Suddenly, the door gave way and he grabbed her hand, pulling her out of its way. He gave the hand he was holding an encouraging squeeze. ‘Are you ready, Miss Strickland?’
He was being formal with her again. She’d thought, after last night, that had ended. And now that he was not Potts, what was she to call him?
He raised an eyebrow, waiting for an answer.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Ladies first.’ Now he held the lantern high, for her.
The space inside had a different kind of stillness, the noise of their breathing amplified by the confines of the room. The lights they carried could not seem to fill the space, leaving the ceiling and corners in darkness. Charity pulled the candles from her own bag, lighting first one, then another off the lantern. ‘Let me see if I can find a place for these.’
She walked forward into the room, bumping against a bench before adjusting her course to put the doors at her back and pacing forward to find the altar. When she felt the corner of the table in front of her, she tipped the candle on its side to drip a pool of wax to fix it in, then stopped. Two more paces brought her to a branched candle stand with enough sockets for the rest of the tapers in her bag.
She lit them and fitted them in their places, then looked around her at the room revealed by the retreating darkness.
‘Astounding,’ Potts said, in a hushed tone. ‘And you did not know this was here?’
‘No one did,’ she said, holding up her hands to indicate the room. Behind her, there was a marble altar, at least six feet long, on a raised dais with the metal stand that they had seen in the Blue Earl’s portrait. On either side of her stood three rows of pews, stretching the length of the room towards the doors through which they’d entered.
Above them, the ceiling vaulted up and away into the darkness, the roof still largely complete. The angles gave the illusion that the space was much bigger than it probably was. But still, it was hard to contemplate how the room had been hidden.
They would need to illuminate the hallway, she thought. A series of candles to light them from the outside would make it possible to see the pictures in the windows.
She frowned.
The family had managed without a chapel for generations. There was no need of one now. Even if there was, there was no one left to marry at Comstock Manor. Even if his Prudence talked him into returning, Charity doubted that she would be willing to settle for anything less than St George’s in Hanover Square.
‘Do you remember the clue?’ he asked.
‘Right, left, right and left, three, four, two, one.’
‘Alternating the two things, we have three to the right, four to the left and so forth.’ He stamped his foot on the flagstones at their feet. ‘But we must find a starting point.’
Charity retrieved her lantern and swung it low, searching the floor. ‘Here.’ She scuffed the dust from a brass cross, set in a stone at the base of the dais.
‘Do we face towards the Bible, or away?’ he wondered.
‘Towards, I should think.’ She shrugged. ‘To be polite.’
‘Very well, then.’ He counted for her and she paced off the stones, only to stumble as she reached the last one.
Because it was loose.
She stared at him in surprise, then pointed down, too excited to talk.
He came to her side, staring down at it and then back to her again. ‘Before I turn over this stone, we must talk.’
‘I cannot imagine a thing you might say that is more important than the fate of our future,’ she said, pointing down at their feet.
‘You might be surprised to know that time will continue to pass even without the presence of the Comstock diamonds.’ Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but he looked older than he had when they had left the bedroom. ‘Have you thought of what you will do if we turn over the stone and find nothing?’
Just the thought of another failure made her throat tighten. It felt like the beginning of tears. But she refused to cry over disappointments. There had been many of them in her life and crying had not done a single thing to change them.
‘What would I do? I would go back to the library and continue to search,’ she said. ‘They must be here. All the clues we have found point to the spot.’
‘But suppose they have already been found,’ he said. ‘Perhaps they were sold long ago. What will you do if we discover that all there is to the estate is what you know there to be: debt and difficulty?’
‘What would I do?’ she said, staring at him in the gloom. ‘You speak as if there is a decision to be made.’
‘There always is,’ he said softly.
‘For men, perhaps,’ she replied. ‘My only decision will be whether I should depend on Faith and her husband, or Hope and hers.’ In either case, she would become the spinster that her sisters had always expected. After what had happened between them, she could not imagine marrying another man. ‘It is not as if I can remain here,’ she added.
‘You love this house,’ he reminded her. ‘When you spoke of it before, your only fear was that I would come and dictate your life to you should you remain. I told you then and I tell you now, that will not be the case. You are free to do as you like, whether I am here or not. And can stay here until you die,’ he replied.
‘To what purpose?’ she snapped. ‘There is no reason for a Comstock Manor, if you are not here to live in it.’
‘You have always known that I would leave,’ he said, surprised at her anger.
‘I knew that Potts meant to leave.’ The thought of that had been painful enough. ‘But I had no idea that the Earl meant to abandon...everything.’
Me.
After all she had promised, before they’d made love, she had almost accused him of the very thing she swore she would not mind. But that was when she had assumed that there would be an earl eager to rule over her. She had hated the thought of it, willing to do anything to prevent it. But it had never occurred to her that a time might come when there would be no one at all to rebel against.
It was terrifying. Before she had known he was Comstock, she had been prepared to beg him to stay with her. But he had made his decision based on what was best for the earldom. It was the one area that she was sure she had no right to interfere with. If she did, she would tell him that yoking himself to this beautiful, American schemer was the height of stupidity. ‘What will I do when you are gone?’ she said at last. ‘I can only tell you what I will not do. I will not sit alone, weeping over the loss of you. If you intend to go back to America, you had best get about it. Now lift the stone so we can see if your trip will be financed on diamonds or silverware.’
‘Very well,’ he said, scuffing the flagstone with the toe of his boot and watching it shift. ‘There is nothing more to say.’ Then, he walked back to the door and retrieved the pry bar, fit it into the widest open crack and lifted.
For a moment, they stared down into the hole he’d opened, stunned.
Then he said, ‘Well, this is unexpected.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
‘Chilson!’ Miles tried to keep the manic tone from his voice. Earls were not supposed to panic when they located the family fortune hidden under the floorboards. It probably happened all the time in England.
When he had moved the loose flagstone, he had assumed that, with luck, there would be a jewellery box, or perhaps a small sack containing the loose stones. They would have a moment of celebration as he counted out five of the best of them into her hand to show that the new Earl was not the demanding ogre she’d expected, just a perfectly reasonable fellow who honoured his bargains. If they could not be lovers, maybe they could at least be friends again.
But their search for the Comstock jewels had been more successful than they’d ever thought possible. Instead of a single pouch of diamonds, there had been several bags of jewellery, several small boxe
s of loose stones and a large metal strongbox full of coins. Cyril Strickland had not just hidden the family jewels from looters, he had amassed a dragon’s hoard of gold and jewellery, then tucked it up under a stone and bricked off the room for good measure.
And then he had died and the world had moved on without him.
After a single, silent glance of agreement, they’d emptied the sacks they’d been carrying and begun to refill them with loot. But it soon became clear that they could not carry it all, and they’d agreed to take just enough to dazzle the rest of the family at dinner. Then he’d replaced the flagstone and led the stunned Charity out of the netherworld between the walls using the passage that led to the main hall.
Having recovered his composure after their earlier meeting, Chilson was there to greet them, freshly combed and starched, ready to serve.
Miles grinned at him. ‘Yesterday you promised me footmen with hammers. Bring them here, please. And Hoover the groom, as well. I need muscle to demolish a wall.’ It made no sense to be creeping through the house with a lantern, when there was a direct route available through the blocked archway in the ballroom.
Once he had explained to the butler what was required, Miles retired to his room to explore the damage done to his person and his wardrobe by the day’s adventures. After its swim with the ducks, his clothing had been returned to the cupboard and seemed no worse for wear. But when he had stripped to wash, his body was a testament of scrapes and bruises from his run-in with Hoover and the time spent stumbling around in the walls. He would likely need help to get out of bed tomorrow once the stiffness had set in. Today, he was still numb.
He glanced at the stack of letters on the bureau that Drake had given him before everything had gone wrong. Damn Prudence, for introducing him to the idea that failure was even a possibility. He had been perfectly happy with how his life had been progressing until she had declared that he was not fit to marry her.
And now, when he had finally found a woman who was his equal, Pru had ruined it for him again. What had he expected Charity to say when he had questioned her in the chapel? Had he wanted her to proclaim her love for him and beg him to break his promise and stay with her?
It had not been her job to ask, it had been his to offer. He had been either too proud or too weak to say the words without some assurance that his proposal would be accepted. Perhaps it was just as well. Despite her many arguments to the contrary, she had spoken of the house being pointless without Comstock in it. If he had offered to stay and marry her, she might have accepted him against her better judgement, for the sake of the family.
But not for love. And without that, there was no point in remaining. If he wanted a loveless marriage, there was one waiting in Pennsylvania already.
He grabbed the letters, ready to throw them into the fire unread, then thought the better of it. If he truly meant to return home, he had best learn what fresh hell awaited him.
The first one he opened had been written while he was still at sea. It was full of the same pleas for aid that the last letter had contained, interspersed with reminders of the difficulties she would face if Pru could not find a husband and the fact that her delicate condition grew more difficult to hide with each passing day.
The next letter was far more recent, dated several weeks after the proposal he had sent her on reading of her plight. In his letter, he had promised to help her and offered marriage, but explained there might be difficulties in getting home and the problems with the Comstock finances. He’d urged her to be patient and promised that he was returning as soon as he could gather enough money to clear Edward’s debts, but would arrive well before the child would need his name.
Her answer to his three pages of promises took barely half a sheet of paper.
Only you could find a way to ruin an earldom.
There was more. But the gist of it stated that his return would not be necessary. His fancy title was worth nothing compared to cash on the barrelhead. She had dared to hope that the second Strickland might finally equal the first, but he had proved sorely disappointing.
To add insult to injury, the letter had been signed Mrs Prudence Parker, the surname of the banker who held Edward’s notes. That man was middling handsome but, since he owned one of the largest houses in Philadelphia, a lack of hair and an excess of belly had made no difference, once Miles had been out of sight of land.
There was a third, somewhat longer letter from the banker Horace Parker, accusing him of abandoning a woman in need, and the child he had fathered. Apparently, Pru had been as thorough in her entrapment of Horace as she had been of him. Parker had dried her tears and settled her debts, and now made it clear that there was no room in Pennsylvania for a turncoat who would renounce his country and serve King George. They were all better off without him. Dire action would be taken should Horace hear that Miles had darkened American shores.
He sat on the bed for a moment, staring at the papers and trying not to grin. She had refused him again. He was free of his promise. Even the ghost of Ed Strickland could not expect him to come back and sort this mess out.
Somewhere deep inside him, there was a desire to return in triumph and prove her wrong. He ignored it. Only a fool would send an answering letter to Pru, announcing that she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life.
But if he was not wanted at home, and he was not wanted here, where did he belong? His plan to turn the estate over Charity was a sound one, but it was so much more complicated now that there was money to give her. Tonight, his mind was as numb as his body. Life was much more complicated than chess. He could not manage to see more than a single move ahead.
As he had not eaten since the night before, his opening gambit would have to begin with food of some sort. He rang for Drake’s valet. In no time at all, Hagstead had worked miracles on him, his clothing and, as promised, his boots. Then, with a sigh of resignation, he went to the linen drawer and retrieved his signet again, slipping it on his finger before going down to dinner.
Tonight’s menu was mutton, likely the best that the cook could manage when surprised by the arrival of four extra guests. But the ragout was as tender as lamb and Miles had sent word that the meal was to be accompanied by the finest wines in the cellar. Instead of the comfortable place halfway down the table with Charity, he sat at the head.
The family rose in respect as he entered. Even Charity, though she did so with downcast eyes. The sight made him wince. ‘Please, sit,’ he said, gesturing them back to their chairs. ‘And the first one of you to call me “my lord” will be banished from the table.’
‘And what are we to call you now? When you can’t seem to keep a name from one day to the next, it is difficult to know what to do.’ It was Charity, of course, the only one with nerve enough to speak her mind.
He smiled. ‘Miles. It is my given name and, since you are my family, I would prefer that you use it.’
‘Of course, my lord,’ Charity replied.
Apparently, the familiar affection that they’d fallen into as they explored had disappeared at the sight of him sitting in her grandfather’s chair. He would have no help from the rest of the family, who sensed the tension between them and began emptying their plates at a speed that made it impossible for them to speak.
‘Thank you, Charity,’ he said. No longer bound by formality, he could call her by the name he had only whispered as they’d shared a bed. ‘Have you told your sisters what it was we discovered this afternoon during our exploration of the house?’
‘I was waiting for you, Lord Comstock,’ she said, her hands in her lap, her tone subservient and her eyes glaring a challenge.
He raised a hand to signal the footman standing at the door of the dining room and instructed him to go to the study and bring the bag that was sitting on the desk.
When it arrived, Miles rose to take it, then dumped the contents out on to the cloth. Forks dropped
as gold coins spilled across the table, clinking against wine glasses. An emerald necklace slithered out after them to lay beside his plate like a snake.
He sat again and took a sip from his wine glass as though nothing unusual had happened.
‘My Lord.’ It was Leggett who spoke, clearly invoking the deity rather than his host.
‘This is just a small portion of what we found,’ Miles announced, revelling in the drama of the announcement. ‘It was not possible to carry it all away. The servants have begun opening a passage to the chapel where it was hidden.’
Then he turned to Drake. ‘This is likely to lead to some complications in the plan I put forth this morning to turn the management of the estate over to your sister-in-law.’
‘What?’ Charity’s voice was sharp as a whip crack in the silence of the room.
Miles gave her a bland look. ‘Though you insist that no Earl of Comstock would ever listen to your suggestions, your ideas so far have been as sound as anything I could come up with. When I left, I was planning to leave the running of the estate to you.’
For the first time since he had known her, she seemed too stunned to speak. It was strangely satisfying.
‘Of course, there are problems with that now,’ he said directly to Drake. ‘Though it shall be easier for her to run things if there is enough money to do it, when we total up the booty, I suspect she has just become one of the most eligible heiresses in England. There will be a problem with fortune hunters, of course.’
‘I am not an heiress,’ she snapped. ‘I am a distant relation to the Earl of Comstock. Perhaps you do not understand the principle of primogeniture.’
‘I understand it. I simply do not agree with it,’ he said, smiling down the table. ‘America has been managing well without it for a generation or longer. I do not intend to come here and regress in my thinking. Like it or not, Charity, you and your sisters will receive a substantial share of the family fortune.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she said softly. ‘Why would you do such a thing?’
How Not to Marry an Earl Page 20
