A Lord Apart Read online

  “We want the end nearest the kitchens,” Miss Pendleton said.

  Combining Daniel’s knowledge of his home with periodic looks out a window, they found the appropriate location. The roof dipped lower here, and the flooring ran out to show exposed rafters and great crisscrossing roof beams. Henry Carson declared this just as well. “We need to see what sort of supports we’ve got to work with,” he said. “Water’s right heavy.”

  Miss Pendleton walked out onto a rafter, showing no sign of apprehension.

  Daniel couldn’t restrain himself. “Be careful.”

  “My balance is secure,” she answered. “I think there’s sufficient room for the tank in this spot, Mr. Carson.”

  The man made his way out to join her. He held up his lantern, surveyed the area, and nodded. “No beams to be cut obviously. Floor to be reinforced first. This ought to do it.”

  “Splendid.” She tripped back as if the surface below her was perfectly solid. “We should make a list of tasks.”

  A groan escaped Daniel.

  Miss Pendleton laughed. “Yes, Lord Whitfield, another list. But I shall have charge of this one, and every task will be well done.”

  He had no doubt of it at all.

  * * *

  Penelope drove back to Rose Cottage bursting with high spirits. There was nothing like the feeling of getting things done—planning, arranging, approving the result. In a few weeks, Lord Whitfield would have his new tub. Such luxury, a whole room just for a bath. She could see it in her mind, with him standing in the steam like a statue of a Roman god. Gloriously unclothed. She flushed but refused to dismiss the idea.

  They’d had baths—the Romans, not the gods. Though perhaps their gods had them as well? She had no idea. Penelope laughed as she drove her gig up to the barn. Her mind was flitting about like a flea.

  Kitty emerged from the house. The two dogs came out with her, Penelope noticed. She’d let them in again. “Mr. Foyle’s gone out,” Kitty called as Jip and Jum pranced over to greet her. “He walked off with Mrs. Hart and left me here all alone.” She came over to help Penelope unharness the horse and tend to him. “I might have been killed by robbers,” Kitty said.

  “There are no robbers hereabouts.”

  “We don’t know that, do we? They’d be stealthy.”

  “It’s a very safe spot.” Penelope set the water bucket where the horse could reach it. “So Foyle escorted Mrs. Hart home?”

  “No, they went to some sort of talk at the chapel. About missionaries in Africa.”

  “Foyle did?”

  Kitty grinned at her. “Could have knocked me over with a feather, too, miss. I reckon he’s courting her. ’Cause Mr. Foyle ain’t one for preaching.”

  Penelope could only agree as they walked to the house together. The dogs trotted behind, clearly intending to follow them into the kitchen. Penelope gave them a stern look, which she transferred to Kitty when Jip and Jum sloped off to their outdoor quarters.

  “Mrs. Hart left a steak-and-kidney pie for dinner,” said the girl quickly. “Will I ever be such a dab hand with pastry, do you think?”

  Penelope doubted it, but she didn’t like to say so. Instead, she pumped water and washed her hands at the sink.

  “Are they really building a great fountain over at Frithgerd?”

  “Fountain? No. Lord Whitfield is installing a bath.”

  Kitty cocked her head. “Mrs. Hart said there was to be pipes all over the place.”

  Stories spread like wildfire in the country, Penelope thought. And just as haphazardly. Once again, she explained the plan and how it would work.

  “Hot water at a touch,” Kitty marveled when she’d finished. “You really think it’ll work, miss?”

  Lord Whitfield’s bathing room would become a wonder of the neighborhood, Penelope realized. Unless it didn’t work, in which case it would be a famous folly. But it would work; she had no doubt about that.

  They ate their pie. As the day faded, Penelope tried to settle to some mending, but her brain craved more activity. The notebooks she’d brought back from Frithgerd sat in a pile on the large table in the front room. She went over, spread them out, and opened them all, in three rows of three. Looking back and forth, she compared the texts. She turned pages.

  These were such odd documents. Any diary she’d ever seen had spoken of familiar happenings. What the writer did in a day, meals and visits and companions. Sometimes there were notes of monies spent. Lady Whitfield’s notebooks were totally different. Fragmentary, cryptic, and yet they nagged at her. Penelope turned more pages.

  Some commonplace phrases were repeated from page to page and notebook to notebook. Lady Whitfield had been interested in birds, apparently, and trees. She’d often recorded the numbers and types she’d observed, and made drawings of them. Then there were notations that looked like words, but weren’t known to Penelope. And some odd symbols, too. Not signs Penelope was familiar with, like Greek letters or numbers. They were more like tiny drawings.

  She read more closely, moving from one notebook to another. So many drawings of birds. Crows and gulls and owls were recognizable. They looked like English birds, however, not exotic species Lady Whitfield might have seen on her travels. The same was true of the tiny pictures of trees. They ran along in lines, interspersed with symbols and an occasional letter. The text didn’t coalesce into meaning, no matter how much she concentrated. Yet it seemed far too complicated and…persistent over such a long time to be nonsense.

  All at once, Penelope began to wonder if the notebooks were written in a code, with all the drawings and phrases and symbols standing for something else. The journals were so intricate. They felt so portentous. And they’d been hidden so carefully. Unless Whitfield’s mother was mad, which she’d never heard, they must mean something. Lady Whitfield had clearly thought them important. Were they the secret record of her innermost thoughts?

  Penelope turned a page, and another, then sat back and rubbed her eyes. If it was a code, there must have been a key—a list of correspondences that explained the symbols and phrases. There was no understanding these notebooks otherwise.

  Penelope’s spirits sank. She’d been so eager to decipher them. But how would she and Whitfield ever find the key—one or two sheets of paper perhaps in the sea of documents at Frithgerd? They could search for weeks. If it was there at all.

  Then she rallied. The person who created these notebooks had been astonishingly meticulous. She would have a system. Penelope concentrated. What would she have done in the same circumstances?

  Lady Whitfield wouldn’t have hidden the key with her notebooks, she concluded. That would be stupid. So not in the trunks then. Somewhere not at all like them, under the writer’s control, readily at hand. Lady Whitfield’s personal possessions would the best place to start. Penelope stood, ready to race to Frithgerd and begin a search, but realized that the hour had grown late as she’d pored over the journals. The house was silent. Kitty was asleep. She’d have to curb her impatience for a bit.

  Twelve

  Daniel opened the gate at the back of Frithgerd’s gardens and ushered his party through. The walk to see the site for the new mill wheel and pump, which Daniel had anticipated as a chance to spend more time with Miss Pendleton, had somehow turned into an expedition. Henry Carson was with them of course, but Macklin and young Tom had attached themselves as well. The latter was full of questions for Carson about building methods and materials, which was no great matter. But Macklin had taken the position at Miss Pendleton’s side that Daniel had begun to think of as his rightful place. She was ethereally lovely in a muslin gown the color of peach blossoms with just a shawl over her arms on this warm summer morning.

  “I’ll go ahead and find the miller,” said Carson after a while. “He’s to meet us by the stream.”

  The builder strode ahead up the slope behind the house. Wh
en he was out of earshot, Macklin said, “We have some news. I believe Whitfield told you about the possibility of watchers?”

  Miss Pendleton’s face grew shuttered, and Daniel nearly cursed. She’d been looking so happy these last few days, full of plans and even jokes. The past should be left in the past, he thought. Raking it up never did any good.

  “Tom has been roaming about the neighborhood,” the older man added. “It’s a habit of his, and everyone is used to it by now. They scarcely notice him anymore. So he’s ideally placed to keep an eye out for strangers.”

  Miss Pendleton frowned at Tom, whether in concern or disapproval Daniel couldn’t tell.

  “And he’s spotted someone,” Macklin continued. “Tell them what you told me, Tom.”

  The lad nodded. “It’s a fella staying above the tavern in the next village over,” he said. “Toward Rose Cottage. Said he’s here to study butterflies.”

  “Butterflies?” Daniel found the excuse unlikely.

  Tom nodded as if he felt the same. “But he don’t seem that sort of person, if you know what I mean. More like a military man, I’d have said. And he don’t know much more about butterflies than I do. I asked him about those little purple ones, and he didn’t seem to know which ones I meant. He walks the fields with a net and a case. But when I watched him for a bit, he didn’t catch any butterflies.”

  “What is his name?” asked Miss Pendleton.

  “He told the tavern keeper Jake Wendell, but I didn’t believe him.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just didn’t.” Tom shrugged. “Growing up on your own, you get a feel for liars. Or you get in a mort of trouble.” He received their sympathetic glances with a shrug.

  “What does he look like?” Miss Pendleton’s face showed the anxiety that Daniel had hoped was eased.

  “Tall and well set up,” replied Tom. “Long, sharp nose and a chin to match. Black hair but light eyes. The kind of fella you don’t want to cross, in my opinion. Like the bully boys in Bristol.”

  “Does that sound familiar?” Macklin asked her.

  “No. I don’t remember anyone like that.” She crossed her arms and gripped her elbows protectively.

  Daniel longed to wrap her in his arms and shield her from harm. Which he had no right to do. Or ability? What could he do about a suspicious visitor? “He was the only stranger in the neighborhood?” he asked.

  “The only funny one.”

  “You should keep an eye on him, see what he does.”

  “But be careful not to let him see you following him,” said Macklin.

  “He won’t, my lord.”

  “This isn’t the streets of Bristol.”

  “I’m used to the country now.” Tom sounded confident.

  “Really,” said Miss Pendleton. “These people are not gentle or patient. Do not put yourself in jeopardy on my account.”

  “No need to worry, miss.”

  “That is what you think,” she replied, almost too quietly to hear. “And then you discover how naive and ignorant you were.”

  It would be vastly satisfying to thrash the men who’d made her feel that way, Daniel thought. He realized that Macklin was watching him. He unclenched his fists.

  They rounded a clump of trees and saw Henry Carson standing beside the stream with a short, plump man in buckskin breeches, an old-fashioned skirted coat, and a tricorn hat. Daniel recognized Walter Simpson, the local miller. They’d met before on estate business, and he’d found Simpson brusque but extremely competent. Daniel moved forward to greet him and introduce the others.

  Simpson nodded with the air of a man who valued manners but had no time to waste. “You’ve got a decent head of water here,” he said. The stream was fifteen feet across at this point, tumbling over good-sized rocks. “And it runs pretty strong all year, as you know, my lord.”

  “Quite a spate when it rains,” Daniel replied.

  “Which is why you need the right bit of bank for your wheel,” said Simpson. “And I’ve found you one.”

  He led them upstream to a spot where the riverlet narrowed between two rock outcroppings and dropped in a picturesque waterfall. “You wouldn’t even need a dam here,” said Simpson. “You could fit an overshot wheel right in there. The fall has hollowed out a space behind, y’see.”

  They all peered into the dim space behind the cascading water.

  “And the water here is deep enough to fit your pump,” the miller said, indicating the pool below.

  “I had thought of that bigger pool near the house,” said Henry Carson.

  “Aye, but that’s where all the kiddies hereabouts swim this time of year and the young people picnic,” said Simpson.

  Daniel met the miller’s sharp green eyes, impressed that he’d taken this into account.

  “You don’t need too tall a wheel for a pump, my lord.” He turned to Carson. “You just have to figure how to cut off when your water tank up at the house is full.”

  Simpson and Carson fell into a discussion of shafts and gears and levers. Carson made notes and drawings on a slate he’d brought along. Tom leaned over the diagrams with eager curiosity.

  “Perhaps your young friend would like to be a builder,” Daniel said to Macklin.

  “Waterworks is certainly an up-and-coming discipline,” the earl replied. “We’ll see if Tom’s interest lasts. He’s always taken by new ideas. But he tends to move on once his curiosity is satisfied.”

  On the walk back to the house, Daniel managed to get Miss Pendleton to himself by the simple expedient of moving slower and slower until the others had pulled well ahead. Yet solitude didn’t bring her back from far away. “It’s fortunate Simpson knows someone who can design the millworks.”

  “What? Oh, yes.”

  She’d been immersed in details of the project, full of enthusiasm, laughing with him as Carson’s helper took a sledgehammer to Frithgerd’s corridor wall. But now she’d gone muted, guarded, and suspicious as she’d been when they’d first met. Daniel loathed the change. “I’d feared the water wheel would take longer,” he tried. “Two weeks is much better than I expected.”

  Miss Pendleton merely nodded. She scarcely looked at him.

  An image flashed on Daniel’s inner eye, repeating as quick as an eyeblink. A carriage driving away, with no acknowledgment from the passengers as the vehicle grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared around a bend in the road. Again, and again, without mercy. “Don’t go.”

  “What?” His companion turned, stared, her attention definitely caught.

  Had he spoken aloud? Surely not. The pictures had been momentary, barely grasped and then gone. And they made no sense whatsoever. Of course she would be going. She didn’t live here. She wasn’t with him in any conventional sense. And thus she would be leaving. In her gig, not a traveling carriage. As she always did. Desolation was inappropriate. Desolation? Ridiculous.

  Miss Pendleton touched his arm. “Lord Whitfield?”

  He’d stopped walking. His chest felt tight. What the deuce? He moved, a step and then faster. “We should make sure Carson remembers to engage the bricklayer.”

  Puzzled, Penelope strode after him. They both knew that Henry Carson needed no reminders; he’d proved his competence over the last few days. So what had caused the strain in Whitfield’s face and the urgency of his tone? She felt a leap of sympathy even though she didn’t understand. Had he said, “Don’t go”? She wasn’t sure now. He’d muttered. The pain in his face had distracted her.

  Penelope’s dark memories, the despair she’d felt at the idea of watchers looming over her, receded a bit. She hurried to catch up with him.

  “What news on the piping?” he asked when she reached his side.

  “Elm is recommended. The pipes can be made from trees in your woods.” He knew this. She’d told him.

  “Tom w
ants to see how they are bored out.”

  “So you said.”

  “Did I? You have a marvelous memory. I don’t know how I got anything done without you.”

  Penelope found his joking tone irritating. But if he wanted to pretend the last few minutes had been just as usual, she couldn’t stop him. He wasn’t obliged to explain himself to her. Pushing aside a brush of hurt, she said, “I wanted to talk to you about your mother.” She’d been trying to find a time to tell him her theory.

  Whitfield started and looked at her as if she’d said something bizarre. “My mother?”

  What was the matter with him today? “I have an idea about her notebooks,” she replied.

  “Notebooks?”

  It was a perfectly simple word. There was no need to look at her as if she was daft. “I think they might be in code.”

  He couldn’t have looked more astonished. “Code?” he repeated.

  “Or call it a private writing system,” Penelope went on. “Some people invent those to keep their personal thoughts private. There’s Leonardo da Vinci’s mirror writing, for example.”

  Once again, he stopped on the path. “You cannot be comparing my mother to da Vinci.”

  “Well, no. Or only in this one sense. Creating a hidden way of writing.”

  “But why would she do that?” Whitfield looked bewildered, then annoyed. “Would she go to such great lengths to keep from revealing herself? Was that really necessary?”

  Penelope blinked at the anger in his voice.

  “To be deliberately incomprehensible,” he continued, voice rising. “And then, as if that was not enough, to hide her notebooks in the lining of trunks where I was bound never to find them. She must have known I never would. Was she insane?”

  “Well, perhaps she had some reason,” Penelope began.

  “What possible reason could she have had?” He started walking again, very fast.

  Penelope nearly had to run to keep up with him. “And anyway, you did find them.”

  “You did. She didn’t count on you. Nobody could have imagined you.” With a humorless laugh, Whitfield strode down to the garden gate, opened it, and started back toward the house.