“No. Thank you. I’m looking for a . . .” She paused, memory tripping over which name to choose out of the ones she’d committed to memory in the viscount’s study. “I’m looking for someone who may work here. A Thomas Whittle?”
The man was quite unaffected. “No, miss. Isn’t a name known around here. Might I ask if you’re lookin’ after the owner?”
“The theater owner . . .” She raised her chin. Confident. Clearheaded. “Yes. Of course. I’m seeking the owner. His name? My apology—I’ve stopped in to inquire after a business matter, and I seem to have misplaced his name.”
“It’s Mr. Churchill, miss.”
Elizabeth nodded, brightening with a smile that would encourage the tale to keep on its present course.
“Yes. Of course. Mr. Churchill. That’s his name. I need to speak with Mr. Churchill, please. Is he here?”
“Oh, he’s always here. Churchill doesn’t go out much.”
The man set the extra candlesticks and knife in the belly of the worn wooden box, wiped his palms against each other, and held an arm out for her to follow down a red-carpeted hall to an open area. The hall was a bit dark and grainy to look at, but it was better than standing in a back hall with no option but to be ushered back outside.
“This way, miss.”
Backstage, sets and ropes and wooden backdrops were piled against a high brick wall. A workman bustled by, calling up to a man on scaffolding. He tossed a coil of rope to the floor and hurried on his way without noticing them. And then, breathless, Elizabeth stepped out onstage.
The man led her across what seemed like miles of polished wood flooring, with gaslights flickering on the side walls and an entire auditorium of plush seats and empty aisles—four stories of balcony space for London’s greatest plays to debut before crowds of thousands.
“’Tis the first London theater with gaslighting innovation throughout the entire building—save for the actors’ corridor, which we keep up wit’, as it saves a pretty penny to light with candles. Quite an expense. But this view is worth it, no?”
“I believe it is, sir. Very worth it.”
“Your husband has never brought you here then?”
He chuckled while he led her down the stairs to the center aisle, as if he had a secret delight in asking a question he must have known the answer to.
She straightened her spine. “No. Not yet. I haven’t had the pleasure.”
He laughed again, under his breath. “Perhaps you need to find a real husband first?”
Elizabeth walked along behind, holding her skirt a shade higher off the ankle, in case she had to make a run for it if her inquiry went poorly. Who knew where he was leading her? Being at the ready was wise. “I’m not certain that’s any of your affair, sir.”
“No. ’Tis not. But I assure you that none round here care to meddle too much in affairs that aren’t our own. We theater crowd don’t care much for backstory. It’s what happens under the lights and on the stage that matters most. So if’n you see fit to nose about the back halls and tell a tale to gain audience with our Mr. Churchill . . . well then, I thought you might like the grand tour. You might be a storyteller yourself, eh?”
Heavens. What was she to say to that brash?
“Just through here, miss.”
They came to a hall—the entry by the look of it, with the grand portico on Catherine Street shadowing the front through the windows. The central staircase was nearly as wide as the stage itself, with gold spindles and chandeliers dripping teardrops of crystal from lofty arched ceilings. The man brought her to an alcove tucked behind velvet curtains and a frosted glass door that read Churchill in stark block letters.
He tipped an imaginary hat and smiled under that trimmed mustache as he tapped the glass.
“Enter,” came the bark from inside.
“I’ll just be out front, miss, should you need an escort to see you safely back to the street.”
Whatever the man had thought of her or the mystery of her obviously manufactured story, Elizabeth had somehow managed to win favor with him. She smiled and nodded, turning her hand to the brass knob.
She hung in the doorway, waiting to be acknowledged.
“What is it?”
Mr. Churchill was no stodgy old thespian, attracted to hard drink and harder living. It was what her mother had always said with a lip curled in disdain—it was proper to wear an appropriate gown and attend a show on occasion, but never, ever was one to associate with the likes of the theater crowd. It just wasn’t done. They were the absolute degenerates of society’s bottommost rung. But the picture Elizabeth had built in her mind was one of an underworld character with a toady smile, a smelly cigar, and perhaps the most uncultured of sensibilities.
Not so of the gentleman before her.
He was young—entirely too young to own a grand theater. He mightn’t have had but ten years on her at the most. But he seemed at home in his hideaway.
A starched shirt, black satin tie, and double-breasted waistcoat of red to match the velvet in the entry hall pegged him as a gentleman of means. Honey-brown hair tipped over his forehead as if a touch of him liked the unruly side, and he looked down a pert nose, with eyes of what color she didn’t know—just scribbling something with fountain pen to paper without care that a woman perched in his doorway.
Elizabeth cleared her throat and he looked up, a slight air of impatience sneaking out through a grimace. “Who are you?”
“I am—” Oh dear. She hadn’t thought of that. Elizabeth couldn’t give her real name. And couldn’t very likely tie anything to the viscount.
The clock was ticking on her story.
Think, Elizabeth. Think.
“. . . Mrs. Eleanor Davies.”
He paused for a breath, then replaced his pen in the wooden holder on the desk with marked intention and stared back. “Mrs. Davies, is it? How may I help you?”
“I’m sorry to trouble you, sir. But I am in a hurry, so I’ll get to the point. I’m looking for an employee of yours—or someone who may have been employed by this theater some years ago.”
“The gentleman’s name?”
“Thomas Whittle.”
“Thomas Whittle, you say?” His eyes narrowed a cinch. He stood, taking his time about slipping shirtsleeves into his coat. “And why would you believe Thomas Whittle would be employed at this establishment?”
“I’m not certain he is. I’m seeking a gentleman who may have had a business association with someone close to my family, and all I know as of yet is a name and that he may have worked in London theater at one time.” Elizabeth felt small under his scrutiny, clearly able to see his eyes in a cool blue staring straight through her. “It is a business matter of great importance.”
The man adjusted his waistcoat and coat and smoothed wrinkles from his cuffs as he walked toward the door. “I have a Royal Patent on file, miss. Nothing illegal goes on in my theater.”
“I’m not inquiring after your operations, sir.”
“Aren’t you? Now that Her Majesty has seen fit to culture the urban masses, I hold no argument with the smaller theaters that they, too, should try their hand at the stage. You may go back to your employer and report that Christopher Churchill will not be bullied. Not by anyone—especially with a manufactured name sent to stoke my temper.”
“Which name?”
He started like she’d smacked him. As if she should know the name Thomas Whittle would have lit a fire within him and anger was a completely natural reaction.
“As if you don’t know?” He smiled. Grinned with arrogance that he’d peeled back enough layers of her story and wasn’t buying a fraction of it. “Eleanor Davies? Please do try to be more imaginative than that.”
Eleanor Davies . . . That’s what this was about?
How in the world would he have recognized a conjured form of her mother’s name—Eleanor Meade, Dowager Countess of Davies, was somehow known to him?
“I’m sorry if I—”
“You are not sorry, miss. And I pity you your present task. Sent here to ferret out more information. Or more money, which you will not receive.” He crossed his arms over his chest, confident. Irritated. With eyes that stared at her as though she were the scourge of London. “How much is she paying you to come here and dig into my business affairs?”
“You know someone by the name of Davies?”
He laughed—booming enough to shake the glass panes in one of the bookshelves against the wall.
Something in Elizabeth said to ask more. Find out what manner of fate brought her to a theater—of those she’d stopped by in the city already and hadn’t the faintest luck—and all of a sudden she’d selected a name that generated some sort of vitriol in a complete stranger.
“I don’t understand. Do you know the Countess of Davies?” When he didn’t budge, Elizabeth felt something awaken, and she took a desperate step forward. “How do you know her?”
A miscalculation seemed to have caught him off guard, for something shifted in his face. A furrowed brow, a deep swallow, and a terse line forming at the jaw—they combined in a manner that left him almost crestfallen.
What had just happened to change the temperature of his persona from the edge of enraged to backtracking now in wide-eyed fear?
The sounds outside were amplified by the silence that had swept in and flooded the space between them. A breeze caught white gauze curtains, shifting them out like a specter had entered the room.
“You should go, miss.” He flitted a glance to the busy street beyond the glass. “Surely you are expected by someone.”
The incomparable flutter of boldness—the need for answers—rippled through her. “And do you know a Viscount Huxley, perhaps?”
He stood still, staring her down in her afternoon dress of blush satin as if weighing something in his mind. It was only a moment, but a long one. And after she’d braved mentioning the name of a onetime street urchin with rare eyes who’d grown up in ten years, followed the activities of London theater, and then professed an aversion to it at the same time . . .
It was a rare secret, of which they both seemed to know something.
Churchill stepped past her to the theater alcove, then shouted through the door to the gentleman who’d allowed her entry. “Dorchester?”
“Aye, sir!” the man shouted back from his post washing windows. He dropped his towel in a bucket at his feet and scrambled in their direction.
“Show this lady out. Now.” He gave the command in control. “If you allow her entrance here again, it will cost your position. Do you understand?”
“Aye, sir. Of course.”
“Good. Then we understand each other,” Churchill said, then turned to her, the same cool veneer showing upon his face that said all he wanted was for her to be gone. “Go. And do not ever come back.”
Twenty-Two
Present day
The Castle House
Framlingham, England
Keira breezed through the front door of the Castle House and fell into the scarred wood booth at their vintage pub table, in a complete but wonderful daze.
Emory didn’t look up. He didn’t need to. They’d fallen into a rhythm since London that said they were past the awkward first things—how to make small talk or what to say so you didn’t sound like a dolt to the person across the table. Since they’d shared their messy backstories and were working side by side, there wasn’t much by way of discomfort to worry over.
Emory took a hearty bite of a blueberry-lemon scone, then dropped it back to the porcelain while he chewed and began flipping through photos on his phone, comparing something to words on the page of a notebook he held.
Keira stared at him—a creature content in his element, too focused to notice she hadn’t said a word since she’d rejoined him.
“Here. I ordered you a latte the way you take it.” He slid a cup and saucer over in front of her, still without glancing up. “Like a hopelessly sugared-up New Yorker. Should have seen the glare the waitress gave me when I had to explain the details.”
“I don’t think I’ll have any.”
“No coffee? That’s new. Turning back into an actual Brit by switching over to tea, are ya?”
Keira twisted her blonde waves into a loose knot at her nape and wrapped her fisherman’s sweater around her middle. The fire crackled behind them. It was more than enough to keep her warm. But tugging at the cable weave was more of a distraction than anything. To absorb what she’d just heard on the phone, her hands needed to think too.
“I managed to sweet-talk the waitress into bringing the owner over while you were gone. May have promised to leave her an exorbitant tip, but . . .” Emory turned his laptop at an angle so she could see it better. “It’d be worth it. The owner of this pub is something like an eighth-generation innkeeper and confirmed what I’ve been hoping to hear. Says his grandfather apparently knew the estate owners back in the late 1930s—a Viscount Huxley and his wife. Same title Carter now lays claim to. So the last couple who stayed on at the estate before it was boarded up— Hang on. I have their names . . . Here. An Arthur and Amelia Woods. And you’re not going to believe what I found in the library this morning that ties it all together.”
Emory finally connected his glance with hers, victory in his smile. But it faded fast behind the napkin he brushed over it. “What’s wrong?”
“I just received a call I did not expect,” Keira whispered. She bit her bottom lip with her front tooth, trying not to cry.
“What—about Victoria?” Emory asked, his attention so arrested that he froze with the scone in midair.
“No. Not that. This is personal, actually.”
“Personal. Alright.” Emory tossed the scone back to its plate, then pushed the laptop out of the way and folded his hands out in front of him. “Not bad news, I hope.” He hesitated again, this time as if choosing his words very, very carefully. “From London . . . or New York?”
Thank heavens the call had nothing to do with Alton. Or his pearl-strung socialite mother. Or the fact that Keira hadn’t listened to one word the woman pushed on her in London and, instead, stepped in league with the art world’s enemy numero uno.
“No. This is good news. The best. My brother Quinn—you know, the one you haven’t met?”
“I submit that I haven’t actually met the other one. Not officially. Cormac just tried to stare me through the wall of your father’s pub. But if that’s being introduced to one of the Foley men, I guess, yeah. We’ve met.”
Classic Cormac.
“He did do that, didn’t he? Sorry.” She squinted, the apology subtle but sheepish at the same time.
“I’m not convinced you really mean that. By your expression, I’d say you’re remembering it much more fondly than I do. I still believe I had a bull’s-eye on my back halfway down O’Connell Street after I left that place. But what’s this good news? I could use some right now.”
“Well, we’ve been waiting for this prognosis for a while and today we got it. Ellie, my sister-in-law, has been battling breast cancer for the last year, and they’ve just learned she’s in remission. Cancer-free. Quinn said the oncologist told them she doesn’t need any more treatments. He told her to go live her life.” Keira tried hard not to cry in front of him. “‘Go live your life.’ How many people are aching to hear those words, and they did. They get to. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to face something so precious as your future with your spouse being taken from you, and then it just comes rushing back . . . in a blink. And suddenly you have all your tomorrows again.”
And then the connection hit her, and Keira thought of how he might construe it with his own loss of Elise. “I’m so sorry. I should have remembered how insensitive that would sound . . .”
“No, it’s okay. I’m happy for them. Happy for you too.”
“Quinn asked if I can be home by Christmas. The library and the painting have become more of a project than we initially thought, haven’t they? I don’t wa
nt to bail out on you before we have answers, but it feels like this is important to them and I need to honor that.”
“We’re working on it, aren’t we? I think being home for Christmas is a definite possibility, if it’s what you want.”
“I can’t believe I’m saying it, but I think yeah. It’s time I go home to Ireland because I choose it—not because I have no place else to go. Ellie and Quinn live in France, but they’ve been in the States for treatment. So they’re coming over to Dublin. With Da there, and now Laine and Cormac, they want to spend the holiday together as a family before they go home for good.”
“For good?”
“Yeah. It’s this mad thing. We Foleys seem to have an affection for castles the way you Scotts fancy . . . What is it you Scotts fancy?”
“I still maintain that my father was entirely disappointed that I didn’t end up on Wall Street like him. He still can’t stomach that his son took a liking to fine art instead of getting that old MBA from Harvard. He seemed to think chasing down paintings would ruin my future. He was right at least in some measure.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Don’t be. I’m not. You know that. But tell me more. Tell me something good’s come out of this and it’ll make my entire day.”
“It has. The good picks up where they left off. Ellie and Quinn were restoring a château at our grandfather’s home in the Loire Valley. It’s called ‘The Sleeping Beauty’ by locals—this forgotten little castle with a moat and a storybook forest around it. They got married on the grounds last winter. I couldn’t make it over from the States, but Laine says it’s really lovely there. There was an ancient chapel with stained glass windows and candlelight and snow falling all around—girlish fairy-tale stuff I won’t dare bore you with. But they had to set aside the restoration when the shock of the cancer diagnosis happened. And now, well, they want to get back to living. I can’t even believe they want to open the château up to the public in the spring. Imagine that. An old castle will breathe new life again. I really hope I get to see that one day.”
The Painted Castle Page 23
