Seconds ticked off in Felton’s head. His heartbeat thrummed to his finger, the finger pressed and waiting against the trigger.
But he never had to shoot.
One by one, the men turned back to their table, sat down without muttering anything, and resumed drinking their ale.
Something wasn’t right. Why were they backing down against one man?
But he had no intention of staying to find out. Stuffing his flintlock back into his trousers, Felton strode through the still-open doorway, mounted, and galloped his way out of Lodnouth’s lifting fog.
There was more to find out about Captain Jasper Ellis. Much more. And somehow all of it was linked to the night Lady Gillingham was pushed from her bedchamber window.
He just didn’t know how.
Yet.
I don’t want to go in.Eliza reached for the door, curled her hand around the knob, then withdrew.
Coward. Isn’t that what a coward would have done?
Not a girl in one of her books. Not the girl she oft pretended she was. Wouldn’t Captain be disappointed if he knew the courage she lacked?
But this door. For days it had been bothering her, flashing into her mind, summoning tears, carving its way into the granite of her never-changing nightmare. Because sometimes she remembered things. A piece of furniture. A painting on the wall. Or the familiar old voice of an elderly servant. All things that came and went, a faint tickle of familiarity, like a fog that lifted and settled back again.
Why couldn’t she pass this door without staring? Without sickness hitting her stomach?
She reached for the knob again. She shouldn’t be doing this. She should be sitting in the library with a book. Or outside watching Minney play with Merrylad. Or in her own chamber, allowing the maid to help assist her into a gown as they waited for the dancing master’s daily arrival.
Not roaming the house this way.
Not prying open a door she had no right to intrude.
As she pushed it open, the hinges yawned into the quietness, as if she’d just awakened the room from slumber. Dust motes stirred as she closed herself inside.
A massive bed with tied curtains at each corner. A dark wood armoire. A bedside table, a hearth and chair, a looking glass, a dressing table.
And a window.
Her eyes were drawn to it, forced there, where the heavy red drapes hung limp and dusty.No, no.She almost turned and fled. The sickness took her breath. Screams split her ears, the screams of her nightmares. Why were there always screams? Were they hers or someone else’s? Or both?
Her heartbeat thumped louder and harder with each step she took toward the window. This…couldthisbe the place?
She’d never thought it to be real. Never wanted it to be real. Captain had promised they were only nightmares, that it would always be gone the next day, that none of it was true.
But it was.
Everything was true, but she didn’t understand.
Nausea surged through her. She touched her hand to the white windowsill. Then to the glass no longer broken. Then, with shaking fingers, to the curtains that had so long suffocated her.
But she never looked down from the window. She couldn’t. Not again. Because whatever was down below she hadn’t the strength to see again.
“So they invited you.”
“All of us.” Felton took back the red-sealed invitation his father handed him. “He invited all of us.”
“Tut, tut, as if your mother and I would attend such a ball.”
“I think you should.”
