She stood there for a long time, her face turned up to the rain. A shaft of sun drifted across her face, warming her, then vanished behind a bank of clouds. She closed her eyes and prayed.
When she opened her eyes, she felt calmer. No one else could stop Lucas, only she. No one loved him as she loved him. And this day was inevitable. She’d known it for a long, long time. This was why she’d been sent back to Hawkshill.
Turning from Haig House, she now looked at the object of all her dread, the ruined priory. It was situated far below Haig House, concealed by thick stands of trees. That’s why she had never seen it before. And there wasn’t much to see. All that remained of this once-flourishing monastery were crumbling stone walls and the tower.
But there was more here than could be seen by the naked eye.
The mist was rapidly rising, not only from the river, but also from the earth itself. It was a veil she welcomed,
heaven-sent. She could explore the ruins without fear of detection.
When she started down the other side of the incline, Haig House was shrouded in a swirl of vapor.
The path made a sharp turn to the left, well before the priory, then climbed steeply toward the trees that concealed the road. Jessica picked up her skirts, veered off the path and waded through a patch of newly scythed grass to the low stone wall that enclosed the ruins. It took her only a moment to navigate it.
She had known that what she would see would be the “church” of her dream, but all the same, it gave her an eerie feeling. Here, on this bare slab of stone, the cross had stood. To her right was the rectory, though all that remained of it was its stone pulpit and foundation. The cloisters and dormitories had vanished long since and were now replaced by a close-cropped stretch of grass. And it was right here, on the stretch of turf, that her wedding guests had played their game.
A shiver ran over her when she approached the main building. This was where Rodney Stone was taken to have his head chopped off. It was a ruin now, but it hadn’t been a ruin in her dream. Or maybe it had been. All she’d had were impressions.
One down and two to go
. The unholy litany drummed inside her brain.
Who was the next victim? Who?
She glanced involuntarily over her shoulder toward Haig House. Mist swirled in front of her like a sheet of transparent gauze. The silence was stretched taut, as if the whole of creation was holding its breath to see what she would do next.
Quickly turning, she passed through the stone archway and into the nave. The archway and its tower were almost intact but she could just as easily have entered the nave by climbing over a pile of rubble. She’d entered by the tower
door without thinking and she realized now that she was retracing everything that had happened in her dream.
Above her, where once the vaulted roof had hung like a canopy, was the open sky; beneath her feet were flagstones; ahead was the chancel where the high altar had stood. She passed white marble statues in niches and effigies of knights carved into the walls. The mist cast a ghostly pall, sometimes obscuring her vision, sometimes lifting to reveal the sad splendor of a long-ago era. But she didn’t need eyes to see what she’d come for. She was seeing things with an inner eye.
She approached the chancel with dread churning inside her. Each step heightened her senses to a razor-sharp edge. The hem of her garments was damp and clinging; she could smell wood smoke and the sweet scent of newly mown hay; the rain had stopped; a dog barked off in the distance; someone was watching her.
Her heart leapt and she jerked her head round. From his perch on top of one of the walls, a squirrel sat contemplating her as he calmly chewed on an ear of wheat. It took a long while for her heartbeat to return to normal.
She found what she was looking for in a small bay off the chancel. Like the tower entrance, this part of the building was well preserved, and here too the floor was flagstones.
In the very center of the floor, in solitary splendor, was a stone tomb, with the effigy of a woman, hands clasped in prayer, reclining in her final repose.
“Saint Martha,” Jessica said, barely mouthing the words. “Saint Martha’s crypt.” The tomb in her dream.
And the final resting place of Rodney Stone.
A great sob tore at her throat, but she choked it back. She couldn’t stop to worry about how it would all end. She couldn’t think of Lucas. Too much was at stake.
Ruthlessly suppressing all emotion, she examined Saint Martha’s tomb. It wasn’t a coffin, but rather a marker to indicate the crypt that would lie beneath it. In her dream,
there had been a set of stone steps leading down into the bowels of the earth.
She examined the tomb from all angles. She touched first one sculptured detail then another. She tugged, she pulled. Nothing happened. Finally, she sat back on her heels. There must be something she was missing.
She looked around the small bay and her eyes came to rest on a life-sized relief of the saint set in one wall. Rising, she walked to the wall and examined the sculpture. Saint Martha stood beneath a foliated cross with a fish in one hand and a lamp in the other, but it was the cross with its intricate halo that held Jessica’s eyes. This was the cross of her dream.
She saw now that this slab of stone was not part of the wall but was attached to it, much like a painting. She ran her fingers around the bottom edge. A draft of cool air fanned over them. With mounting excitement, she began to twist, press and pull every projection she could get her fingers around. She was just about to give up when she touched the Latin inscription at Saint Martha’s feet. It moved, or so she thought. When she pulled on it hard, it twisted to the side and she heard a grating sound, as if a key had turned in a lock.
Pulse racing, heart hammering, she splayed her hands on the stone sculpture and pushed hard. It wheezed, resisted, then slowly swung inward.
She’d found her steps. They led down into an icy, inky darkness.
Adrian was yawning when he entered the breakfast room of Walton Lodge. Lucas was already there, seated at the table. After helping himself from the servers on the sideboard, Adrian joined him.
“Where is Perry?” asked Lucas.
“Having a bath.” Adrian glanced at the clock. “So what is the agenda for this morning?”
“I suggest that the first thing you do is get dressed.”
Adrian looked down at his dressing robe and grinned. “Why? There are no ladies here to take offense, just we men, like in the good old days.”
“Were they good old days? I’m beginning to wonder about that.”
Adrian’s smile faded and he looked at Lucas more closely. “You sound,” he said, “as though you got up on the wrong side of the bed. What’s wrong, Lucas?”
“What’s wrong,” said Lucas, throwing down his napkin, “is exactly what I told you on the way down here.” He began to tick things off on his fingers. “First, Rodney Stone is missing, and foul play is suspected. Secondly, according to Perry, the butler at Haig House kept all the cards for Bella’s ball. He remembers Rodney Stone particularly because he was a dandy, but there is no card now with Stone’s name on it. So what happened to it? Third, there is a rumor going around about Stone and a woman he came down to see, but no one knows the identity of this mysterious woman, nor do they know where the rumor originated. Fourthly, my wife believes that Stone was paid to frighten her so that she would stop asking questions about her father’s death. I could go on and on.” Lucas looked off into space and said in a different tone of voice, “I tell you, Adrian, there’s something very strange at work here, something that goes back to the night William Hayward died.”
Adrian reached for the coffeepot and poured himself a cup of coffee before responding. “I can’t see it myself. What I think is that Stone has gone off to the wilds of Scotland or something, and that when he turns up, as I’m sure he will, he’ll explain everything.”
Lucas said, “That may well be, but I’m not taking any chances until I question him in person.”
“Chances on what?”
“Chances on something happening to Jessica.”
Adrian was shocked into swallowing a mouthful of
scalding hot coffee. “Are you serious?” he demanded incredulously. “Who would wish to harm Jessica?”
“Whoever murdered her father.”
There was a long silence as Adrian digested this. Finally, he shook his head. “You’re not suggesting that one of us would do anything to hurt Jessica?”
“I don’t know, Adrian. I don’t know what I think anymore.”
“But it was you … that is … if you didn’t … I don’t understand.”
Lucas’s eyes blazed with sudden anger, but he kept his voice low. “I did not execute William Hayward. Yes, I know, I drew the short straw, but I did not go through with it. I told you at the time that I wouldn’t go through with it, that I couldn’t. What I want to know is—who did?”
“If you didn’t do it, then it wasn’t Rupert or me.” Lucas was silent.
Adrian lifted his head and his eyes were as hard as Lucas’s. “And what if,” he said softly, “one of us did take matters into his own hands? Would you betray him to the authorities? Would you go back on your word to your comrades? Where do your loyalties lie, Lucas?”
Lucas moved like lightning. His hand closed around Adrian’s arm, and coffee cup and coffee went flying. Neither man paid any attention to the porcelain cup that smashed to fragments or the spreading coffee stain on the pristine white tablecloth.
In a low, driven voice, Lucas said, “Nothing comes before my wife, do you understand? Not the past, not our friendship, not an oath I swore on my immortal soul. Nothing! And if I discover that someone has tried to hurt Jessica, or frighten her, no matter who it is, that person has become my mortal enemy, and I shall deal with him accordingly. Do I make myself clear?”
He released Adrian’s arm and, suddenly rising, went to look out of the window, inwardly cursing himself for taking
his frustrations out on Adrian. He felt helpless, that was the problem, helpless and deeply uneasy by what had come to light, not only with his own investigation of Stone, but with what Perry had told him the night before. An invitation card was missing. He knew that Bella’s butler, Verney, was a stickler for detail. If he said the card was missing, then someone must have taken it. But the thing that disturbed him most of all was Perry’s disclosure about the rumor that was going the rounds. It was Jessica’s name that was being bandied about. She was the “mystery woman” that Stone had come to see. And if Stone turned up murdered, the next rumor that would go around was that Jessica was implicated.
He was glad, now, that he’d left her safely in London.
He turned to face Adrian and managed a smile. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I shouldn’t take my frustrations out on you. You asked about the agenda for today. We’re to meet Rupert at his place later this morning. But before that, I want to speak with the driver of the carriage Stone hired that night. Jessica insisted that he saw her. Maybe he’s lying. Maybe he has something to hide.”
Adrian was still rubbing the arm Lucas had grabbed. “Why Rupert’s place? Why not invite him here?”
“Because I want to question his butler as well. And I want to look over the priory.”
Both men spoke at the same time. “Lucas—”
“Adrian—”
The door opened and the butler entered, “Milord,” he said, “her ladyship’s maid is here.”
The butler held the door wide, and Sadie entered. Lucas recognized her as Jessica’s abigail. “What the devil are you doing in Chalford?” he demanded.
The little maid flushed at her master’s hostile tone and began to tremble. “I came with her ladyship,” she said, and promptly burst into tears.
The butler took over. “There’s a hackney driver here
as well, milord. He says he drove her ladyship to Saint Luke’s, and watched to make sure that she entered the church. But her ladyship did not enter the church. She took the path that goes by the old priory.”
“I’ll get dressed,” said Adrian.
Lucas was already striding for the door.
She made the sign of the cross before she climbed over the ledge to the first step. Once there, she hesitated, overcome by a chilling, nauseating terror. It wasn’t only dread of what she would find in the crypt that gripped her. She hadn’t given a thought to providing herself with a candle or a lantern. She’d been too overwrought.
She heard a faint sound—a horse on the bridle path? Some small creature passing through?—and her head jerked. Mist swirled around, blanketing the walls of the priory in a ghostly shroud. Whoever she’d heard was now silent. Drawing in a deep breath, her back pressed hard against the stone wall, she began to descend the stairs.
When she reached the bottom, her foot touched hard-packed earth. She hesitated, absorbing as much as she could through her senses. The air was cold and clammy, but what she had feared most did not transpire. She’d steeled herself for the stench of putrefying flesh, but there was no stench. Nevertheless she was convinced Rodney Stone’s body was here because she was sure that her dream had come to her straight from the mind of the murderer. What she did not know was what state of decay it would be in.
She peered into the gloom. The darkness swallowed up the light a few feet in front of her face. Though there was nothing to be seen, her imagination was seeing things that made her flesh creep. A crypt was a place of burial. God only knew what she would find, and she wasn’t as brave as she had hoped she would be.
A few deep breaths calmed her a little, and it was then,
as she was inhaling, that she became aware of something she had not noticed before. The faint essence of something sweet and cloying hung on the air, the scent of a flower. Roses.
Thoughts raced through her mind in rapid confusion, then there was only one thought. “Bella,” she sobbed softly.
The word echoed back to her in a mocking refrain.
She held her breath and listened. There wasn’t a sound to be heard. With one hand on the stone wall, she began to inch forward. It might have been her imagination, but the scent of roses seemed to intensify. She was edging close to panic when her foot stepped on some small, soft object. With a cry of fright, she stepped to the side. The smell of roses filled her nostrils. It took every particle of her control to force herself down on her haunches. Slowly putting out her hands, she felt for the object she had trampled. It was the head of a rose. Her fingers closed around it convulsively.