to some trauma in their past.
Her past was indeed filled with ugly thorns; and it terrified her to think that they had pierced her sanity and allowed dementia to seep within. But there was another explanation: a spirit using her body to enact correspondence with the living. That possibility had filled her with hope, especially since the pen was always in her left hand. Though she was right-handed, Jasper wrote with his left, and to be connected to her beloved brother on any plane meant she hadn’t truly lost him.
However, it was unbelievable for so many reasons—too farfetched. And her optimism fell away when the writings stopped altogether.
Felicity never admitted any of those details to Emilia, for if the time lapses in her memory were ever to become public, she would be deemed unfit to raise her nieces.
Felicity was so afraid to that end, she hadn’t told anyone in the household but Clooney, and only he knew because he’d been treating her symptoms during that time. Also, he was the one who mailed the letters to Emilia on his trips into Carnlough. He’d been the one who had suggested the possibility of Jasper using her hand, trying to keep himself among the living through automatic writing. But he knew as much as Felicity how unlikely that was.
Some three months ago, when the final chapter was written and mailed off, everything simply stopped. Felicity’s nights were hers once more … and her memory no longer had spotty patches. Since every following letter would be written by her hand—her right hand—Clooney took over the business correspondence so as not to reintroduce the different scripts. He wrote the note breaking off Felicity’s contact with Emilia and asked to continue any interactions via Master Thornton, the girl’s father. Felicity felt guilty for not giving Emilia any reason, but protecting her family was of utmost import.
At the thought of protection, Felicity
went to her desk and pulled out her top drawer, withdrawing the knife she’d found among the shattered glass in the greenhouse—the blade that belonged to the wounded man now slumbering on the fourth floor.
The few times she’d managed to sleep the past few nights, she’d dreamt of him. A stranger, yet not. His youthful face, so filled with compassion and rage. Then the contrast of seven years—a man now, whose body straddled hers in the greenhouse, a heavy and potent sensation which took her breath in a way that was far from unpleasant.
She would never have imagined him mixed up with someone like Landrigan. For him to be in Ireland instead of London boggled the mind even more. Until she had some answers, she deemed it wise to hide his weapon. She knew too well the damage such a blade could incur.
As she ran a finger along the handle, tracing the initials N.T., she wondered what the letters stood for. So long reminiscing of her knight in shining armor, and still no name to assign him.
At her picture window, she opened the black brocade curtains which matched the cushions on her window seat. Bluish light streamed in through the water-tinged glass and caused the flocked patterns on the crimson wallpaper to appear to dance. It must have started raining hours before sunrise. Typical. Dawns were rarely anything but misty and hazy here in Ireland. But it was unusual for her to not have even heard the drops hitting the window.
She put the knife aside and gathered up her gown, placing a knee on the seat’s cushion. With both palms splayed against the chilly glass, she wiped away the condensation and stared out at the thick, needled canopy that blocked most of the gray sky. A thousand pines, firs, and coniferous trees surrounded the castle—green, lush, and isolated. A foreboding and shadowy beauty which had taken years for her to grow accustomed to. Now, she wouldn’t know how to survive anywhere else. This temperate rainforest, tucked along the outskirts of Carnlough where steep coastal mountains and cliffs bordered the North Atlantic Ocean, had become her home. A sanctuary she had secured at great price.
She unbuttoned the front of her gown and ran a finger between her breasts to her abdomen, tracing the ugly scar … bidding a memory as dark as the underbelly of the marshes and bogs hidden within the forest.
In all these years, she’d never once braved looking at it full-on in a mirror. She only knew the disfigurement by touch; and by the flash of its angry red flare in her peripheral at times she almost forgot to avert her eyes.
As she traced the trail of thickened skin, her wounded guest’s face came to mind again.
A knock on the door startled her.
She forced her gaze from the view outside just as a flock of vivid yellow goldfinches began to leap about in the canopy. Buttoning her placket, she pulled a shawl around her shoulders. After securing the knife in her drawer, she padded in her stocking feet to her door and unlocked it.
Clooney waited on the other side in an orange plaid shirt and green trousers. With the addition of his balding head and hunched back, he looked like an underfed pumpkin.
“Please tell me Landrigan hasn’t arrived already,” she said.
“Not yet. But our patient is up. And he’s asking … no … demanding to see you. He wasn’t very happy to learn we kept him sedated for three days. I’m thinking it might’ve been a bad idea to wake him. He’s strong as an ox, injuries notwithstanding. We’re having a difficult time keeping him abed.”
Clooney’s breath hinted of tobacco, and Felicity imagined he’d already been out in the courtyard for a calming smoke.
“Well, I should see to him then.” A phantom stitching sensation tightened the damaged skin between her breasts. This overwhelming desire to meet her rescuer unsettled her, awoke a fascination she had never contemplated being faced with. Ever.
She started to step out of her room.
Clooney stuck out a boot, holding her back. “Forgetting something?”
Remembering what she wore, she bit her lip. “I should wash up first. And dress.”
“Among other things.” He gestured to her face. “He is expecting a forty-year-old dowager … not a young beauty. Better age that skin.”
Felicity touched the outer corner of an eye. “Oh … yes.”
“And there’s something you should know. I managed to get his name last night while he was still groggy. He doesn’t realize he told me yet. But it’s Nicolas. Nicolas Thornton. Of the London Thorntons.”
Felicity gulped, stunned by the coincidence. That’s what the initials on the knife meant. How could it be? The boy who had once been her hero had lived under the roof of one of her patrons. Almost within reach … and Felicity had never known.
“Well, what are your thoughts?” Clooney pressed. “The son of a patron. Brother to your prior mailing correspondent. This poses a bit of a problem, aye?”
“Indeed it does.” More than Clooney could conceive, because she’d yet to tell him that this was the boy … the man … who had saved her life years ago. Felicity’s fingers drummed the door frame in an effort to hide her nerves. “That must be why he was in the greenhouse. He was sent by his family to check on their missing shipments.”
“Missing?”
“Last months’ have yet to go out. My pupas have been dwindling.”
A swift intake of air whistled through Clooney’s lips.
Felicity stared at him. “What?”
The old man blushed in fits and starts—little blossoms of red on his cheeks and neck. “I-I had no idea the shortage had become so serious.”
“How could you? I haven’t yet told you of the fungus.” She stepped back into her bedchamber.
“You’ve found a fungus? Where?”
“On the passion vines. I believe it’s what’s causing the butterflies not to breed successfully, and I’m sure Donal is responsible. It is the reason I was in the greenhouse last night. I meant to catch him, to show him he wasn’t the only one capable of subterfuge and violence.” Her eyes met Clooney’s. “If only Jasper were with us still. He’d know how to cure his butterflies.”
Clooney visibly tensed. “We’ll talk more about the pupas later. Make yourself presentable and I’ll meet you upstairs. Together, we can smooth things over with Lord Thornton.”
She caught the groundskeeper’s hand, still not prepared to tell him the whole truth of their guest’s identity. “No, Clooney. This is one introduction I wish to make alone.”
The old man’s white-bearded chin tightened in reluctant resignation. “Then there’s one thing more you should know.”
Sighing, Felicity steeled herself. What else could there possibly be? “Go on.”
“This man is a professional thief. He had a cascading wallet. By the imprints in the leather, I’d reason it once held an entire set of picklocks. They’re gone now. But he left no trace or scratch when he jimmied that lock on the gate, so he apparently doesn’t need them. And … and I’ve heard talk about town of a widow missing her horse. What struck me, was that someone would steal a hobbie.”
“A bog pony?”
“Which is what our guest had tied to the tree last night.”
“Incomprehensible. For a man of his stature?”
“Exactly my point. The pony’s eight hands high and looks to be almost fifteen-years aged. Far too small and old to appeal to any honorable English nobleman.”
Felicity was speechless.
“He obviously just needed it to carry his baggage on the walk up the mountain.” Clooney thumbed the pipe in his pocket. “We found his bundles tied to the horse. Humble supply, really. Only a lantern, a flask, a threadbare change of clothes, and two blanket rolls. One blanket belongs to his dog, judging by the hair shed upon it. Oh, and he had a journal about spirits. Considering the book’s content, there could be something to your theory about him working for Donal.”
A slow breath slipped from Felicity’s lips.
Clooney clasped her hand in both of his. “I don’t know why a nobleman’s son would lower himself to scaring a woman and children and stealing decrepit ponies. But you’ve ha
d enough dealings with reprobates in your life. I don’t wish to see anything disrupt the semblance of peace you have with the girls here. Find out why he came, then let me patch him up and send him on his way.”
He squeezed her hand before striding down the corridor, leaving Felicity to contemplate the unexpected chinks in her knight’s shining armor.
Chapter Three
“Cranky old snoot. Telling me to stay abed.” Nick shifted to his right side beneath the canopy and gazed into Johnny Boy’s soulful eyes, thrilled to see him awake and responsive. Of all the destructive messes Nick had made of other people’s lives … now he’d managed to pull his dog into one.
At least Johnny appeared quite happy at the moment, sharing the plush quilts and pillows in the dimly lit bedchamber.
“Who does this Binata think she is?” Nick asked, falling into the old habit of talking things over with the hound. “She takes my clothes and leaves me here naked. If she thinks that will stop me, she’s in for a ripe surprise.”
Johnny tilted his head and gave him a slimy, smelly lick on the nose.
Nick tried to emulate the dog’s one-sided smirk. Who but Johnny could make him feel better after that conversation with the groundskeeper earlier?
The old man said he’d found the little mare Nick brought and stabled her, but then he outright accused Nick of stealing her. Didn’t matter that the groundskeeper was right. He shouldn’t be one to judge. After all, he’d either lost or stolen Nick’s knife.
That blade had been a gift from his father in his youth, to encourage Nick’s innate talent for carving beautiful things out of wood. A talent he used to help build a herd of carousel horses for his brother’s amusement park set upon his family’s estate. Nick’s artistry was the one thing he’d ever accomplished that made his father proud, and the one thing that made him feel close to Julian.
Yet in the end, the razor-sharp edge of his knife had been used to destroy beauty.
His gut clenched on the memory. Perhaps it was better if the blade remained lost. Then he would no longer be tormented by its part in his wife’s brutal death.
The Glass Butterfly Page 2