A Lord Apart Page 16

  She trotted after him, wanting to ask what he’d meant by that last remark. It hadn’t sounded like a compliment. Nor had it seemed to be a criticism exactly. She gazed up at him as they raced along. His face was grim and closed. Perhaps it would be better to drop this subject. But she was driven to solve the puzzle of the journals. He must feel the same, surely? They contained his mother’s thoughts. “So, if it is a code, which I really think it is, there must be a key.”

  “A key? To unlock what exactly?”

  “Not an actual physical key. It would be a list of the phrases and symbols that she used over and over again. She did, you know. You can see the repetition if you look through the notebooks. So the key would have an explanation of what each one stands for. Substitutions.”

  “Substitutions,” Whitfield echoed. His sidelong glance was darkly skeptical.

  “Yes.” In her hurry, Penelope tripped on a stone in the garden path. She stumbled, trying to catch her lost balance.

  Whitfield caught her, effortlessly holding her upright with one arm and pressing her close against his chest. He felt like a bulwark. There were his lips, inches from hers. There was the line of his jaw and the breadth of his shoulder. The anger drained from his expression as he stared down at her. “You really believe they’re meant to be…deciphered?”

  “I think it’s a strong possibility.” She was breathless. Her hands had gripped his upper arms as if they belonged there. She didn’t want to let go.

  “You do know how strange that sounds.”

  The cloth of his coat was smooth under her fingertips. She couldn’t look away. And seemingly, neither could he. “The notebooks are rather strange.”

  He gave a bark of laughter. “An understatement, Miss Pendleton. And why, we ask? Uselessly.”

  “We might learn the reason if we decode them.”

  He let her go. Did he regret that as much as she did? Penelope inhaled the sweet scent of some flowering bushes at the edge of the path. The heady perfume would always remind her of him.

  “How do you propose to do that?” he asked, his voice gone flat again.

  “By finding the key, of course.”

  “Finding. We haven’t had much luck at that so far. Nothing about the Rose Cottage legacy. Just a mountain of moldering paper.”

  Something had certainly soured his mood. Penelope wanted to raise it. “I think the key would be among your mother’s personal things.” She explained her reasoning to him.

  “My parents’ possessions were packed up and stored in the attic,” he said when she’d finished.

  “Shall we go and look at them?”

  Daniel was reluctant. He didn’t want to go through his mother’s things. Nor did he care what her diaries said, or so he told himself. When had anything gone right with his parents? But Miss Pendleton was practically vibrating with curiosity. The bright enthusiasm was back in her face, and he couldn’t deny her. Daniel nodded and walked on.

  They made a brief stop to question his housekeeper and snag a branch of candles, and then he led the way upstairs to the attic.

  “Mrs. Phipps said they put my mother’s things over here when they cleared out her room.” He walked around bits of old furniture and stacks of boxes to the west side of the main attic. As his housekeeper had promised, he could easily identify the recent additions to storage. To one side was his father’s old shaving stand. He hadn’t wanted to look at it every day, and anyway he had a newer, more efficient one. “These should be hers,” he added, indicating a neat row of trunks and boxes and a dressing table that he hadn’t wanted to see again either. He lit the candles, augmenting the light from the dormer windows, and put them on the dressing table. Melancholy threatened. He pushed it aside.

  “Right.” Miss Pendleton surveyed the prospects like a workman rolling up his sleeves. “Do you want to—”

  “You look,” said Daniel.

  Sympathy and uncertainty seemed mingled in the glance she gave him. She opened a trunk and began lifting out gowns swathed in linen. Unfolding the coverings, she examined each one. “No pockets,” she said. “You have no idea how lucky you are to have so many pockets in your clothes.”

  The scent his mother had used drifted over them. Daniel was besieged by fragments of memories, glimpses of his parents flitting in and out of his life. Mostly out. Without a backward glance.

  Miss Pendleton replaced the gowns and repeated the process with a second similar trunk. She looked through a box of shoes, gloves, handkerchiefs, and reticules, turning out the latter and shaking each one. She sorted through ornaments from his mother’s room and mementos from her travels. Her enthusiasm appeared to dim as she found no sign of what she wanted.

  The last two trunks held hatboxes. She looked inside them all, and the hats. “Nothing,” she said. She sat down on a closed trunk, surrounded by sheaves of tissue paper and ornate headgear.

  “Her dressing case and more personal items went down with the ship,” said Daniel. He was ready to leave this shadowed room and the weight of the past.

  “She wouldn’t keep the key with her,” declared Miss Pendleton.

  “Why not?”

  “That would have defeated the purpose of a code. Anyone might have found it and deciphered the journal she carried. No, the notebooks were hidden here at Frithgerd. The key would have been, too.”

  “You may be making far too much of this. Perhaps my mother just had an addiction to…inane scribbling.” Had the contents of her mind been as jumbled as the estate records, Daniel wondered. Was his heritage nothing but muddle?

  “I don’t think it can be that. I feel the notebooks are important.”

  Conviction and curiosity lit her face. She wouldn’t give up; she wouldn’t turn away. Daniel felt as if he could look at her forever.

  She sighed. “But there isn’t even a scrap of paper.”

  He roused himself and looked around. “My mother had a writing desk. Its contents should be with the rest of her things.”

  “Oh!” Miss Pendleton spread her hands. “We’re idiots! We had all the papers taken downstairs. Whatever was in her desk must be among them.” She grimaced. “If only we’d known from the first, this might have been much easier.” She wrapped tissue around a hat, nestled it in its box, and replaced the lid. When she bent to place the container in the open trunk, she said, “What’s this?” Setting the hatbox aside, she reached into the bottom of the trunk, coming up with a small flat case covered in velvet.

  “Looks like jewelry.” Daniel held out his hand. “That should have gone to the strong room.” She handed it to him, and he opened it. A sapphire and diamond necklace sparkled in the candlelight. He’d never seen his mother wear this. But then he’d seen so little of her. Daniel looked up. The sapphires were just the color of Miss Pendleton’s eyes. “This would suit you.”

  Penelope’s frustration flamed into a violent revulsion. She wasn’t angling for jewels. Mistresses got jewels, were continually greedy for them by all accounts. Did he suppose she was helping him to augment her fortune, to cajole rich gifts out of him? “I don’t want a necklace.”

  “I merely observed that sapphires are your—”

  She barely heard him. “I need no largesse from you.”

  “Largesse? What sort of word is that?”

  “The sort used by sanctimonious prigs who patronize the poor and downtrodden.” She’d been looked down upon by too many insulting men in the last year. She wouldn’t tolerate any more.

  “What the deuce is wrong with you?”

  “I don’t want your necklace!”

  “I wasn’t offering it to you!”

  “But you said—” She broke off in confusion.

  “That sapphires would suit you. Not that you could have my mother’s necklace.”

  Penelope felt the blush spread from her cheeks down her neck and across her chest. She
was certain the crimson was visible even in the dim light. She’d allowed unhappy memories to control her. She’d vowed never to do that. Still agitated, she said, “I decide what suits me and whether I shall have it. Not you.”

  “Undoubtedly. But that does not give you the right to—”

  “My desires are not your responsibility.”

  Whitfield blinked.

  She’d silenced him, Penelope saw, enjoying the sensation. And yes, this was about far more than a necklace. It was about a year of being chivvied about and mistrusted and frightened, whenever her captors could manage that. They’d intimidated her for quite a time. Perhaps they meant to try again, by sending someone to lurk in her new neighborhood and spy on her. She couldn’t stop them. But she could refuse to follow the steps they laid out, like the lines of a dispiriting play.

  The light in Whitfield’s dark eyes shifted as she gazed steadily into them. Her past trials weren’t his fault. But her future wasn’t his responsibility either. Her decisions were her own. He would have to learn that.

  She stepped closer and set a hand on his shirtfront. She could feel his heart beating against her palm. She moved closer still.

  It was like setting a spark to tinder, or plying the bellows to make a fire flare. She could rouse him with a gesture, she thought, and she gloried in that power. Penelope slipped her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  His arms and lips received her with only an instant’s hesitation. Then he was holding her, and their kiss went from gentle to probing to urgent.

  A great wave of certainty rose in Penelope, riding the sweet sensations that shook her whole body. She wanted this. She would have what she wanted. She pressed against him. His hands slid over her, promising delights.

  “My lord Whitfield?” Tom’s voice floated up the stairwell. “Miss Pendleton?”

  Whitfield pulled away as if he’d been stung. Though he looked dazed, he took two quick steps back. His boot heel caught on an uneven floorboard, and he stumbled briefly.

  Tom’s homely figure appeared at the head of the stairs. “They said you was up here. Mr. Carson needs you to approve the size of the new doorway before they frame it in.”

  Whitfield muttered something—possibly a curse. Penelope was pleased to think it was, at any rate.

  Thirteen

  Something had teetered in the balance before that intoxicating kiss, Daniel thought, grasping the tatters of his dignity as Tom came over to them. Not the nonsense about the necklace—something more. “My desires are not your responsibility,” she’d said. He could still hear the conviction that had vibrated in her voice. He could feel her hand on his heart. She’d commanded him in that moment, and it was beyond any thrill he’d experienced before.

  “Just a moment,” Miss Pendleton said. Daniel was pleased to hear the tremor in her tone. She was as shaken as he was, and he was fiercely glad of it. She picked up an elaborate hat to place it in its box.

  “Watch out for that one,” Tom said. “It’s got some wicked pins in it. Sharp as a knife.”

  She turned back, holding the wide brim of a confection adorned with ribbons, feathers, artificial flowers, and improbably, an entire stuffed bird. “I saw them. But how do you know?”

  “Ah, well.” Tom shifted from foot to foot. “We were larking about when everyone was hauling papers down from here, and Kitty put it on, meaning no harm, miss. She tried to take it right off again, but them pins stuck in her hair.”

  Miss Pendleton nodded. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Or it might have caught on the paper that was inside,” Tom added.

  “Paper?”

  “It fell out when we pulled the hat off Kitty.”

  Her face lit with excitement. She leaned forward. “What sort of paper?”

  “We didn’t look, miss. It was folded up in the hat.”

  “Where is it now?”

  Tom took a step backward, clearly intimidated by the intensity of her question. “Ned put it into a box. Following orders. All papers to go downstairs.” He looked worried. “That’s what we was supposed to be doing.”

  “Yes, of course you were. Tell me about the box.”

  “The box, miss?”

  “The one Ned put it in.”

  She was worrying the boy. “It’s all right,” Daniel told him. “There’s nothing wrong. Just tell us whatever you remember.”

  “Yes, my lord.” Tom frowned. “I wasn’t paying any particular attention to Ned. I believe the box was wooden, sitting right about there.” He indicated a spot next to the trunk. “Mebbe so big?” He held his hands shoulder width apart. “I’m not sure.”

  “Did it have any special markings?” Miss Pendleton asked.

  “I didn’t notice any, miss. Was it somethin’ important? Nobody told us.”

  “That box must have held the contents of my mother’s desk,” Daniel said to her. “Papers. That’s why it’s not here.”

  “And that’s the one we have to find,” she replied. As one, they turned to the stairs.

  “What about the doorway?” asked Tom.

  “What doorway?”

  “They’ve finished breaking through the wall down by the new bathing room. Mr. Carson wants you to have a look at the doorway. In case you want it bigger.”

  “Right,” said Daniel. “We’ll do that first.”

  Once they had, they consulted the housekeeper, who confirmed that the contents of his mother’s desk had been packed up into a box that was wooden, as far as she recalled. She couldn’t remember anything distinct about it, however.

  And so they set about examining all the wooden boxes that had been brought down from the attic and put in the blue parlor and another room beyond it. The day waned as the pile of those that were not the one they wanted grew. Sandwiches were brought in lieu of dinner, and the search went on. At last, a final box was discovered. This one had been shoved behind others, had tipped over, and been hastily repacked. It did contain papers, in a jumble.

  “This looks like the things from her desk,” said Daniel. “Yes.” He lifted out an empty inkwell, a crystal paperweight, and some small ornaments. “This is the one.”

  He carried it back to the estate office and, once he’d removed the larger items, upended it onto the desk. A litter of receipts and correspondence and household accounts rained down. Daniel poked through them. A packet of letters tied with a black ribbon sat on top. Miss Pendleton leaned over his shoulder. He breathed in her light scent and felt as if he’d gone molten. Everything fled his brain except those kisses.

  “That’s odd,” she said.

  Odd that she could set him afire by mere proximity? But she couldn’t mean that. “What is?”

  “That looks very like my mother’s handwriting.” She picked up the packet of letters. “And her notepaper. It is her notepaper.” She untied the ribbon and spread the letters out. “This is her hand. And this one. And this. What are letters from my mother doing here?” She read one of the addresses. “Who is Miss Serena Walsden?”

  “That was my mother’s name before she married,” replied Daniel. He bent closer. “This one is her handwriting. And this.” Quickly he separated the missives into two piles, one written by his mother and the other apparently by Miss Pendleton’s.

  She sat down beside him. “Katharine Keighley,” she said, touching the address on a letter. “That was my mother’s name before she married.”

  Side by side, they stared down at the preserved correspondence.

  Daniel shuffled through the piles, examining each one. “They seem to date from 1792 to 1811.”

  “My mother died in 1811. Her letters must have been sent back to her correspondents. Papa and the solicitor took care of all that sort of thing.”

  Daniel tried to remember anything particular about that year and his mother. Nothing came to mind. He would have been eighteen and
in London.

  “So here is the connection between our families,” Miss Pendleton murmured. “Our mothers were acquainted. Friends.”

  He looked down at the scattered letters.

  “Do you suppose the reason I have Rose Cottage is in there? It must be. Can we read them, do you think?”

  “They were in her desk, not hidden or secret,” Daniel replied. “I think we can.” He was curious but also a little apprehensive for some reason.

  Miss Pendleton nodded. Daniel thought she looked as if she felt the same. She sorted the missives. “We should go in order by date.” She checked each letter and laid out the two sets in order.

  He smiled. “Always methodical.”

  Seeming too unsettled to smile back she handed him a letter. “This is the first. From your mother.”

  Slowly he unfolded the page. Nearly thirty years old, the ink was a little faded. “Dear Kate,” he read.

  “No one called my mother Kate.”

  “Apparently my mother did.” He acknowledged the bewilderment in her gaze, suspecting his face mirrored it. Looking down, he began reading aloud again.

  Dear Kate,

  And so we are to be married in the same year, very nearly in the same month. I certainly wish you great happiness. Isn’t it odd to do so by letter from far away when we spent every day of the last three years together? And can it have been only three? Somehow, though our school years were brief, they made me feel as if I’ve known you all my life. I am well aware that my existence BK (before Kate) did not include you, and yet I expect you to recall every detail. Perhaps because I was always pouring out confidences, whether you wished to hear them or not!

  I hope this Sir Jared fellow is worthy of you and understands what a gem he is getting. Tell him I will make him sorry if he does not!

  Your ever friend,

  Serena

  Daniel raised his eyes and gazed at his lovely companion. She seemed transfixed by what she’d heard. “They were at school together,” she said.