Aurora (18 page)

“No, I think you had better enter like a thief. The door has a chain, and Wilkins will have it put on. I’ll let you in at the library French windows.”

“The servants sleep downstairs. It would be better for me to go in by the upstairs. Make less of a furor. Open my bedroom window. The beech tree will let me slip in, unless someone has lobbed off my favourite branch.”

“Which was your room?”

“The far end of the east wing. A paneled room, adorned with a garish display of female pulchritude, if Mama has not had the walls stripped.”

“The walls are now adorned with a very proper display of military heroes,” she informed him. “Nelson, Wellington,
et al.”

“I wonder what she did with my gallery of beauties. I had an excellent set of Emma Hamilton I cherished. Copies of Romney’s series depicting her as Venus, Circe, Mary Magdalene and herself, all the more interesting varieties of seductress. She was gorgeous, don’t you think?”

“Yes, if you favour brunettes. We seem to keep hearing of your penchant for blondes.”

“It was the unrelieved company of dusky ladies in India that made me hanker for a blonde. You know the room I mean?”

“There’s only the one paneled room upstairs.”

Kenelm’s face took on a figuring look. “I wonder if she would have hidden the emeralds in
my
room—a nice incriminating touch if they should happen to turn up there. I’ll have a look around. A strip of panel behind my bed used to lift up. Many is the mouse and frog secreted there in days gone by.”

She was no longer surprised at the wealth of information he had about Raiker Hall. She knew now he was Kenelm and assured herself there was nothing wrong in the owner entering his own home, even if he chose to do so by a window.

“I’ll be there around midnight. I’ll watch from the outside to see when the lights are extinguished in the servants’ quarters. We’d better give them an hour to settle into sleep. You’ll know when they retire. With her dresser gone, there will be only Charlie on that floor, and a child will sleep soundly, I trust. I am looking forward to our tryst. I always wanted to have a tryst with a lady at midnight.”

Aurora found that in spite of her lingering fears and doubts, she was looking forward to it too. He stayed an hour, discussing other things than the night’s activities. He was led to expand in more detail on his doings in India, of which she believed somewhat less than half, and if a quarter of them were true, the entire British population there ought to be behind bars. But still it sounded so very jolly that she could not think he had been entirely miserable. She thought he was the kind to find amusement wherever he went. She suspected he even enjoyed his little game with Clare.

“I’ve only been telling you the good parts,” he told her when she charged him with having liked it. “I have omitted the monsoons, the diseases, and
much
worse, the cures.” That a red-hot iron ring placed over the navel should cause the intestines to revolve and cure cholera she mistakenly assumed to be a joke, but believed that typhoid and malaria had no real cure and little treatment when she heard the number who had died of them.

“You were fortunate to leave there alive,” she congratulated him.

“Only the good die young. I’ll reach a hundred. Imagine, I survived all that, and Bernie died of an ear infection. I’ll take good care of my ears now I am home. So, we shall rendezvous at midnight or thereabouts in my bedroom. Sounds marvelous, doesn’t it? I trust you will be wearing your most dashing peignoir, Miss Falkner. And I shall be wearing my passe-partout and a piece of wire. And a shirt and cravat, of course. I mean to observe the formalities. I have suspected from time to time—just a certain way you have of looking at me askance—that you find me lacking in formality. You mustn’t feel because I masqueraded as a gypsy and attacked you and have embroiled you in this questionable spree that I am anything but a high stickler. I have already asked you to be my instructor in matters of form.
Do
let me know if you object to anything.”

He arose to take his leave, bowing formally, but uttering his usual offhand comments.
“À bientôt.
I can hardly wait. I haven’t had such fun since I caught my nawab’s favourite mistress, and mine too, with her hands in the diamond jar.” As her eyes widened in shock he rushed on with an explanation she doubted. “I
mean,
I favoured her for
his
mistress. She wasn’t nearly as bad as the others.”

“I see,” she said, still stunned.

“Yes, I’m afraid you do. Good day, Miss Falkner,” he took a hasty departure, muttering to himself some words that sounded like “damned fool.”

Rorie soon took Charles home, and while he had a bath—for he had managed to get well soiled crawling under the furniture with Mimi—she made a seemingly innocent trip to Clare’s studio, ostensibly to admire her paintings, but actually to go through cupboards, closet, boxes and paint chest for emeralds or clues. She found nothing of either, but did come across some sketchbooks that must have been over eleven years old, as they contained paintings of her husband, and one of Charles as an infant in his crib. In the same book, there were two sketches of young men, one she thought must be Kenelm. The man—boy, really—was fuller in the face, the nose less sculptured than now, but the eyes were similar, the shape of the head, and the mouth. She recognized the man in the picture of the boy, and wondered that Clare should deny it.

The other young man she did not recognize. He too was young, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a swarthy complexion denoted by shading. She wondered if it could be Horace Rutley. She thought not—there was a foreign look about him—but she would show it to Kenelm and ask him. She put the books back and went to dine with Charles, and wait for midnight.

Chapter Twelve

Aurora’s evening passed more quickly than her morning. She enjoyed dinner with Charles, a pleasant and conversable companion. A ceremonious round of the doors was made with the butler, who eyed her with scant approval; he had used to smile on her when he was only an upper footman and she a guest in the house. With the mistress away, the servants retired early.

Already at half past ten there was not a sound in the house but the ticking of the clock. Rorie tiptoed down the hall from her bedroom and surreptitiously tried Clare’s bedroom and sitting-room doors. Both were locked. This augured something worth hiding inside, but her hairpin proved an inadequate passe-partout, and she could not get in.

To pass the time till Kenelm came, she took her branch of candles into some unlocked guest rooms to rummage through drawers and under mattresses, but discovered nothing. She did some preparatory exploring in Kenelm’s room too, curious to see where he had passed his youth, but the chamber, stripped of personal effects, was uninteresting, gave no secret clue to his character. A paneled room with indifferent window hangings and rather nice campaign dressers, cornered in brass. Wellington and Nelson surveyed her with cold, haughty eyes from the walls. In a cupboard she found Kenelm’s cherished copies of the paintings of Emma Hamilton, the frames stripped away. Horace Rutley would not have known about these, she thought with satisfaction. How pretty the girl was. And how typical of Kenelm, that prodigious flirt, that his only belonging should relate to women. Marnie, Lady Alice, Ghizlaine, Millie and herself—he had made up to them all. Every female in the place except Clare.

As she looked at the pictures, she was startled to hear a tap at the window, and looking toward it she saw a form crouching in the branches beyond. In an instant she knew it must be Kenelm, come early, but for that fraction of a moment she was terrified. A frisson ran down her spine, but soon she was hurrying to the window, unlocking it and throwing it open. The branch was not so close to the window as she had thought it would be. In fact, it would take something of an acrobat to negotiate the leap, but Raiker proved up to it. He pounced unhesitatingly forward and landed on the windowsill with only a soft thump. She grabbed his arm lest he fall, but he was in no danger of it.

“Did I frighten you?” he asked in a low voice. “I have been there this half hour. The lights have been out since then, so we might as well get on with it. I have Mr. Passe-partout here, but I see you decided against your peignoir,” he said, with a glance at her gown.

“I have been looking around here,” she said, disregarding the mention of the peignoir.

“I’ve been watching you. You’ll make Emma Hamilton jealous, flirting with her Admiral Nelson.”

“Oh, yes, I found your pictures.” She handed them to him, but he barely glanced at them. “Where is the loose panel?” she asked.

“Right here,” he said, and climbed on the bed carefully, making a grimace as it let out a little squawk beneath his weight. “It always did that,” he said, laughing. He slid his hand down between the bed and wall to pry up a loose board. He felt around with his fingers, but they came up empty and dusty. “No—not there,” he told her, and hopped off the bed. Though his movements were rapid, brisk, he made very little sound. He went to the clothespress, felt the jacket pockets, top shelf, in the toes of boots and other likely hiding places, but found only a couple of fish hooks and a bill for a pair of boots.

“Go through those drawers, will you?” he said over his shoulder while he searched the clothespress. The drawers were empty. Clare had done away with his shirts and linens. The room searched, they looked into the hallway and walked stealthily to Clare’s room, down the shadowed way with only a brace of candles. The master key did the trick, and they were soon in a lavish room, done up in white gilded furniture, with opulent appointings.

“This has been redone since Marnie lived here,” Rorie mentioned, looking with distaste on yards of swathed satin on the canopied bed.

“Bordello,” Kenelm muttered in disgust, then became more businesslike. “Start on the dresser; I’ll take the desk.” They both whisked quickly through the drawers, taking care to disturb nothing. There were so many possible hiding places—any jacket or hat or shoe might hold the gems—that it was really a hopeless task, and there was still the sitting room to go. After half an hour they had done what could be done without ripping open the mattress and pulling up the floorboards, which Ken considered more likely places, and stopped to discuss the next move. Other than the natural curiosity of examining another’s personal effects, Rorie found the evening actually close to boring. She had expected more of it.

“I’ve been through the studio,” she told him. “There is nothing much, but one picture I would like you to look at. I think it might be Rutley. I never saw him, but it is a young dark-haired man. If she knew him well enough to sketch him—well, then they were sort of friends, I assume. There is one of you too.”

“Wearing an open-necked shirt?”

“Yes. At least I thought it was you. You remember posing for it?”

“Very well,” he answered, with an inscrutable expression—not a smile, but not quite a frown either. “Let’s go. I’ll put out the candles.”

This was done, and they left, with Kenelm twisting the key again behind him to conceal the fact that they had been there. They went along to the studio and relit the taper, and Rorie found the book again. Ken looked at it, pausing over the drawing of his father and himself, then turned to the other man. “This isn’t Rutley,” he said at once. “It looks like one of the gypsies.”

“It is swarthy, and the features rather un-English. But would she have a gypsy pose for her?”

“Possibly. This next one is a fisherman from the wharf, you see. She was doing character studies at the time. She might have paid one of them to pose for her.”

Rorie studied the picture closely. “Odd she didn’t put in any detail to tell us—tell anyone, I mean—that it is a gypsy. No kerchief or earring.”

“He’s a handsome buck. She liked painting young men.” There was a look of deep concentration on his face.

She had painted himself, Rorie thought. She was said to like more than
painting
men. The sittings no doubt were the scene of a flirtation. And it was said that Kennie was fond of his stepmama too. Hennie had mentioned it.

“I fancy she had a flirtation with this one,” Ken said, returning the book to her. In Miss Falkner’s mind this was as good as a confirmation of her suspicions. “It’s not Rutley in any case. Now, what about the safe? I might as well have a look while we’re here. Not that we’ll find anything.”

The safe was downstairs in the study, and the trip below was carried out with the greatest stealth, the candle extinguished. They went down hand in hand, lending a little excitement to the proceedings that had thus far been futile and unadventuresome. The lock on the safe had been changed. The passe-partout did not perform its magic, but Kenelm seemed undisturbed. “There wouldn’t have been anything there anyway.” He looked perfunctorily through a few desk drawers, again without result.

“Shall we tackle the attics, or call it a night?” he asked.

“It’s early. We have lots of time, and no one is up. We might as well search them while you’re here,” she replied, not liking to have her first adventure finished so soon.

“I’ll go alone if you like,” he offered. “You won’t want to be up there with the mice and dust.”

“Will there be mice?” she asked, her craving for excitement diminishing.

“The cheese room is right below it.”

“I think I won’t go,” she added.

He laughed aloud—much too loud, considering the secret nature of their enterprise. “Aurora Falkner, do you mean to tell me a big girl like you is afraid of
mice?”
he asked, and taking her hand he assured her the best way of overcoming her aversion was to confront them head on. Her low-pitched protests were to no avail. She was led up the stairs and down the hall to the attic door, and soon it was quietly closed after them.

The aura of stale air and disuse added gloom to the eerie darkness. It was extremely uncomfortable. If Clare’s bedroom had been difficult to search, the attics were clearly impossible. Five large rooms, with hardly a square yard of uncovered floor space anywhere. There was scarcely a pathway through them. Chests, boxes, racks, battered furniture, discarded lamps and bowls, toys, cribs and beds—there was the debris of several generations of hoarders here. They made only a cursory look around. It would take months to go through it all. It was gloomy and unwelcoming—their one brace of candles doing little to dissipate the long black shadows and darkened corners that invaded nearly to the centre of the room. Once Kenelm entered a door a few steps before her, leaving her in nearly total darkness, and she dashed to his side, to clutch his arm in fright. He held the candles high and looked at her in surprise. “I’m sorry,” she said, letting go of his arm.