Kylemore spoke as kindly as he was able, given the tempest raging inside him. “I’m sure you didn’t, Elsie. This will remain our secret if you agree to answer my questions. Our secret and I’ll give you a gold sovereign for your help.”
Elsie’s eyes rounded at the offer, although she still trembled. He assumed tête-à-têtes with the nobility were outside her ken.
“Yes, sir. Th-thank you, sir.” She bobbed into another curtsey.
“First of all, where is your mistress?”
Elsie shook her head. “I don’t know, Your Grace. She and Mr. Ben went off in a hired carriage last night. I was the only one left behind, but I didn’t hear their direction. They was both dressed for traveling, though.” Elsie, when not fearing for her life or virtue, was clearly far from stupid.
“Did they take all the household things with them?”
“No, sir. Only a few boxes in the carriage. Everything else was sold, even Miss Soraya’s clothes. Which was odd. She still needs to dress herself, don’t she?” Elsie relaxed into her story. “There’s been blokes in and out of the house all week carting away pictures and furniture and stuff.”
“And you believe the house has been sold as well?”
“Oh, it has, sir. A nabob’s moving in. I caught a peek at him last week—all brown and burnt he is, sir. Quite nasty. Why, Mr. Ben, he said…”
Suddenly Kylemore realized just what had niggled at him earlier. “Mr. Ben? You mean Ben Ahbood, the servant? He spoke?”
he asked sharply.
Elsie’s confidence faltered and she looked at Kylemore with renewed nervousness. “Of course, sir.”
“And he has spoken this whole time?” A horrible suspicion grew in his mind. A suspicion that the mystery of Soraya’s disappearance wasn’t such a mystery after all but the oldest story in the world.
Elsie clearly thought his questions were insane. “Yes, sir. How else could he tell us what to be getting on with?”
“And how did this Mr. Ben sound?” he asked in a dangerous tone.
“How do you mean, sir?”
He curbed his impatience before he panicked her into her cupboard again. “Did he speak as I do? As you do? Did he sound foreign?”
She frowned. “I don’t know about foreign. He didn’t sound like me—or you either, sir.”
Given that Kylemore spoke with the clipped accents of the upper classes and Elsie had a decided Cockney twang, he couldn’t say that narrowed the field much.
“And he and…and Miss Soraya.” He nearly choked on the name. His mistress was lucky she wasn’t here now or he might have choked her instead. “Did they seem close, friendly?”
“Oh, yes, sir!” Elsie said with enthusiasm.
Then she must have perceived his hostile reaction to that information, because she went on. “Not in any untoward way, sir. Just friendly. Affectionate, like. Please don’t get the wrong idea about Miss Soraya, sir. She was always awful good to us staff, whatever else she was, begging your pardon. Why, she gave all of us a month’s wages extra and good references afore she left. Even though she said she was sure Your Grace would see us right anyway, considering we was really working for you.”
Kylemore was in no mood to listen to praises of his absconded paramour. But Elsie had clearly been fond of Soraya, and apart from further encomiums on the jade’s character, he could discover little else from the girl. Eventually he sent her on her way with the promised sovereign and instructions to see his butler at Kylemore House about work in the kitchens there.
Then he furiously combed every inch of the villa, although he already knew the crafty bitch he’d kept in such high style would have made sure nothing here could help him trace her. She hadn’t even left him so much as a mug to smash, and by the time he’d finished his mad search, he dearly needed to smash something. Preferably Ben Ahbood’s smug face.
All the time, his mind circled the problem of Soraya and just how much of a fool she’d made of him in their dizzyingly expensive year together.
Ben Ahbood was not mute after all. If he was not mute, it was highly unlikely he was a eunuch either. And no man could know Soraya without wanting her.
So had she played Kylemore false with her manservant?
They had been living together, Devil take them. Only a soup-brained nitwit could imagine their relationship was innocent.
The idea of that hulking brute grunting over Soraya’s pale naked beauty became too much. Cursing, Kylemore burst out of the house into the garden. He breathed deeply and struggled to order the anarchy hurtling through his head.
He was Cold Kylemore, famous for his self-control. No damned twopenny whore and her fancy man could disrupt his sangfroid.