Chapter 19
Mrs. Ingleby had told Jessica that when Athcourt had been enlarged and remodeled in the sixteenth century, the layout had been similar to that of Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire.
The ground floor had been the service area primarily.
The family apartments had occupied the first floor.
The second floor, lightest and airiest, thanks to its high ceilings and tall windows, had held the state apartments.
In Dain’s grandfather’s time, the functions of the first and second floors were reversed, except for the Long Gallery, which continued to display the portrait collection.
The nursery, however, as well as the schoolroom and nursemaids’ and governess’s quarters, remained where they’d been since the late fifteen hundreds, at the northeast corner of the ground floor—the coldest and darkest corner of the main house.
That, Jessica told Mrs. Ingleby, shortly after Dain and Phelps had departed, was not acceptable.
“The child will be distressed enough at being separated from the only family he’s known and brought to a cavernous place filled with strangers,” she said. “I will not exile him to a dark corner two floors away, where he is sure to have nightmares.”
After a consultation, the two women had agreed that the South Tower, just above Jessica’s apartments, would be more suitable.
Whatever needed to be moved out of the South Tower rooms could easily be transported across the roof walkway to one of the five other towers.
The servants could do the same with items brought in from other storage rooms. That would leave a few very long trips from the present nursery to the new one, but only a few.
Most of the room’s furnishings had been put into storage twenty-five years earlier.
Thanks to Athcourt’s grand army of servants, the project made rapid progress.
By the time the sun set, the new nursery was furnished with a bed, a rug, fresh linens, and handsome yellow draperies.
The latter were not quite so fresh, but acceptable after a good shaking out in the twilight’s clear air.
Jessica had found a child-size rocking chair as well, rather battered but not broken, and a pull-along wooden horse minus half its tail, and most of the set of wooden soldiers Phelps had mentioned.
Mary Murdock, who’d been selected as nursemaid, was sorting through a trunkful of His Lordship’s boyhood belongings for enough garments to see an active child through the days before a wardrobe could be made up for him.
Bridget was removing the lace collar from a small nightshirt, because her mistress had told her that no boy of the present generation would be caught dead in that fussy thing.
They were working in the North Tower storage room, which had become the campaign’s headquarters, for it was to this place the previous marquess had consigned most of the artifacts of his second wife’s brief reign.
Jessica had just unearthed a handsome set of picture books.
She was piling them onto the windowsill when, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flash of light in the darkness beyond.
She bent close to the thick glass. “Mrs. Ingleby,” she said sharply. “Come here and tell me what that is.”
The housekeeper hurried across the room to the west-facing window. She looked out. Then her hand went to her throat. “Mercy on us. That must be the little gatehouse, my lady. And it looks to be…on fire.”
The alarm was sounded immediately, and the house swiftly emptied as its inhabitants raced out to the gatehouse.
The small pepperbox structure guarded one of Athcourt’s lesser-used gates. Its gatekeeper normally spent Sunday evenings at a prayer meeting. If it burnt to the ground—which was likely, for the fire must rise high before anyone could see it—the loss would be no catastrophe.
However, His Lordship’s timber yard was not far from that gate.
If the fire spread thither, the timber stacks would be lost, along with the sheds filled with sawyers’ tools.
Since the timberyard supplied the lumber used to build and repair the homes of most of the estate’s dependents, the fire was a community concern, drawing every able-bodied man, woman, and child from the village as well.
Everything happened, in other words, just as Charity Graves had promised Vawtry it would.
All of the small world of Athton descended upon the blazing gatehouse. In the excitement, Vawtry had no difficulty slipping into Lord Dain’s house unnoticed.
It was not as easy, though, as it would have been a week hence, as originally planned.
For one, Vawtry couldn’t pick his moment, but had to set the fire soon after a rainstorm.
The wood and stone pepperbox was stubbornly slow to take fire at all, let alone blaze up to the heights necessary to be seen from miles around.
Thanks to the damp, the blaze would also be slow to spread, which meant it would be under control a good deal more quickly than was comfortable for Mr. Vawtry.
Furthermore, the original scheme had required him only to make the conflagration.
Charity had been responsible for getting into Athcourt and making off with the icon.
Instead, Mr. Vawtry was obliged to play both roles, which meant a mad race from one end of the estate to the other—all the while praying the concealing darkness wouldn’t also conceal an obstacle that would cause him to break his neck.
Thirdly, Charity had been in the house several times and knew the general layout. Vawtry had been there once, for the previous marquess’s funeral, and one overnight stay was not enough to master the scores of stairways and passages of one of the largest houses in England.
The good news was that, as Charity had promised, no one had bothered to lock all the doors and windows before running off for firefighting heroics, and Mr. Vawtry got into the proper end of the house with no trouble.
The bad news was that he had to wander from one room to another before he discovered that the north backstairs route Charity had described lay behind a door disguised as part of a wall of well-preserved Tudor-era printed paneling.
Not until after he’d found it did he recall Charity’s laughing remark that all the servants’ exits “pretended to be something else, like there were no servants at all, and the big house run itself.”
Still, he managed to find it, and after that it was quick work to reach the second floor.
The door to Dain’s apartments was the first on the left. As Charity had assured him, one needed but a moment to slip in and another to cross the vast chamber and collect the icon. Most important, the icon was precisely where she’d said it would be.
Lord Dain kept the heathenish picture his wife had given him on his bedstand, Joseph the footman had told his younger brother…who had told his betrothed…who had told her brother…who happened to be one of Charity’s regular customers.
But never again, Vawtry vowed as he exited the bedchamber.
After tonight, Charity would share her bed and stunning skills with only one man.
That man was the daring, heroic Mr. Roland Vawtry, who would take her abroad, away from Dartmoor and its unwashed rustics.
He’d show her the sophisticated world of Paris.
The French capital would seem like fairyland to her, he thought as he hurried down the stairs, and he would be her knight in shining armor.
Lost in his fantasies, he pushed open a door, raced down a set of stairs…and found himself in a hallway he didn’t remember. He hurried to the end, which turned out to be the music room.
After going through half a dozen more doors, he ended up in the ballroom, from whose entrance he saw the massive main staircase. He started toward it, then paused, undecided whether to try to find the back stairs again.
But it’d be hours before he found it, he told himself, and the house was empty. He made for the stairway, hurried down and across the broad landing, round the corner…and stopped short.
A woman stood on the stairs, looking up at him…then down, at the icon clutched against his breast.
In that instant’s flicker of Lady Dain’s glance from his face to the precious object he held, Vawtry regained his wits—and the use of his limbs.
He ran down the stairs, but she lunged at him, and he dodged too late. She grabbed his coat sleeve and he stumbled. The icon flew from his hands. He regained his balance in the next instant, and pushed her out of his way.
He heard a crash, but didn’t heed it. His eyes on the picture at the foot of the carpeted stairs, he raced down and snatched it up.
Jessica’s head had struck the wall and, grabbing blindly for balance, she knocked a Chinese vase from its pedestal. It struck the railing and shattered.
Though the world was reeling perilously toward darkness, she dragged herself upright. Firmly grasping the railing, she hurried down, ignoring the colored lights dancing about her head.
As she reached the great hall, she heard a door slam, and masculine curses, then the hurried tap of boots upon stone. Her mind clearing, she realized that her prey must have been trying to escape by the back way and got himself lost in the pantry instead.
She dashed down the hall toward the screens passage and reached the pantry door as he was running out.
This time he dodged her successfully. But even as he was bolting for the vestibule, she had grabbed the nearest object at hand—a porcelain Chinese dog—and it was out of her hand almost in the same instant, hurtling toward him.