how she’d have fared in that world if she had been obliged to make her come out in polite society. The idea was so far removed from her real life it made her want to laugh, but she bit it back and reminded herself this was serious.
‘Surely you heard that?’ she whispered urgently, listening to the night with the uneasy feeling it was listening back. ‘I’d swear that was a window opening or closing on the landward side of the house.’
‘The wind, perhaps?’
‘There is no wind; nothing ought to be out here but foxes or owls.’
‘Some poor creature could have got in and not been able to get back out, then,’ Lady Wakebourne murmured.
‘I refuse to believe bats and birds can unbar shutters or open windows,’ Polly said as lightly as she could when this black darkness made her want to shout a challenge at whoever was out there.
‘Tomorrow we’ll go in and see for ourselves, but if you take another step in that direction now I’ll scream at the top of my voice.’
‘They will be long gone by then,’ Polly argued, although she knew Lady Wakebourne was right and she couldn’t afford to encounter an unknown foe in the unused parts of the castle.
Her three brothers had to grow up and be independent before she was free to have adventures, but it was so hard to fight her wild Trethayne urges to act now and think later. At least memory of her father’s recklessness reminded her to leash her own though; she was all that stood between her brothers and life on the parish, if they were lucky, and she had no plans to leave any of them in the dire situation Papa’s death had left her in as a very naive and unprepared seventeen-year-old.
‘At least we’ll find out if these felons of yours exist outside the pages of a Gothic novel. If they do we’ll have to get them to believe there really are ghosts at Dayspring Castle and leave us in peace with them.’
‘Perhaps I should cut my hair and borrow a fine coat, then ride up the drive and announce myself as the Marquis of Mantaigne come back to claim his own,’ Polly suggested as the most absurd way of scaring anyone out of the old place she could think of.
‘And perhaps you should stop reading those ridiculous Gothic novels the vicar’s sister passes on to us when she knows them by heart.’
‘Aye, they’re about as likely to come true as the idea Lord Mantaigne will ever come here without being kidnapped and dragged up the drive bound and gagged first. So ghosts it will have to be then,’ Polly agreed, reluctantly admitting there was nothing to be done tonight, and followed her fellow adventuress back to the castle keep and the closest thing she had to a home nowadays.
* * *
‘I should have sent the butler and housekeeper from Tayne on ahead of us, Peters. At least they might have found a few rooms at Dayspring undamaged after all these years of neglect and managed to make them habitable for us by now.’
Tom halted his matched team of Welsh greys at the gatehouse and wished himself a hundred miles away. Dayspring Castle was puffed up as his most splendid country seat in the peerages and guides to the county, but he felt a clutch of sick dread in his belly at the mere sight of it ahead, wrapped round the clifftop like a beast of prey from his worst nightmares.
‘They would have given notice,’ his companion argued. ‘It would need an army of servants to get such a place in any sort of order after lying empty so long.’
‘True, but wouldn’t that army need to be directed by my man of business?’ Tom retaliated against a not very-well-disguised rebuke for neglecting the wretched place until it became the ruin he’d once sworn to make it.
‘I like a challenge, my lord,’ Peters said, and wasn’t he a mystery of a lawyer now Tom came to think about it?
Nothing about this business was simple, though, and he supposed he’d have to admit the man had been useful to Luke in the part of the quest Virginia set him. According to James Winterley, who had a way of knowing things you didn’t expect him to, Peters had helped a variety of aristocratic clients sort out the skeletons in their rosewood cupboards, including the Seaborne clan, whose shrewdness Tom would back against a corps of wily diplomats. So Tom had no choice but to trust this man to watch his back, even if the fellow saw too much of what lay below the surface of life for comfort.
‘You’re only here for three months, and heaven knows why Virginia thought I needed you by my side the entire time. Perhaps she expected you to force me up the drive at pistol-point if I lose my nerve.’
‘The late Lady Farenze merely instructed me to meet you in Dorchester and accompany you here. I couldn’t say what your godmother had in mind, my lord,’ Peters said primly, but there was a world of disapproval in his gaze.
Perhaps the man was a Jacobin? Tom decided he didn’t care if he was hell-bent on revolution, so long as they got on with this wretched business and left as soon as they found out what was wrong. ‘I believe I mentioned my dislike of being “my lorded” at every turn when we first met,’ he replied with a preoccupied frown at the neatly kept castle gatehouse.
‘I’m supposed to be your temporary secretary here, not your equal, my lord.’
Tom found himself doubting that and how unlike him to look deeper into another man’s life than he wanted him to. Lord Mantaigne had spent most of his adult life skimming over the surface of life like a pond-skater, and Tom shook his head at the picture of himself not caring about anything very much. He’d loved his godmother and Virgil, but they were both dead now, and at least he’d managed to keep the rest of the world at arm’s length, except a voice whispered he’d let in Luke and his daughter and James. Now Lady Chloe and her spirited niece seemed to have chipped their way into a corner of what he’d thought was his cold heart, and how could he have been so careless as to let himself care about so many people without noticing?
He glared at a certain window high up in the ancient keep and stark memories rose up to whisper he was right not to come back until he had to. Virginia’s last letter had told him one of her legion of friends had written to tell her something was amiss at Dayspring and he must go and find out what was so wrong with the place, but all he could see wrong with it right now was that it was still standing. Only for the woman who had taken in the feral little beast who had once existed in that keep and loved him anyway would he revisit the place despite all his resolutions not to.
‘Whoever you intend to be, you’ll have a poor time of it here,’ he warned Peters as he slowed his greys to a walk.
‘I expect I’ll survive; I’m not faint-hearted.’
‘Just as well. My last guardian only kept a few servants here once he took control of the estate for me, and I paid them off when I came of age,’ Tom warned.
Peters shrugged as if he wanted to get on with his mission and leave, before he violated some lawyerly code and told a client exactly what he thought of his criminal neglect of such an historic property.
‘I expect there will be a couple of rooms we can make habitable for the few days I intend to spend here,’ Tom added glumly.
‘Indeed, although the castle looks very well preserved to me, despite your orders it should not be.’
‘And it’s evidently a lot less empty than it ought to be,’ Tom mused with a frown as he watched a plume of smoke waft lazily from a chimney in the oldest part
