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It had taken her a while to realise that no one should ever have to do that.
She picked up his empty glass and took it inside. Rinsing it under the scullery tap, she ran her fingers over the place where his lips had touched and wondered for the hundredth time who Jem Arden really was and what he was doing at Coldwell.
Damn.
Jem swung the axe and winced at the retort of pain that shot through his chest. He turned to look at the open mouth of the kitchen door and thought about going after her.
I don’t know him, he could say, but I think he knows me. I think he’s worked out that I’m the brother of a boy who went missing here nine years ago. I think he suspects that I’ve come here to find out what happened. And if he does, I’m sure he intends to stop me, by whatever means it takes.
He kicked the shards of split wood into a rough heap, trying to imagine how he would explain. He pictured that slight frown—the two faint lines that appeared between her fine brows when she was thinking—as she listened. It sounded so far-fetched; that a lad could have come here as part of an ordinary Friday-to-Monday party and just… disappear. How could he expect her to believe it when he couldn’t really make sense of it himself?
She would ask for evidence, and he would offer her… nothing solid. Only the sparse collection of facts he had gathered about Jack’s movements that autumn, supplemented with the things he had heard in London when he’d worked for Mr Winthrop: the servants’ gossip and rumour that had led him to Sir Randolph, and Coldwell…
She would think he was unhinged.
He swiped the back of his hand across his sweat-slick forehead. He’d seen how alarmed she was at the idea of an intruder. She was hardly going to give a sympathetic hearing to someone who had conned his way into the household with the intention of seeking justice for an old, unproven crime. She would think him a fantasist or a fool, possibly both. At a single stroke he would sever the cautious connection that was growing between them and she would order him to leave.
He couldn’t risk it.
After what had happened before, he’d vowed not to involve anyone else in his search, but as the keeper of the keys, she had access to all of Coldwell’s shuttered rooms and the power to unlock its secrets.
Like the queen on the chessboard. The most useful piece in the game.
Kate passed the remainder of the slow, hot afternoon making potpourri.
In the days of the late Lady Hyde there had been a rose garden, and though it was now tangled and neglected (Gatley couldn’t spare hands to tend a space that the family never set foot in), the old-fashioned bushes still bloomed, untamed and unseen. After last night’s rain, the damask roses were heavy-headed and ready to drop, ripe for gathering in fragrant fistfuls and spreading out in the stillroom to dry.
At six o’clock, when the heat was subsiding and the basement passages were filled with perfume, she went to the pantry to cut bread and cheese for tea. Mr Kendall and his troops had finished for the day and the silence was as thick and golden as honey. She could hear a fly buzzing drowsily against a windowpane somewhere, the clock ticking in the empty kitchen, but nothing else. It should have been peaceful, but somehow it felt like the house holding its breath.
Waiting.
For what? she asked herself crossly. Precious little happened at Coldwell, even when the full staff was in residence. What on earth was she expecting when the place was empty?
Without the structure of routine, there was too much time to think, too much space inside her own head to fill with things that weren’t helpful. When she’d eaten, with the light summer evening stretching ahead, she opened her ledger to apply herself to the household accounts, working steadily down the columns of figures and sorting through the invoices for items for the Jaipur Suite and its new bathroom, until her neck was stiff and her fingers cramped from writing.
The pinkish light washing the room told her she had missed a beautiful sunset. She stood up, arching her back and flexing her aching shoulders, suddenly restless. Impatient to get out of the small, stuffy room and go up and look for herself at the suite of rooms where all the items she had chosen would be displayed.
The passageway was haunted by the scent of roses. She closed her door firmly, so the sound rang out, and made no attempt to still her jangling keys or soften the retort of her footsteps on the back stairs as she climbed up to the second floor. As she walked along the ladies’ corridor, her shadow slid along the wall at her side, hunched and black, like a premonition. She suddenly saw herself, an old woman, dressed in the same sober black, walking the same corridors, her frame as shrunken as the narrow horizons of her life.
She flapped the unwelcome image away, like a crow from a freshly turned field.
Inside the Jaipur Suite the smell of plaster dust and sawn wood had banished the lingering whisper of old Lady Hyde’s favourite lily of the valley scent. The rose-coloured silk (Jaipur was known as the Pink City, apparently) that had been hung when Coldwell had its last revamp in 1819 had been pulled down from the walls in the adjoining dressing room and piled in a heap on the floor, ready to make way for the peacock-print wallpaper Kate had ordered. The room had been cleared of its furniture—all but the bed, which was too large to move, but had been covered in holland cloth and stood in the centre of the space like a tented pavilion. Lengths of lead piping lay on the floor, and ladders leaned against the walls. Standing at the door to the dressing room Kate saw that a section of the ceiling had been pulled down and the floorboards beneath lifted, where the pipes for hot water would be laid.
She tried to imagine what it would be like when it was finished, and her mind was unwillingly drawn back to another house, another bathroom. Piped hot water. A deep bath, panelled in mahogany. Dark green tiles with a patterned border of lilies, and a white porcelain sink as wide as the tin tub most people still bathed in…
Nothing but the newest and best for you, my angel. Didn’t I promise you would have the finest home in the city?
The echo of his voice in her ear was as close as if he was standing behind her. She could almost feel his breath on her neck. She squeezed her eyes shut, but above the whooshing in her ears she still heard footsteps. It was ridiculous that her mind could still play such tricks, after all this time—
‘Oh. Sorry.’
Her eyes flew open, and she turned to see Jem standing just inside the bedroom door. Embarrassed heat exploded in her cheeks as he held up a ring of keys. ‘Mr Goddard asked me to lock up. I didn’t know you were here.’
‘I came to see how the work was progressing, and check that everything was secure.’ She took refuge behind her mask of brisk efficiency, shutting the dressing room door and folding the shutters across one window, then the other, so that darkness enfolded them, hiding her embarrassment. ‘I haven’t heard about any more break-ins, but we can’t be too careful.’
They went out into the corridor. She would have gone back the way she had come, but he had turned in the other direction, towards the nursery wing and the staircase the workmen used, and she found herself following. He walked stiffly, one arm folded across his chest, his shoulders tense. A heavy door separated one part of the house from the other, and he propped it open for her with his foot rather than use the hand that was tucked under his arm. In the mauve dusk his face was drawn, the bruising beneath his right eye matched by a blue shadow of exhaustion under the left.
She looked away, thanking him as she passed.