Strangers at Dawn (26 page)

“Anne,” he said.

She didn’t care about finding Simon and Martin now. Turning on her heel, she quickly returned to the house. In the vestibule, she halted, taking a moment or two to compose herself. She didn’t blame Drew for having affairs, because the woman he wanted was out of his reach. But
she did blame him for starting an affair with Constance. It could so easily have been Lucy or Simon or Martin who entered his cottage that afternoon to find their mother in Drew’s bed.

Constance hadn’t seen her, but Drew had. She’d been standing transfixed in his office because she recognized the woman’s voice coming from behind the closed bedroom door. She must have made some sound, because before she could slip away, Drew opened the door and stepped into the office. He was half-clothed, and his hair was disheveled. They’d stared at each other for a long, long moment, but neither of them had said a word. She knew she hadn’t concealed her disgust. And from that day on, she could hardly bear to be in the same room with him.

Maybe she was making too much of it. Constance was lonely. Drew was lonely. She could accept that. What she could not accept was that they carried on their affair so close to home.

There was a mirror on the vestibule wall and she caught sight of herself pacing. She stopped and stared at the girl reflected in the mirror. She was no beauty. She’d known when William had married her that he’d married her for her money, and she’d been content. It was the most she could hope for, she’d thought then. Fate had played a cruel trick on her. Even the little she’d hoped for was swallowed up in a nightmare of brutality.

Sara didn’t know the half of it. Sara thought she was a dutiful wife. But she hadn’t been dutiful, and now she was paying for her sins.

She was frightened. Max Worthe was asking everybody a lot of questions. Sara had been acquitted. Why couldn’t he leave well enough alone?

She breathed deeply and slowly, trying to calm herself. The vicar had told her that God was merciful. She wished she could believe it, because sometimes she thought she was living in hell.

Knowing that Max Worthe had the eyes of an eagle, she pinned a smile on her lips before she made her way upstairs.

N
O ONE LINGERED IN THE DRAWING ROOM
that evening. Everyone was preoccupied with his or her own thoughts. Constance pleaded a headache and excused herself; Max went for a walk; Lucy and Anne played a game of checkers, then drifted away; and Sara went in search of Simon and Martin.

They weren’t in their rooms and none of the servants knew where they were. It was just as well, she told herself, ass he dragged herself up the stairs to her own chamber. She would probably have lectured them again, especially Simon, and it never did any good.

She was sinking into self-pity when she entered her chamber. The same old thoughts crowded her mind. She’d tried to do the best for her family and they weren’t even happy. With the exception of Lucy and Anne, they were quarrelsome, selfish, self-centered, and insufferably rude.

Had they always been like this?

Just once, she would like someone to ask her what would make
her happy.

She wandered over to the window and looked out. Though it was almost ten o’clock, it was still light. It had started to rain again, but at least it was warm. There would be no need to light a fire tonight.

She breathed out slowly, and as she exhaled, she felt the self-pity wash out of her. Her family was abominable except in one respect: her trial for William’s murder had made no difference to them. They didn’t look at her askance or watch her speculatively, as others did, wondering whether she was innocent or guilty. They didn’t fear she might turn on them. They treated her as they’d always done.

They thought she was innocent, of course.

If only she could leave things the way they were.

But she couldn’t leave things as they were. She had to come to some decision about the dower house. She couldn’t afford to rebuild it until she came into her money, and even then, she didn’t want to rebuild it. Drew was right. It was better to raze it to the ground.

Her hand was being forced every way she turned. The time for prevarication was past. That’s why she’d had a quiet word with Dobbs before dinner. She’d told him that every night from now on, he should take as many men as could be spared and make sure that there were no vagrants or gypsies or tinkers camping out in the dower house.

Tonight, somehow, she would find the courage to do what had to be done.

When she turned from the window, he eyes fell on her dressing table. Propped against her silver hairbrush was a folded piece of vellum. She knew what it was before she reached for it.

Her name was written on the outside in William’s beautiful copperplate. Her fingers trembled as she tore open the wax wafer.

Welcome home,
was all it said.

Sixteen

I
HAD STOPPED RAINING, BUT THE GRASS WAS
drenched and the trees were shedding enough drops of water to make it necessary to raise the hood of her cloak. From time to time, Sara looked back at the house. There were no lights at any of the windows. All the same, she was careful to keep to the shelter of the trees and shield her lantern with her body. In her right hand, she grasped her father’s pistol. It was heavy and clumsy, but it was also vastly comforting. She wouldn’t have had the courage to leave the house in the dead of night without it, not after receiving that note.

Welcome home.

After all the agonizing she’d done tonight, she felt curiously detached, almost fatalistic. In the next few minutes, she’d learn the truth about William. She didn’t know how it would help her. If William wasn’t sending her these notes, someone else was, someone close to her. Someone who hated her.

The suspicion lay like a shadow on her heart.
Mter
the first wave of shock had receded, she’d stared at the note in black despair. Only someone in the house could have put the note on her dressing table for her to find, either a servant or one of her family.

She was glad Max had not been there when she received it. He wouldn’t leave it alone. He’d probe and probe until he found the answer. And she was so terribly afraid of what the answer would be. It had been a mistake to allow him to come here. She should have defied him, told him to do his worst. What did it matter if he wrote about her in his newspaper? There were worse things than that. He wanted to clear her name, but if the truth ever came out, he would only destroy her.

A twig snapped close by and she froze. Every muscle in her body tensed, and she slowly raised the pistol in her right hand.

A badger shuffled out of the undergrowth. He wasn’t afraid of her, but inquisitive. His bright beady eyes seemed to sum her up, then he sniffed and swaggered into the darkness.

Only then did she let out her breath. She wasn’t a fool. She’d known she was taking a risk by exposing herself like this. But it had to be done. If not tonight, another night. This was why she’d come home.

She knew she was nearing the dower house when the familiar haze of summer scents wrapped around her, honeysuckle and jasmine and the heavier fragrance of roses. In her mind’s eye, she could see the dower house as it used to be, before the fire, with a profusion of scented flowers carelessly draped over the garden walls.

Snatches of memories flitted through her mind. She was eight years old and standing on top of the wall.
I’m the king of the castle,
she’d cried out, and had promptly taken a fall. She’d been on the point of crying, she was so shaken, but Anne had started to bawl, and she’d had to comfort her sister instead.

Absurdly, tears filled her eyes now.

In those days, the house was rented outmost of the time, but when there were no tenants to chase them away, the dower house had become their playground, hers and Anne’s.
They’d learned all its secrets. And they’d kept those secrets to themselves.

Fear squeezed her heart, and she waited a moment until she had mastered herself. There could be no turning back now. On that thought, she made herself move, picking her way over tree roots and broken branches. At the big iron gate at the entrance to the garden, she halted. The padlock on the gate was broken.

The light from her lamp barely reached the house. Veiled as it was in semidarkness, it looked curiously untouched, and as quiet as a tomb.

She cursed herself for the stray thought, and before her courage completely deserted her, she quickly pushed through the iron gate and entered the garden. Little hills and depressions, now covered with weeds, pockmarked the flower beds. This was where the constable and his men had turned over the earth in their search for William’s body. They’d also made a thorough search of the house and found nothing.

Other memories were beating at the edges of her mind, demanding to be let in, but she resolutely pushed them away. She made her mind blank as she crossed to the house, mounted the stairs, and entered the hall. Here, she halted, and raised her lantern high to view the wreck the fire had made of this once-lovely house.

And wreck it was. Blackened beams littered the floor like grotesque coffins. There was no gracious staircase now, only jagged remnants to mark its passing. She looked up at the roof. The light from her lantern did not reach that far, but she could see a patchwork of light and dark where the roof opened to the sky. Directly opposite her, facing the entrance, untouched by the fire, was the great stone fireplace with its inglenooks on either side.

The memory was as fresh as if it had happened yesterday. They’d been playing a game of hide-and-seek, she and Anne, when she’d stumbled upon it. She was hiding in one
of the inglenooks, and Anne was coming closer and closer. She could never remember afterward what insanity had made her decide to try and climb the inglenook wall. She’d reached for one of the decorative bricks high above her head and had been left hanging when her feet lost their hold. As she’d tried to regain her balance, part of the chimney floor slid open.

They’d heard of priests’ holes, of course, those hiding places for priests during England’s bloody history, when Catholics were hunted down. There was one at Longfield, but it was no bigger than a closet. The one at the dower house was more like a small room.

She and Anne had told no one. For one thing, their father would have punished them if he’d known that they were playing in the dower house, and for another, they’d hugged the secret to themselves, as children do, feeling smug and superior because no one else knew about the room beneath the flagstone floor.

And it had remained their secret to this very day;

She swallowed hard and willed her pulse to slow down. Many moments passed before she steeled herself to go on. With head bent, she concentrated on navigating her way over debris and around obstacles to reach the fireplace wall. Six feet from the hearth she saw them, and all the air rushed out of her lungs.

By some trick of fate, two massive beams had fallen into the fireplace and barred her way. She might reach one corner of the chimney, but not the one she wanted.

She set down her lantern and pistol and tried to angle her body into the inglenook so that she could put her shoulder to one of the beams. It was impossible. A child might fit, but a child wouldn’t have the strength to move the beams.

She wasn’t ready to give up yet. She stood back for a moment, then came at it from a different angle, clasping the nearest beam with both arms and dragging on it with all her might. She gritted her teeth, feeling the strain across her
shoulders and back, using muscles in her thighs and stomach she hadn’t used in an age. She pushed, she pulled, she came at it from every direction. It would not budge.

Finally defeated, she sank down on a fallen beam. She could have wept. To have come so far only to meet with this brought her to the edge of despair. She didn’t know what to do next. It would need a man or a team of oxen to move the beams. If she could find a lever of some sort, or a length of rope, she might stand a better chance.

She was reaching for the lantern when she heard a small, stealthy sound, like the crunching of gravel underfoot, coming from just outside the entrance. Her head whipped up and she listened intently. When it came again, she reached for her pistol and blew out the lantern.

M
AX’S HEAD JERKED, DRAGGING HIM FROM
sleep, and he stretched his cramped muscles. It took him a moment to come to himself. He was fully dressed and had fallen asleep in a stuffed armchair. Simon’s chair. Simon’s room.

He stretched again and got up. The candle was beginning to sputter, so he lit a fresh candle he found on the mantelpiece. It was three o’clock in the morning, and still no sign of Simon-or Martin, for that matter.

What in Hades did they get up to till this time of night?

Stupid question. When he was an eager eighteen-year-old, he’d got up to plenty, and his parents hadn’t known a thing about it.