Chapter 3
Amelia
Twenty-four hours earlier
Pemberley, it was not.
In fact, Amelia thought as she stared up at Sundew Abbey, it was like turning up to a first date and realizing the guy’s profile pic was several decades old.
She stepped out of her rental car and held up the flyer she’d picked up from the village inn.
Visit Pemberley, it said, fluttering in the chilly January wind, set of the definitive Pride and Prejudice.
She looked from the photo—a still from the TV show—to the building’s stone facade and back.
They were the same imposing shape: a three-story neoclassical mansion so immense that Amelia had to strain her neck to peer to the top.
They nestled into the same valley, beside the same river and forest.
But in the photo, the abbey looked like it’d been built yesterday, the limestone lit to a sun-warmed honey.
In reality, the stone was the same listless gray as the skies above.
Many of the decorative details once carved into it had worn away or sheared off.
The roof over one of the building’s symmetrical wings had collapsed, exposing its ribs like a dark-timber whale.
As Amelia stared, a large black bird rose from the architectural carcass and flapped away, screeching.
Across the crenelated roofline, the balustrade was missing multiple teeth, and several statues had crumbled or toppled.
A stone horse lay broken and mossy on the gravel drive below, beside an equally gravity-stricken family crest. Curtains billowed behind missing or broken panes.
There was a smoky smell, stronger than could be justified by the puffs from the nearest intact chimney.
Amelia shivered. It was the tourism equivalent of being catfished. Dracula wouldn’t lower himself to living here, let alone Jane Austen’s most famous hero. It was less “a fine house richly furnished,” and more “no one to hear you scream.”
Could she have come to the wrong place? She leaned into the car and grabbed her phone.
No signal of any kind. The map on the flyer showed a property called Wildwood Farm farther up the lane, but otherwise the only interruptions in the blank expanse of the moor were Moorleigh Village, and the abbey, with its estate and woodlands.
The woman at the tearoom had warned her not to go “wandring” on the moor alone, which Amelia had no intention of doing, having read far too many gothic novels in her youth.
“You won’t get mobile phone coverage here, love,” said a gruff voice, behind her.
She squawked, and turned. The wind snapped the flyer from her hand and it sailed away. A grandfatherly man with thick shoulder-length gray hair stood on the lawn, holding a rake—a tableau of a tenant farmer from Austen’s time, but in denim overalls and a thick jacket.
“Sorry, love. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Oh, no, you didn’t.” As it was obviously a lie, she added, “I’m easily spooked.”
“I can give you the wi-fi password, if you like.”
“No, that’s okay,” she said hurriedly. The whole point of this vacation was to leave the real world behind, though with only a week left, she was on the cusp of declaring that a failure.
Her body was here in England, but her mind was still in New York.
Emotional jetlag. She tossed the phone onto the driver’s seat, shut the door and locked the car, quickly, as if the phone might escape.
She dropped the keychain into her pants pocket, feeling liberated of the outside world.
“Tour guide shouldn’t be far off.” The man pushed back his sleeve to check his watch. “I’ll let you into the house. It’s brass monkeys outside today.”
“It’s what?”
He didn’t hear. He set off across the turning circle toward the main entrance, boots crunching on the gravel. “You’re American, then?” he called back. “Living in the UK, or just visiting?”
A distant bang sounded, followed by an echoing retort. A rifle shot. Some distance away, but she hurried to catch up. “On vacation, for a few weeks.”
“You picked a strange time of year.”
“A last-minute thing. Plus, fewer crowds.”
“Cheaper too, I suppose.” He stopped at the steps to the columned portico and peeled the tour flyer off the face of a stone lion.
Its mood wasn’t improved by the liberation.
“She doesn’t look like she did on the telly, sorry to say,” he said, peering up at the house.
“Even I didn’t recognize her at first, when we watched the program, and I’ve lived here all me life.
She’s crumbled some more since it was made, plus they did all that CBS tomfoolery. ”
“CGI?” Amelia offered.
“Don’t know why they bothered to come all the way out here when they could have made the lot on the computer. But it paid my wages for a good couple of years, so…”
Another gunshot cracked. Amelia flinched. It seemed nearer, like an advancing thunderstorm.
“Nothing to worry about, love, unless you go and sprout antlers—the bloody neighbors, hunting in our wood again. But I wouldn’t go wandering about. Those Pritchard boys have a habit of straying, when they’re chasing a stag.”
He climbed the steps and stopped at two huge wooden doors.
He retrieved a black velvet bag from a pocket, drew a medieval-looking key from it and slotted it into an ancient lock.
The lock looked way too easy to pick, not that she had experience with breaking and entering—at least, not as a perpetrator.
She looked for evidence of security cameras and alarms and found none.
She resisted the urge to ask about security.
It might sound like she was casing the place.
And what use would an alarm be out here?
Safety was an illusion, as she now knew, though that didn’t stop her assessing her relationship with it everywhere she went.
Like the stone wall that marked the estate’s perimeter.
A year ago, she might have wondered about its age or the long-dead craftspeople who’d built it.
Now, she noticed its insufficient height and the potential handholds and footholds.
Which was silly, seeing as an intruder could roll straight on in between the rusted metal gates she’d passed through at the top of the drive.
By the look of them, they hadn’t been closed in decades.
“Miss?” the man said. He was holding one of the doors open for her. She hesitated. Was it wise to enter an apparently deserted and objectively creepy old mansion in the middle of nowhere with a strange man?
The sound of an approaching vehicle saved her from the fight-or-flight call. She would have defaulted to “freak out” anyway, going by previous experience.
“Ah, and here’s the van now,” the man said.
There was no vehicle in sight, but then the tunnel-like glade that passed for a drive zigzagged like a roped-off airport queue, as if designed to drag out the distance from point A to point B for as long as possible.
Since emerging from it, Amelia had lost her internal compass, and the anemic sun shrouded by low cloud was no help.
But sure enough, the glade spat out a white van signwritten with Sundew Tours, followed by a couple of nondescript hatchbacks similar to Amelia’s.
“The tour begins in the grand entrance hall, so you might as well wait there. Xanthe won’t muck around getting indoors, in this weather.”
As Amelia stepped inside, he touched his cap—doffed it, she supposed, though it was a beaten-up Yankees cap rather than a ye olde newsboy hat.
She mentally rolled her eyes at herself for pegging a 60-something armed with a blunt garden implement as a potential serial killer.
So much for taking a break from paranoia.
She straightened her hunched back, but her expectations of a reprieve from the chill were optimistic. Instead, an icy draft crawled up her sleeves. No white-gloved butler to retrieve her coat and lead her to a crackling fire.
“This entrance was in the TV show, wasn’t it?
” she said, turning. A gust caught the door and it slammed with an echoing shudder.
She was alone. She didn’t need a stethoscope to know her heart was racing.
“Cool it,” she said to her nerves, and an echoed whisper swished up a wide oak staircase.
There was no logical reason that loud noises in the daytime should spook her.
Quiet scuffles at night, sure, but right here, right now, she was safe.
“Safe,” she announced, and the echo backed her up. “Relatively.” The echo agreed.
Despite the cold, the entrance hall was “lofty and handsome,” as in Austen’s novel.
The staircase cleaved the space precisely in two and drew the eye up to a grand chandelier, and an enormous tapestry on the landing.
The plasterwork on the soaring ceiling could use a repair and repaint, but the elegant, swirling details were mostly intact.
The marble floor undulated, and numerous cracked or missing tiles broke up the gray and white checkerboard.
Beside the staircase, an actual suit of armor stood to attention.
There were marble columns, and statues on plinths—Amelia was prepared to believe their various missing limbs were design choices.
It might not be CGI-perfect, but it was authentic.
Even the light switches appeared to date from the beginnings of electricity.
If she let her vision blur, she could imagine Darcy himself striding—
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a good man in possession of a single wife, must be in want of a fortune.”
Amelia swiveled, frowning, as a very pregnant woman wearing a name tag that introduced her as “Xanthe” swept in through the doors, followed by a dozen visitors. By the exchange of puzzled looks and raised eyebrows, Amelia figured they too had noted the botched opening line from Pride and Prejudice.