Castle & Key, page 20
Since it wouldn’t have been useful to express as much to Helfer—it seemed unlikely that he would even understand what she was saying—Susan exercised the greatest restraint she had yet exercised in the manor and held her tongue.
It was in the process of so doing that she noticed a shadow in one of the windows of the manor directly behind and above Helfer. No, not a shadow: a person. If Susan wasn’t very mistaken, Mr. Oswald was looking down at them through a window somewhere in the right wing of the manor—had, perhaps, been watching them for some time.
She must have looked for just a fraction too long: Helfer turned to follow her gaze and immediately his shoulders stiffened. He turned back to the table, grabbed the few remaining forks and threw them in with the polished silver, and began rolling up the large polishing mat that he’d laid down, with all the silverware in it.
“I’ll be in for it if I take any longer on this,” he said. “You’d better get back to your own work, too, before Mrs. Carmichael comes along and boxes your ears.”
“I’d like to see her reach,” Susan said cheerfully, but it was too late.
Helfer, spooked and skittish, was already hurrying back toward the kitchen, leaving her alone in the sunshine with the spoon she’d been polishing and the distinct inclination to sit a little longer in the sunshine to collect her thoughts.
Since the shadow of Mr. Oswald vanished from the window a moment later and there was no sign of far-too-broad shoulders or spiky, close-cut hair to warn her of Emmett’s imminent approach, Susan allowed herself to follow her inclinations and remained where she was to bask in the warmth and think.
What principally worried her right now was the gardeners. She already had reason to believe that not only were staff members not entirely safe from the dangers of the curse, but they were in an actively upward trajectory if another staff member died while the story curse was in course with a particular story.
Which meant that if the gardeners wanted to get into the house badly enough…
Susan shook her head. What a ridiculous thought! The curse might prompt people to do quite a lot of things, but most of the suggestions were light, insidious ones. And despite the significant sins of omission and greed that the townspeople and the manor people alike seemed willing to commit in pursuit of the prosperity of the town—or personal prosperity—she didn’t yet have any reason to think that they were willing to commit sins of commission and actually murder others in the manor in order to move up the ranks. There was also no reason to suspect that the gardeners wanted to get into the house badly enough that they would kill anyone, despite their disturbing habit of peering through windows.
As a matter of fact, she might have thought Helfer was joking if he hadn’t reacted so strongly after what he’d said. Hopefully, she would be able to think of some way to get him to talk about it again later—outside of the manor, where ghosts and curses attached to the master couldn’t overhear.
Perhaps the thought was still nibbling away at her consciousness when Susan, sighting Emmett through the kitchen windows, hastily ducked around the sunny side of the manor to avoid him and returned to the breakfast room through the glasshouse entrance.
She said, “Don’t mind me, I’m just passing through!” to Janet and the master—who were far closer to each other than would have been proper if they weren’t married—and made Janet giggle. At the door, Susan added, “Don’t worry, I won’t come back soon,” and that made the master choke with laughter, too.
Certainly the idea was in her mind when she passed swiftly down the length of the lower hallway, ducking her head into each doorway as she passed, because when she caught sight of the gardeners both standing at the window of the music room, one close enough to fog the glass with his breath and the other far enough away to look as though he was a good head shorter than the first, Susan stopped short with a feeling of satisfaction.
She wheeled and turned into the room, shutting the door behind her, and crossed the room while Gardener One, who was closest to the glass, watched her dumbly. He was still staring at her when she swung the long window inward and left only fresh air and mist between the two of them.
Susan leaned casually on the side of the window and said in a friendly sort of way to the closest tweed-surmounted face, “You might as well come in. I won’t tell anyone.”
Gardener One stared at her as if she had two heads, and Gardener Two slowly sank behind the hedge as if she couldn’t see his booted ankles from where she was, or as if she hadn’t seen him making his exit.
She added encouragingly, a little bit louder, “Your other half can come in, too. It’s not much use him hiding behind the hedge when it doesn’t go all the way to the ground, you know.”
The other gardener slowly straightened from behind the hedge, once more adding torso and arms to the ankles.
“Can’t come in,” said Gardener One. “Why did you open the window?”
“Because you’re always pressing your nose up against them. I thought you might like to get in and have it over with,” she said pleasantly. “If it’s your boots you’re worried about, you can leave those outside, after all.”
Seemingly perplexed, he said, “We’re not worried about our boots.”
“Well then!” said Susan, pushing the window open wide and stepping aside.
For a moment, she thought the gardener, hesitating on the outside, might actually step through.
Then, an irate voice from the door demanded, “What’s the meaning of this? Miss Susan, what are you doing, consorting with the outside staff?”
“Exactly that,” Susan said, with what she hoped was disarming honesty.
Almost in synch, the gardeners both took a step back as Mrs. Carmichael stormed across the room and flapped her apron at them. “Out! Out, you dreadful people! I won’t have you trying to get into the house with your big boots and dirty fingernails!”
The gardeners beat a quick retreat, thoroughly browbeaten, and Mrs. Carmichael made a flurry of closing the windows before she turned on Susan and said severely, “I’ll thank you not to encourage the outside staff to think themselves good enough to enter the house, Miss Susan!”
“They seemed interested in being inside,” Susan said innocently. “I thought they must have had some business here.”
Mrs. Carmichael sniffed. “Wanting to live like their betters, I should think. Once they get a taste for being inside, you can’t get them back out again. They’re carriers and diggers, and that’s all they’ll ever be.”
“What if one of us dies and upsets the numbers inside?” suggested Susan.
She didn’t miss the odd, secretive look that flitted briefly across Mrs. Carmichael’s face. “That’s another thing entirely,” the woman said, and left the room.
Eleven
Susan threw herself into one of the couches to think and rest her tired eyes after last night’s sleeplessness, and must have fallen asleep mid-thought, because she woke to the sound of a bell and the lingering remnants of the same thought.
“Bother you,” she said to that thought, which was large with Emmett.
It took her a few minutes to shake her head and stretch out her limbs, and another few to make sure her mind was as empty of Emmett as the hall, before Susan crossed the carpet and sauntered toward the breakfast room once again. By her reckoning, it was close to mid-day, and while she slept, the sky had darkened on both sides of the manor, casting a faintly green shadow through the entire place.
Thunderstorm, thought Susan, with her hand on the doorknob of the breakfast room door. And a thunderstorm meant earlier dark, which probably also meant ghosts darting around the manor earlier than usual. She grimaced a little and entered the room, then stopped short two steps into the room, because instead of seeing Janet and the master together, or Janet alone, she saw Emmett and Janet standing together by the fire.
They weren’t as close together as Janet had been with the master earlier, but they were still, in Susan’s opinion, far too close to one another. And, she noticed with exasperation, Janet had her hand on Emmett’s forearm once more, leaning forward to speak confidingly.
More annoyingly still, that hand didn’t leave Emmett’s arm when she looked around to see Susan standing there—it didn’t move, in fact, until Emmett drew away from the fireplace.
“Shall I take you up to your room?” enquired Susan, her voice light.
“No, I’m to go for a ride with the master,” Janet said. “You might as well…make yourself useful around the manor.”
Her tone was as light as Susan’s, but Susan caught the implication in it. She nodded and asked, “Are you taking the hound?”
“I think so. She seems to want to come; I think she likes the horses.”
And she wafted out in a queenly sort of way that Susan knew she would never be able to pull off, leaving Susan alone with Emmett and unsure whether to be annoyed by that or simply relieved that Janet was no longer with him alone. She turned back to Emmett and found that he’d moved nearer to her and further away from the fireplace, which only had a small fire in it in deference to the sunshine that was presently streaming into the room through the windows.
“I wouldn’t stand too close to that,” she said, tipping her head toward it. “That’s the one Janet nearly walked through the other day.”
“I’m not asleep now,” Emmett said, but he continued toward her and away from the fire. “I won’t be led around by the nose when I’m awake.”
For a moment, Susan was dreadfully tempted to seize Emmett by the ears as she had done to the ghostly representation of him that morning—and this time kiss him properly, if only to see how the real Emmett would respond to any such thing.
It could even be seen as an experiment of sorts—something like Emmett had done in the darkness of the left wing after following a ghost very nearly to his death. A touch to see if the skin was warm, so to speak.
But since Susan was very well aware that she would only be gratifying her own wishes by doing so, she stuffed her hands into her pockets to help resist the temptation and asked, “Do you really think so?”
It wasn’t until he leaned down with mesmerising slowness to speak in her ear that Susan became aware how very near Emmett had drawn.
“It wasn’t a challenge,” he said softly. And then, into her suddenly buzzing ears, he added, “And don’t look around at the window, but I fancy there are two gardeners out there watching us.”
Susan felt as though the air stilled around her. She had suspected that there was someone in the glasshouse outside, and it only made sense for it to be the gardeners, who had evidently circled the manor to peer through some more useful windows.
It was not the information that the gardeners were once more staring at her that seemed to make the room stop moving. No, it was the fact that although Emmett’s voice said he hadn’t been making a challenge, both his tone and the bright light of his eyes said something diametrically opposed. And for the first time since they had arrived in the manor, Susan was genuinely uncertain as to whether she was experiencing reality or dream. She didn’t have to think—or perhaps simply didn’t think—she narrowed her eyes and took her hands out of her pockets.
“We’ll see about that,” she said, pulling Emmett’s face down toward hers by his ears.
Dream Emmett had been startled and then angry at the loss of control; Real Emmett—and he could only be real, with the warmth of his ears and cheeks—was certainly startled, but he didn’t resist the pull of her hands. He might even, thought Susan in the brief moment before she kissed him, have stepped forward with it.
Emmett’s arms closed around her waist as she lifted her chin to press her lips against his, drawing her close against himself, but was otherwise gentle today where he had been forceful the other day. He was there, pressure for pressure and delightfully practised in the art of kissing, but there was no pushing her back against a wall or even a step backward; he simply held her in place and made the most of everything she gave.
And Susan, who had quite some moments ago in this exercise answered every theory and question for which she had desired an answer, found it very difficult to do what she should have done immediately upon having those answers, and break the kiss. Happily for her, a log shifted and fell in the fire; soft and unmistakeable at the same time, that noise seemed to break the spell. Susan turned her face a little to stop the kiss while it still seemed possible, and caught at whatever little sanity she still possessed while Emmett turned his head into her neck and settled there, his heartbeat mingling with hers.
She breathed into his ear, “Are they still out there?”
Emmett shifted a little, and for a moment Susan was quite certain that the embrace tightened rather than loosened; then she felt his head lift slightly and deliberately, and after a few, lingering moments, he said, “No.”
He let her go as soon as she pulled away, but one of her hands was inexplicably in one of his, and Emmett used that connection to pull her back toward the fireplace and the fat, padded chairs there. She sat down in one of them, very conscious of Emmett’s eyes on her face. She could have sworn that there was a sliver of concern in those eyes; mostly, she saw a certain wariness as he sat down opposite her, and she didn’t really blame him for that. It wasn’t the first time that she could be said to have attacked him, but it was the first time she had done so without warning.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m not going to go for you again.”
Genuine amusement swept over his face. “Are you going to do that every time we’re caught alone with someone watching us?”
“No,” said Susan, heartily regretting what she’d done. It was so unfair to Emmett when he was labouring under the curse, and she could have effectively done the same thing in a far less invasive manner, even if she couldn’t have confirmed her theory from the morning’s adventures. “But I needed to check a theory, and this was the easiest way to do that.”
Emmett’s eyes fixed on her face. “You were checking that I wasn’t a dream?”
“I could have done that just by touching your arm,” Susan said, giving only that half-answer.
She wasn’t sure if he would catch her in the omission, and it was a relief when he said instead, “I looked for you all morning.”
“I was polishing silver,” she said, relaxing a little. “And learning about the first owner of the manor, who apparently cursed the current one.”
Emmett, who seemed to have opened his mouth with another question, closed it again and then asked, “Someone was willing to talk openly about that?”
“Yes, I fancy he didn’t think it was important enough to worry about. Very interesting, that.”
“He?”
“The little footman,” said Susan. “And I don’t think he was trying to be helpful, either; I think he was trying to warn me. In fact, I’m pretty sure the little blighter threatened me at one point.”
“Is he the one who hit you on the head?”
“Not unless he was in two places at once. I’ve got my money on Mrs. Carmichael for the act, but I wouldn’t put it past Mr. Oswald, either. I’m still not sure about Regan.”
“All right. What did the footman tell you about the first master and this one? All of it.”
“I’ll tell you, but only if you tell me what you know about what the master usually does after dinner—and don’t say brood, because I already know that.”
* * *
When Susan had finished filling Emmett in on what she had learned from Helfer, and he had done the same with the scant information he had about the master, they both reluctantly decided that it wasn’t wise to spend any longer together alone with the manor as highly strung as it presently was, and made for the door.
They returned to the hallway to find Regan dusting the closest planter, shooting a distrustful look up at the portrait above her and then at them as they exited the room. Susan managed a delightfully convincing giggle that made Regan roll her eyes and look away, and felt the huff of air that was Emmett silently laughing behind her. Emmett vanished with his usual quietness toward the front of the manor—perhaps for a brief word with Brennan—leaving Susan to meet Regan’s meaningful look.
“You’d best get to the kitchen,” she said to Susan. “Mrs. C is in a bate: the master wants the gaslight on for tonight, so of course it’s off and on as usual—it always fails when we’re already having an unsettled day! We’ll be lucky if we get through the day without someone’s ears being boxed, at this rate.”
“Sounds absolutely delightful,” Susan said, and turned reluctantly toward the kitchen.
“Of course, you won’t have to do half as much as we will,” Regan added as she walked away. “Being the mistress’ maid.”
“It’s the joy of my life,” Susan said over her shoulder.
She would have gone right on to the kitchen if she hadn’t heard Mrs. Carmichael’s voice wafting up from the left wing of the manor as she passed the turning; Susan took the left-hand turn and found the housekeeper in a room she had not yet seen the inside of. Wide and dark, and glittering with golden embellishments on every wall, golden ceiling roses curving around the lights in the shadowy ceiling, it was a room for elegant dinners and rich company.
Not, Susan would have thought, the sort of place to enjoy a quiet dinner in the presence of a woman you were being gently teased into caring for by a ruthless and far-too-powerful curse, in order to cement your goodwill and interest. A twinge of unease pulled at Susan. Was the master planning on using this dinner as a catalyst for giving Janet the key? Surely he would know that Janet would much prefer a warm, peaceful dinner in one of the smaller rooms—or, scandalous thought!—his suite.
