“Refreshments will be served shortly, ma’am,” he said in his deliberate way, with a glance at the clock on the mantelpiece.
Pompous, self-opinionated man! The rage that exploded in her middle, that went whistling like shrapnel along her veins, was at that moment precisely what Sophy needed. No more vacillation! She had so much to do and so little time to accomplish it all. She felt impatient to begin. George Dunwoody’s arrogance hardened her resolve as nothing else could have done. Which was good.
He thought he was dealing with an ingenue! Fleecing the innocent seemed a pastime for many people since the war. Seth needed her business acumen. She bent forward to peer at the papers on the table, suddenly very intrigued.
“Oh, but Mr. Dunwoody, you know what they say about new brooms!” she claimed with relish, looking up again abruptly.
Her eyes met his. For a moment they stood assessing each other, each sizing up the opposition. He appeared to turn the situation over several times in his mind, and then he nodded.
“I think that new brooms sweep very clean.” His smile was thin and frosty. He picked up the ledger and held it in his hand.
Staring at the cover, he shook his head once, slowly, as if still reluctant to allow her access to such confidential information. But if he bad learned anything, George Dunwoody thought, it was that he would do well not to underestimate the woman opposite him. It was clear to him that this particular female suffered from a curious perversity, and he would be a fool to ignore the hints of its scope.
After a moment he spoke and his voice was quiet and earnest. “I would be lying if I told you that you were welcome here, Mrs. Weston. It isn’t my style to trust a woman with figures. I have been manager of the Paterson factory since before the war. You’ll find none better.”
Sophy heard him in attentive silence, and all the time watched him. Her gaze didn’t falter. When he finished speaking, she did not say anything for a moment, but looked thoughtfully at him. He squirmed uncomfortably.
After a pause, she said, “It might be a nice learning experience for both of us to find something I do better than you.”
Two spots of color burned on his cheeks. He had no illusions why she was here. He had been privy to too much detail, and too many contracts had gone wrong. His solid girth trembled. He gave a mental shrug and watched her mouth quirk up.
Sophy had read his thoughts accurately from the expressions flitting across his face. Drawing a deep, steadying breath, she looked him directly in the eye.
“Or it could be a question of us both being better at different things. Figures don’t lie. I am a potential threat only if we are on opposite sides. The ledger, please, Mr. Dunwoody!” She reached for the sheaf of papers and account book he slowly extended.
“Thank you.” Her expression changed. She smiled sweetly across the space that separated them, her eyes clear and bright. “You knew my husband before the war, Mr. Dunwoody. Tell me, what was he like then?”
George Dunwoody surrendered to the inevitable.
Chapter Thirteen
T
he boisterous wind and the ceaseless hiss of rain drowned out all other noises. Although the sky had faded to a luminous melon green, and the landscape was blurry with mist when it was time to leave New Jersey, they were safely across the Hudson before the storm struck.
On arriving back at the house on Fifth Avenue, they had gone their separate ways to dress for dinner. Immediately after the meal, Seth had shut himself in his study, saying he wanted to check a portfolio of new designs. Still not feeling one hundred percent, Sophy had retired for the night.
Outside, the wind drove the rain down in heavy sheets that in their turn were dashed away by more gusts of wind—and out of it, the hail, a deafening pounding, bouncing like golf balls from the ground in white streaks.
Sophy loved it. It was the perfect excuse to go back to basics. To spend some time making final arrangements for the Thanksgiving menu. To be alone. To think. It was growing more and more difficult to think clearly around Seth. One could think in the kitchen, come to some conclusions. The trouble was, her mind was a blank.
She still had no idea what...
The new cook was slicing fresh vegetables for tomorrow’s bouillabaisse when she came into the kitchen. He waved a knife distractedly in answer to her query.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Weston, but I can’t seem to find them jars of preserved cherries you was lookin’ for. You know, the ones you brung from Yonkers that you wanted special for Thanksgiving. They’re not in the pantry.” His face held a pained expression.
Sophy had already gone across the room to pick up a kerosene lantern, which stood on the bench. She selected a large latchkey from a hook on the wall, and picked up a box of locofoco matches, dropping both items into her apron pocket.
“Don’t worry, Alphonse. I’ll check out the cellar. They were probably taken down there in error. The jars were packed in similar containers to my father’s wine collection.”
She frowned, furiously trying to concentrate her mind. When Seth had questioned her about the results of her audit, she had been deliberately evasive. Her suspicions were aroused, but she mustn’t give him any specific information until she had absolute proof.
Heart thundering in her rib cage, she had been sure he knew she was concealing something. For a moment he had seemed engulfed in thought, then had deliberately changed the subject.
Absently staring at the toe of his polished boot, his voice quiet, his words deliberate, as if he chose them with care, he had spoken to her about Ulysses Grant’s terrible trepidation before an action against a particular rebel camp.
The general had arrived to find the troops gone, giving a whole new perspective on the question.
The enemy had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his. The lesson was valuable.
The anecdote about Grant did reveal the empathy that attends true understanding of human limitations. Was Seth trying to give her a view of the investigation she had not considered? That he knew the situation, but was facing a terrible problem, seeking vainly for a solution? Or that he feared the evidence she might uncover could lead to disillusionment and danger?
In either circumstance, how could she tell him of her deductions? Dry documentary evidence was not the solution, and she saw the impossibility of conveying in words how a man had drifted into a vortex from which there seemed to be no return. She had to choose a strategy to deal discreetly with her conclusions.
The trail of evidence led directly to Charles Lethbridge. Cast-iron circumstantial evidence. All very plausible. But Charles remained an enigma. He had evaded her usual quick diagnosis, and remained in many respects a closed book.
Undoubtedly he was a brilliant designer. Seth trusted him. Didn’t that mean something? She paused, adjusting her thoughts. Or was it sharp thinking on the part of the real villain?
Putting the worst possible construction on events, suppose someone else was the culprit? Wasn’t it a smart precaution to have a suspect in reserve? It was useless to speculate. Speculation led, more often than not, to false conclusions.
Sophy lit the lantern wick, carefully adjusting the brass screw until the flame flickered, tall and even. No, she was almost sure of the truth. But it was like making her way through five layers of cotton candy. The feeling gave her just enough hesitation not to confide in Seth. She would wait until she had positive proof.
A large wooden door barred the entrance to the cellar. She fumbled for the key in her apron pocket. The lock opened smoothly.
The narrow staircase, made all shiny in the lamplight, reeled into the darkness like a filament of some mammoth spider’s web. There was no handrail on the inner side, and it seemed a terribly long way down.
Sophy did not want to venture into that dank, dark cellar. It made her dizzy just thinking about it. She hesitated a moment. She should go down there. It was why she had come, after all.
Fear rooted her to the spot. The terror of her own private nightmare reared up at her. She seemed frozen in her tracks as if split apart, one half not obeying the other.
I don’t like the dark.
How stupid could she be! That was no answer!
Perhaps it was only from looking down into the solid blackness? She took a deep breath, and shook her head as if to clear her mind of her thoughts. Some of the tension ebbed out of her. There was no choice, really, and it would only take a minute.
Sophy took a step forward. Another. Every step forward took the effort of two in reverse. She thought of Alice down the rabbit’s hole and wondered if Mr. Carroll could have had this in mind when he wrote
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Inside it was cool and echoey. The silence seemed appalling and absolute after the long siege of the hail. Dust lay thickly along the stairs, clung to the wall.
She tried to ignore the hammering of her heart, which felt as though it had lodged in her windpipe. The creak of the steps, the soft slap of her shoes against the stairs, the whisper of her gown as it brushed the wall, all seemed to be swallowed whole in that vast bowl of quietude.
Shadows flitted, larger than life, skittering along the brickwork like a magic lantern show as she held the lamp high and slowly descended the stairs. An odd, tingling sensation manifested itself between her shoulder blades. She felt a movement, the quiet humming as of an inquisitive bee.
Suddenly, the door swung shut, clanging home with funereal finality. The silence seemed absolute. It was as if the outside world did not exist. Sophy felt very vulnerable indeed.
A hand went to her throat and the silver disk that hung there. She felt the first painful flutterings of panic take wing inside her, and wished she could touch Seth. Wished she were sitting quietly on a couch in the study watching his beloved dark head. Instead, preoccupied with his designs, he probably hadn’t even noticed her absence.
This was a new fright, and she gave a little start. Her heart was thumping uncomfortably, as loudly as a blacksmith strikes his anvil. She squared her shoulders as if she faced something hostile. The feeling of being sealed as in a tomb had unnerved her a little, that was all.
Time had no meaning down here. A dankness hung in the air like a steel curtain. It was a vertiginous sense of space, echoing minutely. Silence almost. Only the sound of her own breathing.
Fear touched her heart anew. She staggered, blindly put an outstretched hand against the wall beside her to steady herself. Her foot kicked out from beneath the hem of her gown, tangled in her skirts and caught for a moment in the steel hoop. Then she was free, tumbling, rolling.
The breath whooshed out of her, and, in falling, she dropped the lantern. There was a clatter of metal as it banged against the brick wall and bounced off again. The light went out. She was in impenetrable blackness, a dense and appalling silence.
Sophy felt giddy, lighter than air. She was utterly powerless. It was if she bad unexpectedly stepped off a shelf of rock in the shallows and plunged to the bottom of the sea. She turned around the way she had come but she could see nothing, no walls, no shelves.
“Seth!” Nothing. Her mind felt like jelly. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. The world had collapsed, and she was adrift in the dark, directionless, alone and dazzled. What was happening to her? The years were falling away like crimson leaves whirled in an autumn storm. She was spinning out of control.
“Seth!” she called again, her voice echoing off the brickwork hollowly, seeming to mock her.
Like a key jarring open a lock in her mind, a memory had surfaced. Years melted away before her open eyes like veils parting before a freshening wind. She was a child of four again, frightened, alone in the darkened nursery, alone with her nightmares.
“Seth!” Her voice seemed thin and strangled now, one she could barely recognize. She felt as if reality were slipping through her fingers, dreamlike, lost within her imagination.
Then, with an immense indrawn breath that midway through turned into a gasping shudder, she clasped both arms about her body and began to rock back and forth as she had when she was a child, terrified by phantoms springing out from the pitch-blackness of the night.
Seth’s head jerked as if he had been abruptly reminded of something. He glanced across to the empty spot on the couch where Sophy normally sat.
For a moment, he had an odd sensation, as if she had called to him. The presence of her stole over him like a mantle of reflected light from the lurid streaks rending the night sky.
A strong gust took some hail pebbles and shot them against the window, strewing them along the sill where they lay like pristine pearls along a pretty girl’s throat. For a long moment, he stared at them while all manner of thoughts flung themselves like rain in his mind. A smile edged his lips, as it did sometimes, in anticipation of a funny story.
He shrugged, long lean muscles rippling with the movement. First things first. His head lowered again, and he went methodically on with what he was doing, but not for long. The sensation came again, too strong now to be ignored. So acute was the feeling, he was aware of the thunder of his heart pumping, his accelerated pulse.
Seth’s head turned again from the brief he had been reading, as if of its own volition. His peculiar sixth sense was warning him...of what? Sophy! Yes, he thought now, there was no doubt.
Sophy. His senses were full of her. Something fierce tugged at his insides. It was imperative he go to her. What was wrong? He began to move even before fully coherent conclusions had been reached.
Walking stiff legged from sitting so long, Seth went through the darkened hall and into the kitchen, wondering that none of the lights had been lit. He stopped, still as a statue, just over the threshold, listening and watching the shadows.
The kitchen was deserted. No one answered his call. She was not there. Nothing moved. He paused for a moment, confused.
Hadn’t Sophy said she was going to the kitchen? She had given him one of her bright smiles, and promised to return shortly with a pot of hot chocolate. That had been two hours ago.
Seth cursed softly and, returning to the doorway, leaned against it, trying to make sense of it all, feeling a moment of irrational chill. There was a sighing in the room as if the winter wind outside had somehow crept through a crack in the window sash and now swirled around him.
Perhaps she had simply gone to bed? His heart contracted, as if a heavy weight had been placed on his chest. It made no sense. He shrugged inwardly. In matters like this, he reflected, one never knew. For a long moment he simply stood there, collecting his thoughts.
From deep within him came a secret fear that, somehow, Sophy had managed to uncover some undisclosed error in the accounts, and was deceiving him. This afternoon when he had tried to glean how the audit was progressing, she had stared down at her laced fingers.
Her face, calm and composed, revealed nothing of her inner feelings. He could scarcely discern the rise and fall of her breasts as she breathed, but he had the distinct impression she was struggling with herself. Which was absurd. Was she keeping something from him?
He could not say, and he did not know why it should worry him. When she swallowed he had seen the play of light along the side of her throat, the small shadow lying in the hollow like a teardrop. In that split instant, a brief shudder contracted the muscles ridged along his straight back as he was struck by a new and horrible suspicion.
He had been about to challenge her, when she had lifted her head and smiled, her teeth white and even. Her candid, open smile, untainted by sarcasm or cynicism, was like coming home after a weary journey. Locked, their eyes had stared within and through.
At the time it had been enough to allay his doubts. He had even sought a further closeness by deliberately telling an anecdote from a war he would rather forget.
Now, he shrugged away a prickle of dismay, and made his limping way into the drafty and desolate hallway. His eye caught something pale on the tiled corridor. He bent his broad back, retrieving a white linen handkerchief in long, trembling fingers.