I climbed, keeping to the edge to minimise creaks, and found myself at a half-open door onto a vast hallway. Again, the dust lay thick and unmarked. However people were getting up to the attics, it wasn’t up these stairs, or through the hall – but presumably there were service stairs from the kitchen area as well.
I went up further, looking out for footprints or weapons and finding neither. The stairs swept up to galleried landings with double doors leading off that hinted at large rooms behind, but I kept going, up to the third landing where the staircase stopped.
The silence was beginning to get to me. I knew there were at least two other people in this house – the woman at the window and the person who had lit the fire – and yet I could hear nothing. It was as though the house was holding its breath and listening to me.
I was going to have to explore this floor for the attic stairs or turn around, go back to the ground floor and get out. Prudence told me I had pushed my luck far enough. It was time to leave, go to the gate, wait for help in the form of four large, armed gentlemen. I turned, one foot on the second step down, and a door above me slammed.
Chapter Twenty Five
There was something about the sound, something vicious and angry, that brought me round and sent me off along the corridor that led from the landing. I tried every door that I passed. They were all unlocked, all opened into large rooms holding the traces of past grandeur – carved panelling, elaborate, broken plasterwork, bedraggled hangings, rickety furniture. There was nothing to suggest they had been entered in months.
I retraced my steps, checking more carefully, and in a closet leading off one of the smaller rooms I found a jib door, made without obvious frame or handle in order to blend in with the wall. The dark edge all the way round was all that betrayed it and I had to run my hands over it until I found the recessed finger-hole that let me pull it open.
Behind it was a landing with a flight of steep, uncarpeted stairs that went both down and up. The centre of them was marked with footprints, too close together to make any sense of. They could have been men’s or women’s, there might have been many people or only one using the stairs repeatedly.
Down below a door closed, normally this time, not slammed, but the sound echoed up the stairwell, reminding me to be quiet. I stood in the silence watching the disturbed dust motes in a shaft of sunlight swirl and gradually slow and felt truly afraid for the first time since my reckless rush into the house.
Well, I was here now. I took the pistol from my pocket, pulled back the hammer, almost dislocating my thumb in the process, and held it in what I hoped looked a confident manner with one finger on the trigger. Then I climbed, my trainers almost silent on the worn wood.
There was a window at either end of the attic corridor when I reached it and, dirty as they were, they gave just enough light to be able to move confidently. I followed the track of the footprints, careful to keep within them so the pattern of my soles did not show up, the fancy tread so different from the plain leather soles of all the other shoes that had passed that way.
If the footprints hadn’t led me to the door then the key in the lock would have told me which was the right one. I listened, one ear pressed to the panels, but could hear nothing, so I turned the key and opened the door.
The young woman inside was sitting on a stool by the window, an embroidery hoop in her hand. When I entered she looked up, her expression aloof, then, when she saw it was a stranger, the composure vanished and she leapt to her feet and grabbed for the small scissors in her box of silks. ‘Do not come any closer!’
‘Arabella? Are you Arabella Trenton?’ I took off my hat as I spoke so she could see I was a woman and shoved the pistol into my pocket.
‘Yes. Yes, I am. You were outside earlier. Who are you?’ She was just as she had been described to me, charmingly pretty, with a mass of blonde curls, blue eyes and a sweet, innocent face that just now was set into an expression of strained determination. No wilting violet, Sir Clement’s lady-love. Oddly, despite the fact that she was obviously a captive, she was dressed in an expensive-looking morning dress and the room, even though it was in the attic, was carpeted and furnished like a lady’s sitting room.
‘Cassandra Lawrence. I am helping Sir Clement and his friends search for you.’
‘Oh, thank God.’ She said it prayerfully, eyes closed for a second. ‘Is Clement here?’
‘He is coming, very soon, along with Lord R
adcliffe, his brother James and Garrick, Lord Radcliffe’s valet. I should have waited for them, but I saw you at the window and thought someone had pulled you back roughly.’
She rubbed her upper arm and winced. ‘They do not like me looking out for a long time. I do not know what they think I am going to do. Fly away?’
‘Who are they?’ And what should we do now? I wondered. Try and escape, lock ourselves in or hide somewhere else in the house until help came?
‘It is Lord de Forrest’s people,’ she said. ‘I think he must be mad.’ She said it flatly as though it was beyond comprehension. ‘He tricked me into eloping – I thought he was Clement until he took off his mask – and then he said I was a wanton and not to be trusted, but that he would marry me anyway to save me from disgrace. But I do not want to marry him. He is middle aged and… and odd.’
‘What about your brother?’
‘My step-brother?’ She paced away from me and back again. I had never seen anyone wring their hands before. ‘He has been so strange this last year. He says I must not fix my interest with anyone, that I am too young, too innocent. But I love Clement and I want to marry him and he loves me and all he wants is to look after me.’
‘Your step-brother doesn’t need your money, does he?’
She looked surprised at the question. ‘No, certainly not. He inherited a lot from his father and he is very careful. Is that why you think he does not want me to marry?’
‘I can’t think what else could explain it. Does he know you are here?’
‘He cannot, can he? Otherwise he would come and take me away. Lord de Forrest is a friend of his, but surely Peter would not allow him to keep me like this? I think Lord de Forrest has gone completely insane.’
‘Has he tried to… touch you?’
‘Ravish me, you mean? No, he has not tried to do anything like that. He has not even kissed me.’ She looked completely puzzled. ‘I would have thought he would, wouldn’t you? I expected him to. Then I would have to marry him, or so Peter would say when he found out.’