Chapter Seven
Chapter
Seven
We troop back inside and head straight up the staircase to sort out my sleeping arrangements.
“I still can’t believe I’m doing this,” I mutter, pushing open the first door I come to.
The room is small but functional with a single bed, and it has a pretty view over the gardens.
A flash of movement out there catches my eye, and when I cross to the windows to check it out, Britannia Lovell emerges slowly from behind a huge rhubarb plant.
She’s alone and not looking anything like the sassy, confident woman I’ve met in the castle so far; I’d go as far as to say she seems forlorn as I watch her trudge up the path.
“This room will do.”
Marina pokes her head inside and then pulls the door closed again. “Nope.”
“What?”
She looks at me as if I’m stupid. “Just because you don’t want to do this, it doesn’t mean you have to pick the smallest bedroom in the place just to cut your own nose off.
This is the closest you’ll ever come to being a princess, Melody, and me by default.
You’re having the grandest bedroom in the joint, no arguments. ”
There’s no point in arguing with Marina when she’s like this. Artie and I trail her along the corridor as she flings doors open and checks them all in turn. A few doors from the far end she stands there and gawps. “This is the one.”
We all walk in and check out the furnishings, and I have to admit that she’s right.
The first room had been quite small; pretty, but nothing on the scale of this.
The huge carved four-poster bed stands central in the room, draped in heavy gunmetal silk.
Two tall windows look out over the grounds, and the eiderdown on the bed looks to be about three feet deep.
“Fit for a princess,” Marina breathes. She’d love the chance to stay here; it ticks all of her romantic movie boxes and then some.
“Or a prince,” Fletch says, appearing from what must be the en suite bathroom. “Sorry, Ghostbuster, this one’s taken.”
I sigh, resigned, but Marina laughs in his face and jerks her thumb toward the door.
“Out of here. You’re only here because Lord and Lady Letterman were too polite to say no. Melody’s the one on the payroll, so she gets to call the shots.” She turns to me. “Am I right or am I right?”
“I think you’re right,” Artie says, because he’s learned that that is always the appropriate response in this type of situation.
Fletch looks at me and I realize that it would be a good thing to have some ground rules, and laying this one down early will be to my advantage.
He needs to know that I am the boss, and as long as he is here shadowing me he does what I say, not the other way around.
It’s easy to be bold when I have Marina next to me though; no one argues when she’s here.
“I’d like this room, please,” I say stiffly, feeling mean, which is ridiculous given that he’s got the pick of God knows how many other gorgeous places to rest his handsome, annoying head, and none of them will involve cockroaches.
He looks for a moment as if he’s going to dig his heels in, but then he just throws me a jaunty grin and makes for the door.
“I’ll go and find myself a cupboard under the stairs then.”
I lace my laugh with sarcasm. “Harry Potter? I don’t think so. Voldemort, more like.”
“I’ve warmed the bed up for you.” He tosses a look over his shoulder, and I’d like to toss something heavy at the back of his head as he disappears.
“He’s funny.” Artie grins, taking a seat on the blanket box at the end of the bed.
Oh well, that’s just great. A spot of bromantic hero worship is just what I could do without.
“The man writes cracker jokes for a living,” I say, more pithy than a navel orange.
Artie lifts his eyebrows as if he isn’t sure if I’m lying, and worse, as if he’s even more impressed by Fletch if I’m not.
Clicking my phone, I check the time. “We have a couple of hours before lunch. Let’s run through what we know.”
Marina kicks off her heels and wriggles her painted toes in the sheepskin rug.
“Mind the head,” I say, and she looks down a second before she steps on the sheep’s skull. Jumping off the rug, she rams her feet back into her shoes and shudders.
“Who does that?” she mutters darkly, eyeing the sheep’s head as she walks around the edge of the rug to get to the bed.
“So, we have three principal circus ghosts plus the lion,” I say, pacing back and forth by the window. “And there’s a couple of nuns in the chapel, and Lord and Lady Shilling in the library.”
“This job gets more and more like Cluedo every day.” Marina settles herself back onto a mound of pillows as we recap the case so far.
“My instinct is to leave the Shillings where they are. They’re not bothering anyone,” I say, glancing out over the drive as Leo appears briefly outside the tower. He is much more suited to this place than I am; I wonder if there’s anywhere in the world that would be just right for a girl like me.
Artie reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a piece of paper that he’s folded several times.
“I found this on the internet last night,” he says, smoothing it out on the blanket box beside him.
Marina crawls to the foot of the bed to take a look and I cross to stand beside them.
“It’s the Shilling family tree going back to when this place was built,” he says, holding it flat at the edges for us to see.
Artie is turning himself into our resident genealogy expert, based mainly on the fact that his mother is mad into all that stuff and has subscriptions to all those fancy websites.
“Lord Alistair Shilling.” I trace my finger across the name as I spot it printed beside Lady Eleanor Shilling.
Counting back through the generations, I can see he was the fifth Lord Shilling to inherit Maplemead, succeeded by his son, Rupert, who presumably is the one who decided to end the family connections with the castle.
“So we know that Britannia is Lady Eleanor’s niece,” I muse, feeling in my pocket for a pen.
Marina reaches into her blouse and hands me the one she keeps stashed in her bra, shrugging when I raise my eyebrows and jot the ghosts down on the paper.
“Good work,” I say, smiling at Artie as I grab a file out of my bag.
Flipping it open on the blanket box lid beside the family tree, I recap my research into the castle’s checkered history.
The Shillings gave it over several times to be used by the community, including a spell in the early nineteenth century as home to an order of Benedictine nuns.
“That explains the silent nuns, anyway,” I murmur. I don’t plan on trying to oust them either; silent nuns who confine themselves to the chapel are about as benign as it gets when it comes to paranormal activity.
“Yet there’s no mention at all of a circus meeting its grisly end here,” Marina says, scanning the text.
“Come on, let’s go take a look around,” I say, closing the file for now. “See what we can unearth.”
We’ve searched the many bedrooms, annoyed the cook by being under her feet in the kitchen, and climbed and descended enough stairs to give me cramps. We’re just checking out the grisly dungeon when someone hits the gong at exactly one o’clock.
“Lunch?” Artie asks. I can see he’s conflicted, because if it is he might not get to have his beloved egg sandwiches.
Given that he’s just allowed himself to be strapped onto a torture rack by Marina, it’s testimony to how good his sandwiches must be that they’re what’s uppermost in his mind right now.
Marina crosses her arms across her chest and nods toward him.
“I vote we leave him here and send Hells Bells down to find him.”
“And I vote you leave him down here so I can twist those handles until his guts burst like spaghetti.”
I spin around and find Dino behind us.
“Dino.” I greet him aloud to alert the others to his presence. “I don’t think so,” I say, answering his macabre suggestion lightly. “He’s quite tall enough already.”
That’s an understatement; I barely come up to Artie’s armpits.
Dino shrugs, his face like thunder.
“Maybe it will help you decide to leave us in peace.”
“If I could be so bold, you don’t seem all that peaceful,” I say, tipping my head to one side to study him. I’m not keen on how full of fury he is.
“Dino was fine until the Americans came, and now the peacock with his eyes on her all the time too. I want to wring all of your scrawny necks!” He makes throttling gestures as he prowls toward Artie and lunges for the handle to stretch his arms.
“We need to get Artie down this second,” I whisper urgently to Marina, and she gasps and sprints across the bare earth floor.
I’m a second behind her and we scrabble with a leather wrist strap each as Dino battles to make the rusted handle turn.
Alarmingly, he seems to get it moving slightly and Artie whimpers, “Help me,” in panic under his breath.
“Nearly there,” I say with a tight smile, and when he gasps painfully a second time, Marina abandons her strap and turns instead to the handle Dino is desperately trying to crank.
Grabbing hold of it, she drags it backward as Dino redoubles his efforts to pull it forward, snarling like a rabid dog.
Oh, he’s picked a fight with the wrong woman.
Marina kicks her shoes off and plants her feet wide on the ground as she hangs on to the handle for dear life and lets forth a string of fast, furious Italian that makes Dino do a double take in shock.
He falters and she gains the advantage, then he’s right back at her with an unintelligible string of what must be expletives of his own.
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” I chant under my breath to Artie, and then I almost shout with relief because I actually have got it and one of Artie’s arms is thankfully free.