The Secret of Pembrooke Park (20 page)

In the spacious, sunny drawing room a few minutes later, the three visited together over tea and slices of cake, her father asking Gilbert questions about his family and his new position. Then he asked, “How long can you stay?”

Gilbert glanced up at the clock on the mantelpiece. “I should return in time to dress for dinner.”

That didn’t give them much time. Abigail smiled at Gilbert. “Before you go, may I show you those house plans I mentioned?”

Gilbert met her gaze with a knowing look and rose. “Very well.”

He bid her father farewell, and he and Abigail excused themselves.

As they crossed the hall, Abigail asked, “May I tell you something in confidence?”

His eyes roved hers. “Of course.”

She led the way into the library and stepped to the map table. Behind her she heard the door latch click and turned in surprise. Gilbert had shut the door, and now walked toward her, a small smile on his face.

Abigail licked dry lips and looked away. She retrieved the old plans from their drawer and spread them atop the map table, her hands slightly unsteady.

“You really wanted to show me house plans?” he asked, his voice tinged with surprise.

She shot him a questioning look. “Yes. . . .” Realization dawned, followed by embarrassment. “Did you think it a ruse to get you alone? My goodness, Gilbert. You were in Italy too long.”

He sighed playfully. “Can’t blame a man for hoping . . .”

She turned away sharply, but he touched her arm, his voice apologetic. “Abby . . .”

She gentled her voice and faced him. “You should know that Mamma has written to me. She mentioned that you have called on Louisa since your return.”

“Ah. . . .” He finally had the decency to look sheepish.

She inhaled and turned back to the plans. “Yes, I really wanted your opinion on these plans. You see, there are rumors of a secret room somewhere in Pembrooke Park, and if it exists, I want to find it.”

“A secret room?” he echoed, brows rising.

“Yes. Supposedly it hides a treasure of some sort, though the former steward assures me those rumors are nonsense. Still, I would like to find the room.”

“Have you anything to go on beyond the rumors?”

“A little. I’ve received a few letters from someone who used to live here. She mentioned studying the plans for clues.” Abigail decided not to mention the dolls’ house to Gilbert when he already looked skeptical.

“And did this former resident find the room?”

“She hasn’t said. Yet.”

He gave her a doubtful glance.

“Just look at them, Gilbert, and tell me what you see.”

“Very well.” He sighed. Offended, or disappointed?

He began a casual survey, then frowned and bent his head closer to the drawings.

“May I have more light?”

“Certainly.” She went and drew back the drapes all the way and opened the shutters.

Gilbert pored over the drawings. “These are a series of renovation plans. Do you happen to have the original plans?”

“I don’t know about original. But these are older. Before the west wing was added.”

She spread another set beside the others.

He compared the two. “Yes, see? At some point, the tower was added in the corner there. Probably mid-1700s, when many modernized their ancestral homes by adding water closets. A cistern on the roof collected rainwater, which then ran down through a series of pipes drawn by levers below. Then at a later date, another wing was added in front of the tower.”

He looked up at her, eyes alight with interest of a different sort now. “Perhaps it is time you gave me the tour of the house.”

Satisfaction. This was the inquisitive Gilbert she knew.

Together they walked from the library into the main hall. There, he pointed up. “This is the original hall, open several stories high to allow the smoke of open fires to dissipate in the days before chimneys. You can see that staircase is a later addition, as well as the gallery above it.”

They walked through the morning room and into the dining room. Gilbert glanced around, then stepped to the corner of the room and pressed his hand against a panel of wooden wainscoting. The panel slid open.

Abigail’s heart lurched and she hurried forward. “Did you find it?”

“I found the hoist from the kitchen belowstairs.”

“Oh. I hadn’t noticed that before.” Embarrassment singed her ears.

“No doubt the servants raise trays with this pulley, and lay breakfast on the sideboard before you raise your pretty head from the pillow.”

Hearing Gilbert mention her pillow felt strangely intimate.
Silly
female,
she remonstrated herself. Had she not hit Gilbert with her pillow on several occasions when they were children?

He walked to the other side of the dining room, to a narrow door beside a recessed china cupboard. “Having looked at the older plans, I would have imagined the servants’ stairs on this side of the room.” He opened the narrow door, but it led only to a linen cupboard.

“What’s above this room?”

Abigail thought. “My bedchamber.” She hesitated. “Would you like to see upstairs as well?”

“If you don’t mind showing me.”

“Of course not.” Abigail led the way up the hall staircase, around the gallery railing, past the door to Louisa’s room. She supposed she should offer to show him, but she did not. She saw how he had looked up at the windows, and she had no wish to help him imagine Louisa in her bedchamber, or anywhere else for that matter.

“Is there a housemaid’s closet on this floor?” he asked.

“Not that I know of.”

They proceeded to her bedchamber. She opened the door and looked inside, making sure she had left no item of feminine apparel in plain view. She saw the room with new eyes—with Gilbert beside her, the flowery pink bed-curtains and dolls’ house suddenly seemed too little-girlish.

He hesitated on the threshold. “May I?”

“Of course,” she whispered, feeling self-conscious about having a man in her bedchamber—even if the man was her childhood friend. Abigail remained in the doorway. Polly walked past with an armload of linens, her eyebrows rising nearly to her hairline to see a man disappear into her mistress’s bedchamber. Abigail gave her a closed-lip smile and said quietly, “It’s all right.”

Gilbert walked slowly around the room, pausing to look at the dolls’ house. “Someone went to a lot of trouble. My employer built a scale model of his London house for his daughter. It was quite the undertaking.”

He paused again at the door to her closet. “May I?”

“If you like.”

He opened it and knocked on the wooden panels, pulling and pushing on the various shelves and gown drawers within. Then he opened her oak wardrobe cupboard beside it and pushed and prodded there as well. “No false back or moving panels.”

“No. I couldn’t find one either.”

“And the dining room is below us?”

“Yes.”

“So the kitchen hoist is on this wall downstairs.”

“Right.”

In the end, he shook his head and said, “In my professional opinion, I would say your ‘secret room’ was this closet. At some point, it might have served as a housemaid’s closet or water closet, but the pipes have been removed. Perhaps the door was not as it is now, but a hidden panel like the one used to conceal the hoist below it.”

“Ah . . .” Abigail swallowed her disappointment. “I should have known there was a logical explanation for the rumors.” She sighed.

He gave her an indulgent grin and tweaked her chin. “Not too disappointed, I hope.”

“No.” She braved a smile. “There is an attic as well, with a storeroom and a few servants’ bedchambers, if you would like to see them, but . . .”

“What time is it?” He glanced around for a clock and not finding one pulled out his pocket watch and consulted the face.

“I had better head back or I shall be late for dinner, and Mrs. Morgan will scowl at me.”

“Horrors,” Abigail teased.

He patted his pocket and said, “Before I forget, Susan sent a name you asked for. She says she’ll write a proper letter soon, once their next edition is printed.” He extracted a slip of paper from his pocketbook and handed it to her. “A writer for her magazine, I think she said?”

“Mm-hm.” Abigail read the name but didn’t recognize it:
E. P. Brooks
. “Thank her for me.”

Together they walked companionably back downstairs and to the front door.

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

“Better late than never, I hope.”

“Yes, definitely. I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay at Hunts Hall.”

“I don’t know how much of my time shall be my own, but if I find myself free, may I call again?”

“Of course. You are always welcome.”

“Thank you, Abby.” He reached out and gently grasped her fingers. Bending low, he pressed a slow kiss to the back of her hand for the first time in her memory.

The spot remained warm and sensitive long after Gilbert had crossed the bridge and disappeared from her view.

For nearly an hour after Gilbert departed, Abigail walked around the house and about her tasks in a contented daze, thinking she would give up her search. If Gilbert was right, there was no secret room, beyond perhaps her own closet. But the notion left her unsatisfied. Perhaps Gilbert was wrong. For all his education and experience and travel, he didn’t know everything.

Illogical or not, she put on her bonnet and clean gloves and went back outside. Again she walked slowly around the house, looking up at the rooflines, the windows, and the tower Gilbert had pointed out, perhaps eight feet square. Something caught her eye in the tower, some twenty feet or more above her. There were no windows in that narrow wall. But . . . what was that? It appeared as if the stones of a roughly rectangular section were lighter than those around it. As if there had been a window there decades ago but it had been filled in.

Perhaps if the tower had begun as a servants’ staircase and then been converted to a water tower or water closets, windows would have been unwanted. Might that explain it?

“What are we looking at?”

Abigail started and whirled about, surprised to see William
Chapman standing there, hands behind his back, staring up at the house as she’d been doing.

“Mr. Chapman. You startled me.”

“Forgive me. I didn’t intend to.”

She pointed out the area above. “Do you see that section of lighter stone—at about the second level?”

He squinted up at it. “Yes. It looks as if there used to be a window.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“No big mystery,” he said with an easy shrug. “Many people have bricked over or otherwise covered unnecessary windows, to avoid exorbitant glass taxes.”

That was logical. She felt foolish not to have thought of it herself. Likely some thrifty owner or steward of generations past had ordered some of the windows to be filled in to save money. Had he covered other windows as well? It didn’t make sense to brick over merely one window for tax reasons. She stared up higher, trying in vain to see evidence of another filled-in window on the level above. She did not see one at the ground level either.

A gig came rumbling up the drive. Abigail glanced over and saw Miles Pembrooke seated beside the coachman, returning from Hunts Hall. When the gig halted, Miles gingerly climbed down, one leg buckling a bit before he righted himself. He waved to thank the driver and turned toward the door. Seeing them standing there at the side of the house, he lifted his hat and hobbled toward them, leaning on his stick.

“That’s Miles Pembrooke,” she said. “Do you know him?”

Beside her William stiffened but said nothing.

“Hello, Miss Foster,” Miles called out as he neared. “Don’t you look a picture in that bonnet.”

“Thank you, Mr. Pembrooke. Did you enjoy your visit to Hunts Hall?”

“It was most . . . enlightening.” Miles glanced with interest at William. When Mr. Chapman said nothing, Miles looked back expectantly at her.

“Forgive me,” Abigail said. “I thought perhaps you two knew each another. Miles Pembrooke, may I introduce William Chapman.”

“Will Chapman . . .” Miles echoed. He offered his hand, but William continued to stare at the man’s face, as if he didn’t notice. “I can’t believe it,” Miles said, shaking his head in wonder. “You were but a wee ginger-haired scamp last I saw you. Perhaps, what, four or five? Darting about the place like a redbird. Of course I was only a lad myself.”

“What brings you here, Mr. Pembrooke?” William asked, his voice uncharacteristically stern and clipped.

Miles hesitated, then took a step nearer Abigail. “I wanted to see the house again. And my good friends and distant relatives the Fosters have been kind enough to invite me to stay. Haven’t you, Miss Foster?” He beamed at her.

She felt self-conscious and illogically guilty under Mr. Chapman’s disapproving gaze. “Yes, Father is very kind,” she murmured.

“I saw
your
father today, Mr. Chapman,” Miles said. “Though only from a distance. Shot a cork off a bottle at fifty yards. How well I remember Mac. He frightened the wits out of me when I was a boy. Though not nearly as much as—” Miles broke off. “He is in good health, I trust?”

“Yes.”

“Do greet him for me.”

“I shall certainly tell him you’re here.”

Arms crossed, William glanced at her and then looked at Miles, as if expecting the man to excuse himself and take his leave.

But Miles held his ground. He looked from Mr. Chapman to Abigail, as though trying to sort them out. Finally he said, “Miss Foster, you have not been here that long, I gather, so you have only recently become acquainted with our former steward and his family. Is that right?”

“Yes. They are excellent neighbors. And perhaps you are not aware, but Mr. Chapman here is our curate.”

“Will Chapman? A clergyman? Inconceivable.” His dark eyes glinted with humor. “You
can’t
be old enough.”

“I am indeed. I am nearly five and twenty, and recently ordained.”

“Astounding. Well. Good for you.”

Still neither man made a move to leave. Miles glanced up at the exterior of the house. “And what have you two found so interesting out here?”