“Are the hampers in the carriage, Forbes?” asked Rosalind at ten that morning.
“Yes, my lady.”
“And is my sister ready?”
“She came downstairs a few minutes ago, my lady, but I don’t know where she may have gotten to. Perhaps she is in the attics again.”
“The attics? Whyever should she be?”
“She has been seen there once or twice, my lady. Roaming about the moors, too.” Forbes kept his face carefully impassive, but his tone let Rosalind know he disapproved.
“Oh, well, she is used to more company, you know, and a livelier household. I daresay she misses our brother James and is a trifle bored.”
“Indeed, my lady. I only mention it because we have been worried she might be hurt, exploring odd corners.”
“Hurt? How would she be hurt?”
“A fall, perhaps, my lady? In the cellars. She might not be found for some hours.”
Rosalind shrugged. “I’m sure Miranda has no desire to go through the cellars. Will you see if she can be found, Forbes, and tell her the carriage is ready?”
“Certainly, my lady.” But Forbes looked as if he was far from satisfied about Miranda’s desires, and not at all happy about them. As he turned to go, Rosalind watched him with a puzzled frown. It was not like Forbes to complain.
At that moment, Miranda came running down the stairs. “Are you ready? I just went up for my other shawl. Can you believe the sun is shining at last? I am so glad we are going out.”
Rosalind smiled. “I told you we would have some fine days. Come along, the carriage is waiting.”
They walked out into the soft June morning. The sun was indeed bright. It lit the rolling moors beyond the walls in folds of brown and green, and made even the gray stone of Clairvon Abbey sparkle with tiny chips of light. There were daffodils by the doorstep, tossed in an errant breeze, and bluebells at the end of the lawn. “Isn’t it a glorious day?” said Miranda.
“It is indeed. Here are Philip and Alan. Let us be on our way.”
The two men reined in their mounts beside the carriage, and Rosalind and Miranda were handed in. “You’re certain you don’t wish to ride, too?” asked Miranda as they started down the gravel lane leading to the gate.
“Certain,” replied her sister. “But I have said you may ride.”
“I wouldn’t leave you all alone.” Miranda gazed out the window. “Have you been to this castle before?”
“No. But I have heard it described as a very interesting ruin. It should be just what you like.”
“I am rather fond of ruins. When I write a book, I shall set the great final scene in a ruin, in the moonlight. And I believe the villain shall be killed by falling from the remains of a tower, as he is trying to carry off the heroine, who has fainted.”
“But won’t she fall, too, in that case?” asked Rosalind with a smile.
Miranda bit her lower lip. “Well, yes, I suppose, but only a short way. Her…her gown will catch on a jagged bit of rock, and she will hang there during the fight between the hero and the villain. She will wake in the midst of it and see where she is and be terrified.”
Rosalind laughed out loud. “Why do you wish to write such hair-raising stories, Miranda? Nothing of the sort ever happened to you.”
“I know. That is just the point.”
Rosalind shook her head. “I don’t know how you think of these things.”
“It is mostly from reading,” her sister admitted. “But I expect I shall soon be learning from my own adventures.”
“What do you mean, soon?”
“Well, I am nearly grown up. Mama cannot keep me at home forever. Or leave me with you. In a year or so I shall begin to know all sorts of things. And then I can really begin to write.”
Rosalind gazed at her with warm fondness and a kind of pensive regret that Miranda was too engrossed to notice.
“Look there,” cried Miranda. “What is that? Philip? Alan? Is that a warship out to sea? Or maybe a trader going to the Indies?”
“It is a rock,” replied Philip in a discouraging tone.
There was a pause. “It looks rather like a ship, though,” added Alan Creighton. “Really a very suggestive shape.”
“It is called Ship Rock,” agreed Philip grudgingly. “They say a customs cutter—” He broke off.
“What?” said Rosalind, leaning forward to see.
“Nothing!” Philip glowered at her and spurred his horse to a canter. Miranda glanced quickly from one to the other, and then to Alan. He raised one eyebrow and shrugged.
“This coast looks treacherous,” Alan said. “Boney can be glad he never tried an invasion. Those rocks would have given him some trouble.”
“They look like teeth,” agreed Rosalind.
“We are nearly there,” called Philip from up ahead, and he kicked his horse again and began to leave them behind. Alan went after him, and Miranda leaned far out the window to catch her first glimpse of the ruined fortress.
When Dunstanburgh finally came into view, she gasped with pleasure. Tumbled stone and mangled battlements littered the cliffside above the now calm sea. Great rocks lay scattered as if by a giant’s hand, and one could see the remains of walls and bastions, banquet hall and dungeons. “Oh, it’s splendid!” she cried, throwing Rosalind a glowing look.
Her sister nodded, and Miranda was too excited to notice the discomfort in her face.
As soon as they stopped, Miranda jumped down and ran a little forward. “I want to see everything,” she declared, spreading her arms wide.
“Come along then,” answered Alan Creighton with a smile. “I can keep you from mistaking an arrow slit for a romantic peephole for hidden priests.” He offered his arm, and Miranda took it with a flourish.
Still sitting in the carriage, Rosalind sighed. “I suppose I should not let them go off unchaperoned. Mama would expect me to do better. But we can see them wherever they go, after all, and Alan seems trustworthy. I must believe his behavior in London was an aberration. I am glad to have him here to amuse Miranda.”
“You will stay right where you are,” said Philip savagely. “And I will start a fire and make tea. You look sick as a cat.”
“Thank you, sir. I always know where to come for compliments.”
“Rosalind!”
“All right, perhaps I don’t look well. But it is not something I wish to hear about. And I shall not stay in the carriage. I will sit on a rug on the grass and enjoy the sun. We can spread the cloth by that rock there.” She started to step down, and Philip hurried to help her, keeping one arm around her waist as they walked to the rock. Rosalind raised her parasol and settled beside it. “I am quite comfortable,” she said then. “And quite all right. But I would like tea.”
Philip nodded curtly, and Rosalind gazed after him as he strode off to start gather wood.
“Can’t you just see the knights and ladies and jesters who must have lived here?” Miranda said to Alan as they picked their way between fallen rocks. “I can picture a great tournament right here, with pennants and lances and the huge warhorses snorting through their armor plate.”
“Ah, well, I think this would have been the kitchen garden,” he replied. “That looks like the midden there.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Miranda turned away. “Where do you think the hall might have been, where they sat at night and listened to the minstrels and poets and drank the health of Richard the Lionheart?”
“Let’s see.” He scanned the ruin. “Perhaps there?” he said, pointing.
Miranda started in that direction. “Don’t you just long for those days? How I should have liked to be in the seats watching the tournament and giving my favor to my chosen knight.”
“I don’t know how many tournaments they would have held here,” said Alan. “This must have been built for coastal defense. The French again, I suppose. It always is the French. Must have been a cold, lonely post in winter.” His blue eyes flickered with memory.
“Well, but, still, they…they probably had a minstrel. Wandering. Minstrels wandered.”
Alan smiled. “That must have been a miserable thing in winter, too. Slogging along in freezing rain half the time. And then having to sing when you arrived. That would have been more than I could stomach.”
“They loved it!” retorted Miranda. “They chose to live in such a way, so that they could be free and write songs and poetry.”
“No doubt it was better than working the fields,” he agreed.
“Have you no spark of romance in your soul?” she cried. “Must you see everything in terms of…mud and work?”
He met her snapping green eyes for a moment. “I beg your pardon. I suppose there has been too much of both those things in my life so far.”
Immediately, Miranda felt ashamed. “No, I’m sorry,” she said at once. “You know a thousand times more than I do about knights and fighting, I’m sure. They probably were cold, especially here. I just enjoy the stories.”
“And why not?” He felt a bit abashed himself. His wartime hardships were of no interest to a gently bred girl. “I believe the dungeons must be over there. Shall we go and look?”
“Oh, yes. Do you think the prisoners may have carved on the walls? There was the most affecting verse in Walter Scott. How did it go? I can’t remember.”
Forbearing to tell her that most of the castle’s prisoners probably could not write, Creighton took her arm once again and led her forward.
They spent the entire morning examining the ruins and then returned to the carriage to find their picnic spread on a white cloth on the grass. Rosalind looked lovely beneath her pink parasol, and Philip lay on the grass beside her, reading.
“I forgot my sunshade,” said Miranda guiltily. “I shall be horridly brown.”
“Not so horridly,” said Rosalind. “I have some lotion you may use. Are you hungry?”
“Yes!”
“We all are,” said Philip, closing his book. “Come and eat.”
Cook had sent them cold ham and beef between thick slices of her fresh-baked oat bread, with pickles and mustard and hard-cooked eggs. There was cheese and fruit and biscuits, as well as a dozen cherry tarts wrapped in a checked napkin. And lemonade and ale and the tea that had been brewing over the small fire the coachman had made. All of them, even Rosalind, fell to with enthusiasm.
For some minutes, there was silence. Then Alan said, “You have a fine cook, Rosalind.”
Miranda nodded, her mouth full of cherry tart.
“Don’t I?” Rosalind smiled. “Even though I can scarcely hold a conversation with her. I tell her what I would like for dinner, and she nods and smiles. If she has something to say to me, the kitchenmaid has to translate.”
“The cook is a foreigner?”
“Well, she’s a Scot,” answered Rosalind, with a teasing look at her husband.
“She is perfectly easy to understand,” replied Philip. “She speaks English as well as…” He broke off.
“As well as what?” teased Rosalind. “You grew up with her. I don’t think she is even speaking English, or Gaelic, either. It is some language she has made up from the two, and you must be acquainted with her for a dozen years before you can grasp it.”
A reluctant smile crossed Philip’s handsome face. “There’s something in that, I suppose. She likes you, though.”
“And I her. Particularly when she makes cherry tarts.” Rosalind took a second one. “She knows they’re my favorite.”
“They’re delicious,” pronounced Miranda, taking her third. “This is the best picnic I have ever had.”
“Out of such a great many?” asked Alan Creighton.
“I have gone on picnics before!” Miranda saw no need to mention that they had all been with her sisters and brother.
They sat for a while with cups of tea, while the sun started down the sky in the west. They were beginning to think of packing up the hamper when Rosalind said, “Philip, would you walk a little with me?” Her voice sounded tight and uneasy.
“Where do you wish to walk? You’re comfortable where you are,” was his reply.
“Please!”
Seeing her face, he sprang up and went to help her rise. She clung to his arm as they walked along the edge of the ruins toward the hill behind. “What is it?” he said.
“I am going to be sick. Get me away from them.”
Setting his jaw, Philip supported her until they were hidden from the others by a screen of foliage, and then held her as she rid herself of lunch, his face a grim mask. When she was better, he wiped her brow with his handkerchief and gently lowered her onto a fallen stone. “Don’t move until you feel better,” he commanded.
Rosalind managed a weak smile. “Am I to sit here until winter then?”
“Your mother promised you would be better before that!”
“Yes, Philip, of course. I was joking.”
“How can you when you are so ill? I cannot bear it, Rosalind. I feel…it is all my fault, and I…”
“Don’t be silly. Here, help me up. We must go back before Miranda—”
“Stay where you are!” Philip’s voice sounded savage. Neither he nor Rosalind noticed Miranda approach behind the bushes. “You were a fool to come out today. I told you that. You must stay at home and rest. Miranda will have to understand that you cannot be jolted about the countryside and parked in the sun whenever she wishes for some amusement. We did not want her here—the timing is abominable—and she will simply have to adjust to our way of living.”
“Philip, you are exaggerating all out of…”
“Be silent! You will listen to me. You will do as I say. You are not to go out. I will lock you in your bedchamber, if necessary!”
Appalled, Miranda fled.
“Will you indeed, my lord Highdene?” responded Rosalind. “And feed me on crusts and water, I expect? And forbid me any pleasures?”
“You know what I meant,” he muttered.
“I know you are talking like an idiot, my dear. Women have babies every day and are none the worse.”
“Not my wife,” he replied.
They looked at each other in silence for a moment, neither daring to say, or perhaps even think, that some women were the worse, that some even died in childbed. Rosalind, whose fears were springing to life with her constant sickness, pushed the thought resolutely from her mind. “Help me up,” she said again. “We must be getting home.”
The drive back to Clairvon began in silence. Miranda was in turmoil after what she had overheard, and Rosalind was both ill and worried. But at last Miranda could contain herself no longer, and she burst out, “Are you sorry I came to stay with you, Rosalind?”
“What do you mean? Of course not.”
“Mama and Papa insisted, you know. I was longing to see Rome.”
“I do know. But I thought we agreed that we were both glad of the chance to become better acquainted.”
“Yes.” Miranda could not admit that she had eavesdropped. But she couldn’t forget what she had heard either. “Rosalind…” she began.
“Yes?” said her sister when she did not continue.
“Are…are you happy here? In Northumberland, I mean? D-don’t you wish you had never come?”
“Not at all. What makes you say such a thing?”
“You are ill all the time!” cried Miranda, goaded. “You never have visitors or any parties. You love parties! And Philip…Philip is beastly to you.” She shrank back against the carriage cushions, frightened by her own temerity.
“Beastly? Nonsense.”
Miranda lost her head. All her concern for Rosalind, as well as her own imaginings and frustrations, burst out. “He is dreadful,” she insisted. “He is not at all what we thought him. Mama and Papa would be furious if they saw the way you live, practically a prisoner. And so ill. Why don’t we go away? I will go with you to London, or Rome, anywhere you like. You have to escape from this horrible place before he does something really wicked, Rosalind!”
Rosalind’s pretty face had gone stern and cold. She had every intention, at the start of this conversation, of explaining to Miranda the cause of her “illness.” But the remarks her sister had made about her husband went too far, especially in light of her own doubts. She could not afford to think such things, and she would not be lectured about marriage by a chit not yet out.
“You know nothing about it,” she said. “How dare you come to stay in my house and then say such things! Philip is exactly what I thought him, and we are very happy together. I forbid you to mention this matter again.”
“But Rosalind…”
“Miranda!”
They drove on in silence, both miserable. Miranda felt dreadfully guilty for having displeased her sister, but she could not feel she was wrong. Had she not heard it herself?
It was only then that she remembered she had meant to tell Alan Creighton about the ominous incident of the crow.