Last Night's Scandal (18 page)

Yours sincerely,

Olivia Carsington

On Wednesday Roy and Jock Rankin returned from Edinburgh, their pockets jingling with the profits from the most recent sale of things that didn’t belong to them. They found Gorewood’s public house buzzing with news: The Marquess of Atherton’s son, the Earl of Lisle, was moving into Gorewood Castle with a full retinue of London servants. One carriage had already arrived with boxes, trunks, and a set of servants, and more were coming in a few days.

Roy and Jock looked at each other.

“Not likely,” Roy said. “Some Londoners coming to stare at the old castle, like they do sometimes. Everyone hereabouts gets fool ideas. Always thinking someone’s moving in. No one’s moved in since the old man moved out—what was it?—ten years ago?” But the people about them were excited, much more than they ever were when traveling
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visitors from England turned up wanting to explore the castle.

After a time, the brothers left the tavern and went out in the rain to see for themselves.

Their neighbors, they found, had got the story right for once. From the road, through the steady drizzle, they could make out light in at least three windows. When they sneaked in closer they discovered a carriage and horses in the ramshackle stable.

“This won’t do,” said Roy.

“We’ll have to put a stop to it,” said Jock.

Thursday 13 October

The butler Edwards was not as drunk as he wanted to be. It had been raining steadily since he’d arrived at Gorewood Castle. It was an ugly heap of stones, dank and stinking of disuse.

They’d brought bedding but there were no beds. It was one thing for the master, who was used to sleeping on stone floors or bare ground, but it wasn’t what Edwards was used to.

They’d been working from sunup to long after sundown, trying to make the great dungeon of a place habitable for the ladies. The villagers were not cooperative. They steadfastly refused to understand simple English and even the master, with all his knowledge of heathen languages, couldn’t make heads or tales of their speech.

The London servants were treated like an invading army. You would think the shopkeepers would want the custom, but ask them for this or that and all you got was a blank look. And when at last they condescended to recognize you as a customer, they got the order wrong.

At least they’d got it right at the Crooked Crook public house—after making him go through a dozen gyrations and finally having to write it down. He’d stopped there to warm his insides before trudging back to the curst castle in the wet.

The road was lonely, not a streetlamp anywhere. To one side he made out the ragged outlines of the church that had burned down last century. He could see the churchyard, the gravestones sagging at untidy angles, as though the rain and the dark and the cold weighed them down.

He was looking that way, shivering, when he heard the rustling. Then suddenly it loomed in front of him, a white figure with glowing eyes.

He screamed and turn and ran.

And ran and ran and ran.

Gorewood Castle

Friday 14 October

Dear Olivia,

You had better find another butler. Edwards has disappeared.

Yours sincerely,

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L

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Chapter 10

Gorewood

Monday 17 October

S
he stood in the road, looking up at the monolith that crowned the rise.

Lisle had left the village and arrived in time to see Olivia’s carriage stop next to the graveyard and ruined church. He’d watched her alight and move to one side of the road.

There, hands clasped over her bosom, she gazed, obviously enraptured, at Gorewood Castle.

A parade of vehicles—mainly carts and wagons, heaped with who knew what—had preceded hers. Others followed. All of the village’s inhabitants had stopped whatever they were doing and come out to gape.

He’d gaped, too. He hadn’t seen a line of vehicles that long since King George IV’s coronation, a decade ago.

She was oblivious to the horses, carts, and wagons passing by her. She was oblivious to everything but whatever it was she saw in that great, grim rectangular heap of stone.

Lisle knew she saw worlds more than he did.

All he saw, really, was Olivia, in a pose that was so like her. He remained for a moment, simply watching her stand so still that a fanciful person would believe she was spellbound.

Since this was Olivia, she was undoubtedly spellbound. One needn’t be fanciful to know that. One needed only to know her.

What, he wondered, would she make of the Pyramids?

Stupid question. She’d be enchanted. She wouldn’t mind the hardships. She’d grown up on the streets of Dublin and London. She’d be happy and excited . . . until the novelty wore off and she grew bored.

His life wasn’t always as exciting as she imagined. The work itself was repetitive and tedious. Finding a tomb could take days, weeks, months, years of patient searching. Day after day in the heat, overseeing workers carefully shifting sand . . . the slow, meticulous work of copying the images on tomb and temple walls, of making drawings of monuments, because they could easily disappear.

Whole walls and ceilings had been cut out and taken away to adorn museums and private collections. Temples had been dismantled, their stones used for factories.

He missed it, the repetitious, tedious work. He missed finding, measuring, sorting, imposing order.

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She understood his passion for Egypt but she’d never understand his passion for such slow work. The reality of his life there would bore her witless, and he knew what happened when Olivia became bored.

She’d see the Pyramids someday, he didn’t doubt. She’d visit as others did, the aristocrats who sailed to Egypt in their yachts and went up and down the Nile, and went home again in a few months, the yachts piled with
anteekahs.

She turned then, while his mind was still continents away. Unprepared, he felt the world drop away. Nothing remained but her beautiful face, the blue, blue eyes and the pearly skin, the color rising in her cheeks like a sunrise.

And things stabbed, tiny daggers to his heart.

“Ah, there he is, the laird of the manor,” she said with a thick Scottish burr she must have picked up in Edinburgh.

The sound jolted him from his reverie. He hoped she hadn’t picked up bagpipe playing as well.

He approached. “Tell that to the natives,” he said. “They seem to think I’m the tax collector or the hangman.”

She laughed the low, velvety laugh. He could feel himself being drawn in, a dunce of a fly skirting the edges of the spider’s web.

Facts. Stick to facts. He studied her clothes as though they were ancient artifacts.

Over the mass of red curls she wore the usual milliner’s insanity: a thing with a brim the size of a flagship’s foredeck, with feathers and ribbons sprouting out of the top. She wore the usual dressmaker’s insanity—sleeves the size of wine barrels and puffed-out skirts that made her waist seem tiny enough for a man to encircle with one hand.

Seem
wasn’t a fact.
Seem
was fantasy. He flung the thought away as though it had been a useless piece of rubble.

He swept off his hat and bowed, to give himself something rational to do. “Welcome to Castle Horrid,” he said. “I hope it’s hideous and gloomy enough for you.”

“It’s wonderful,” she said. “Beyond anything I could have hoped for.” She was well and truly thrilled. It was there, unmistakable, in the flush of excitement in her cheeks and the light in her eyes.

If they’d been children, she would have run at him and flung her arms about his neck and cried, “I’m so glad I came!”

He felt a moment’s grief, a sense of loss—but one couldn’t be a child forever, and one didn’t want to be.

He put his hat back on his head and turned his attention to Gorewood Castle and its facts.

“Motte and bailey style,” he said. “U-shape. Main block containing basement and three floors. Two wings projecting from the west face of the main block, with three main floors above the basement. The height is one hundred six feet from ground level to the top of the parapets. The walls, on average, are fifteen feet thick. It is far from a common type of structure, I agree, and it is certainly extraordinary in having survived for so long, relatively intact.”

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“Thank you for the architecture lesson.” She gave a little shake of her head that made the curls bounce about her face. “You never change, do you? I referred to the
atmosphere
. So grey and forbidding. And the light, at this time of day—the lowering sun piercing the clouds to drive long shadows over the bleak landscape, as though Gorewood Castle spreads its gloom over the surrounding valley.” While she spoke, a flock of crows, disturbed by something, started up from the north tower, cawing. “And there are your dark ghosts,” she said.

“Atmosphere is your department,” he said. “I’ve had as much atmosphere as I can take. It

’s done nothing but rain.” Too many short, dark days of rain, followed by long, dark, rainy nights. All the while wondering what he’d done in his life to deserve being sent into exile here. Wishing he had someone to talk to, and telling himself he didn’t mean
her,
but someone sensible. But here she was, glowing like an Egyptian morning, and stabbing at his heart and lifting it at the same time.

“Then I pronounce the atmosphere completely correct,” she said. “The perfect setting for a horrid tale like
Frankenstein
or
The Monk
.”

“If that’s your idea of perfect, you’ll be ecstatic with the inside,” he said. “It’s damp and cold and dark. Some of the windows are broken, and we have chinks in the mortar. As a result, we get interesting shrieking and wailing sounds as the wind blows through.” She came nearer then, and peered up at him from under the gigantic rim of her bonnet. “I can’t wait,” she said. “Show me—now, while we still have the light.”
O
livia had been enthralled, yes, but she hadn’t failed to notice the castle’s dilapidated entrance arch, through which her train of carriages and carts and wagons passed. She’d expected to see Lisle appear there. She’d imagined him standing next to the equally dilapidated and picturesque drum-shaped gatehouse for a time, watching the vehicles pass and looking for her. Then he’d spot her and come out and . . . well, he wouldn’t open his arms so that she could run into them. But she’d expected him to come out from there, to greet her, as the lord of the manor would do.

Instead, he’d appeared out of nowhere, in exactly the place where the lowering sun could catch at his hair when he swept off his hat and bowed. The sun made glittering gold trails in his hair and danced on the straw and dust from the carts and wagons, making golden sparks fly about him.

It was very aggravating of him to suddenly appear, all gleaming gold like a figure in a medieval tale. For a moment, she’d imagined him sweeping her up on his white charger and carrying her away. . .

To where? Egypt. Where else? Where he’d drop her in the sand and forget about her as soon as a crumbling, smelly mummy caught his eye.

But he couldn’t help it, any more than she could help who she was. And he was her friend.

Her friend, she discovered on closer inspection, had shadows under his eyes. Under the shade of his hat brim the bruised eye was barely noticeable, but that same shade emphasized the lines of weariness in his face.

He was unhappy as well. He was being stoical, but she could hear it in his voice and see
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it in the way he carried himself, all determination and no zest.

She said nothing, though, only listened as he went on in his pedantic way while they passed under the entrance arch into the weedy courtyard.

The curtain walls were crumbling, she saw, but the stables at the far end of the courtyard were merely shabby. Overall, it was not in nearly so ruinous a state as the Athertons had made out. Not altogether surprising. Both she and Lisle had understood the castle was merely a means to an end.

They neared a set of stairs leading up—perhaps thirty feet—to a door in the castle.

“This is how we get to the first floor,” he said. “One used to cross a drawbridge and pass under the portcullis, but those disintegrated long ago. When major repairs were done last century, my ancestor must have decided stairs were more practical. A wise decision, I think.

A drawbridge and portcullis serve no useful purpose nowadays, and they’re the devil to maintain.”

She could picture the drawbridge and portcullis. She could picture the castle as it had been long ago, when the walls about it were strong, and men kept watch from the towers and gatehouses and parapets.

Before she could start up the stairs, he touched her wrist to stop her. If he’d been the romantic figure she’d imagined, he would have pulled her into his arms and told her how much he’d missed her.

She, to her vexation, had missed him. She’d wished they might have explored Edinburgh together. Even he would be disarmed by its beauty. Even he would appreciate how different it was from London, like another world entirely.