At the sound of moaning, Hyacinth sat up in bed, the half-closed window hangings dancing in the night’s draft. Looking to the window, she stifled a scream. Something moved along the glass pane like a hand scrabbling for purchase.
She rubbed at her sleepy eyes. Surely, no one had climbed up the outer wall of Ashthorne Hall and attempted to enter through her window. Could a person even do that? She had to investigate. Swinging her legs out of bed, she felt the shock of her warm feet hitting the cold stone floor.
Moving toward the window, her steps were tiny and slow. She knew that whatever had startled her awake was simply a trick of the wind on stone, but now, standing in the darkness, surrounded by the sound of moans, the delightful fear she had felt touring the dim and shadowy hallways of Ashthorne with Lucas had lost its pleasurable coating. Hot waves of panic pulsed up her neck. Who could be reaching in her window? And how? The wind whipped her hair across her face, obscuring her vision even further, but she continued to place one foot before the other until she reached the window.
There is nothing to fear, she told herself. And then she told herself again. She placed her hands on the sill.
A black shape, darker than the night sky, pushed in and touched her hand.
Hyacinth shrieked and jumped back, her whole body flashing hot and then ice-cold in an instant. She felt a tingle across her scalp, as if each strand of her hair had grown a fraction of an inch simultaneously. Eyes wide and arms stretched out in front of her, she stared at the window, waiting for the ingress.
Within seconds, the shape pushed in again, and Hyacinth’s hands flew to cover her mouth. Growing accustomed to the darkness surrounding her, she dared take her eyes off the window to scan the room for something useful with which to defend herself, for even if she let out a full-throated scream, who would hear her? Mrs. Carter’s rooms were half a house away. Lucas Harding’s cottage, even farther.
She spotted the yawning mouth of the empty fireplace along the wall opposite her bed. If she dared turn her back to the window, she might reach the fireplace poker before whomever—or whatever—was out there made entry, at which time she would have both feet solidly planted on stone floor while the intruder clung to the ivy growing up the walls of Ashthorne.
The ivy. Growing up the walls.
Ivy.
The thought turned over in her mind like a key hitting the tumblers of a lock. Armed not with a weapon but with a rational explanation, she felt the stiffness ease out of her spine from the top to the base as she saw the intruding shape for what it was: a branch of ivy blowing in the wind, its leaves like hands pushing into the room.
Berating herself for being a fool, her relief lasted only until the next gust of wind played against the stones of the manor, drawing out another deep and painful moan. Even with full understanding of the architectural cause of the sound, Hyacinth could not repress her shudder of dread. In concert with the arms of ivy, no one with a beating heart could fail to experience this trembling of fear, particularly in the middle of a dark night.
She stepped over to the fireplace, keeping an eye on the window. Wrapping her fingers around the handle of the poker somehow made her brave. Maybe it was a connection to the logical part of her mind, however scarcely it made itself known these days. Poker in hand, she walked with fractionally more confidence. She felt grateful that no one watched her tiptoe to the window, jab at the ivy leaves with the fireplace tool—just to be certain—and then close the window and draw the draperies tight.
If Hyacinth felt like a fool for climbing into bed with a hearthside poker in her hands, at least she gave herself credit for solving the mystery. And if an hour or more passed before she could relax enough to lie back against the pillows, no one ever had to know.
Even with the draperies covering the window, Hyacinth saw the line of cloudy light crossing her floor from the sunrise several hours later. Body aching from continued tension during the restless second half of the night, she maneuvered herself out of bed, still clutching the poker. She used the tool to lift the edge of her window drapes, allowing colorless light to pour into the room. She unwrapped her hand from the rod, feeling each finger prickle as the flow of blood returned.
Pushing the curtains all the way open, she stared out at the perfectly still autumn morning. The roof of an outbuilding peeked through a grove of trees, each leaf still painted a quiet and peaceful green. Soon the trees would put on their colorful cloaks, and then drop their leaves for winter.
Not a bird flew across her view. A low morning mist draped the fields in a gauzy sheet. Everything Hyacinth could see testified to the most lovely, peaceful sunrise. A simple, cloudy autumn morning. Exactly as it should be.
But a whisper of wind still echoed, just enough to shiver the ivy covering the outer walls. She had not dreamed it, she knew. But nothing of what she saw, felt, or heard now even hinted at the violence of her fear in the night.
Nothing but a single leaf of ivy, torn from its vine, its edges tattered from the beating it endured, resting on the floor beneath the window.
Hyacinth lifted the leaf, brought it close to her eyes, inspected it.
Only a leaf.
Not a threat.
She wanted to remember this logical answer to her midnight fear, so she carried the leaf to her bedside table. She would keep it there, as a talisman against further nighttime folly. As she laid the leaf upon the table, she saw a small pewter bowl half filled with strawberries.
A bowl she was certain had not been there when she lay down for bed the night before.
Upon arriving in the kitchen, Hyacinth expected to find the usual basket of bread and bowl of fruit. Instead, she saw Mrs. Carter and Lucas Harding, heads pressed close together in rapid, whispered conversation.
Mrs. Carter shook her head. “She must not know. She cannot. It won’t be safe.”
A new shudder ran across Hyacinth’s shoulders like a tickle of intrigue. Stopping in the doorway, Hyacinth waited so as not to interrupt, and, whether she would admit it or not, wishing to hear more.
Lucas must have been looking for her. Without responding to Mrs. Carter’s statements, he straightened and turned to Hyacinth with a smile of delight upon his face, a smile that felt to Hyacinth warm and sincere.
“Good morning,” he said, stepping close to her and laying his hand gently upon her forearm, long fingers reaching toward her elbow.
Never had she imagined such a touch would feel so perfect. She smiled up at him in return.
“Good indeed,” she said. “So calm. So quiet. So unlike last night.”
Mrs. Carter darted a glance at Lucas and then at Hyacinth. “Did you have a restless night?” the housekeeper asked.
Hyacinth knew speaking the words would make her both feel and sound like a fool, but she simply could not stay silent. “I thought I was being haunted,” she said.
Mrs. Carter’s hands flew to her open mouth, shock and terror clear in her eyes.
Lucas placed a hand on the housekeeper’s arm, and Mrs. Carter stilled. Lucas sent another smile toward Hyacinth. “Whatever gave you that feeling?” he asked, his tone respectful of her former fears but appropriate to the light of the morning.
She turned to Mrs. Carter. “You know how this building weeps and moans. The breezes blew strong throughout the night.”
“Like we heard it last night?” Lucas asked, reminding her—as if she needed reminding—of their walk together.
Hyacinth nodded. “Yes, but stronger. Louder.”
“That does sound frightening,” Lucas said. “And you felt as though something sinister was afoot?”
“Oh, no. The menacing part was the hand reaching into my room.”
Mrs. Carter gave a yelp and looked at Lucas, her eyes wide. She turned back to Hyacinth. “You must bar your door. Every night. Without fail.”
What did Mrs. Carter imagine Hyacinth had seen? An intruder inside the house? Silly. No one was here on the property but the three of them.
Unless Mrs. Carter knew about the ghost.
Unless she had seen it too. How exciting.
Hyacinth restrained a laugh so as not to offend the woman. “The hand did not come from the bedroom door. It reached in through the window. But as it happens, it was not a hand at all, but a vine of ivy blowing in through the open pane.”
She saw Mrs. Carter relax a fraction.
“But fear not, I fought it off with a fireplace poker and my indomitable will.” Hyacinth brought a fist to her hip in mimicry of the heroic poses she had seen in the portraits throughout the manor.
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Carter said, offering a shaky chuckle. “You had a dreadful fright.”
Hyacinth did not wish the housekeeper to dwell on the misadventure, particularly if she was unwilling to offer any new information, so she gave another smile and assured her that the morning light had chased away any lingering fears. “The sunrise and the strawberries,” she said. “Thank you for bringing them to me.”
Shock passed over the housekeeper’s features. “What strawberries?”
“The ones you brought to my room this morning. The ones in the pewter bowl. The ones left undamaged by the chicken.”
Mrs. Carter stared at Hyacinth for too long before she forced a smile. “It was my pleasure. I’m happy to bring you anything that might make you more comfortable.”
If the look Mrs. Carter and Lucas exchanged had been hidden from Hyacinth, the shake of his head was not. More secrets.
Mrs. Carter excused herself from the room, and Hyacinth pocketed a crusty bread roll and picked up a handful of cherries.
“May I escort you to the greenhouse?” Lucas asked, extending his arm.
On the path, Hyacinth felt Lucas’s eyes on her, but he waited to speak until they were in the grove. “You spoke as though you were unafraid, but I worry you took your shock last night quite to heart.”
Heart.
Lucas was giving her an opening to say more. To make a confession. To continue to strengthen the ties that were drawing them closer.
For a fraction of a moment, she wondered if she could tell him of the true condition of her heart. How quickly, how completely he had taken root in her soul and how she felt herself blooming. She would rather speak of tomorrow’s future than of last night’s fear. But she only met him yesterday. How silly would she sound if she confessed that she already admired him, possibly even adored him?
She looked at him, reading his earnestness along with a look of something more than polite concern. The speed with which she had found herself sincerely attached to him still took her by surprise, but she could see from his words and actions, he felt the same. She was not alone in her regard.
But there were secrets. Even after only one day.
She knew Lucas and Mrs. Carter had been speaking of her when she was not with them, because their conversation stopped when she entered the room. Despite the discomfort such knowledge added to her already muddled feelings, she was delighted and surprised by their obvious mutual attraction, an unanticipated addition to her employment in Mr. Whitbeck’s garden.
All of these thoughts danced through her mind before she responded to his solicitation.
“I felt deeply afraid. And then deeply silly,” she told him honestly. She glanced up at him. “Do you think I really ought to bar my door as Mrs. Carter said? If she and I are the only ones in the house, what danger could possibly befall me?”
“There is nothing in the manor that will hurt you,” Lucas answered.
Hyacinth doubted that was true. But her mind was full of far more than decorative hanging swords and rooms crammed full of unused furnishings. She thought of her privacy.
According to Mrs. Carter, last evening’s strawberries had been destroyed by a rogue chicken in the kitchen. Yet they had appeared—or at least most of them—whole and unblemished in a bowl left on her nightstand by someone she had neither seen nor heard, sometime between her falling asleep and waking.
The ivy blunder had her questioning what she’d seen, what she thought she understood. But notwithstanding her misunderstanding about the intrusion through the window, someone had come into her bedroom in the night.
And yet she could not say the words to Lucas. Why was that? Fear, certainly. Fear that it had been him, sneaking into the manor, up the stairs, down the vast hallway, and into her room. Fear that it had been him, breaking all manner of rules of propriety, decency. Fear that it had been him, behaving unacceptably.
If it had been Lucas, she had misjudged his character deeply.
But if it had not been Lucas, someone else had stolen into her room in the dark of night.
Someone else. But who?
She said nothing. There was nothing she could say that would not make this awkward situation more uncomfortable. She could continue to collect data. She could wait.
With no further questions or confessions from either of them, Lucas left her at the door to the orchid house and went about his work.
Hyacinth worked until the sun rose to the center of the sky, then she set aside her tools and her notes. She walked to the table where Eleanor sat, her leaves and remaining blossoms looking strong and well.
“Eleanor, you are so brave. Even after a tumble, look how you’re holding on.”
She lifted the new pot in which her prized orchid grew and examined the underside of her leaves. “I think this hothouse is good for you, but I miss you when you’re not in the room with me. Perhaps I shall bring you inside the big house to sleep, at least some of the time. I should hope to be as bold and resilient as you are. But I have far to go, you know. There’s a whole manor house that is off-limits to me, and I have barely even set foot in the forbidden sections. That’s not very like me, is it?”
She set Eleanor’s pot carefully back on the table next to trays of rooting compound. She leaned close and whispered to the orchid, “I believe it’s time for me to see what I can see.”
Mrs. Carter had left no doubt about her rules, but Hyacinth Bell was not one to obey without question, especially when there was evidence to gather. The housekeeper could not be everywhere at once, after all. No one could.
Hyacinth walked toward the kitchen door, unsure if she’d rather find Mrs. Carter or not. If she saw the housekeeper, she would know where the woman was working and could explore without any need for explanation, but if she did not see her, she could not know where Mrs. Carter was working.
Mrs. Carter was not in the kitchen, and as Hyacinth moved past some of the sitting rooms, she stopped and listened. She heard sounds of cleaning: small objects being moved, a quiet humming, cloth whisking across furniture.
Perfect.
With quiet steps, Hyacinth walked to the foot of her staircase. If she was caught in defiance of Mrs. Carter’s rules, she could claim she was on her way to her bedroom. Even with this plan in her mind, she could not help but look up the north staircase to the forbidden hallway. The position of the autumn afternoon sun seemed to cast more shadows on that hallway than on her own.
At the top of the stairs, Hyacinth put her hand to the knob of the first door. It was locked tight, as she expected. She could move down the hall and try each door; surely Mrs. Carter had missed locking one or two. She turned toward the next room, but instead, she stiffened her spine and reminded herself that she was a person not so easily defeated.
Ashthorne Hall was hiding something, and Hyacinth would discover what it was.
Undeterred by a simple bedroom door, she leaned down and inspected the locking mechanism, sure that, with the help of a pair of hairpins, she could enter, just as she had done to her older sister’s room in years long past.
She grasped the handle and rattled the knob, feeling the solid wood construction and the snug fit of the door in its casing.
“Very solid workmanship. Well done, builders,” she murmured. She knelt, holding her eye to the knob. The metal surrounding the lock was scratched and scuffed, scraped as if by picks or pins.
“Ah. I am not the only one who considers a locked door a worthy challenge.” She wondered if one of the Whitbeck children shared her tendency to enter rooms forbidden to them. The thought made her chuckle and then firm her resolve.
Pulling out two pins from her hair, she made a few cursory stabs at the lock, her movements made more awkward than usual by the heavy shadows in the hall and her nerves fluttering at the possibility of discovery.
Shaking her head, she pushed all thoughts of Mrs. Carter into the back of her mind and renewed her efforts.
When she could feel the resistance of tumblers within the lock, she wiggled and twisted until the lock sprang free.
“Ha,” she said, then held her hand to her mouth. Instead of crowing in pleasure, she patted the doorknob and smiled to herself.
Hyacinth stood upright and stepped into the room. The first thing she noticed was the movement of the holland covers over the furnishings. The second was the strength of the breeze. She moved to the wall and put her hands to the open window, wondering why Mrs. Carter would leave a window thrown wide in a locked room.
A careful exploration of the room would take longer than the few minutes she had, but she made her way along the walls, passing each item of furniture, running her hand over desk and dresser, armoire and bedposts. She lifted covers on each painting and mirror. What, she wondered, did she think she might find? A chest of treasure? A pirate’s map? A warren for the spirits that haunted the manor?
Nothing startling appeared in her search. In fact, the room felt quite familiar. Even with the dustcloths shrouding the furnishings, Hyacinth could see how its appointments compared to her own. A dressing table. A stand beside the bed. Another black cabinet, locked, just like the one in her bedroom.
A clock chimed somewhere in the manor, and she made her way back to the door, careful to ease her way out slowly in case Mrs. Carter had finished cleaning the sitting room and moved toward the stairs.
Hyacinth hurried down the hall to her own room, heart thrumming with excitement as she ran along the carpeted floor. She had done it. Entered a forbidden room. With this success behind her, what adventure was outside her reach? Now that she had made her way into a locked room, what would stop her from trying a door or two in the forbidden hallway? She felt great delight in the prospect of continued exploration. She grinned, knowing she could enter the manor’s locked rooms any time the fancy struck her, and the very idea made her feel more than ever at home.