Lady Cooper made a slight adjustment of her bonnet. “Of course.”
“Nothing could be simpler,” said Lady Withcote.
The three women stood near the entrance door of the great hall. They were waiting for the carriage that would take Ladies Cooper and Withcote to Edinburgh.
Their mission was to seek out Frederick Dalmay’s nurse and servants and pump them for information.
“I hope you won’t find it too tedious,” Olivia said. “It might be a bit like finding a needle in a haystack.”
“Oh, I think not,” said Lady Cooper. “We know the names. We ought to be able to find them easily enough.”
“And once we find them, I foresee no difficulty in getting them to talk,” said Lady Withcote.
“When all else fails, bribery will usually do the trick,” said Lady Cooper.
A footman came in from outside. “The carriage is here, your ladyships.”
Lisle entered minutes after the ladies departed.
“They said they were going to Edinburgh,” he said. “To look for clues.”
Olivia hadn’t seen him since last night. It had taken her a long while to fall asleep. She’d come down very late to breakfast as a result. The ladies were there but he wasn’t. He was out with the workers, Herrick had told her.
She’d decided to behave as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. It was easier than she’d expected. He was still Lisle, and what they’d done last night seemed by daylight to be the most natural thing in the world.
Because she loved him and had probably always loved him. The love had taken different forms over the years, but there it was.
And there he was . . . holding a shovel.
“Did you bring that indoors for some mysterious purpose, or did you forget to leave it in the courtyard?” she said.
He was frowning at her hand. He looked up. “What?”
“The shovel.”
“Ah, yes. This.” He gazed at it. “One of the workmen found it this morning when he arrived. One shovel. One pickaxe.”
“Evidence,” she said.
“I didn’t need evidence,” he said. “I believed you. But I hadn’t pictured it properly. You must have terrified them.” He grinned. “They dropped everything and ran.”
“Everything except the lantern.” If they’d dropped the lantern, she wouldn’t have been able to follow . . . and what had happened afterward wouldn’t have happened.
“Still, I didn’t mean to carry it in,” he said. “I saw the ladies leave, and I came in to ask you about it, and I forgot to leave the shovel outside.”
He looked about him. Herrick appeared. “Yes, your lordship. Joseph will take that for you.” A footman hurried forward and took the shovel and went out.
Herrick vanished.
“I’m not myself today,” Lisle said in a low voice. “Can’t think why.”
The fire crackled in the grate. Servants padded to and fro, discreetly going about their business. A pale light traversed the deep window recesses, softening the gloom of the vast room, but not exactly illuminating the place. A candelabra stood on the table. By the clock it was broad day, but by Scottish weather, it was twilight.
The air between them thrummed.
“Strange dreams, perhaps,” she said.
“Yes.” His gaze drifted down to her hand again. “At any rate, I’ve come to help.”
“Help what?” she said.
“I’ve come to help you look for clues,” he said.
The way she’d looked at him when he came in.
But it was the same way she’d looked at him that night when he’d found her in the ballroom. Had he seen worlds in those blue eyes then?
He’d seen something, and it had stopped him in his tracks.
Last night she’d said . . . she’d said. . .
I adore you. I always have and always will.
What did it mean, what did it mean?
He said, “I was wrong to dismiss your clue out of hand. I was wrong about those provoking ghosts. If I’d stopped to think for a minute—but it’s obvious now why I didn’t. The fact is, I was wrong. The fact is, the men don’t need me standing over them constantly. The fact is, we need to stop the ghosts. At present, your plan is a perfectly good one. The ghosts must have strong reasons for believing they’ll find a treasure here that no one else believes in. Either they’re completely insane or extremely stupid or something’s misled them . . . or it exists.”
She folded her hands at her waist. She wore very little jewelry. A simple bracelet. One ring, that one ring.
“Thank you,” she said.
He dragged his gaze from the ring. He glanced about, but no servants stood nearby. “That’s why I was awake when you came in during the night,” he said softly. “The paper you found nagged at my mind. It wouldn’t let me sleep. I got up to see what I could make of it. I had some ideas, but I was working from memory. I should like to have another look at it.”
“It’s in the muniments room,” she said.
As Lisle had been surprised to discover, the castle’s simple exterior concealed a complex and inconsistent interior. The entresol Olivia had made their muniments room was tucked between the first-floor kitchen passage and an alcove off the second-floor drawing room. Its window overlooked the gap between the north and south wings.
The straightforward way to get there was by climbing the south tower staircase. The other route took one up to and across the minstrels’ gallery through the door into the north tower. Then a left turn into a short passage, past the doorway to Herrick’s quarters, then up a shallow set of stairs. The room was larger and brighter than the kitchen passage below, because the window recess wasn’t as deep. Not that it was exactly bright on this grey day.
“Well?” she said.
He looked about. “The last time I saw it, the place was a jumble of boxes and books.”
“This is Herrick’s doing,” she said. “He’s had the workmen put up shelves and install a cupboard.”
Now everything was in its place, neatly labeled.
He oughtn’t to be surprised. He’d seen how she organized the staff. All the same, it was a puzzle. In so many ways, she was so chaotic.
But no, that wasn’t quite right. She was calculating, too. Ruthlessly so at times.
Maybe she only seemed chaotic because she made her own rules.
“The furniture came from your cousin Frederick’s study,” she said.
There wasn’t much. A small, plain writing table with a single drawer stood in the window recess. An old-fashioned wooden writing box lay on the table. One very utilitarian chair that probably weighed a ton.
“It looks like the sort of thing Dr. Johnson might have written his dictionary on,” he said, “if he wrote on his grandfather’s writing table.”
“Frederick Dalmay was not a man of fashion,” said Olivia. “Most of his belongings were so old and ugly, I left them in Edinburgh. Mains is waiting for you to tell him whether to sell them or give them away. But I thought we ought to have something of your cousin’s here. He lived in this castle for so long, and seemed to love it. I thought those pieces fit here well enough.”
“They look very well,” he said.
“Better here than they did anywhere else, at any rate,” she said. “Herrick’s moved the more recent household ledgers to his office. Since your cousin’s collection is all about the castle’s history, it seemed right to consider the books and papers as estate papers or muniments, and keep them here with the other property documents and such.”
She took a book from the shelf. “I put the mystery paper back into the book where I found it,” she said, “in case there’s a key to the code in the book itself. I c
an’t see any connection, but you might. I thought that whoever put the paper there probably didn’t do it at random.”
She opened the book to the page where the odd paper lay, and gave him the book.
He took out the singed document and scanned the pages between which it had been placed.
“One of the ghost stories,” she said. “The one about the dungeon prisoner. I thought there might be a connection.”
“Might be.”
She drew nearer and peered at the paper he held. He could smell her hair and her skin and the shadow of a fragrance that hung in the air about her.
“I remembered it better than I thought,” he said. “The same clumsy grid, and those tiny symbols or figures scratched in some of the rectangles.”
“I know it could be a puzzle,” she said. “Or a game. But I can’t give up the feeling that it’s more.”
“That’s what kept me awake,” he said. “The feeling that there was more than I was seeing.”
“I’m not good at these things,” she said. “Decoding wants logic, and I’m not logical.”
“You don’t have to be,” he said. “I’m logical enough for two.”
“It does look like a child’s attempt to draw the castle,” she said. “The flattened perspective. The curious proportions.”
“That’s the style of Egyptian art, essentially,” he said. “Take the wall paintings. Size isn’t in proportion. Size designates importance. The face is in profile, but one eye looks straight out from . . .” He trailed off, his attention shifting from the paper to the room about him. “The wall,” he said. “We’re looking at a wall.”
She followed his gaze. “A wall? But that’s so straightforward.”
“Maps are usually straightforward, too.” He squinted at the tiny figures. “I should have brought my magnifying glass.”
She opened the writing box and took out a magnifying glass. “I needed it to read Cousin Frederick’s writing,” she said.