by Colleen Ladd
“We thought to make this room ready for you, my lady,” Mrs. McFerran offered when Portia continued to survey the room, which she found strangely pleasing.
“And?”
“We stopped when it began to rain.” She indicated a battered bucket near the window. It was half full of murky water, the carpet around it dark. The leak must be of recent vintage, for it hadn’t yet colored the ceiling plaster. Portia tried to remember which room was directly overhead, but had seen so many she wasn’t certain. It made no matter, the rain could easily be running down the outer wall and across the ceiling without showing itself upstairs at all.
Portia didn’t ask why they’d attempted to make the master’s bedroom habitable when the mistress’s chamber would have been more suitable. First, because she had no doubt there was some fault in the mistress’s chamber which the McFerrans knew or suspected and which Portia would discover only when the chimney started falling about her ears. And second, because just at that moment, a sharp noise startled the breath out of her.
It was repeated a moment later, and again, resolving itself into the measured tread of footsteps. Mrs. McFerran gasped, her hand flying to her throat. For all Portia suspected her of making up ghost stories to drive her new mistress away, there was no denying the housekeeper looked frightened. Someone was walking about upstairs.
The footsteps seemed to be making for the door, so Portia did as well, following them out the door and down the hall. There was no carpet runner in the upstairs hallway and his boots echoed off the bare floor and walls. Portia broke into a run and reached the stairs before he did. She stood staring at the upper landing as the footsteps approached, beating as hard upon her ears as her heart did upon her ribs, washing over and around her like the sea, until they were directly overhead. Still, she saw no one.
Then, so suddenly her heart missed a beat, they stopped.
CHAPTER FOUR
Portia stared at the upper landing, silence ringing in her ears. She counted out twenty beats of her heart without seeing or hearing anything from upstairs, then called for Ellie until her maid dashed into the hall below.
“Have you been in the kitchen all this time?” Portia called down.
“Yes, miss. My lady.”
“Have you seen Mr. McFerran?”
“Sommat the matter?” that gentleman asked, coming into the hall behind Ellie.
“Where have you come from, Mr. McFerran?”
“Stables,” he said readily enough and without any trace of the breathlessness he’d surely have evinced had he run down the back stairs and around the Hall to arrive blameless on the ground floor after walking about loudly in the upper stories. Even assuming he could have done all that in a few short moments and without making a sound.
Portia turned to Mrs. McFerran, who stood watching her with a faint quirk to her thin lips. She scarcely seemed the same woman who had, only a moments before, looked so terrified of the noises overhead. “Who else is in the Hall?”
“No one, my lady.” The quirk turned to a narrow smile. “Excepting the ghost.”
Refusing to dignify that with a response, Portia called down to the other two to go on about their business, which Ellie did with obvious reluctance, McFerran without even a shrug.
Then Portia climbed the stairs to the upper landing. He, whoever he was, had had plenty of time to sneak off, though how he could have managed it without making even so much noise as a mouse, Portia didn’t know. But of one thing she was certain, he could not have come down the hall without leaving tracks.
There were no footprints in the dust that lay thick on the floor of the hall but Mrs. McFerran’s and her own.
*****
Portia rejoined Mrs. McFerran on the landing, the older woman wisely keeping her peace. Giles Ashburne’s portrait smirked at her from over the housekeeper’s shoulder, and Portia turned away before Mrs. McFerran could interpret the direction of her gaze as proof she believed this talk of ghosts.
“Now then, Mrs. McFerran, for the ground floor.”
Portia barely saw the parlor, the sitting room, the conservatory full of the husks of dead plants and the smell of rot, and only noticed the billiard room insomuch as it struck her that her brother would have wept at the condition of the table. The breakfast room made no impression whatsoever, assuming the housekeeper even showed it to her, and the dining room was memorable only for the layer of dust and cobweb that lay so thickly on the table she at first thought it a tablecloth.
She did notice the library, for Mrs. McFerran at first walked past the door, and only returned to it when Portia did not follow. For a moment, it appeared the housekeeper had mislaid her key, but finally the door opened. Portia walked into the large room like a woman in a dream. Papa hadn’t held with society’s ideal of feather-headed ladies; until illness took him from them, he’d seen to it that Portia had as good an education as her brother. Tony had surpassed her now, having gone off to University while Portia rusticated at Rosewood Close, but her love of books had never left her.
The cases ran from floor to ceiling, and the ceilings—like all of those on the ground floor, though this was the first Portia had made particular note of it—were very high indeed. The books ran wall to wall to wall with a gap barely wide enough for the door and breaks for two tall, narrow windows. Portia had not been aware of the rain ending, but as she stood staring, the sun threw itself through the windows to light up the bookcases in a blaze of glory. Whole shelves of books had matching leather bindings—the kind rich gentlemen bought by the foot to fill out their libraries and left eternally unopened, the pages uncut—but the rest, oh the rest, were a miscellany of bindings, a riot of colors. Books bought for the pleasure of it, for reading rather than looking at. Books to be avidly devoured, consumed with pleasure and a touch of desperation that, some day, all would be read.
“Oh my.” Portia’s voice was little more than a whisper, and that hard enough to squeeze through a throat tight with something other than breathing dust. How far from expecting this she’d been. Rosewood had a small bookroom, a couple hundred books of various stamps, of which James Ashburne had permitted Portia to take a small handful. The decision of which to take could not have been harder if a mother had been told to pick which of her children to keep. Had Portia but known what she was coming to....
“My lady?”
Portia took quick halting steps to the nearest case, moving stiffly on legs that had forgotten how to obey her. She stroked the rich leather binding of a folio of William Blake, his beautiful engravings rising into her mind. Nearby was a rackety copy of Burns, the spine much abused. And there Coleridge.
“My lady, we’d best be getting on.”
And down away to her left, two whole shelves of Shakespeare, pray heaven the mice hadn’t gotten to them!
“There’s the kitchen and stillroom yet.”
Portia made herself step back, swallowing the rebuke that rose to her lips. The books had waited ten years; surely she could school herself to patience a little longer. There were, sad to say, greater calls on her time.
“Yes, let us get on.” But she couldn’t stop herself looking back wistfully at the door Mrs. McFerran had locked behind them.
Ellie jumped up from a plate covered with breadcrumbs when they entered the kitchen, which was neat, clean, and as sound as they come. The McFerrans clearly knew where their priorities lay. Mrs. McFerran allowed Portia a quick look into the well-stocked root cellar and the scullery, pointed out the sadly abandoned stillroom, then stood with her hands clasped primly before her and fixed Portia with a gimlet eye.
“And that door?”
“That’s the butler’s pantry, my lady.”
“Open it.”
Her lips pressed into a thin line, Mrs. McFerran found the proper key and fit it to the lock. She swung the door open on a room black as pitch.
“Get me a candle, would you Ellie?”
When the maid returned with a flickering tallow candle, Portia stepped into the c
ramped, windowless pantry. Flames reflected from a million pale eyes, wavering across the family silver that had languished ten years without the touch of a butler’s busy polishing cloth. Hundreds of pounds’ worth of plate, and Roger had left it to tarnish in the Hall. He must really have hated the place, else this wealth of silver would have been unearthed and sold long ago.
“If need be,” Portia murmured to herself, and perhaps Ellie, “we can always pawn the silver.” What James didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. He’d spout the silver himself, if he but knew it was there.
The housekeeper drew an angry breath, nearly choked on it, and locked up the butler’s pantry with a sharp twist of the key.
“I’ll need her late ladyship’s keys,” Portia said, and the tight line of the housekeeper’s lips whitened further. “Or his lordship’s. Whichever you can lay your hands on.” She would be a fool to leave herself at the mercy of a hostile housekeeper. Mrs. McFerran had everything locked up tighter than the Tower, and Portia would be dashed if she was going to meekly ask the housekeeper to open the library for her. Or anything else, for that matter. “Now, if you will, have Mr. McFerran shift my trunks, and one of you get a fire started under the wash tub. We’re going to make this place livable again, starting with my bed chamber.”
She’d never have spoken so to the housekeeper at Rosewood Close, but even at Rosewood there’d been underservants, scullery maids and footmen and a washerwoman who boiled all the laundry twice a month. Here, there were only the four of them, and they would all have to pitch in if they were to get anything accomplished.
They worked straight through the day with only the briefest of pauses to eat a simple nuncheon of bread and cheese (the bread slightly less stale than last night’s, the cheese no less moldy). By the time they were done, the furniture had been shifted, the carpet turned, and the draperies, bedding, and cotton from the mattress boiled and laid out to dry in the sun with many a muttered imprecation against sudden rain showers. Mr. McFerran—whose entire vocabulary seemed to consist of “ar” and “yes’m”—had cleaned out the hearth and thrust a long-handled brush up the chimney, knocking loose large quantities of soot and the disintegrating remains of several bird’s nests. The afternoon was well advanced when Portia wiped the last of the dust off the delicate dressing table and looked about her with satisfaction.
The room looked bare without its draperies, but the warmth of the sun falling through the windows was welcome. Though the carpet had clearly been turned previously, before the Hall fell on hard times, the underside was now in better shape than the top, being only a bit threadbare around the edges. And if the weather kept clear, there’d be clean, mouse-free bedding to retire to that night.
Ellie finished sweeping the hearth and propped her hands on her hips to survey the bedchamber. “Not a bad day’s work, if I do say so myself.”
“If you don’t, I will.” Portia laid down her dusting cloth and ran a finger over the elaborate inlay that scrolled across the top of the dressing table. “Lovely. Now to get you settled in. Have you a room picked out?”
“Aye; at the end of the hall near the stairs. Mrs. McFerran added the bedding into the washing pot after your own. And not best pleased to do it, either,” she muttered in tones which made Portia glad she’d not seen the confrontation between her maid and the dragon. Mrs. McFerran was taller, but Ellie was twice as wide, and it was anyone’s guess which of them was more stubborn.
“Let’s go give it a good cleaning.”
Ellie whisked a bit of stray soot into the hearth. “You’ve no need to worry your head about that, my lady. I’ll see to it once you’re settled in here. There’s your trunks yet to be unpacked.”
Portia sighed, knowing it would be futile to argue. Surely other women didn’t have this much trouble with their ladies’ maids. It was her own fault. She’d needed an ally far more than a properly deferential servant when her husband of less than a week packed her off to Rosewood Close. On her own head be it that she’d thereby lost all pretense of cowing her own maid. It was just as well. A cowed maid would have been a colorless companion.
While Ellie finished up in Portia’s bed chamber, Portia set about clearing space in the dressing room. Giles Ashburne had clearly left in a hurry. Coats still hung in the wardrobe, their gay colors sadly moth-eaten. Shirts here, trousers there, all in dire need of pressing and streaked with dust. A hat occupied a high shelf, so covered in cobwebs it looked like gray felt. Portia shifted everything into one wardrobe and closed the door, sneezing at the dust and the smell of neglect.
A silver-backed brush lay abandoned in one corner. Portia picked it up and rubbed absently at the tarnish. What kind of man had used this? A murderer? Truly?
“Now you know there’s little enough room in here for me and your trunks,” Ellie said as she bustled in with a broom and dustmop.
“All right, I know where I’m not wanted.”
Ellie set about unpacking Portia’s gowns with a care better suited to more delicate materials. Portia watched her cluck over smudges and smooth out wrinkles. There was little enough to exclaim over when all was said and done. Most of Portia’s wardrobe she’d brought into the marriage with her, and it was depressing to realize that the dresses had outlasted her husband. Even more lowering that Roger had been so often absent he’d seen no more than half her small collection of gowns.
Too many of Portia’s dresses had suffered the dye bath when Roger died, for there was no money for widow’s weeds. Nothing new there. There’d been no new dresses for years. However much James wanted to blame Portia for the state of the Ashburne finances, he had to admit that the money certainly hadn’t gone for her clothes.
Portia went into the master’s bedroom, still clutching the silver brush. Her feet balked for a moment at the doorway before she forced them onward. When she discovered she was holding her breath, listening for footsteps, she shook herself angrily. It was dark in the chamber, and she pushed open the drapes to let in the light. Here, too, was evidence of hasty packing, still visible where the McFerran’s superficial and quickly interrupted cleaning had not reached: a scum of lather and whisker dried in the washbasin where a man had stood shaving, a snowy cravat abandoned on the floor by the dressing table, the top drawer of the heavy writing desk sitting open, paper poking out higgledy-piggledy. All stood as it had the day Giles Ashburne left, not even a servant come in to tidy up. Why bother, after all? The lord of the house had gone for good.
She wondered if Roger had been at Ashburne Hall when it happened. He’d never talked about it. Never mentioned the Hall at all except to wish it to perdition. One was hardly likely to make a talking point of one’s cousin murdering his fiancée and fleeing to the Continent, of course, but Portia’d married into the family, for pity’s sake. She deserved to know what happened.
Portia sighed. She’d deserved a lot of things. There was no point in falling into a brown study over it. She put the brush down on the writing desk and peered into the open drawer. His correspondence lay within, untouched and imbued with the warm odor of fine tobacco. Feeling suddenly like a trespasser, she slid the drawer gently shut and went to have a word with Mrs. McFerran about dinner.
*****
It was no cold collation this time, despite the hours the housekeeper had spent toiling over a hot wash tub. Portia had made it quite clear that would not suit.
Mrs. McFerran had responded in her own particular manner. The meat pie was a marvel of the cooking arts: overcooked on the inside with a crust so undercooked as to be soggy. There was little to no seasoning, the meat was tough as old shoe-leather and the vegetables limp, stringy, and unidentifiable. In short, dinner was edible only to the extent that Portia was starving.
When Portia had swallowed all she could, she took up the candle by which she’d dined and went to the library.
It took her five minutes to find the proper key. Mrs. McFerran had handed the ring over when she laid dinner before Portia, her face pinched with disapproval. She hadn’t v
ouchsafed a single word, which Portia took to mean she could sort out the keys on her own. She made a note to find the one for the butler’s pantry first thing in the morning, just to be certain she had it.
Using the tallow candle in its simple brass holder to light her way, Portia found a small volume of Byron’s works and took it up to her new bedchamber. It wasn’t until she’d sent Ellie to bed and was settled in with clean sunlight-scented linen pulled up close about her, warmed and lighted by a fire that did not smoke overmuch, that she realized the book smelled impenetrably of tobacco. She hadn’t noticed before, as the candle reeked rather of the barnyard.
Portia stared for the longest time at the door leading through to the master’s bedroom. “What kind of man were you, Giles Ashburne?”
CHAPTER FIVE
She woke from blissfully uninterrupted sleep when Ellie drew open the drapes to let in a beam of buttery sunshine. They wouldn’t have to worry about leaks today.
It wasn’t until Portia was sitting up in bed drinking her morning tea, the coverlet pulled up to ward off the chill, that she remembered what was so strange about a sound night’s sleep.
“Did you sleep well, Ellie?”
“Yes, my lady.” Ellie flashed her a quick smile and went on into the dressing room, her voice floating back. “A quiet night.”
Indeed, Portia thought as she reached for a piece of toast. No midnight noises. No footsteps. No ghost.
The toast was burnt on the underside and put on the plate just so, so Ellie wouldn’t notice. Portia ate it anyway, though the housekeeper had somehow managed to leave the unburnt side distastefully soggy. If she left any, Ellie would know something was wrong and Portia didn’t need anyone fighting her battles for her. She sipped her tea, which Ellie had clearly made herself, as it was hot and sweetened to perfection. Once a poor substitute for the morning chocolate she’d never done without before her marriage, tea had become such an integral part of breaking her fast that Portia wondered if she’d take to chocolate again if ever she had it. She gave an unladylike snort. Little chance of finding out.
