Chapter Eleven The Hunting Lodge #2
The hall was low-ceilinged and panelled in dark wood, its narrow windows shuttered so tightly that the daylight entered only in grey slivers.
Dust lay on the floorboards except where small animals had disturbed it.
The air smelled of damp ashes, old leather, gun oil, and the sour residue of bottles emptied long ago and never properly cleared.
On the walls hung hunting prints darkened by smoke, antlers, a cracked mirror, and two crossed guns above a rack that had once held more.
A pair of boots stood near the door, stiff with age.
A table bore the rings of old glasses. Everything seemed masculine, not because men had lived there well, but because no one had ever asked what comfort might mean to anyone else.
Marianne looked toward the stair.
If Evangeline had been brought here after the ball — drugged, disbelieved, shamed, watched — this house would not have soothed her.
It would have confirmed every fear. Men’s chairs.
Men’s boots. Men’s guns. Men’s locks. A place where laughter might become vulgar and crying might be recorded as proof.
Sebastian seemed to feel it too.
“I had forgotten how cold it was,” he said.
“Was it always?”
“In winter, yes. In summer it smelled of smoke and wet dogs.”
“That is not much recommendation.”
“No.” His voice lowered. “I thought it an adventure when I was a boy.”
“You were permitted to leave when you wished.”
He turned to her.
Then he looked up the staircase.
“Yes.”
Tom entered behind them with two lanterns and an expression of deep dislike for the house. “Where do you want me, Your Grace?”
“Check the ground floor with Roberts. Do not open locked boxes. Note rooms only. If anyone approaches, signal twice from the hall.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Tom,” Marianne added, “look at the back doors and lower windows. Not only whether they are locked, but whether they have been opened recently.”
Tom’s face brightened with purpose. “Yes, miss.”
Sebastian looked at her.
“What?” she asked.
“You give better instructions.”
“I give different instructions.”
“They are often better.”
She did not know what to do with such a plainly offered concession, so she turned toward the stairs. “Which room was Evangeline’s?”
“This way.”
The staircase groaned beneath them. At the landing, Sebastian paused, one hand on the banister.
The corridor beyond was narrow, paper peeling in one corner from damp.
Doors stood closed on either side. A mounted fox head watched them with glassy accusation.
Marianne thought again of masculine loneliness and wondered how often men confused it with freedom.
Sebastian opened the second door on the left.
“This room,” he said.
Evangeline’s room had once been meant for occasional female guests, perhaps wives brought unwillingly to shooting parties or sisters tolerated between seasons.
It was lighter than the hall, with two narrow windows facing the stream, though the shutters kept most of the light out until Sebastian crossed the room and forced them open.
Pale daylight spilled across a bed covered in a dust sheet, a small dressing table, a wardrobe, a washstand, and a hearth where old ashes lay undisturbed.
There were no flowers. No books. No softness left except a faded shawl folded over the end of a chair.
Sebastian saw it and stopped.
Marianne followed his gaze.
The shawl was pale blue wool, moth-nibbled at one edge, worn thin at the fold. It did not belong to the lodge. It belonged to a person. That made it terrible.
Sebastian crossed slowly and lifted it with both hands.
“She had this at Halgrave,” he said.
Marianne remained near the hearth. “You remember it?”
“It was my mother’s. Evangeline took it after she died and claimed it had been given, though no one remembered such a gift. My father said she was sentimental over trifles.” His hand tightened in the wool. “She wore it when ill as a child. She said it made rooms less stern.”
Marianne looked around the room, at the cold bed and narrow windows and dead hearth. “She must have needed it here.”
He closed his eyes briefly.
She left him with the shawl and moved toward the wardrobe.
The door stuck, then gave with a scrape. Inside hung nothing but a broken hanger and a small sachet so old its lavender had surrendered to dust. Marianne lifted the lantern higher and leaned in.
At first she thought the marks inside the wardrobe door were scratches made by accident: rough lines scored into the wood at uneven heights. Then she looked more closely.
Not random.
Grouped.
One, two, three, four, slash. One, two, three, four, slash.
Tally marks.
A count of days.
Her throat tightened.
“Sebastian.”
He came at once.
When he saw the marks, the shawl slipped slightly in his hands.
“Days?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“How many?”
Marianne counted. “Twelve full groups. Then three.”
“Sixty-three days.”
The number filled the room.
Sixty-three days in a hunting lodge, or counting before she left, or counting until she feared she would lose track of herself.
Sixty-three days a woman marked inside a wardrobe door where men might not think to look.
Sixty-three days of proof that she had been there long enough to need a calendar and hidden enough to keep it secret.
“There is more,” Marianne said.
Near the lower inside panel, the scratches changed. Not tallies now. Letters, faint and awkwardly cut, perhaps with a hairpin or broken penknife.
S came not.I called.
Sebastian reached out as if to touch the words, then stopped before his fingers met the wood.
Marianne turned away because his face was too exposed.
He had said little since entering the house, but this silence was not emptiness. It was a pressure that made the room hard to breathe in.
“She waited,” he said.
There was no answer that did not wound.
Marianne knelt near the hearth because her eyes needed work and because pity, if allowed too much room, might become another cruelty.
The ashes were old. The fireback was cracked.
A loose brick leaned slightly forward on the left.
She noted it, then studied the boards around the hearth.
Dust lay over most of the floor, but near the left corner one board had settled differently.
Not recently. Long ago, perhaps, and then left. The nail head was scratched.
She touched it.
The board shifted.
“Here,” she said.
Sebastian came to her side. His grief had not vanished, but purpose gave it a shape again.
“What?”
“This board has been lifted.”
“Recently?”
“No. That may be better.”
She took the small knife from her reticule. Sebastian, after one glance, removed his own and held it out. She looked at it, then at him.
“It is stronger,” he said.
“Not merely larger?”
“That too.”
She accepted it.
The board resisted, then lifted with a small sigh of old dust. Beneath it lay darkness, a shallow cavity between joists.
Marianne reached in carefully and felt cloth.
Oilcloth, stiff with age but intact. She drew out a packet no larger than a folded handkerchief, tied with thread that snapped when she touched it.
Sebastian did not move.
The room, the lodge, the whole waiting house seemed to gather around the packet.
Marianne laid it on the hearthstone and unwrapped it.
Inside were folded pages.
Several pages.
Evangeline’s hand.
Not fragments. Not scorched corners. Not another voice describing her.
Her.
Sebastian sank slowly to his knees beside Marianne without seeming to notice that he had done so.
Marianne lifted the first page.
The ink had browned, but the words were clear.
If this is found, then I was not entirely silenced.
She looked at Sebastian. “Shall I read?”
His mouth moved once before sound came. “Yes.”
Marianne drew breath and began.
“I write this because they have taught me how easily a woman’s voice may be rearranged once she is not permitted to hold the paper herself.
I have written letters that are now used against me.
I have signed my name on harmless notes that have become models for a lie.
I have spoken in anger, and anger has been recorded as madness.
I have cried, and tears have been called confession.
Therefore I write now with as much plainness as my shaking hand allows.
“On the night of Lady Honoria Datchworth’s ball, I wore white muslin with silver embroidery. I record this because they have already spread a rumour of blue silk and private suppers, and I fear that if I do not write even the colour of my gown, they will make a different woman of me entirely.
“I was angry that evening. Not ashamed. Angry. Someone had ordered a gown in my name, and I had refused it. Lord Ashmont laughed when I challenged him, saying I must not punish a man for admiring what would become me. I told him admiration was not authority. He did not like that.
“Later, I drank wine brought to me in a retiring room. I remember the glass because the stem had a small chip near the base. I remember thinking Lady Honoria’s servants were less perfect than her manners.
After that my memory becomes broken. I remember heat.
I remember the music sounding far away. I remember Lord Ashmont’s hand under my elbow and Mr Mordaunt saying I required quiet.
I remember saying I wished to find Sebastian.
I remember being told Sebastian had left, though I had seen him not half an hour before.
“When I woke more fully, I was in a room I did not know, with dark walls, candles burning too low, and gentlemen standing around a table.
Lord Ashmont was there. Mr Mordaunt was there.
A man they called Blackwood stood near the mantel.
I do not know if that is his name. He wore no title in his face, but the titled men listened.