Chapter 8
There was almost certainly no such thing as the Scourge of St. Petroc’s.
Alice, who was Ruby’s authority on all things nature, had never heard of it.
When Ruby had related Captain Archer’s story to her friends, Alice had immediately begun to take notes upon the creature’s habitat and diet.
(“The hearts of young ladies does seem awfully specific, don’t you think? ”)
For her own part, Ruby didn’t believe in the creature at all.
The Scourge, thus far, had only been mentioned in moments of extremity on the part of both Captain Archer and his staff.
Admittedly, she’d heard some mysterious scraping and moaning outside of her chamber the last two nights running, but the sound had stopped promptly upon her opening the door.
When she’d got the candle lit, she had glimpsed angelic blond ringlets vanishing around the corner.
No. She was quite, quite positive that Lamentation had invented the sea monster, and Captain Archer had gleefully embroidered the details during their encounter in the library.
Except—
Well. She did not believe in the Scourge. And yet, as she crept into the larder at four o’clock in the morning, the shadows deep and the sound of growling still lurking in her memory, she felt the smallest, tiniest bit unsettled.
She gritted her teeth. There was nothing to be frightened of. Sea monsters didn’t exist—only charming, suspicious sea captains with dreadful blue eyes and criminal dimples.
And besides, she had a plan to carry out. She was too busy to be afraid.
Four days ago, while she had been sparring with Captain Archer in the library, Alice and Tamsin had gone down to St. Petroc’s for supplies.
Though the food situation had improved ever since the macaroni incident—the staff seemed to have given up that particular gambit—Alice and Tam had felt it wise to procure biscuits and crackers and fresh fruit in case circumstances deteriorated once more.
They’d also acquired a host of supplies for the house’s refurbishment: whitewash, paintbrushes, rich brocade fabric—and, because Tamsin was Tamsin, practical items like soap and stockings and candles.
They’d paid in advance and asked the shopkeepers to deliver the unwieldy parcels directly to Pomeroy House that afternoon.
This excellent plan had been foiled somewhat by the fact that none of the items had ever arrived.
The parcels’ disappearance was bizarre. Inexplicable. And, in light of the preceding month’s other peculiarities, decidedly suspicious.
Ruby and Alice had ventured down to the village yesterday evening to verify that the items had indeed been delivered as they’d requested.
After confirmation from a variety of bemused shopkeepers, Ruby had hatched a new plan: one that involved creeping surreptitiously around the house in the middle of the night, her dressing gown belted tight around her waist and her ears attuned to every sound.
If the Pomeroy House staff had intercepted the parcels for some baffling reason of their own, the items were no doubt hidden somewhere in the house.
And Ruby was going to find them.
She’d begun the search hours ago and had found nothing of note in the conservatory or the library.
Her clandestine hunt had then taken her to the ice house—cold, empty of lady-in-waiting paraphernalia—and now to the underground larder beneath the kitchen.
She was busy riffling through jarred jellies and finely milled flour, curls clinging damply to her neck, when she heard a sound from somewhere up above her head.
It was long and low and unearthly. A hiss—almost a rasp.
The hairs on the back of her neck rose. Had that been . . .
No, she thought. Get hold of yourself, Ruby Ballimore.
The Scourge of St. Petroc’s was not real. And even if it was, it had no reason to spend its night creeping about six feet above her head, trapping her underground until her bones disintegrated to dust.
As she stood motionless beneath the rickety wooden staircase, the noise came again: a long, creaking, drawn-out scrape. And then, to her surprise, a mumbled curse.
She put fictional sea monsters firmly out of her mind. It was not the Scourge. It was a person—and the sound resembled not a terrifying monster stalking young ladies, but a heavy object being dragged across a freshly mopped kitchen floor.
Her heavy object, if Ruby did not miss her guess. And whoever was up there was on the point of spiriting it away.
She took the stairs two at a time and flung open the larder door.
In front of her, in a patch of moonlight, stood Captain Malcolm Archer.
His booted foot was braced on a wooden crate, and his shirt hung open at the neck.
He had, perhaps, been up all night: His jaw was thick with black stubble, and his mouth was set not in his characteristic smile, but in a grim slash of handsome concentration.
An expression that shifted, when he saw Ruby, to one of dismay.
“Ha!” she exclaimed. “I knew it!”
He blinked at her. “You . . . what?”
“I knew it. I knew you were up to something nefarious.”
He glanced at the door and the dark expanse of the stairs behind her. “Did you just emerge from the larder in the middle of the night?”
“I—well, yes, but that’s not—”
He smiled at her, a long curl of wicked amusement. “Fancied a midnight snack, did you?”
Devil take the man, it was as if he couldn’t help himself. She made herself scowl in the face of all that charm, despite the shivery sensation it seemed to set off inside her.
In truth, that smile only made him more suspicious. No one had ever flirted with Ruby like that without some ulterior motive.
“My whereabouts,” she said distinctly, “are none of your concern.”
He stepped closer, and she took a quick, shallow breath. Her eyes dropped helplessly from his mouth to the place where his shirt gaped open. His skin looked silvery-gold in the moonlight, his chest muscular and sprinkled with black hair.
“You are lady-in-waiting to my employer.” His words scraped out, sweet and rough, and she could feel the warm proximity of his body. “And you are living in my house. Everything about you is my concern.”
Oh God. Her stomach flipped at his words, his tone—but she refused to let him have the advantage. She gritted her teeth and removed her gaze from his throat so that she might glare at his wooden crate instead.
“I believe you have something that belongs to me,” she said.
He followed the direction of her gaze to the crate. His expression went slightly bemused. “I don’t think so.”
“Do you not?” She set her hands on her hips. “Four days ago, Alice and Tamsin made a number of purchases in St. Petroc’s, which were meant to be delivered to Pomeroy House.”
He raised his brows. “And?”
Oh, he meant to play at innocence, did he? She frowned harder. “And while our parcels were purportedly delivered to the house, none of us have been able to locate them.” She pointed at the crate so he could not pretend to misunderstand. “Until now.”
“I think you are mistaken, Lady Ruby.”
“I beg your pardon?” She took a little step closer to him as well. “Do you intend to suggest that we did not go down to the village? Or that our items have not gone missing? Because either way, I do not believe that—”
“No,” he said, “I mean, I don’t think what’s in that crate is yours.”
Goodness, she was awfully close to him now; she had to lift her chin to meet his eyes. “Forgive me if I seem unduly skeptical, Captain Archer—but if that is not a crate of our stolen belongings, then why were you sneaking about with it in the middle of the night?”
His feet were braced wide, his chest a solid, sand-dotted expanse. His lashes fluttered briefly before he spoke. “I always move crates at night. This one in particular.”
“You always move crates at night?” she repeated incredulously. “In the dark?”
“Of course. To avoid the . . .”
There was a brief silence.
“Yes?” she prompted.
“Dogs.” He said it very definitely, and then he followed the word up with a blinding grin that—curse the man—made her knees feel weak. “It’s bones. A whole crate full of bones from the butcher. Wall uses them in his potage à la reine.”
“I don’t believe you.”
His breath hiccuped on a laugh. “I assure you, that potage was most assuredly made of—”
“Not about the soup.” She lifted her chin a little higher. “Open the crate and show me.”
“I can’t. The scent of bones will attract the hounds. They’ll wake the whole house with their clamor—you’ve heard them.”
Good God, the way the man spun nonsense ought to be studied by natural philosophers. She scowled at him. “I’m willing to risk it.”
He opened his mouth—no doubt to deliver more absurdities—and then stopped. His entire body went suddenly taut.
Ruby too froze, her gaze flying from Captain Archer to the wide kitchen window.
Something had moved out there in the dark. Some black, man-sized shadow had flitted across the glass.
Her skin went cold. Her whole body, in fact, felt as though she’d been plunged into ice.
That wasn’t . . . Surely it couldn’t be . . .
“What the devil,” Archer muttered.
“Was that”—she had to pause to lick her lips—“one of your people?”
“No,” he said flatly. “It wasn’t.”
He put his hand to her arm to hold her in place, and they both stood motionless, listening intently. In the ensuing silence, they heard a sound from outside—a small crack, like a twig snapping.
And then they saw the shadow flit once more across the window.
Archer pressed her behind him and then strode to the kitchen door in two long strides. “Stay here,” he barked, abruptly naval and commanding. And then he vanished into the corridor.
She pondered this directive for half a moment. He was not her superior officer, was he?
No, she reasoned. He was not. She trailed him out into the hall.
He glanced back. “I thought I told you—” He broke off at another muffled sound from outside, almost inaudible. “Never mind,” he growled. “Stay behind me.”
He moved cautiously outdoors, and she followed, pressing herself to the exterior wall beside a barrel of blue delphiniums. The sky was slowly shifting from gray to pink; it was brighter here than it had been inside the kitchen.
Archer’s loose white shirt whipped slightly in the wind off the sea, rippling over his shoulders.
Ruby watched him, heart in her throat, as he eased himself around the corner of the house. As he—
Spun back.
Covered her body full-length with his own.
She gasped. The back of her head bumped the granite wall behind her, and his heated, solid body pressed into her chest.
“What—” she got out.
His mouth was at her ear. “Shh,” he whispered. “There’s someone out there. Don’t move.”
She held herself still as a stone, and so did he, his body crushed against her own.
Was it a trick? A lie? She couldn’t make him out—couldn’t think clearly beyond the roaring of the waves and the thunder of her own pulse. She sucked in silent gulps of air, her cheek pressed to Archer’s bare chest. His breathing too was unsteady; each ragged exhalation ruffled her hair.
She couldn’t say how long they stood like that. When she shifted, individual grains of sand from his chest scraped her skin: tiny pinpricks that flickered along her nerves. His hand tangled in the band of her dressing gown, holding her in place.
There was silence all around them. No more soft cracks or mysterious figures. Nothing but the throb of her own blood.
She felt . . . she felt . . .
She didn’t know what she felt. Her blood was racing with terror and a sudden, dizzy awareness of his body against hers. Her skin felt hot, her thighs tight and loose at once. His thumb made a slow, slow arc at her waist, and she shivered.
When he pulled away, it felt like a loss.
As she watched, he stepped in front of her to peer around the corner and then strode off in the direction they’d heard the sounds. He moved easily, gracefully: a jungle cat, prowling about the edges of the cliff.
When he came back to her, his face was taut. “I think—whatever that was—it’s gone.”
Her mouth was still too dry to speak. To swallow. She licked her lips and watched as his gaze flickered, for space of a heartbeat, down to her mouth.
And then he looked back up. His eyes were bright blue now that the sun was nearly up—fierce and deathly serious. “Tell me the truth. Was that one of your girls out there?”
“I—what?” Her voice wobbled, and she had to stop to clear her throat. “Of course not. Alice and Tam are in their beds asleep. I thought . . . it wasn’t . . . one of the staff?”
He lifted his hand to rub at his stubble. “No.”
Oh heavens, she felt exceedingly stupid saying this, but: “The Scourge, perhaps?”
“There is—” He broke off halfway through the syllable, staring down at her. A gust of sea wind snapped his shirt, baring more tanned skin.
“Yes,” he said finally. “Of course. The Scourge. What else could it have been?”
She narrowed her eyes. His right hand was curled around the lip of the flower barrel, and his face had gone closed. He wasn’t trying to charm. But he wasn’t telling the truth either. She could read it in the careful blankness of his face.
They had seen something outside the window. She knew they had. And though she wanted to attribute Archer’s actions to some ulterior motive, his urgency had seemed all too real.
“You don’t know either, do you?” She moistened her lips again. “We are both in the dark.”
His jaw tightened. “It was the Scourge.” The edge of his hand brushed the delphiniums, and a few tiny blue flowers fluttered to the ground. “Go back inside, Lady Ruby. Keep your friends away from the village. As you can see, it’s not safe to be out.”
“But we—”
She broke off abruptly. His palm had come to rest, warm and heavy, on her waist, and the sensation shocked her out of speech. Her lips parted as she met his gaze.
“Quit skulking about the house,” he said. He used the tie of her dressing gown to turn her around, back toward the kitchen door. “Especially at night.”
She looked at him over her shoulder. “But our parcels—”
“I’ll hunt down your missing items.” His voice was low, and he looked her in the eye as he spoke—so earnest she could almost believe him. “I promise.”