“Herfate? What do you think has happened to her?”
“What would your parents have done to your sister if she hadn’t run away?” asked Lady Somersby.
Livia felt her jaw unhinge. “You think Lady Ingram has been shoved into the attic like Mr. Rochester’s wife?”
“Who is this Mr. Rochester?” asked Lady Avery. “Why have I never heard of such infamy?”
“Fictional character, Caro. Dreadful mad wife in the attic, and with her there he tries to marry someone else.” Lady Somersby turned back to Livia. “At least Lord Ingram won’t be able to commit bigamy with your sister, since we all know he’s already married.”
Livia could barely keep her voice from rising an entire octave. “Why do you keep bringing everything back to my sister?”
“Everything comes back to her because she is an understandable motive. Think of this, what if Lady Ingram had something to do with her downfall? What if, instead of Mrs. Shrewsbury, it had been Lady Ingram who organized that mob who marched in on her and Mr. Shrewsbury? And what if Lord Ingram, in punishing his wife, thinks of himself as having righted a wrong perpetrated against Miss Charlotte Holmes?”
“Ladies, I begin to weary of declaring your ideas preposterous. It isn’t so simple to hold someone prisoner!” Livia had tried writing something like that in her Sherlock Holmes story and the problems had immediately become apparent. “How does he feed her? Who empties her chamber pot? How does he prevent her from screaming without suffocating her in the process?”
A scream pierced the peaceful afternoon.
Livia started. The ladies looked at each other in confusion. The scream came again, a man’s scream. The three women picked up their skirts and ran.
The path led downhill. Soon Livia saw the man. The boy, rather, an adolescent dressed in a dark jacket and dark trousers. A servant of the house.
He was on his knees. When he saw the women coming toward him, he rose unsteadily to his feet and attempted to speak.
“She’s—she’s—” He swallowed. “She’s in there. She’sinthere!”
He pointed to an grassy mound to their left.
“Who is in there?” demanded Lady Avery.
But the boy trembled, as if he’d come down with a case of palsy, and couldn’t get another word out.
Livia peered at the mound. “Is that the icehouse?”
“I believe so,” said Lady Somersby grimly.
They found the entrance on the north side of the mound. The heavy door hadn’t been locked but had shut by its own weight. With some effort, Livia pulled it open.
What in the world was she doing? She should be staying with the poor, traumatized boy. Why was she headed for a destination that had made him run out screaming?
And who wasshe?
They passed through three antechambers, each chillier than its predecessor. The second one smelled of a badly kept latrine. Livia grimaced. Why should there be such a disagreeable odor in an icehouse?
The third antechamber was quite large. The lit taper that had been set into a wall bracket illuminated shelves built to either side, holding all kinds of foodstuff that benefited from cold storage. A wheelbarrow lay sideways on the floor, which was wet from a pail of milk that had been knocked over.
And fortunately here the air smelled mostly of milk and cold, nothing foul.
They skirted the puddle and headed for the last door.
Which opened to greater brightness than Livia anticipated—the lamp just inside had two lit tapers and a mirrored back. The ceiling domed above the ice well, the lip of which rose a foot from the floor.
Nothing, as of yet, looked out of place.
“So... he left his wheelbarrow outside to open this door and light the tapers,” Livia heard herself say.
She had not advanced farther toward the ice well. She felt as if her blood was congealing, the warmth in her veins draining away.
“Once they were lit,” said Lady Avery, her voice almost a whisper, “he would have gone to the edge of the well to take a look at the ice level.”
