Chapter Six
Ravenshaw, Northumberland
Jerome stood on the cliffs overlooking the German Sea, the gusty wind blowing his dark hair back and piercing his shirt with icy fingers.
The clouds were gathering, bringing a storm.
The water crashed and roiled against the rocks below, sending sea spray high into the air.
Droplets peppered his skin, and the smell of salt, seaweed, and imminent rain filled his nostrils.
Behind him, the sprawling wreck of Ravenshaw faced the sea’s buffeting salt-laden wind.
The row of second floor double doors with their balconies looked black and sightless from here.
His eyes strayed to one balcony in particular and a shiver, unprovoked by the wind, skated over his skin.
He dragged his gaze away and shook himself.
He faced out to the sea once more, where the louring storm beckoned.
The setting sun broke through the clouds on the horizon, sending shards of pale-golden light over the greenish-gray, storm-tossed waves.
He’d spent the past three days here with his steward, Kelham, going over all the things that needed to be done to bring the house back to what it once was.
He felt its heavy gray stone behind him.
The weight of it pulled at him, the place taunting him with memories he’d spent his lifetime trying to forget.
Layer on layer of imperfection, guilt, regret.
The problem with memories is that they never leave you.
Even if you banish them to a corner of your mind under lock and key, their presence remains like a festering wound, gathering nastiness in the dark.
Part of him wanted to flee south again, but the knowledge that the time had come to stop running held him fast. He had to face this down, once and for all.
The constant quarreling between his parents that had tainted his childhood.
The suspicions that had haunted his adolescence.
The guilt that nearly destroyed his young adulthood.
Why he would choose to do it now, when he was at his lowest ebb, he didn’t know.
It was madness. Yet, in the depths of his despair, he found a source of strength he didn’t know he had.
Ava was lost to him, and that was as it should be, for her happiness was worth far more than his own.
In surrendering her to Haldane’s care, he found a kind of melancholy peace.
An easing of the ceaseless ache of wanting what he couldn’t have, that had dogged him for two years.
If she was happy, he would find the strength to sort out his own life and make of it what he could with the fractured pieces that remained.
Turning his back on the sea, he was drawn irresistibly to the place beneath that balcony where he was told his mother’s shattered body had lain, soaked with rain from the storm that shook the house that night.
He’d not been here, not seen any of it. He only had his father’s clipped account of what happened.
And he had been haunted ever since by the question What if?
What if I had been here? Could I have prevented it?
He made himself walk over the bit of ground where she must have landed, but it was covered now in a tangle of ground creeper, weeds, and long grass. There was nothing here or in the house to indicate what had happened on that long ago night, and no one to tell him.
After his mother’s death, the existing servants had been dismissed by his father, replaced by a caretaker couple, the McClellans, new to the area, and the house shut up to all intents and purposes.
When his father was killed falling from his horse, in Jerome’s seventeenth year, he’d not reversed that decision, only making sure that the tenants were looked after properly by the steward he appointed and the home farm kept in order.
He chose to spend his holidays at friends’ houses, and only when he left Cambridge did he take up residence in his London townhouse in Hanover Square.
He would post up quarterly to meet with Kelham and inspect the home farm and tenants and expected fortnightly reports from the man on their condition.
But the house had remained shut up and neglected. Until now.
The wind whipped at his jacket and sliced through his shirt.
He trudged back to the house, in through the large entrance hall with its soaring atrium ceiling, and up the broad stairs to the first floor where the library was situated.
He’d made this his headquarters since he’d arrived.
The McClellans, thrown into a spin by his unexpected appearance, had scrambled to make a bedroom usable for him and took the holland covers off the furniture in the breakfast room and the library.
Kelham, learning that the marquess was soon to be wed, had been given instructions to hire as many staff as would be needed to clean the place up and to throw an army of workmen at the ruined stables in the west wing and the portion of the east wing that had lost its roof.
Gardeners were also to be employed to transform the tangled forest that had once been the surrounding green, the south lawn, and rose arbor into something resembling a garden once more.
The windows in the library looked out on the sea and rattled with the rising wind, which was beginning to howl around the gray stone building. The light was fading fast, and he rang for candles and a fire, pouring himself a whisky from the decanter on the sideboard.
While the fire and candles were attended to, he paced to the window and watched the heavy gray storm clouds approach.
The golden light from the westering sun was almost gone now.
The panes of glass, lashed by rain and hail, soon obscured what was left of the view, and he turned away to a lit fire and a room made cozy by several candelabra and one of the new maids bobbing a curtsy.
“Will that be all, my lord?”
“Yes, thank you.” He smiled.
“Mrs. McCelland said dinner would be ready by six, my lord, if it pleases you.”
“My thanks to Mrs. McClelland. It does,” he said and watched her move toward the door.
She was barely sixteen, he thought. One of the village girls, no doubt, and ecstatic to have a job at the big house.
Something in the cast of her features seemed vaguely familiar. On impulse he said, “Just a moment.”
She turned. “My lord?”
“What is your name?”
“Lucy, my lord. Lucy Miller,” she said with another bob.
He frowned in an effort of memory. “Are you related to Ellen Miller by any chance?”
“That’d be my gran, sir. Who was my lady’s own abigail back in the day.”
“Yes, I remember her. Is your grandmother still alive?”
“No, sir.” Lucy’s face took on a melancholy expression. “She died before I was born, but my da spoke of her highly. I wished I could have known her.”
His heart skipped. “How did she die?”
“She contracted the influenza the winter my lady died. Da said she was never the same after your lady mother passed and your father dismissed all the servants and shut up the house. When she lay dying herself, he swore she tried to tell him something about it all, but whatever it was he couldn’t catch it. ”
“Where does your father live Lucy? Could I speak with him?”
She shook her head. “He took bad with a stroke last year and never recovered. He passed in his sleep.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. Is there no one left with living memory of what happened the night my mother died?
“Tell me, Lucy, are any of the servants my father dismissed still around here?”
She frowned. “Well, there’s old Mrs. Pennyweather, who was married to the head gardener, Pennyweather, but she’s blind and deaf and most people say she ain’t right in the head no more.”
“Where does she live?”
“On the promontory, hard by Hartley Common, my lord. Her daughter, Elspeth Nancarrow, looks after her.”
“Thank you, Lucy.”
“You’re welcome, my lord.” She bobbed another curtsy and left him to some dark thoughts.
He would pay a visit to Mrs. Pennyweather tomorrow. It was time he faced the truth. He could no longer live with suspicions. He had to know what really happened that night.
He had several whiskies before he went to bed, but it didn’t stop the things that haunted him from surfacing in the dark, jerking him from sleep in a cold sweat of horror and guilt.