Chapter 2
In which flirtations dance
When Dame Hartwell returned from tasting the latest delicacies and teasing out an audience for her next séance, Sir Hubert was fit to be tied. He insisted upon Edith sitting with him in the library so he wouldn’t have to face the dame alone.
Sir Hubert was twitchy, in every sense of the word. He read a book, but spent more time staring out the window, dreading the dame’s return. He crossed and uncrossed his ankles, tapping his foot against the lush oriental rug.
When his startled leap from his seat caused Edith to drop her needlepoint, she placed her hand at her heart and snapped, “Sir Hubert, be calm.”
Raising his brow and having the decency to look a bit sheepish, Sir Hubert ran a palm against his bald head and nodded. “You’re right, of course. I’m certain it’s in this house.”
“And I’m certain Dame Hartwell won’t mind at you having lost it. She will probably think this a diverting mystery to solve.”
Sir Hubert frowned with a slight shake of his head. Before Edith questioned the oddly forlorn expression flitting through his eyes, the dame appeared in the library doorway.
“What diverting mystery have I to solve? How dare you let me leave, knowing a mystery needed solving!”
Edith plastered a pleasant smile on her face as she turned to greet the dame.
Dame Hartwell was a slight woman, with a complexion confirming she spent her time in séances and beneath layers of veils when venturing outside.
She had snapping blue eyes the color of a thin sky, and glistening white hair that tended to curl when it rained heavily.
She wore gray, a perpetual half mourning for her dearly departed husband.
Once, a decade of mourning marked eccentricity. Her Majesty’s precedence of mourning her prince for thirty years, however, had made the dame conservative in her remembrance.
Sir Hubert’s mouth dropped open at the sight of the dame stalking into the room, peeling off her gloves with a happy rustling of skirts.
“Where did you come from?” he demanded.
Now it was Dame Hartwell’s turn to raise a brow. “Certainly my location wasn’t the mystery, my dear Sir Hubert. What a waste of excitement over something so trivial.”
Sir Hubert ran a hand across his forehead, and Edith spotted a bead of sweat gathering at his temple. “No, my lady, it’s just that we’ve been waiting for you.”
Dame Hartwell frowned, looking to Edith for both confirmation and explanation.
“We’ve been here these last two hours watching for your arrival,” Edith said, lifting her dropped needlepoint. “And you’ve flummoxed us despite our vigilance.”
“Ah,” the dame said, waving her hand. “I came in through the courtyard. It’s a lovely day. Why on earth are you hiding in the library?”
“Because we’ve lost something, and hoped the knowledge in these books might inspire us to find it,” Edith said. She didn’t bother hiding her sarcasm. She smiled at Sir Hubert’s annoyed, narrowed eyes, and the dame’s excited, widening ones.
“We’ve lost something; how delightful!” Dame Hartwell clapped her gloves into her purse. “What did we lose?”
Edith rolled her eyes at Sir Hubert, who harrumphed.
“Sir Hubert’s journal, in fact,” Edith said. She stuck her needle into the canvas, setting it aside. “And he’s blaming the spirits for its loss.”
Dame Hartwell paused. Edith saw a similar forlorn expression flit across the dame’s face. She couldn’t make sense of it. What on earth was so special about this journal?
And then Edith thought perhaps she had imagined it, for the dame bounced on her heels, her skirts swishing around her ankles and her bustle bobbing. Practically ripping her hat off her head, she plopped onto the chaise beside Edith with an expectant look up at Sir Hubert.
“Your journal! How could you be so careless?” The dame’s excited, encouraging tone was at odds with her words. “And to blame the spirits! How unfeeling. You should be more careful, Sir Hubert, or one shall play tricks on you and your careless hands for scapegoating them.”
Edith adjusted her spectacles.
“My dear lady,” Sir Hubert said with a wince, “I’m not scapegoating anyone or thing. I left my journal for all of a moment—”
“For your early afternoon spot of tea and biscuits,” Dame Hartwell interrupted with a sage nod.
“For my tea and biscuits. I was gone for moments, I say. Pomeroy was already en route with the tray.” Sir Hubert frowned. “Does the entire house know my habits, then?”
Edith shrugged. She was new to the household, knowing little about the resident researcher. But even she knew to move aside come early afternoon, unless she wanted to be bowled over by Sir Hubert dashing for the cook’s latest biscuit experiment.
“I’ve made it my business to keep my guests satisfied,” was all the dame said, and quite primly.
Edith gave a sidelong glance at the dame, spying a twinkle in her eye and a dimple in her cheek. Heavens, was the dame flirting with Sir Hubert?
“Where have we looked?” Dame Hartwell asked.
“Where haven’t we looked?” Edith said. “I’ve checked between every book in this room, and searched all the ladies’ rooms. Sir Hubert went through the gentlemen’s rooms. The servants looked through the kitchens, the sideboard. Even the refuse. I say the journal is gone.”
“And yet, Sir Hubert thinks a spirit took it? Why?”
“Because no one came into the house. No one left the house except you, my lady.”
“And I certainly wouldn’t steal it,” the dame said.
“We must all protect Sir Hubert’s research.
Without his publication, we will hardly legitimize the Society of Hesitant Mediums on our own.
We need to find the culprit and bring them to task.
” She tapped her lip. “But how to begin when the spirits have lost interest?”
“Lost interest?” Sir Hubert scoffed.
“Lost interest,” the dame insisted. “Ever since Mary and Tessa left for their honeymoons, haven’t you noticed how quiet the house is?
No creaking floorboards, no rustling curtains, no quiet moans off in the distance.
I haven’t had a ribbon misplaced or a breeze mussing up my hair in days. It’s awful.”
The dame shuddered, and Edith hid a smile. “I assure you, the spirits are with us, my lady.” She looked meaningfully to the corner of the library where a ghost sat, legs crossed at the knee, picking at the dirt in his fingernails as he floated.
The ghost had all the typical markers of a benign spirit. His pupils were whited over. Neither Sir Hubert nor Dame Hartwell saw him, yet Edith could see through him to the wallpaper. He had a posh mustache and fluff of hair coiffed to complement his fortyish years.
If Edith blinked just so, she engaged her Sense of Beyond to spy gray ribbons emanating from the spirit’s lower back. A broken back leading to his death, she guessed. Perhaps a horse race gone poorly, or a terrible fall.
Dame Hartwell interrupted Edith’s reverie. “Well? Have the spirits said anything about Sir Hubert’s journal?”
Edith coughed, adjusting her Sense to pay attention to the living. “No,” she said, “the spirits are being oddly quiet today.”
“Because they know something,” Sir Hubert muttered.
Edith frowned at the gentleman ghost in the corner.
She flinched when he looked up, his white eyes studying her in turn.
She knew what he would see, what her mother never let her forget: A rather insipid woman with pale blonde hair bound up in what hardly passed for a proper bun.
Her blue eyes hiding behind reflective spectacles.
Her too-curvy body dressed in an unbecoming shade of lavender out of respect for her sister’s death.
Her mouth dropped open when the ghost winked at her and disappeared with a cheeky little popping noise.
“What did you see?” The dame spun to stare at the now empty corner.
“I think, perhaps, that Sir Hubert might be right,” Edith said slowly. “The spirits know something, or at least . . . one of them does.”
Sir Hubert’s smirk only annoyed Edith further. He did so love to be right about things.