Authors: Marsha Canham
She pressed her hands to her temples and squeezed. It was just too confusing. There were too many contradictions to try to sort through, when she could barely think her way clear to what to do in the next five minutes.
Anne looked down. Her skirt was crumpled where her hands had crushed the fabric. While she absently tried to smooth the creases, she turned her head and glanced out the window at the panorama of stars smeared across the sky, wondering how everything could look so lovely and tranquil when her entire world had just been turned upside down.
Something … a noise, a rustle, a soft squeak of a floorboard … intruded on Anne's thoughts and she frowned. She stared at the curtain for a long moment, then edged forward on silent toes to peer cautiously through the fringed edges, wondering if, unbeknownst to her, one of the officers had remained behind. Forbes had locked something in his desk, nervous that it was in his possession. Perhaps he had left someone behind to guard it.
She heard the sound again and bit off a scream as something small and furry darted under the hem of her skirt and scampered out the other side.
“Jesus God in heaven!” she gasped, clapping a hand to her breast. It was a mouse. A damned mouse!
She lashed out with her foot, accomplishing little more than stubbing her toe and tangling a heel in the bottom hoop of her farthingale. Extricating it brought forth another muttered curse, after which she pushed one panel of the curtains aside and ducked back into the main room, happy to leave the rodent with sole possession of the alcove.
The library appeared as it had before, though darker now that the outer doors were closed. A very faint undercurrent of sound filtered through the silence, indicating the ball was getting under way overhead. Musicians would be tuning their instruments. Footmen would be weaving their way through the guests, balancing silver trays laden with wine and punch. The chairs set around the perimeter would already be occupied by the crones and matrons, their fans cooling their faces, their heads tilting together over a choice remark about the fabric of
someone's gown, or another's shocking display of cleavage. The soldiers would be inspecting the women, trying to decide who would most likely accompany them into a shadowy corner and relieve a few lusty needs.
Anne's gaze wandered down to the Lord President's desk. It was a massive, solid affair built with deep drawers on each side of the wide kneehole. The top two drawers on either side had small brass lockplates, as did the long flat one in the center; almost without thinking, she reached up and withdrew a thin steel pin from her hair.
Running her fingertips along the smooth, polished wood, she glanced at the door again, then bent over and, with a steady hand, fed the end of the pin into the center lock. It was a simple, single ratchet mechanism not unlike the one in Angus's study, and it gave on the second turn.
The drawer slid open soundlessly and Anne peered inside. There were papers—half-written letters, mostly; none of them seeming important enough to come from a late-night courier—several sticks of sealing wax, and two large gold stamps, one embossed with the Forbes coat of arms, the other with his seal of office. The drawer on the left opened as easily, and it contained a second locked box which took all of two seconds to work open. The sight of a sizeable cache of gold coins barely caused a twitch in the set of her jaw, nor did the contents of the third and final locked drawer.
Frowning, Anne glanced over the top of the desk at the door before sinking down in a crush of silk skirts. She had distinctly heard Forbes turning a key in a lock, but the other drawers opened without effort.
It was when she was pushing the last one back into place that she noticed the oddity. The drawers on the left pedestal were much shorter than those on the right; they were barely as deep as the length between her palm and elbow, whereas those in the other bank could accommodate her arm from fingertip to shoulder. She ducked down and searched again, finding nothing on the first pass of her hand. On the second, with the help of a candle hastily lit with flint and tinder, she felt the scar of a small keyhole embedded in the wood and, beside it, the faint line of a seam that, if one did not know where to look, would appear to be part of the grain.
“Clever bastard,” she muttered, confirming her suspicion by peering at the outer side of the desk, where the ornate carvings and curlicues concealed two thin hinges discolored with a dark patina to blend into the carved patterns on the wood.
Wasting no more time on admiring the carpentry, Anne applied the hairpin, cursing softly when the lock proved to be more complicated. It succumbed eventually, and when she swung the false drawers aside, the first thing she saw was a packet of dispatches bound and wrapped in a leather pouch. There were other bundles, other papers, all of which earned a cursory inspection before she discarded some and added others to a pile on the floor beside her.
When she reached the limit of what she thought she could safely conceal on her person, she pushed the false front of drawers back in place. Since she had never quite mastered the art of
locking
anything with a hairpin, she had to hope no one would come looking for any of the missing papers until morning.
She stood, lifting the layers of her overskirt, underskirt, and petticoat to bare the frame of her farthingale. Between the fourth and fifth rib of whalebone, a pocket had been sewn onto the strips of linen. Her protest to Angus the previous night about not wearing knives to a formal affair was forgotten as she reached inside the pocket and removed the wickedly sharp dirk. The bundles of papers made for a snug fit, and with nowhere else to conceal the dirk, she rearranged several books on a nearby shelf and shoved the weapon well back behind them.
With her hand pressed flat over the constricting tightness of her bodice, she took a moment to catch her breath before ensuring her skirts were straight and orderly again, her hair was not missing a curl, and she had not left anything behind. Everything seemed to be the way she had found it apart from the curtains on the alcoves, and they had obviously gone unnoticed earlier. As a final precaution, she ventured into mouse country one last time to open the French doors, leaving them ajar enough to suggest an alternate means of entry and exit.
Back at the main door, she paused and pressed her ear to the wood. She cracked it open a sliver of an inch, then two,
then boldly threw her shoulders back and walked out into the hallway, a rueful expression on her face as if she had just taken a wrong turn.
The pretense was not needed. Apart from one red-faced couple who emerged from another darkened niche farther along the hall and refused to even meet her eye, she saw no one until she reached the vicinity of the entrance hallway. The weight of the bundle hanging from her farthingale made it feel as if her skirt were dragging at a tilt, and as she passed before an ornately gilded mirror, she fully expected to see the evidence of her guilt reflected back. Surprisingly enough, she saw only a tall, pale woman in gold silk whose eyes were possibly a bit too rounded and dark, and who had to force herself to stop and lean toward the polished surface as if to adjust a displaced curl.
If luck was in any way on her side, Anne reasoned, the theft would not be discovered until she was long gone, and even then she, a mere woman, would hardly be considered the prime suspect. Once she was safely back at Moy Hall and able to think clearly again, she would decide what to do with the stolen papers, but for now, she had to get out of here. She had to regain her composure and act as if nothing were amiss, as if the horrendous pain twisting inside her chest were not there at all.
“My dear, are ye all right?”
“What?” Anne started as Lady Drummuir reached out and touched her arm.
“Ye look as if ye've seen the ghost of William Wallace.”
Anne swallowed. “I'm fine, just tired. Have you seen Angus?”
“Since the last time ye asked not two minutes gone? Nay. Nay, I've not.”
Anne searched the crowded room, but although she saw Lords Forbes and Loudoun laughing at some unheard triviality, there was no sign of her husband. A servant walked by and she signaled for a glass of wine, which she emptied in three swallows and replaced with another.
Meanwhile, couples were lining up in two swirling columns of color that formed the opening lines of the
contredanse. She located Adrienne de Boule, the sapphire blue silk of her gown shining like a jewel under the thousand candles in the chandelier overhead. Her partner was the green-eyed Major Garner—a suitable match, Anne thought belligerently, though she almost wished it were Angus, if for no other reason than she would know where he was.
Farther along, the young Mr. Forbes was dancing with one of the MacLaren sisters—who could keep track of their names when there were seven who all looked frighteningly alike? He craned his neck at every turn to try to catch Anne's attention, but she ignored him.
With her foot tapping impatiently to the music, she started her search at the far end of the cavernous room again, skimming past the clusters of uniformed officers, the tables of refreshments, the curtained recesses where twenty-foot-high arched doors opened onto stone balconies …
Her gaze faltered and flicked back to the doors.
When she had first entered the library, the curtains in the two alcoves had been swagged and tied with gold cords. But when she had paused at the door before leaving and glanced back … they had both been lowered!
She fought the instant surge of panic and forced herself to remain calm, to think as hard as she could and remember
exactly
what she had seen when she looked back from the doorway. Both curtains had been tied back when she entered, she knew that much without a doubt, but regardless of how she tried to change the image in her mind, both sets of drapes were also hanging free when she departed. Someone must have been in the library with her! Someone who had stayed behind? Or someone who had crept back after the others departed?
Just before she'd had her wits startled by the mouse, she had heard a noise she had thought sounded like a stealthy footstep. Whoever owned that footstep must have heard her kick the bejesus out of the mouse and ducked into the second alcove, lowering the panels as she had done to conceal himself.
But if that was what had happened … it meant that someone had seen her searching the Lord President's desk! Someone had seen her pick the lock, steal the papers, then stash them away under her petticoat!
Lady Drummuir jumped at the sound of breaking glass,
gasping when she turned and saw blood welling through Anne's fingers. “Good God, child, what have ye done?”
Anne had not been aware of squeezing the wine goblet or of its shattering in her hand. She was only vaguely conscious now of the dowager holding her hand away from her dress and shouting at one of the servants for a clean cloth.
All she could think of was that someone had been in the library with her, watching her steal important papers from the locked desk of the Lord President of the Court of Session.
“Och, ye've gone an' cut yerself, dearie. Here, let me wrap it so ye dinna drip all over yer fine gown. Cheap bloody glass, that's what it is,” the dowager snorted. “He's had all his crystal and silver plate packed into boxes an' sent to London for safekeeping. It's nae wonder the plates didna crack under the weight of the bread, an' the cutlery not bend each time ye touched it to yer lip.”
Anne allowed herself to be led out of the ballroom, her hand bundled in a napkin. A few of the ladies near the exit gasped and swooned for the benefit of the men in their company but for the most part the accident hardly drew notice. She was taken into a small parlor, where water and more cloths were fetched, along with Doctor Faustus MacMillan, a short strut of a man with bloodshot eyes and rolled sausages for fingers. Under Lady Drummuir's caustic eye, he bathed the latticework of small cuts and bound the hand in clean strips of linen. He was just finishing when Angus and Lord Forbes came through the door, the former looking genuinely concerned as he went down on one knee beside Anne's chair.
“What happened? I was told there had been a mishap, that you were bleeding.”
The doctor glanced over the top of his pince-nez. “Nothing too serious, m'lord. Cut herself on a glass, she did. More blood than bother.”
“It was a silly accident,” Anne said in a whisper. “The glass broke when I lifted it off the tray.”
“Your hand—?” Angus started to reach for the bandaged hand, but Anne flinched away from his touch.
“My hand is fine. There are a few small cuts, nothing that will not heal in a day or two. It was foolish to even bring the doctor away from the party. I could have tended it myself.”
She tried to keep the words from sounding as though they were spat from between her teeth, but because they were, it was difficult to measure any success.
“Are you certain …?”
“I am absolutely certain. Please, do not worry yourself any further.”
“Worry?” Forbes exhaled a breath and clasped his hands behind his back. “He was damned near beside himself, dear lady. Blanched like a lovesick swain, I vow, and with good reason, for I confess my own heart skipped a beat or two. Point out the clumsy lout who gave you a broken glass and I'll thrash him myself.”
“It was no one's fault but my own,” Anne said coldly.
“An' ma son's,” Lady Drummuir added, casting a narrowed accusation in Angus's direction. “If she hadn't been so distracted wonderin' where ye'd taken yerself off to, she might have seen the glass was cracked.”
“You were looking for me?” Angus glanced at Anne.
“No. I mean yes. I… I wanted to tell you I was leaving. I have a dreadful headache and I wanted to tell you I was going home.”
“Home?” Forbes frowned like an indulgent father. “Nonsense. You will stay here the night. I'll have a chamber prepared at once, and—”
“No!” Anne shot to her feet. “I mean … no, thank you. I would prefer just to go home. There is no need for Angus to leave,” she added. “I will be perfectly fine on my own.”