When She Said I Do (17 page)

Ellie might murder her later, at least until she heard about the attending beasties. Then it would be Attie who would be furious to have missed it.

Mr. Button was indeed a wonder. After only an hour, Callie left, quite bemused, toting a parcel of exquisite underthings to replace those lost in the river, her measurements most swiftly and respectfully taken. She’d never been measured by a man before. Then again, Mr. Button was an entirely different sort of fellow, wasn’t he?

Furthermore, she left with the promise of two gowns within the next few days and a gown of silk by the day of the ball, which hardly seemed possible, and yet whilst standing within the spell of Mr. Button’s confidence, it had seemed most entirely feasible.

What a strange little man. She absolutely adored him.

And it was nice to have found another friend.

She wondered how he’d known her name.

M
R. AND
M
RS.
L
AWRENCE
P
ORTER

B
EG YOUR ATTENDANCE

O
N THE EVENING OF
T
HURSDAY NEXT

F
OR A
M
ASQUE

T
O BE HELD IN HONOR OF THEIR RECENT MARRIAGE.

When one was about to spring a surprise ball upon a hermitesque gentleman, one ought not to approach said fellow empty-handed. Mr. Porter had a sweet tooth. The answer?

Pies. Callie’s pies were known far and wide as portions of juicy heaven wrapped in cloud crusts. They made men shudder with pleasure and vow to slay dragons for her. Or in the case of her brothers, lured them into doing Callie’s more unpleasant chores.

A girl needed something in her arsenal other than her winning personality.

The pies she wanted to bake required more apples than the number sitting in their basket in the pantry. It would require a trip into the cellar to find them … and Callie was none too fond of cellars.

It wasn’t that she was frightened of the dark. Exploring in the dark had gotten her into this mess, hadn’t it?

And it wasn’t that she was precisely frightened, either. Just … cautious. Very, very cautious. Cellars were dark and chill and usually old and … well, they simply made her skin creep!

“Oh, for a lowly housemaid. Or a manservant. Or a highly intelligent dog.” She thought about that for a moment, then shook her head. “Oh, dear. That wouldn’t work, would it? I must have green apples and dogs cannot see colors. How would he ever know which ones to put in the basket?”

With a sigh, she took up a lantern from a hook near the door, lighted it from the fire in the stove with a burning twig, and left the house. Cellar entrances were generally found near the kitchens, so it only took a few minutes of poking through the overgrown weeds to spot the trail worn by generations. She followed it, hiking her skirts over one arm as she strode through the warming day, swinging her basket in her other hand. Such a shame to have to leave the brilliance of this beautiful spring morning to go … down there.

She half hoped she wouldn’t be able to find the entrance, but after a moment the trail led her to a short, wide plank door built into the side of the house. Faded and flaking, it looked as though no one had opened it in Callie’s lifetime, although that couldn’t possibly be the case. Taking a deep breath, almost as if she were going underwater, she pulled the simple ring latch to open the door.

It stuck a bit, scraping over the frost-heaved cobbles of the step before it. The screeching sound of wood on stone sent a cold chill up her spine. Callie had an unpleasant thought of being trapped within.

“Oh, no,” she scolded the door. “That won’t do at all.”

Looking about her, she spied a chunk of firewood lying cast off in the high grass. It was just the right size to wedge firmly into the doorway to keep the sagging plank door wide open. Satisfied, Callie picked up her lantern and carefully picked her way down ancient cut-stone steps spiraling into the bowels of the house.

“Unfortunate word, bowels,” she muttered to herself. “Puts one in mind of an giant’s digestive tract.”

It didn’t help that the architecture of the cellar was a maze of rooms like half barrels, the stone carefully fitted by long-ago hands to hold up the vast house above.

She stopped halfway down the stairs. “Oh, I wish I hadn’t thought about that.” Now it seemed as if she felt the very weight of the house itself above her. She raised her lantern high. Before her was a room that on closer inspection seemed perfectly solid. In fact, it was surprisingly dry and clean, empty but for a head-high stack of empty crates in the far corner from the staircase. Other than a few spiderwebs, there was nothing objectionable in sight.

“You’re such a ninny, Calliope Worthington … er, Porter. Look at this place! Verily indestructible! Probably built by the same blokes who built the pyramids of Egypt, in their spare time, of course. It will stand long after you’re dead.” Her bravado faltered. “I wish I hadn’t said dead.”

Her voice didn’t echo in the network of arched caverns before her. It, too, seemed to sink beneath the weight of the house above.

“Apples. Find the blasted apples. Find the blasted apples and then get back out into the sunlight.” She held up the lantern once more and began to make her way deeper into the warren. “It’s a beautiful day. I needn’t go back indoors for hours. Pick some flowers for the dining room. There must be more vases somewhere. And there will be mushrooms in the woods. I can make a sauce that will bring Himself drooling from the smell of my cooking.”

She randomly went left at a joining, but the next vault into which it led was only a wine cellar, filled with vast racks of dusty bottles. Wine was nice but she hadn’t a clue what might be good, what might be precious, and what might be decades-old vinegar.

Reversing her path, she took a meandering tunnel that at last led her to another vaulted room, this one satisfyingly full of stacked bushel baskets of all sorts of edibles. She filled her basket with brilliant green apples, very pleased to find the proper sort for pie. There were some of last year’s pears as well, a little withered but perfectly suitable for stewing in a sugar syrup on another day. She was much cheered by a gracious plenty of other things from the previous autumn. Piled high about the room were bushels and crates of pumpkins, potatoes, carrots, and onions, the colors glowing like the treasures in Ali Baba’s cave. At least Mr. Porter didn’t intend to die by starvation any time soon.

Feeling better about the cellar in general, Callie had to roll her eyes at her own earlier fears. “A right ninny, indeed.”

Yet as she made her way back to the exit, she saw no beckoning light from the open door. She was going the right way, she was sure of it. Yes, there was the gloomy entrance to the wine cellar. Yes, here were the stacked, empty crates. She turned in the room, holding the lantern high. Yes, there were the stairs up to the doorway to sunlight and fresh air.

A doorway that was now most obviously closed.

Now, most women wouldn’t be all that alarmed by a simple closed door, especially on a brisk spring day full of sweet fresh breezes.

Most women didn’t have five brothers.

Nerves twanging, Callie climbed the steps and put a tentative hand on the latch. It twisted easily enough, but when she pushed on the door, nothing happened. She pushed harder, juggling her basket and the lantern to one hand and throwing all her strength into a one-shouldered shove.

The old planks creaked in protest, but the door didn’t budge.

“Bloody hell,” Callie breathed. If she weren’t nearly a hundred miles from London, she would swear she could hear Cas and Poll snickering on the other side of that door!

But that was madness. It couldn’t be a prank. Who would do such a thing? Who even knew she was here? It certainly wasn’t Mr. Porter. To even consider that possibility, one would also have to concede the faint possibility that Mr. Porter had a smidgen of a sense of humor, albeit a most juvenile one—and that was patently ridiculous.

Yet Callie knew a prank when she was the victim of one. A surge of anger had her pounding on the door, but she knew no one would come. The prankster would hardly help her, and Mr. Porter was somewhere in the great house, far from her muffled noise. She would have to be her own rescuer, as usual.

“Well, then.” Putting her basket and lantern carefully out of the way on the step below hers, she briskly dusted her hands in preparation.

She hammered, she shoved, she yelled, and she pushed. Finally, she resorted to throwing herself bodily against the planks, gasping curses at the top of her lungs. Well, five brothers, after all.

As she flung herself particularly violently at the planks one more time, she felt her shoe slide on the gritty stone step. Her balance shifted precariously and her foot kicked out sideways, knocking her basket of edibles over and endangering the lantern.

Apples be damned. Callie grabbed for her only source of light.

“Got you!”

Immediately after which, Callie forgot how to breathe. Bent nearly double over the rickety railing, the rescued lantern swinging from her fist, she had a perfectly marvelous view of the writhing mass of glossy black snakes as they slithered from their winter nest in the curve of the stairs, disturbed by apples falling from above.

“Sweet flaming hell,” Callie whispered, hoping with all her heart that snakes couldn’t climb stairs.

And then the railing snapped.

Chapter 14

Where the hell was she?

Gone for a jaunt across the countryside without his knowing? Rambling about the rooms of the manor, digging through some obscure closet?

Dangling by one hand from some great height? Again?

There was no help for it. Ren had to enlist the help of the men of Amberdell, whom he scarcely knew. There was one, the fellow who delivered the goods for his larder, a brutish bloke by the name of Unwin. Unsavory perhaps, but he evidenced no fear or curiosity toward Ren.

Unwin was nowhere to be found. Ren was forced to approach his second choice, Teager, the carpenter who had repaired a section of the stables for Ren’s horse.

Teager agreed to help, politely not trying to peer into Ren’s hood, although the men he enlisted to search were perhaps not so self-restrained.

Ren turned away from them, riding on the outside of the group, deflecting their curious stares.

Fury fought with worry. Damned woman, forcing him into this mortifying position!

Where the bloody hell was she?

*   *   *

Callie perched high on the teetering stack of crates, the lantern clutched in her hands and her gaze locked on the snakes.

She’d tried counting them, but they would keep moving. Somewhere between ten and thirty, she thought. Perhaps two dozen snakes, between her and the door to … well, nowhere.

She’d tried twice to make her way back to the stairs. It had taken every scrap of courage she could muster to climb down to the enemy-occupied floor. Yet every time she’d taken a step, she was sure the snakes’ heads turned her way. Quailing, she’d clambered back up the pile of crates, just as she had done when she’d landed on her hands and knees on the stone floor. Her palms were scraped raw and stinging and her knees ached abominably and the chill of the cellar was seeping right into her bones, but really, all that was nothing compared to her terror of the snakes.

She knew she was being silly. She knew, or rather, she’d been told repeatedly by the scientifically observant Orion, that snakes were more frightened of her than she was of them.

“Horse apples,” she muttered. “Rion, you are full of horse apples!”

These were not ordinary snakes. These were demon snakes, sent from some snake hell to enact revenge upon her for all the creatures captured, kept, and/or dissected by her curious brothers. Yes, and Attie as well, although Callie blamed Cas and Poll for her baby sister’s diabolical bent.

Although, to be fair, it had been Orion who had put the snake eggs in Callie’s bed when the family had gone on holiday in the country. True, he’d only been twelve years old on that trip, and true, the hatched snakes had been tiny green things, no bigger than a pencil. But it hadn’t been until she was fully asleep that her investigative brother had slipped the eggs into her bed to keep them warm, because, as he quite logically explained afterward, if he put them in his bed, Lysander would have rolled over onto them.

The hatchlings, quite logically, decided to find the warmest place about—this was according to Orion, for Callie had no actual conversation with the snakes themselves—which happened to be none other than Callie’s … um … nethers.

She’d woken at the wriggling between her thighs and had shrieked the roof of the inn down, rousing every single guest and servant to rush to her aid where they found her climbing her bedpost like a bell rope in her panic. Naked.

She’d been so sure there were more snakes in her nightdress that she’d stripped it from her without a thought.

A handful of tiny green snakes had left her so afraid that she’d shamelessly exposed herself in front of strangers.

Two dozen yard-long black shapes now writhed on the floor below her. They were as black as night and as thick as sausages. Fascinated by their slithering explorations, Callie could not look away.

She rather thought she’d happily parade herself before an entire garrison if only said garrison would pool their combined might and break down the bloody cellar door!

Yet for all the maddened panic boiling up within her, she didn’t shriek. She didn’t make a sound. She didn’t dare. If the snakes had been attracted by her nearly silent footsteps, what might they do if she disturbed them with her shouting?

There was nothing to do but wait. She was high and safe, with her one salvaged apple and her trusty lantern. Determined to be courageous in her captivity, Callie took the apple from her pocket and polished it on her skirt.

Unfortunately, the apple had a worm.

Even more regrettably, the lantern was almost out of oil.

*   *   *

It seemed to Callie that a hundred years had passed in the dark. Then, a scrape assaulted her ears and light jangled her wide-open eyes.