Daniel opened the gate at the back of Frithgerd’s gardens and ushered his party through. The walk to see the site for the new mill wheel and pump, which Daniel had anticipated as a chance to spend more time with Miss Pendleton, had somehow turned into an expedition. Henry Carson was with them of course, but Macklin and young Tom had attached themselves as well. The latter was full of questions for Carson about building methods and materials, which was no great matter. But Macklin had taken the position at Miss Pendleton’s side that Daniel had begun to think of as his rightful place. She was ethereally lovely in a muslin gown the color of peach blossoms with just a shawl over her arms on this warm summer morning.
“I’ll go ahead and find the miller,” said Carson after a while. “He’s to meet us by the stream.”
The builder strode ahead up the slope behind the house. When he was out of earshot, Macklin said, “We have some news. I believe Whitfield told you about the possibility of watchers?”
Miss Pendleton’s face grew shuttered, and Daniel nearly cursed. She’d been looking so happy these last few days, full of plans and even jokes. The past should be left in the past, he thought. Raking it up never did any good.
“Tom has been roaming about the neighborhood,” the older man added. “It’s a habit of his, and everyone is used to it by now. They scarcely notice him anymore. So he’s ideally placed to keep an eye out for strangers.”
Miss Pendleton frowned at Tom, whether in concern or disapproval Daniel couldn’t tell.
“And he’s spotted someone,” Macklin continued. “Tell them what you told me, Tom.”
The lad nodded. “It’s a fella staying above the tavern in the next village over,” he said. “Toward Rose Cottage. Said he’s here to study butterflies.”
“Butterflies?” Daniel found the excuse unlikely.
Tom nodded as if he felt the same. “But he don’t seem that sort of person, if you know what I mean. More like a military man, I’d have said. And he don’t know much more about butterflies than I do. I asked him about those little purple ones, and he didn’t seem to know which ones I meant. He walks the fields with a net and a case. But when I watched him for a bit, he didn’t catch any butterflies.”
“What is his name?” asked Miss Pendleton.
“He told the tavern keeper Jake Wendell, but I didn’t believe him.”
“Why not?”
“I just didn’t.” Tom shrugged. “Growing up on your own, you get a feel for liars. Or you get in a mort of trouble.” He received their sympathetic glances with a shrug.
“What does he look like?” Miss Pendleton’s face showed the anxiety that Daniel had hoped was eased.
“Tall and well set up,” replied Tom. “Long, sharp nose and a chin to match. Black hair but light eyes. The kind of fella you don’t want to cross, in my opinion. Like the bully boys in Bristol.”
“Does that sound familiar?” Macklin asked her.
“No. I don’t remember anyone like that.” She crossed her arms and gripped her elbows protectively.
Daniel longed to wrap her in his arms and shield her from harm. Which he had no right to do. Or ability? What could he do about a suspicious visitor? “He was the only stranger in the neighborhood?” he asked.
“The only funny one.”
“You should keep an eye on him, see what he does.”
“But be careful not to let him see you following him,” said Macklin.
“He won’t, my lord.”
“This isn’t the streets of Bristol.”
“I’m used to the country now.” Tom sounded confident.
“Really,” said Miss Pendleton. “These people are not gentle or patient. Do not put yourself in jeopardy on my account.”
“No need to worry, miss.”
“That is what you think,” she replied, almost too quietly to hear. “And then you discover how naive and ignorant you were.”
It would be vastly satisfying to thrash the men who’d made her feel that way, Daniel thought. He realized that Macklin was watching him. He unclenched his fists.
They rounded a clump of trees and saw Henry Carson standing beside the stream with a short, plump man in buckskin breeches, an old-fashioned skirted coat, and a tricorn hat. Daniel recognized Walter Simpson, the local miller. They’d met before on estate business, and he’d found Simpson brusque but extremely competent. Daniel moved forward to greet him and introduce the others.
Simpson nodded with the air of a man who valued manners but had no time to waste. “You’ve got a decent head of water here,” he said. The stream was fifteen feet across at this point, tumbling over good-sized rocks. “And it runs pretty strong all year, as you know, my lord.”
“Quite a spate when it rains,” Daniel replied.
“Which is why you need the right bit of bank for your wheel,” said Simpson. “And I’ve found you one.”
He led them upstream to a spot where the riverlet narrowed between two rock outcroppings and dropped in a picturesque waterfall. “You wouldn’t even need a dam here,” said Simpson. “You could fit an overshot wheel right in there. The fall has hollowed out a space behind, y’see.”
They all peered into the dim space behind the cascading water.
“And the water here is deep enough to fit your pump,” the miller said, indicating the pool below.
“I had thought of that bigger pool near the house,” said Henry Carson.
“Aye, but that’s where all the kiddies hereabouts swim this time of year and the young people picnic,” said Simpson.
Daniel met the miller’s sharp green eyes, impressed that he’d taken this into account.
“You don’t need too tall a wheel for a pump, my lord.” He turned to Carson. “You just have to figure how to cut off when your water tank up at the house is full.”
Simpson and Carson fell into a discussion of shafts and gears and levers. Carson made notes and drawings on a slate he’d brought along. Tom leaned over the diagrams with eager curiosity.
“Perhaps your young friend would like to be a builder,” Daniel said to Macklin.
“Waterworks is certainly an up-and-coming discipline,” the earl replied. “We’ll see if Tom’s interest lasts. He’s always taken by new ideas. But he tends to move on once his curiosity is satisfied.”
On the walk back to the house, Daniel managed to get Miss Pendleton to himself by the simple expedient of moving slower and slower until the others had pulled well ahead. Yet solitude didn’t bring her back from far away. “It’s fortunate Simpson knows someone who can design the millworks.”
“What? Oh, yes.”
She’d been immersed in details of the project, full of enthusiasm, laughing with him as Carson’s helper took a sledgehammer to Frithgerd’s corridor wall. But now she’d gone muted, guarded, and suspicious as she’d been when they’d first met. Daniel loathed the change. “I’d feared the water wheel would take longer,” he tried. “Two weeks is much better than I expected.”
Miss Pendleton merely nodded. She scarcely looked at him.
An image flashed on Daniel’s inner eye, repeating as quick as an eyeblink. A carriage driving away, with no acknowledgment from the passengers as the vehicle grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared around a bend in the road. Again, and again, without mercy. “Don’t go.”
“What?” His companion turned, stared, her attention definitely caught.
Had he spoken aloud? Surely not. The pictures had been momentary, barely grasped and then gone. And they made no sense whatsoever. Of course she would be going. She didn’t live here. She wasn’t with him in any conventional sense. And thus she would be leaving. In her gig, not a traveling carriage. As she always did. Desolation was inappropriate. Desolation? Ridiculous.
Miss Pendleton touched his arm. “Lord Whitfield?”
He’d stopped walking. His chest felt tight. What the deuce? He moved, a step and then faster. “We should make sure Carson remembers to engage the bricklayer.”
Puzzled, Penelope strode after him. They both knew that Henry Carson needed no reminders; he’d proved his competence over the last few days. So what had caused the strain in Whitfield’s face and the urgency of his tone? She felt a leap of sympathy even though she didn’t understand. Had he said, “Don’t go”? She wasn’t sure now. He’d muttered. The pain in his face had distracted her.
Penelope’s dark memories, the despair she’d felt at the idea of watchers looming over her, receded a bit. She hurried to catch up with him.
“What news on the piping?” he asked when she reached his side.
“Elm is recommended. The pipes can be made from trees in your woods.” He knew this. She’d told him.
“Tom wants to see how they are bored out.”
“So you said.”
“Did I? You have a marvelous memory. I don’t know how I got anything done without you.”
Penelope found his joking tone irritating. But if he wanted to pretend the last few minutes had been just as usual, she couldn’t stop him. He wasn’t obliged to explain himself to her. Pushing aside a brush of hurt, she said, “I wanted to talk to you about your mother.” She’d been trying to find a time to tell him her theory.
Whitfield started and looked at her as if she’d said something bizarre. “My mother?”
What was the matter with him today? “I have an idea about her notebooks,” she replied.
“Notebooks?”
It was a perfectly simple word. There was no need to look at her as if she was daft. “I think they might be in code.”
He couldn’t have looked more astonished. “Code?” he repeated.
“Or call it a private writing system,” Penelope went on. “Some people invent those to keep their personal thoughts private. There’s Leonardo da Vinci’s mirror writing, for example.”
Once again, he stopped on the path. “You cannot be comparing my mother to da Vinci.”
“Well, no. Or only in this one sense. Creating a hidden way of writing.”
“But why would she do that?” Whitfield looked bewildered, then annoyed. “Would she go to such great lengths to keep from revealing herself? Was that really necessary?”
Penelope blinked at the anger in his voice.
“To be deliberately incomprehensible,” he continued, voice rising. “And then, as if that was not enough, to hide her notebooks in the lining of trunks where I was bound never to find them. She must have known I never would. Was she insane?”
“Well, perhaps she had some reason,” Penelope began.
“What possible reason could she have had?” He started walking again, very fast.
Penelope nearly had to run to keep up with him. “And anyway, you did find them.”
“You did. She didn’t count on you. Nobody could have imagined you.” With a humorless laugh, Whitfield strode down to the garden gate, opened it, and started back toward the house.
She trotted after him, wanting to ask what he’d meant by that last remark. It hadn’t sounded like a compliment. Nor had it seemed to be a criticism exactly. She gazed up at him as they raced along. His face was grim and closed. Perhaps it would be better to drop this subject. But she was driven to solve the puzzle of the journals. He must feel the same, surely? They contained his mother’s thoughts. “So, if it is a code, which I really think it is, there must be a key.”
“A key? To unlock what exactly?”
“Not an actual physical key. It would be a list of the phrases and symbols that she used over and over again. She did, you know. You can see the repetition if you look through the notebooks. So the key would have an explanation of what each one stands for. Substitutions.”
“Substitutions,” Whitfield echoed. His sidelong glance was darkly skeptical.
“Yes.” In her hurry, Penelope tripped on a stone in the garden path. She stumbled, trying to catch her lost balance.
Whitfield caught her, effortlessly holding her upright with one arm and pressing her close against his chest. He felt like a bulwark. There were his lips, inches from hers. There was the line of his jaw and the breadth of his shoulder. The anger drained from his expression as he stared down at her. “You really believe they’re meant to be…deciphered?”
“I think it’s a strong possibility.” She was breathless. Her hands had gripped his upper arms as if they belonged there. She didn’t want to let go.
“You do know how strange that sounds.”
The cloth of his coat was smooth under her fingertips. She couldn’t look away. And seemingly, neither could he. “The notebooks are rather strange.”
He gave a bark of laughter. “An understatement, Miss Pendleton. And why, we ask? Uselessly.”
“We might learn the reason if we decode them.”
He let her go. Did he regret that as much as she did? Penelope inhaled the sweet scent of some flowering bushes at the edge of the path. The heady perfume would always remind her of him.
“How do you propose to do that?” he asked, his voice gone flat again.
“By finding the key, of course.”
“Finding. We haven’t had much luck at that so far. Nothing about the Rose Cottage legacy. Just a mountain of moldering paper.”
Something had certainly soured his mood. Penelope wanted to raise it. “I think the key would be among your mother’s personal things.” She explained her reasoning to him.
“My parents’ possessions were packed up and stored in the attic,” he said when she’d finished.
“Shall we go and look at them?”
Daniel was reluctant. He didn’t want to go through his mother’s things. Nor did he care what her diaries said, or so he told himself. When had anything gone right with his parents? But Miss Pendleton was practically vibrating with curiosity. The bright enthusiasm was back in her face, and he couldn’t deny her. Daniel nodded and walked on.
They made a brief stop to question his housekeeper and snag a branch of candles, and then he led the way upstairs to the attic.
“Mrs. Phipps said they put my mother’s things over here when they cleared out her room.” He walked around bits of old furniture and stacks of boxes to the west side of the main attic. As his housekeeper had promised, he could easily identify the recent additions to storage. To one side was his father’s old shaving stand. He hadn’t wanted to look at it every day, and anyway he had a newer, more efficient one. “These should be hers,” he added, indicating a neat row of trunks and boxes and a dressing table that he hadn’t wanted to see again either. He lit the candles, augmenting the light from the dormer windows, and put them on the dressing table. Melancholy threatened. He pushed it aside.
“Right.” Miss Pendleton surveyed the prospects like a workman rolling up his sleeves. “Do you want to—”
“You look,” said Daniel.
Sympathy and uncertainty seemed mingled in the glance she gave him. She opened a trunk and began lifting out gowns swathed in linen. Unfolding the coverings, she examined each one. “No pockets,” she said. “You have no idea how lucky you are to have so many pockets in your clothes.”
The scent his mother had used drifted over them. Daniel was besieged by fragments of memories, glimpses of his parents flitting in and out of his life. Mostly out. Without a backward glance.
Miss Pendleton replaced the gowns and repeated the process with a second similar trunk. She looked through a box of shoes, gloves, handkerchiefs, and reticules, turning out the latter and shaking each one. She sorted through ornaments from his mother’s room and mementos from her travels. Her enthusiasm appeared to dim as she found no sign of what she wanted.
The last two trunks held hatboxes. She looked inside them all, and the hats. “Nothing,” she said. She sat down on a closed trunk, surrounded by sheaves of tissue paper and ornate headgear.
“Her dressing case and more personal items went down with the ship,” said Daniel. He was ready to leave this shadowed room and the weight of the past.
“She wouldn’t keep the key with her,” declared Miss Pendleton.
“Why not?”
“That would have defeated the purpose of a code. Anyone might have found it and deciphered the journal she carried. No, the notebooks were hidden here at Frithgerd. The key would have been, too.”
“You may be making far too much of this. Perhaps my mother just had an addiction to…inane scribbling.” Had the contents of her mind been as jumbled as the estate records, Daniel wondered. Was his heritage nothing but muddle?
“I don’t think it can be that. I feel the notebooks are important.”
Conviction and curiosity lit her face. She wouldn’t give up; she wouldn’t turn away. Daniel felt as if he could look at her forever.
She sighed. “But there isn’t even a scrap of paper.”
He roused himself and looked around. “My mother had a writing desk. Its contents should be with the rest of her things.”
“Oh!” Miss Pendleton spread her hands. “We’re idiots! We had all the papers taken downstairs. Whatever was in her desk must be among them.” She grimaced. “If only we’d known from the first, this might have been much easier.” She wrapped tissue around a hat, nestled it in its box, and replaced the lid. When she bent to place the container in the open trunk, she said, “What’s this?” Setting the hatbox aside, she reached into the bottom of the trunk, coming up with a small flat case covered in velvet.
“Looks like jewelry.” Daniel held out his hand. “That should have gone to the strong room.” She handed it to him, and he opened it. A sapphire and diamond necklace sparkled in the candlelight. He’d never seen his mother wear this. But then he’d seen so little of her. Daniel looked up. The sapphires were just the color of Miss Pendleton’s eyes. “This would suit you.”
Penelope’s frustration flamed into a violent revulsion. She wasn’t angling for jewels. Mistresses got jewels, were continually greedy for them by all accounts. Did he suppose she was helping him to augment her fortune, to cajole rich gifts out of him? “I don’t want a necklace.”
“I merely observed that sapphires are your—”
She barely heard him. “I need no largesse from you.”
“Largesse? What sort of word is that?”
“The sort used by sanctimonious prigs who patronize the poor and downtrodden.” She’d been looked down upon by too many insulting men in the last year. She wouldn’t tolerate any more.
“What the deuce is wrong with you?”
“I don’t want your necklace!”
“I wasn’t offering it to you!”
“But you said—” She broke off in confusion.
“That sapphires would suit you. Not that you could have my mother’s necklace.”
Penelope felt the blush spread from her cheeks down her neck and across her chest. She was certain the crimson was visible even in the dim light. She’d allowed unhappy memories to control her. She’d vowed never to do that. Still agitated, she said, “I decide what suits me and whether I shall have it. Not you.”
“Undoubtedly. But that does not give you the right to—”
“My desires are not your responsibility.”
Whitfield blinked.
She’d silenced him, Penelope saw, enjoying the sensation. And yes, this was about far more than a necklace. It was about a year of being chivvied about and mistrusted and frightened, whenever her captors could manage that. They’d intimidated her for quite a time. Perhaps they meant to try again, by sending someone to lurk in her new neighborhood and spy on her. She couldn’t stop them. But she could refuse to follow the steps they laid out, like the lines of a dispiriting play.
The light in Whitfield’s dark eyes shifted as she gazed steadily into them. Her past trials weren’t his fault. But her future wasn’t his responsibility either. Her decisions were her own. He would have to learn that.
She stepped closer and set a hand on his shirtfront. She could feel his heart beating against her palm. She moved closer still.
It was like setting a spark to tinder, or plying the bellows to make a fire flare. She could rouse him with a gesture, she thought, and she gloried in that power. Penelope slipped her arms around his neck and kissed him.
His arms and lips received her with only an instant’s hesitation. Then he was holding her, and their kiss went from gentle to probing to urgent.
A great wave of certainty rose in Penelope, riding the sweet sensations that shook her whole body. She wanted this. She would have what she wanted. She pressed against him. His hands slid over her, promising delights.
“My lord Whitfield?” Tom’s voice floated up the stairwell. “Miss Pendleton?”
Whitfield pulled away as if he’d been stung. Though he looked dazed, he took two quick steps back. His boot heel caught on an uneven floorboard, and he stumbled briefly.
Tom’s homely figure appeared at the head of the stairs. “They said you was up here. Mr. Carson needs you to approve the size of the new doorway before they frame it in.”
Whitfield muttered something—possibly a curse. Penelope was pleased to think it was, at any rate.