Moonlight And Mistletoe

CHAPTER TEN

‘Local legends-how amusing,’ Hester said lightly, resisting the urge to tear up the parchment in her hand. It felt unpleasant: old, dirty, strangely gritty. She handed it back to Sir Lewis with an attempt at a bright smile. ‘You must not lose this from your archives, Sir Lewis. One of the family was obviously a collector of antiquarian lore.’

‘Great-uncle William, I believe.’ He frowned at his sister. ‘You should not be alarming Miss Lattimer with this nonsense, Sarah.’

‘I am not at all alarmed.’ Hester eyed Miss Nugent warily.

From suspecting her of having airs to be interesting, she was now wondering if the girl was of a hysterical nature; she was certainly flushed and her eyes glittered. ‘But I appreciate Miss Nugent’s concern and I think this discussion is distressing her.’

Far from eliciting a sympathetic response from Sir Lewis, he said sharply. ‘Sarah, you will make yourself ill; leave these musty books and this foolish superstition. Fresh air will do you good-the day is fine, why not show Miss Lattimer around the gardens?’

‘I would not dream of inconveniencing…’

‘How could you?’ Sarah flared at him. Hester took a step back. ‘How can you forget and call this foolish? Father sold the Moon House and look what happened to him.’

‘It was an accident. He was unwell and slipped.’

‘He was unwell from the moment he signed the deeds away. And an accident? To slip on the steps in full moonlight? And where did the rose come from, pray?’ She broke off panting, staring defiantly at her brother, who appeared lost for words.

‘Rose?’ Hester queried, not wanting to hear the answer.

‘There was a dead rose in his hand,’ Sarah burst out and ran from the room.

‘I…’ Sir Lewis gave himself a little shake. ‘I apologise. Allow me to offer you some refreshment while my sister composes herself.’

‘No, please, I would not dream of imposing upon your time when Miss Nugent is unwell. Please give her my apologies for not waiting to take my leave of her.’ Hester felt she was babbling and added, as she stepped into the hail, ‘You must both come to dinner one evening when she is feeling more herself.’

‘Let me walk you back to the stables.’ He fell into step beside her in awkward silence. Finally he said, ‘I am sorry if Sarah alarmed you. She is distressed because her betrothed is kept longer than expected on his plantations in the West Indies. She misses him and, of course, the wedding had to be postponed anyway because of our bereavement. She reads too much to pass the time and broods on what she has read. If I had my way, I would burn every Gothic novel ever written!’

‘She has a vivid imagination.’ Hester struggled to find something helpful to say. ‘I am sure she is very sensitive.’

‘The trouble is,’ Sir Lewis said grimly, ‘it is not all her imagination. I do my best to play down her fears and the strange stories, but something is very wrong with that house; I hope you will be careful, Miss Lattimer.’

‘Perhaps I should sell to the earl after all.’ Hester brushed her fingertips together to try and get rid of the unpleasant gritty feel of the parchment before pulling on her gloves. ‘I am sure he could rout the spectre.’

‘I do wish you would decide to sell, and that you would sell it to me.’ Lewis Nugent halted her with one hand on her arm. ‘I feel it is the only honourable thing to do. I would not wish you put in fear, nor to transfer the curse or whatever it is to anyone else; this seems to be a problem for the Nugent family.’

Hester looked up into his handsome, anxious face. ‘No, Sir Lewis. I thank you, but the Moon House is my home now and I am not going to be scared out of it by ghostly or human agency.’

He let her go then with renewed pressure to reconsider and an offer to send a groom with her, both of which Hester refused firmly. She was just guiding Hector past the front door again when he ran out, a brown medicine bottle in his hand. It was half-full of a thick liquid and, as he held it up to her Hester could see a label in a thin hand attached to the neck. ‘Do try this; it will help the lad sleep and give you all some much-needed rest as a consequence.’

Thanking him, Hester drove thoughtfully home. It was difficult to imagine the sort of dangerous spectre that Sarah Nugent conjured up on this brisk, sunny day. Poor girl-she had judged her too harshly. Perhaps it was no wonder she thirsted after attention and excitement, what with the loss of her father and her betrothed’s prolonged absence. A gentleman with plantations in the West Indies seemed a good catch for a country baronet’s sister and she could be excused for wishing to have the knot tied as soon as may be.

Hester could see no sign of Susan when she arrived home, so she unhitched Hector herself and carried the sleeping draught across the yard. She would see what Maria thought about using it.

To her surprise she met Parrott at the kitchen door. He doffed the hat he had just assumed and opened her own door for her. ‘Good day, Miss Lattimer. I took the liberty of calling to see young Ackland. I had promised to speak to him, if you recall, and I thought it might help keep him entertained.’

Hester stamped firmly on her immediate, heated reaction, which was to ask if his lordship thought she needed a minder, and smiled. She was surely misjudging the butler. ‘Thank you, Parrott.’ Jethro would have thoroughly enjoyed such a visit and it was kind of Parrott to have remembered his promise. ‘That was most thoughtful. I appreciate you sparing the time.’

‘A well-run household needs but the lightest touch, Miss Lattimer,’ Parrott said serenely. ‘Is there any way in which I may assist you while I am here?’

Nothing except to carry out a quick exorcism, she thought wildly. ‘No, nothing, thank you, Parrott.’

With a bow he left, shutting the door behind him, and Hester went upstairs to see whether his visit had left Jethro overexcited and running a temperature.

She found him sitting up looking pale and bright-eyed, but with no sign of a fever. Across the landing she glimpsed Susan in her room with the door open, a basket of mending at her feet. From Miss Prudhome’s chamber a faint bubbling snore made itself heard.

He tried to sit up more when he saw her, but the effort made him wince and he fell back again. ‘Do have a care, Jethro, you must take pains not to strain your shoulder.’ Hester laid a hand on his forehead-it was cool enough. ‘How are you feeling? I see you had a visitor.’

‘I’m fit as a flea, Miss Hester. Mr Parrott stayed a whole hour and he told me so much! All about how he started off as a boot boy to Sir Jasper Ings and worked his way up. He says it’s a matter of strategy and planning and one can’t just wait for a post to come up. He says he used to listen in the clubs-did you know footmen and butlers have clubs in London, Miss Hester?-and work out where the next vacancy was likely to be and then read up all about the household.’

‘Well, we had better start our research,’ Hester said lightly. ‘Where do you want to start?’

‘I can’t leave you, Miss Hester!’ Jethro sounded scandalised. ‘I just mean that when you… when you don’t need me, like… then I know all about finding a new job.’

‘And when will that be?’

‘When you get married, of course, Miss Hester.’ Jethro was bending over a book, which was lying on the covers, and missed Hester’s blush of confusion.

Bless the boy, who does he think is going to marry me with my reputation and lack of a fortune?

‘And see what Mr Parrott lent me, it’s called the Household Vedey Meckum or some such and it’s all about everything you need to know to run a big household.’

‘Vade mecum.’ Hester took the big book and opened it at the title page. ‘It’s Latin, Jethro, it means it’s a useful companion full of all sorts of knowledge.’

His eyes widened in awe. ‘Will I have to learn Latin to read it, then? He didn’t say anything about Latin.’

Hester set his mind at rest and left him doggedly ploughing his way through page one, his tongue protruding slightly in concentration.

Susan, nodding over her needlework, confessed that she had left the butler and the boy together and had gone to have a bread and cheese luncheon so she had no idea what they had talked about. Seeing her suppressing a yawn, Hester packed her off to bed and went to make a meal for herself and Jethro which he ate with one hand while precariously balancing the book on his knees.

When Maria emerged looking the better for her nap Hester showed her the sleeping draught. ‘It is Dr Forrest’s handwriting, I recognise it from the notes he left me on making up a saline mixture. It says one wineglass before retiring, but that was for a grown man. Perhaps it wouldn’t do him any harm just to have half a glass, the sleep would do him good, Hester. When he’s so restless he tosses and turns and that can’t help his back and shoulder.’

In the event, by bedtime Jethro was looking flushed and uncomfortable and put up only a token resistance to the medicine. His three weary nursemaids gathered on the landing outside his room, each with their chamber stick in hand, and exchanged relieved looks at the sound of heavy breathing from within.

‘I’ve double-checked round all the locks and catches,’ Susan said. ‘The groom from over the road has been to see to Hector and the lanterns are safely out in the stables.’

‘What are you holding?’ Hester peered at the object Susan was attempting to conceal in her skirts.

‘The kitchen poker. I’d like to see any headless ghoul get the better of that!’

Smiling faintly at the puzzle of where one hit a headless apparition with a poker, Hester took herself off to bed. A thin line of moonlight fell across the floorboards and she went across to look at it out of the window. ‘The waxing crescent,’ she murmured, looking out at the pure beauty of the sickle of white pinned on the black velvet of the sky. ‘What nonsense to attribute evil to that.’

She paused, her hand on the crumbling silk curtain, looking across at the darkened house opposite. Strange that it should be so quiet so early. Perhaps Guy had gone away. That would be a comfort, she told herself stoutly. No one to endanger her reputation in the eyes of local society, no one to lure her into behaving in an immodest and reckless manner, and it would certainly remove the only person who wanted her house. The only person I know who wants it, she corrected herself.

Not that physical proximity would stop whoever it was; whatever she might suspect Guy of, it was not personally creeping about the Moon House depositing dead roses.

Hester climbed into bed and settled herself to sleep by watching the faint shimmer of twigs from the climbing roses outside her window thrown into silhouette on her bedchamber walls by the cold moonlight.

She woke some hours later feeling uncomfortably thirsty. The baked gammon at supper had been rather salty and she had not thought to bring a glass of water to bed with her. Hester lay half-dozing, hoping she would go back to sleep, but the discomfort persisted and, as the longcase clock in the hall struck two, she gave up and scrambled out of bed and into her dressing gown.

It did not occur to her to trouble lighting her chamber stick; the old house was so familiar now that she could have walked around it with her eyes closed, and, in any case, the moonlight cast the faintest of light through uncurtained windows.

Her bare feet were on the lowest step of the stairs before her sleepy brain roused sufficiently to suggest to her that this was not a sensible thing to be doing. Hester took another, cautious, step down so that she was standing on the cold hall floor and listened intently, thirst forgotten.

Silence. Or at least, as her ears strained, the silence of any house at night. A stair creaked where she had just trodden on it, the longcase clock ticked heavily, outside an owl hooted and the ivy scratched against a window pane. Then the lightest of draughts touched her cheek, and with it came the suggestion of the scent of roses.

Hester smiled, then became still at the realisation that all the windows downstairs should be closed. Where was that stir of air coming from? Even as her mind formed the question and her hand tightened on the newel post, she heard the breathing.

It was right beside her, the faintest whisper on the air, the sound of someone keeping very, very still. Waiting. Watching her from the shadows in the drawing room.

She had already made a mistake in standing still for so long, surely they would suspect she knew they were there? Could she make it to the kitchen before they attacked her? There were knives there, the rolling pin-but not the poker, which Susan had taken to bed with her.

And there was also, she recalled with a sudden flash of relief, her father’s sword propped up by the front door. She had put it there that morning to remind herself to drive a nail in to the long wall opposite the clock and hang it up.

To reach it she would have to leave the stairs and cross in front of that half-open door. The breathing was so faint she wondered if she was imagining it, then a board creaked as though someone had shifted their weight. No, that was not imagination.

Fighting the urge to run upstairs screaming her head off, Hester stepped briskly into the hall, half-turned as though to go towards the kitchen then spun round, reaching for the sword. Her hand found the hilt and her fingers closed round it with the ease of long familiarity. How many times had she cleaned it for Papa? She dragged the blade free, letting the scabbard clatter to the marble, and swung round to face the door.

The sword was heavy and she had to use both hands to hold the point up at waist height.

‘Come out. I know you are there.’ Her voice sounded surprisingly level and determined in her own ears.

The door swung wider, slowly revealing a tall silhouette. Hester raised the sword. ‘Out.’

The shadowy man stepped forward, then with a speed that completely wrong-footed her, side-stepped the blade, caught her wrist in one hand and dragged her into the room and against his body.

‘Quiet!’ he hissed. The voice was instantly recognisable.

‘You!’ Hester struggled in Guy’s grip. ‘How could you?’