Rosemary felt guilty that she had applied for a position outside the house—who would care for Lilac if she was left alone at Fenwick? Ivy held the family together and Rosemary supported her efforts as best she could. Poor Lilac still believed that her childhood friend would return to marry her. Rosemary could no longer even remember his name. He had gone off to school and allegedly from there to war. His parents had died in the interim.
Rosemary wandered through the house, tired from helping the servants restore order to the great hall. No one could recall the last time a birthday had been celebrated in style, and despite the fact that Oliver reminded Rosemary of a fox in a henhouse, she had enjoyed setting a good table, surrounded by young ne’er-do-wells who knew how to laugh, if nothing else.
Cheer. Warmth. Laughter.
How long it had been since Fenwick had known a revel?
Oliver and his friends had departed in an excess of high spirits and promises to return. Rosemary had been waiting for the house to settle before she sat down to write into the night.
Now she mounted the stairs, not bothering with a candle. She knew her way in the dark. Everyone had already retired for the night. Perhaps she would go to her mother’s room for inspiration.
But someone in the house appeared to have had the same idea. She entered her mother’s musty bedchamber without making a sound at the exact moment that a figure disappeared into a panel inside the fireplace.
“Rue?” she whispered before she noticed the gray frock coat and notebook that had been placed on a stool by the wall.
She wished now for a candle to read what Sir Oliver had written in his notebook. Perhaps another of his idiotic poems to commemorate tonight’s party.
Why had he pretended to leave and then returned? He was already acting as if he were the master of the manor, and as far as Rosemary knew, Ivy hadn’t accepted a proposal.
“Dammit,” he muttered, banging something—his head, she hoped—against the wall. “Where the hell did I put my tinderbox?”
Rosemary rushed forward, pressed her hands against the panel, and said into the airless void, “Perhaps you left it under your coat. Why don’t you have a little think in the dark to refresh your memory?”
His face popped into view as the panel started to close. “What the blazes are you doing, woman?”
“I should be asking you that.”
“How am I supposed to see in the dark?”
The panel slowly ground back into place. “You’re a writer,” she said, looking down at his shadowy form. “Use your imagination.”
“How—”
She backed away from the fireplace and sat on the edge of the bed. An hour in the passage might teach him not to assume he could act as lord of the manor without permission. After several minutes she curled up on her mother’s coverlet, wishing she hadn’t drunk that last glass of wine. Spirits made her drowsy, drained her of the energy to write.
She closed her eyes. Oliver would wake up the entire house with the racket he was making. If he had half a brain, he would find the tunnel leading to the solar. The manor walls concealed a number of cavities in which the girls had played as children until Lilac had fallen through the rungs of a rotted ladder.
She’d broken her leg in several places, and it had never healed properly. The girls had been forbidden to explore the hidden passages of Fenwick after the accident.
When they were younger, they’d listened to the noises inside the walls at night and sometimes still did.
“They’re ghosts,” Rosemary always insisted.
“They’re rats,” Ivy would counter with all the authority of her one advanced year in age.
Rosemary kicked off her shoes. Tonight Rosemary was forced to agree with her sister. That was definitely a rat in the wall. And he was still scratching. She pulled a dust-laden pillow over her head and tried to remember where she had left off in her story, the revision of Anne Boleyn’s tragic life.
Mary’s bed looked like a shipwreck, even without benefit of a visit from her unruly brother. Ivy tucked the girl in snugly and escaped to her room without incident. Then she took her time washing and changing into her nightclothes, feeling not the least bit tired.
She wanted to stay up all night savoring the memory of the duke’s every caress, the silly conversation they had shared.
She wouldn’t have slept even if her conscience let her; just as she had blown out the candle, the loudest thunderclap she’d ever heard blasted from the back fields of the estate.
She waited for rain to fall.
She waited to hear Mary call for her.
She waited to hear one of the servants in the house rouse or the dogs bark, but there was no other disturbance until, at dawn, she forced herself to stir from her chair to face the day.
And the duke—as lovely as the prior evening’s intimacy had been, it had also been illicit and could only lead to unhappiness. Ivy certainly could not allow such liberties to continue.
Determined, she recommitted herself to resisting any other advances he made. Despite how she might feel toward Sir Oliver, at least the man had offered her marriage.
* * *
What a beautiful dream. Anne Boleyn stood on the brink of her revenge, watching as Henry was led to the scaffold, his head to lose. Beside her Rosemary heard the taunts and jeers of the spectators, the cries of treason from courtiers who jostled against her and pulled her back by the arm to squeeze in for a closer look.
“Don’t,” she mumbled, one insistent hand reaching through her dream to drag her across the bed. “Leave me alone. He deserves to die, and I shall be witness to justice served.”
A shrill voice assaulted her eardrum. “Thanks to you, he might well have died in there! What came over you, Rosemary? How could you be so unkind to a man who brought food to our table? One of these days you and Rue will murder some innocent who comes to our door.”
Rosemary groaned and buried her face in the pillow, but the tirade continued. “How could you mistreat the man who hopes to marry Ivy?”
Rosemary turned her head to avoid meeting Lilac’s baleful stare, only to look across the room into the smirking face of the man she had enclosed in the wall last night. And completely forgotten. She sat up in a swelter of guilt and resentment.
“He doesn’t look dead to me.”
“He was practically unconscious when I found him,” Lilac said, darting to Sir Oliver’s chair to dab his wrists and throat with the damp towel in her hand. “What if I hadn’t woken up in the middle of the night to check in on you? This is what happens when you overimbibe.”
“What if,” Rosemary mused, stretching her arms in the air. She narrowed her eyes. “What if that man who scribbles nursery rhymes hadn’t broken into the house and sneaked into Mother’s room, doing who knows what?”
Oliver surged from his chair. “Nursery rhymes?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I misspoke. Nursery rhymes convey political messages and contribute to social improvement. Your poems are written to impress wealthy tarts and flatter flatulent old lords.”
“Oh!” Lilac’s hand flew to her mouth. “Rosemary, how can you speak such awful words?”
Sir Oliver glanced in the old looking glass to straighten his stained cravat. “She speaks the same awful words that she writes. She hasn’t the talent to become a success and so she despises those who have.”
Rosemary stilled. The smile that spread across her face felt like ice breaking in a frozen pond.
“Where is my gun, Lilac, dear?”
Lilac shook her head, disregarding this threat. “He wants to be our friend, Rosemary. The only friend we’ve had in years. What has he done to earn your distrust?”
“Ask him why he was in the passageway.” Rosemary’s anger surged to the surface. She’d never wanted to pummel anyone in her life as much as she did Oliver, not even the most ruthless of debt collectors who had hounded the sisters without mercy for months on end. He’d gotten under her skin, and he knew it. “Ask him the reason why.”
Sir Oliver glanced at Lilac and shrugged helplessly, the handsome prince confronted by an evil witch. “I tried to explain to her last night, but she wouldn’t listen. You are my witness. She won’t listen to me now.”
“Rosemary, I’m truly ashamed of you,” Lilac said in an undertone.
“He’s a snake,” Rosemary said in an incredulous voice. “And he’s crawled into your good graces. Lilac, you’re a bumpkin and I shall tear my hair out by the roots with despair of you.”
Lilac calmly took her by the arm. “He went into the passageway because the carpenters had warned him that the interior structure of the house showed signs of decay. He was afraid the manor would collapse in on itself like a house of cards. He was concerned about the safety of the workmen and that we might witness an accident.”
Rosemary remained unmoved. “And his solution to this imaginary tragedy was to sacrifice himself? How noble.”
“I thought so,” Lilac said, frowning.
“Noble deeds can be performed during the day,” Rosemary exclaimed. “Wouldn’t it have been safer to explore in the morning with someone standing by with a light? And to ask permission?”
Sir Oliver looked sheepish. “I had a little too much wine last night and got carried away. I never meant to frighten anyone. Rosemary is right. I should have told someone what I was up to.”
“Do you see, Rosemary?” Lilac said. “This is what happens when one is cut off from society for five years. One loses perspective.”
“One loses one’s mind,” Rosemary muttered, walking straight past Oliver to the door with her pen and notebook in hand.
Lilac stared after her. “Don’t you have something else to say?”
“Yes. I have a pounding headache and I’m going to lock myself in Ivy’s room for the day. Aside from the delivery of a pot of tea and an apple tart, I would appreciate not being disturbed again.”
* * *
Sir Oliver studied Lilac’s generous curves from the chair in which she had forced him to sit and let her fuss over him like an angel of mercy. He had come close to asphyxiation in that passageway, and revival by a woman with a fine pair of bosoms and glittering blond curls had helped restore his temper.
She didn’t seem to suspect a thing, which made him wonder if he had chosen the wrong sister to pursue and whether it was too late to change tactics without looking like a complete bounder.
Lilac was lovely. Lilac was also lame. But he hadn’t intended to take his heiress wife to London, so in that regard her appearance mattered less than her fortune.
All the sisters appeared to be enamored of the manor house. He didn’t foresee a problem leaving his bride to rusticate while he carried on his usual affairs.
He reached around the chair for his jacket. “Lovely angel, it would be wrong of me to allow anyone else to catch us alone together in this bedroom and assume the worst.”
Lilac sighed. “That’s thoughtful of you, but there’s no one in this house to care anymore, Sir Oliver. I don’t know why my sisters think you’re up to no good.”
He pulled down his jacket sleeve. “Sisters? You mean Rosemary is not the only one?”
“Rue doesn’t much care for you, I’m afraid,” Lilac admitted.
He feigned a smile. “But you do?”
“Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”
“I can think of none, Lilac.”