She looked out the window. “Do you think so?”
“Definitely. Those sort of clouds come up very quickly. But if you don’t mind your nice dry washing getting soaked . . .” He shrugged.
“You might be right. I’ll bring it in.” She put down the letter and hurried outside.
The moment she’d gone, he slid out of bed and, in two hops, reached the table. The letter was sealed with a simple blob of beeswax. He heated a knife in the fire and sliced the seal open. Around the neat margin she’d left, he scrawled a note to his brother.
Marcus, was injured but am recovering. Give Miss Woodford whatever she wants. Am at her cottage incognito. Funny business going on. Boots slashed, send new ones urgently. Nash.
He underlined “incognito” twice to emphasize the need for discretion, and “urgently” once to emphasize the need for boots. Then he blew on the letter to dry the ink, refolded it, and resealed the letter.
By the time she brought the washing in, he was back in bed looking innocent and bored.
“I won’t be long,” she told him. “If I can get this letter in the post today I’ll be very pleased.”
Without Maddy and the children, the cottage was very quiet. Nash should have welcomed the peace but he couldn’t stay cooped up a moment longer. A jar would no longer do; he needed to visit the outhouse.
He swung his legs out of bed and cautiously put his foot to the floor. It hurt a bit, but if he didn’t overdo it . . .
He took a few steps around the cottage, limping to favor his sore foot.
The stone floor of the cottage was icy. Lord knew why anyone wore a nightshirt, he decided: freezing draughts crept under the blasted thing, wrapping around his thighs and chilling more personal parts.
However did women stand it?
He found his clothes and dragged on a pair of drawers, breeches, woolen stockings, and his one surviving boot. Better, but still very cold. Colder outside. He shrugged into his coat, then hopped to the back door.
There he found the ugly pair of working man’s boots that Maddy wore for working outside. He shoved the toe of his injured foot into one, and limped out to the outhouse.
By the time he came inside he was shivering. He added a small log to the fire. A week ago he would have built a really good blaze. He loved a roaring fire, loved watching the flames dance and the sparks fly. There was a primitive satisfaction in making a fire roar.
But Maddy and the children had to gather the fuel themselves, wandering the forest in search of fallen timber, then dragging it home, chopping it as needed.
On that thought, he went back outside, found the ax she kept just inside the back door, chopped up the rest of her wood, and stacked it neatly by the back door. The combination of exercise and cold, fresh air got his blood moving again. He felt better than he had in days.
He prowled around the cottage in a kind of hop-limp, looking for something else to do. It was remarkably bare. Every item it contained had a utilitarian purpose, except for a handful of very amateurish and crudely framed watercolors that hung on the walls, signed Jane Woodford and Susan Woodford. Susan’s were rather good.
He was about to return to the hearth when he noticed a small, brown leather case tucked away on a corner shelf. His curiosity was instantly roused. He hesitated. As a guest, he should respect his hostess’s privacy. But he wanted to discover why she was being harassed by an imitation ghost and a bullying estate manager. The case could contain useful information.
Or so he told himself.
He brought it to the fireside to examine the contents. He found an unframed miniature carefully wrapped in a beautiful piece of antique brocade, a portrait of an enchantingly pretty girl in the costume of last century, with powdered hair piled high. Who was she? He rewrapped it carefully.
He found an old bible, in French, a battered tin containing a sixpence and two ha’pennies, an old-fashioned doll, and something wrapped in the same antique brocade as the miniature: a hand-bound sketchbook.
The sketchbook was fascinating, dozens of drawings and watercolors executed with a skilled amateur hand. He turned the pages carefully, flicking over the landscapes, and stopped, riveted, when he came to one of an earnest young girl. Maddy as a child, a vivid little face, with that same expression of faint anxiety lurking in her eyes.
He found another sketch where she was sitting with a thin-faced old lady with a careworn expression and severe, upright bearing. Her grandmother?
There was a delicate drawing of a tiny babe with a wizened, ancient face and eyes he somehow knew had never opened on this world: a portrait of grief.
There was a story here . . .
He examined the landscapes with greater interest now; a crumbling ruin of a castle, lovingly detailed; the garden of a small, rural cottage, a laborer’s cottage like this one and, in the foreground, the spare, upright figure of an old lady, veiled and gloved like a beekeeper; a few exquisitely rendered studies of wildlife—flowers, a fawn caught on the edge of a forest, a bee delving into a lavender flower. He rewrapped the sketchbook, his mind full of questions.
The last thing in the case was a cheaply bound, thick notebook tied with a faded ribbon. Curious, he untied it. Pages and pages of writing, French, in a round, girlish hand. A diary. The ink had started to fade at the edges but phrases jumped out at him.
He will be tall and handsome and very charming more charming even than Raoul and he will kiss my hand as if I am a princess and lead me onto the dance floor Grand-mère says he will come that I must be patient but nobody ever comes here and she says she read it in my tea-leaves but we never have tea anymore only tisanes and who ever heard of reading a fortune in a tisane?
