My Lady Caroline

by Jill Jones

  Alison couldn’t help herself. She knew it wasn’t a very grown-up thing to do, but by God he deserved it. With a gleeful cry, she split open the other pillow and joined her ghostly companion in the prank, emptying it over his head before he could recover sufficiently from his surprise to do anything about it.

  “Be my guest, then, Mr. Ryder,” she laughed, grabbing her things from the bed and bolting for the door. “The room is yours, at least for the night. Tomorrow…well, we’ll see.”

  Chapter Ten

  “I never heard of such a thing in my life, taking the Mothers for confidantes!”

  The Prince of Wales

  Desperate to be released from Caroline’s snare, I sought advice from her mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne, and found in her an unlikely ally. She became, in fact, my best woman Friend & Confidante. Lady M. was seasoned in the ways of Love, & oddly did not think it strange that I came to her for advice, I who had been, and if Caro would have her way, would continue to be, the lover of her son’s wife. In fact, I believe she took a certain vicarious pleasure in learning the details of what went on between Caro and I. She had never liked Caroline, a fact she pointed out on our initial visit, so her complicity in the matter of orchestrating Caro’s downfall gave her untold pleasure.

  When Caro learned of my treachery, that I had shared with her husband’s mother some of her private letters written to me, she was outraged, and threw a tantrum in my apartment. Well done! I congratulated myself, thinking she would now revile me. But the tantrum passed, and still she clung to me, pleading, begging me to love her. It was pathetic, & I was little moved.

  But her insane jealousy of Lady M. gave me an idea of yet another way of ending our debacle. Jealousy comes naturally to women, I have learned, & I worked very hard at filling Caro’s heart with jealousy. If she could become jealous of the attentions I paid to a matron old enough to be my mother, I reasoned, how would she react if the objects of my adoration were the younger belles dames in Society?

  Caroline loved to dance, inviting me often to observe as she was waltzed about the room by leering, lecherous men, each touching her porcelain skin in ways that only I should have been allowed to do. When I fancied myself in love with her, these parties sent me into a foul disposition. But now, I plotted to use her dancing parties in the ballroom at Melbourne House to my advantage, openly flirting with other young beauties right under her nose, hoping she would leave me in a fit of jealous rage. But again Caro defeated me. Noting that I had once been displeased by the waltz parties, she simply discontinued them.

  Jeremy watched Alison leave the room, too appalled and stunned by her behavior to follow. Around him, feathers flew. They nestled on the cashmere of his cardigan and fell in soft clouds at his feet. The room was in shambles. But that wasn’t what disturbed Jeremy at the moment. What concerned him was that he was under the same roof as a lunatic. First, he’d come upon Alison deep into some kind of one-sided conversation which was obviously making her very angry. And then she’d attacked him with the feather pillows.

  The woman must be mad.

  But how had she done that so quickly? he mused, brushing the feathers off his arms. One minute they were conversing, and in the next instant, it seemed, when he’d turned his back momentarily, she’d managed to seize the pillow, rip it open, and dump its contents on him. He stared at the bed, realizing suddenly that not one, but two torn pillowcases lay there. Two! The crazy woman was fast as lightning. But what had made him turn his back to her? He’d heard something, he was certain of it. A laugh. A woman’s high-pitched laugh.

  Was Alison Cunningham a ventriloquist as well?

  Jeremy wasn’t sure of anything at the moment, except that he was going to close the door and lock it, light a roaring fire, and crack open the bottle of cognac he’d bought in town. That accomplished, he sat down heavily on the sofa and tried to think. This wasn’t turning out at all as he had planned.

  That’s when he noticed his books had been tampered with. “Damn,” he swore. He’d been a fool to leave them lying about. Someone like Alison Cunningham would have no qualms, he was certain, about snooping through his things. The letter! he thought suddenly. Had she seen the letter? He reached for the middle book, where he remembered hiding the photocopy, and he felt almost physically ill when he didn’t find it there.

  But wait. The books were in a different order than he’d left them. Had she dropped them? Hurriedly, he searched through the top book and breathed a long sigh of relief to find the copy of the letter. Had she seen it? he wondered again. Even if she had, he reasoned with himself, he doubted she would be able either to make her way through the difficult handwriting or understand its message. Likely, as scatter-brained as she seemed to be, she would take no note of it in any case.

  He tossed back a hefty swig of cognac and felt its comforting tingle all the way down. His nerves were wracked. What had started as a quiet day with the promise of an organized search for the memoirs had turned into something altogether irrational. He’d been intruded upon, threatened, insulted, shot at. He’d thought he’d seen a ghost in the tower window. And now this, he looked around, confounded by the feather-drenched landscape of his room. It looked like an indoor snow storm.

  Maybe it would have been better not to argue with Alison Cunningham, he considered. She appeared to be the type who was used to getting her way, no matter what. And gazing into those large eyes only moments before, Jeremy had almost voluntarily let her have her way. She had seemed in that instant small and vulnerable, and very lovely. He had no wish to harm her. In fact, he’d felt a surprising urge to protect her.

  That, and other less surprising, more biological urges.

  Those urges had flown with her outrageous behavior, however. It was not his job to protect her. If she wanted to throw away her money buying Dewhurst Manor, it was none of his business. What was his business was the search for the memoirs. And he needed to get on with it. The only problem was how to proceed without her noticing. He decided to keep a low profile; stay out of her way. He couldn’t afford to aggravate her further. He had to finish up as quickly as he could. Even if it meant working at night.

  Jeremy looked at his watch. Eleven o’clock. It was still early enough to work for a couple of hours. He never went to bed much before one o’clock anyway. Draining his glass, he set it next to the nearly-full bottle of cognac on the table near the sofa and went to change his clothes. Feathers puffed around his feet as he pulled off his trousers and put on a pair of old jeans and donned a navy blue long-sleeved jersey. The night was chill, and he pulled on his cardigan over the knit shirt. What a childish prank, he thought, running a brush through his thick hair and surveying the room. He’d call a cleaning service first thing in the morning.

  Picking up an electric torch, Jeremy decided to return to the wine cellar, which he still considered to be the most likely hiding place for Caroline Lamb’s treasure. Maybe he would get lucky. At any rate, Alison probably would not be able to see the light from the cellar, even if she was sleeping on the couch in the Great Hall. But he took no chances. Before leaving the room, he turned off all the lights. He crept through the blinding darkness, feeling his way down the stairs, around the corner, past the library, down more stairs, until he reached the small anteroom just outside the cellar door. Only then did he turn on the torch.

  His heart was racing, and he felt like an intruder, even though he had every right to be here. Quickly, he pushed the secret panel that unlatched the door. He ducked inside the darkened party room and closed the door securely behind him before turning on the lights. Now, he thought with a certain satisfaction, maybe he could get something accomplished.

  Caroline must have been familiar with this cellar, Jeremy surmised. If she and the old Lord Chillingcote were drinking chums, it was possible they had shared a cup or two in the Dutch room. Surely, if the old man had been proud of his collection of wines, brandies and cognacs, he might have shown off the cellar to his visitor from Brocket Hall. Taking the
large key in hand, Jeremy turned the lock just as Gina had done before, and he heard the metal rasp open. He dragged the heavy chain away and opened the door. The wine storage area was long and narrow, and wound around behind the stairs which led from the Dutch room to the kitchen and the back part of the house. The light from the main room only dimly illuminated the cellar, and Jeremy was glad he’d brought along the hand-held light. He turned it on again and flashed it into the darkened corners. Now, if I were Lady Caroline wanting to hide memoirs down here, where would I put them? he asked himself.

  Not anyplace obvious, according to her letter. Jeremy ran his hand along the edge of the underside of the stairwell and down the dank wall. His skin crawled at the idea that he might meet a rat or some other unpleasant denizen of this moldering underworld. At the far end of the room, he noted that the wall was covered with metal, rather than carved out of the native stone of the area as were the others.

  Hmmmm.

  He pressed hard on the metal, but it appeared to be a solid wall rather than a door. He ran his fingertips along the joint between the wall and the ceiling, and then down again along the opposite wall. And then he discovered a small indentation, and a button of some sort that gave way beneath the pressure of his touch.

  Well, well. Where there was one secret latch, there could be more…

  The metal wall slid away, revealing a second room. A cavern really. Jeremy could not believe his luck. He directed the beam of light in a broad brush across the room, and found to his delight it was filled with rows and rows of bottles. A quick survey told him that, unlike those bottles in the outer room, these were intact and likely still good. He would have to come back at a later time and conduct a careful inventory of what was here.

  But what else was here? he wondered. He examined each shelf as best he could in the dim light, looking for a sheaf of old papers, wondering if Caroline had placed them in any kind of protective holder, such as a box. Papers exposed to the air for almost two centuries might have deteriorated beyond recognition. He flashed the light to the floor, but saw no pile of rubble that might have once been the memoirs of the infamous Lord Byron. In fact, he came across nothing that even remotely resembled what he was looking for.

  Well, he conceded at last, the memoirs were not here, but at least his nocturnal prowlings had not been in vain. He’d discovered the inner cellar, probably where the latest Lord Chillingcote had kept his “good stuff.” He returned to the outer cellar and pressed the button again, and the door closed behind him with a rumble, a louder sound, he thought, than it had made when it opened. But then he heard the noise again after the door had locked itself in place.

  Thunder?

  It sounded more like the deep bass of a musical instrument. A harpsichord.

  Curious, Jeremy hurriedly left the wine cellar, locking it securely behind him. He turned off the light in the Dutch room and crept back up the stairs, following the sound that grew louder as he approached the Great Hall. Someone, it appeared, was playing the harpsichord he had uncovered earlier.

  Alison Cunningham?

  What a time to exhibit your musical talents, Jeremy thought cynically. Likely, she was just trying to disturb him as much as she could, hoping to drive him away. He came to the doorway between the Great Hall and the first reception room, and he stopped in his tracks. The music filled the darkness, one of Chopin’s Nocturnes, if he wasn’t mistaken, but he could see no one.

  Scarcely daring to breathe, he thought he caught a glimpse of a faint light approaching from the back of the house. What was going on here? Was he seeing the ghost? he thought wildly, illogically. The light grew brighter, and Jeremy drew in his breath sharply when Alison Cunningham entered the room, clad only in an oversized tee-shirt and carrying a dripping candelabra.

  What the hell? Why didn’t she just turn on the lights? She was a sexy apparition, hauntingly like the one who had seduced him in his dreams. Jeremy stood spellbound, his body reacting in a most disturbing manner to the sight of the slender figure. Her burnished hair was a tumble of polished copper in the candlelight. Her skin glowed, and the thin fabric of the ludicrously large tee-shirt left nothing to his imagination concerning the size and shape of her thrusting breasts. He stifled a low growl that erupted unbidden from the depths of his libido. He thought he’d been discovered, for her words when she spoke, seemed directed at him.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, going to the harpsichord. Seeing she wasn’t headed for him, Jeremy didn’t reply, but kept to the shadows and watched, fascinated. The music stopped abruptly, and Alison spoke again. “I need to get some sleep. What? So you like to play the harpsichord. So what’s wrong with the daytime?” She paused, as if listening to a reply from some invisible personage. Then, “You act like you’ve been drinking.” Her words were followed by a thunderous discordant roar from the musical instrument.

  “Stop that!” Alison screeched. “Go away! Get out of here, now!”

  If there was another person in the room, Jeremy couldn’t see him, or her. And yet, he got the distinct impression that a presence of sorts had disappeared, leaving behind only the echo of Chopin, a trembling darkness, and a beautiful woman who seemed the more likely candidate for one who had been drinking. Jeremy hesitated for a moment, trying to get a grasp on what he had just witnessed. Alison Cunningham had obviously been talking to herself again. But the music…he could swear it was real, even though no one had sat at the keyboard. How had she done that? Was she some sort of witch? What was her game? He decided to find out.

  “That was quite a show, Miss Cunningham,” he said, switching on the overhead lights. “Want to tell me how you did it?”

  Alison nearly passed out from fright at the sound of Jeremy’s voice and squinted in the sudden glare of electric lights. She was accustomed by this time to encountering the ghost of Lady Caroline. But the figure that spoke to her out of the darkness was a specter of another kind.

  Male.

  Handsome.

  Hostile.

  And very much from this plane of existence.

  “I wish you would stop doing that!” she cried angrily, holding the heavy candelabra between them in front of her, ignoring the wax droplets that spilled onto her forearms. She’d discovered the ancient candelabra in her room and had lit the candles in a flight of fancy, trying to imagine what the place might have been like in Tudor times. When she’d heard the harpsichord, she hadn’t thought to turn on modern lights.

  “Doing what?” Jeremy asked. He went to the bench and took a seat at the harpsichord. Looking directly up at Alison, he laid his finger on a key, producing the extended wail of a single note.

  His aloof composure infuriated her. “You know very well what. Scaring the hell out of me, that’s what.”

  He turned a cryptic smile on her. “Did I scare you, Miss Cunningham? I thought it was you who seemed to be determined to startle me.” With that, he played a phantomly flourish on the instrument, and Alison almost expected to see Vincent Price enter stage left. Her skin crawled in spite of her anger.

  “Quit that!” she sputtered. “And quit showing up out of nowhere, like…like a ghost or something.”

  Jeremy removed his hands from the keyboard and abruptly turned on the bench to face her. “Do you believe in ghosts, Miss Cunningham?”

  Alison glanced around to see if there was any sign that Caro had stuck around after her tipsy performance, but it was hard to tell. “Ghosts? No, I’m not…afraid of ghosts.”

  “I didn’t ask you if you were afraid of them,” Jeremy pursued. “I asked if you believed in them.”

  Alison saw his gaze travel from her face slowly down her body, her bare legs, and up again. She shivered, but not from the cold. Whether she liked him or not, Jeremy Ryder was a damnably sexy man, and at the moment she was acutely and uncomfortably aware of the closeness between them. She pulled at the hem of her tee-shirt, wishing she had on more clothing. “Believe…in ghosts,” she stammered. “No, I don’t believe in
ghosts. That’s a childish notion.”

  The moment the words were out of her mouth, Alison regretted it, for she sensed more than saw what was about to happen. A cold draft swept past her, dousing her candles and plunging the room into darkness. The now-familiar swirl of mist began to coalesce as Caroline threatened to prove her existence to them both.

  Jeremy bolted from the music bench. “What the hell?”

  “Don’t!” Alison cried out to the ghost, not wanting it to reveal its identity to Jeremy. “I didn’t mean it and you know it. Go away. Go away!”

  Suddenly, the electric lights flickered and then went out, and Alison let out a little squeak. Caro was pissed!

  Then another light blazed in the darkness, and Alison watched as Jeremy sent the beam of a powerful flashlight around the room. It traveled over draped chairs and tables, lamps and paintings, all of which appeared ghostly in the gloom, but it revealed no real spirit. Alison let out a sigh.

  Jeremy turned the flashlight off again, and Alison could feel his closeness in the dark. And then she felt the touch of his hands on her shoulders. “Are you all right?” he asked, his voice surprisingly gentle.

  Alison began to quake in spite of herself. She was cold, scared, and confused by the feelings his touch aroused within her. And she was talking to ghosts. No, she wasn’t all right. But he didn’t need to know that. “I’m…fine.”

  “You’re cold,” he replied, and then she felt the welcome warmth of a soft sweater being draped over her shoulders. “Let me take you back to your room,” he offered, turning the light on again. “Where did you…uh…end up for the night?”

  Alison felt almost as if she were in a daze. She wasn’t sure exactly what room she had been sleeping in. Somewhere in the maze of guest rooms. She didn’t want to accept his help, but she was afraid without his flashlight, she might not find her way in the dark back to the warmth and security of her bed, at least not before dawn.