The candle flame quivered, dancing, and the wind moaned through the window of her small bedroom at the inn. Footsteps creaked the floors in the hall, and the sound of the very roof shaking overhead caused delicious shivers to course through her and a slow delighted smile to light Lady Amanda’s face.
I am living in a gothic novel.
With a tiny laugh, she pulled the covers up closer around herself and turned the page of the book that was keeping her up hours into the dark of night.
Tomorrow they would be home. She leaned her head back, relaxing into pleasant thoughts. This trip to London had been thrilling: new gowns for her first Season, the opera, family dinners. But she missed running about on her grounds, volunteering with the children at the local school, and, admittedly, she missed Charlie.
Maybe she didn’t miss him so much as the freedom she had when they were together. After his stable hand chores, they had gone fishing with the children from her class before she had left. But outings with Charlie would be curtailed, and much sooner than she liked to think about.
She returned to her book. No need to address uncomfortable subjects yet.
Unaware of a dark presence above him, Mordaunt ran through the forest. The wind whipped his cape, and a bat swooped down, brushing the top of his head.
The window rattled and she jumped, fisting her blankets and pulling them closer to her chin. The resulting silence unnerved her for a moment, but when nothing more happened, she relaxed and smoothed down her coverlet. Laughing at herself, her eyes found the page again but couldn’t read even one more sentence.
A crash at the window sprayed tinkling glass across her floor. She screamed when something heavy landed near her feet on the bed. Her breath coming fast, she jumped up, whimpering and dancing on her toes to avoid shards of glass. A brown object indented her covers in a single welt. It might be alive. She lifted her blankets to dislodge it from the bed, ready to leap off if it jumped at her. A gaping hole in her window let in the bitter cold from outside and brought gooseflesh to her arms and legs. And the dratted thing was so heavy it wouldn’t move. A strange yellow powder spread across her coverlet, and the room filled with a pungent, burning odor of sulfur.
“Gah!” She pulled folds of her nightdress up to her face to block the smell. Pulling back the covers by inches, trying not to puff any more of the powder into the air, she peeked at what had been hurtled into her room. A rock. A note attached and written in scarlet read, Freedom for all or none.
Ominous. Curious. Bizarre. She had never seen the like. Noting she was not in any danger of being attacked by a creature, she peered closer. A small yellow satchel, dusting its contents onto her bed, was tied to the note. She lifted it and dropped it again, gagging. She’d discovered the source of the smell.
“Molly.” She choked out just as her maid ran into the room from the adjoining closet.
“Lands of mercy! Are you all right, my lady?”
Amanda held her hand up, signaling Molly to wait. Gagging and gasping for air, she tried breathing through her mouth, but the smell stung her throat and she tasted it on her tongue. She knelt and grabbed the blankets, pulling them close, to cover her mouth and nose.
Muffled by the blankets, she coughed. “Wait, there’s glass everywhere. Walk around and alert a footman.” Molly carefully left to carry out her instructions.
Wind whipped her lovely green drapes high up to the ceiling, leaving a sharp, icy cold but clearing some of the odor. Heart pounding, she tried to pull the blankets tighter around her body, but the rock weighed them down.
Dizzy, trying to slow her breathing, she forced herself into motion.
Still holding a part of the blankets up to her face, she rolled to her stomach and slid a foot down to the floor. Glass cut through her skin, a sharp pain stinging her big toe. She flinched and pulled her foot back into bed. A bright trail of red followed and a new thin slice in her skin dripped blood down her foot.
Blast.
Wrapping another portion of blankets around her toe, frustration rose within her, challenging her fear. She loathed feeling helpless. But what could she do with glass all over the floor? Molly had left with the footman.
“Papa!” she shouted. “Molly! Someone, come quick!”
Footsteps and doors slamming sounded in the halls. Within moments, her door burst open. Her parents’ faces paled immediately.
“Good heavens!” Her mother’s voice cleared some of the fog in Lady Amanda’s brain.
Father will be very angry.
But William, the Duke of Devonshire, ran to his daughter, worry all over his face, glass crunching under his house slippers, and cradled her small sixteen-year-old frame in his arms, hurrying toward his own room.
Her mother ran at his side, reaching over to place a hand on her head. “Are you hurt, my dear?”
“A little, but I couldn’t walk on the floor. My toe . . .” The blood started dripping again the moment she pulled away the sheet. It was a mess of red.
“Amanda, you’re bleeding. Oh, my dear.” Her mother waved her hand at a footman. “Summon the innkeeper’s wife.”
He nodded and broke into a run.
“It’s just a small cut. I am fine now, truly. But what a thing to happen.” The corner of her mouth lowered. “What was that? The rock . . .” Amanda’s eyes still stung from the smell, and she blinked back tears.
Her father squeezed her more tightly to him as they reached his room, his lips firming into a tight line. His features stern, lines etched in his face, he shouted at the nearest footman, “Someone discover the meaning of this!”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
The duke shut his bedroom door with a snap. Hurrying to his large bed, he lowered Amanda as if she might break. Kissing the top of her head and holding her hands out to look her over, he asked, “Did the rock hit you?” His hands enveloped the sides of her face. “Are you quite all right?”
Amanda had never seen her father so unraveled. “Yes, Father. I am well. My hands still shake, but that is all.” She held them out, palms down.
The duke covered both her hands in his own.
A scratch at the door interrupted them, and her father rose to crack it open. Amanda strained to hear bits of a hushed conversation. Mother moved to sit next to her, taking her hand.
“Bender,” Simmons, her father’s valet, said in an undertone.
Her mother gasped, and Amanda searched her face. That name meant nothing to Amanda.
“Can you be sure?” Her father’s voice had a higher pitch. He sounded almost frightened.
She studied her father’s back. Who is Bender?
Simmons nodded. “The worst miscreants of all time, preying on such lovely people as yourselves—we should involve the magistrate.”
Her father nodded, his fists and teeth clenched. “Do what we have to—the gallows, if we must. I want him out of our lives, forever.”
The gallows? Amanda turned to question her mother. Everyone seemed to know something and the common frustration of not knowing that very something everyone else knew rose inside her. But she bit the words back before they left her lips, her mother’s face a sickly gray.
“Jack is back?” Her mother’s voice cracked, and she cleared her throat.