‘A refreshing change, hereabouts, ma’am,’ Morefleet remarked, taking the chair, a high-backed Windsor, and pulling a notebook from his pocket. ‘I’m patrolling my stretch of coast, asking landowners and people in authority what they know of the free trading in their areas and checking
on what cellars there are. You’d be surprised how often a respectable householder hasn’t been into their own cellars for a month or so and has a nasty surprise when we open the doors.’
‘Well, you are welcome to the run of these,’ Mrs Bishop said. ‘Terence, show the officer both of them.’
‘This way, sir.’ The footman lit a lantern from the range, then moved to a door almost hidden besides the long dresser laden with dishes.
‘Don’t forget the front cellar,’ Mrs Bishop called after them as they vanished into the gloom. ‘That’s damp with an earth floor, so no use for anything much,’ she added to Theo as the light wavered down the whitewashed walls, throwing long shadows before it vanished. ‘Still, doesn’t do to seem we’re hiding anything, does it?’
‘Front and back? Don’t they connect?’ Theo helped himself to a jam tart cooling on a rack and hitched one hip on a tall stool.
‘The front’s the old part of the house – they do say it goes back to Queen Bess’s time. The back was built last century. You can see if you go outside and look at the house from the side – the front and back roofs are parallel and meet in a gutter.’
‘You find it a lot in this part of the world.’ The sudden contribution from Mrs Albright almost made him jump, she had been so quiet.
‘You are from around here, then?’ Her voice held no trace of a Norfolk accent and he wondered yet again just what her background was.
‘Oh no, I’m considered a foreigner,’ she said with a smile that made him blink before she was serious again.
‘From what I recall of attitudes hereabout, that could mean you’re from the next parish,’ he said, half-teasing, but she was bent over her ledger again and the top of the cap was exceedingly uncommunicative.
Theo was still brooding on quite why that smile had made him want to sit there for the rest of the day attempting to tease another one from the housekeeper when the Riding Officer clumped back up the brick steps in his heavy boots.
‘A well-kept cellar,’ he said, with a nod to Mrs Bishop. ‘Wish mine was as dry and well-stocked.’
‘Come and see the old one, then.’ Terence took a key from a hook on the wall. ‘We don’t use that.’
‘I’ve set out the decanters in the drawing room, my lord. Will dinner at half past seven suit?’
Mrs Albright looked up from her ledger. ‘Mrs Bishop has a fine mutton pie removed with roast chicken and there’s crab fritters with samphire and curd tarts.’
‘That all sounds excellent,’ Theo said, knowing it was a heavy hint to take himself off from the kitchen to the other side of the green baize door where he belonged. ‘Send Morefleet in to me when he’s finished traipsing about, will you?’
Theo finished his dinner in leisurely style, wrote a note to remind himself of exactly what was said by Morefleet and where he had been, so he could get the details right when Perry came home, then settled himself with a book of blood-curdling local legends and folk tales, accompanied by a glass of Perry’s exceptional, duty-paid, brandy.
He nodded off over the tale of Black Shuck, the great hound from hell that prowled the Norfolk coast, only to wake with a start when the book slid from his knee and hit the floor with a crash.
With his mind still fogged by a dream of red eyes pursuing him through a clinging sea-mist, Theo picked it up and smoothed down the pages as the clock stuck midnight.
Someone had been in, banked up the fire, set a guard around the hearth and removed all but the branch of candles at his side. Yawning, he tucked the book under one arm, picked up the candles and took himself up to bed.
Pitkin was dozing in the only uncomfortable chair in the room but he leapt to his feet as Theo wandered in.
‘What the devil are you still doing up?’ Theo demanded, knowing he was being unreasonable. He had given the valet no instructions – in fact, he had managed to forget the man entirely, he realised guiltily. ‘Have they given you a decent room and fed you?’
‘Yes, my lord, thank you. I’m very comfortable, my lord.’ He hovered, driving Theo quietly distracted as he flapped a clean nightshirt, pressed a nightcap on him – something Theo had told him more than once he wouldn’t be seen dead in – worried that he should get fresh hot water as that in the ewer was now luke warm, and produced the hideous slippers that Theo’s Aunt Emeline had embroidered and which Theo had hidden in the back of the wardrobe with a shudder.
Finally, Theo managed to get him out of the door and promptly stripped off the nightshirt, kicked the slippers under the bed, splashed his face in the cool water and discovered that he was wide awake. Feeling faintly guilty – and what was he doing with a valet who made him feel guilty twice in one day? – Theo picked up the nightshirt and draped it over a chair. Pitkin had turned scarlet when Theo had refused to sleep in one so, normally completely blasé about nakedness, he had saved the man’s blushes. As a result, every night they went through the farce of Theo removing the thing the moment Pitkin was out of the door.
It was a complete waste of laundry and probably an indictment on Theo as a feeble employer for not putting his foot down and wearing, or not wearing, what he damn well pleased, but being harsh with Pitkin was like kicking a dog and he just did not have it in him.
His heavy silk banyan went on with a pleasantly sensual shiver for its cool slide over his skin. Theo lit a single chamberstick, blew out the rest of the candles and took his book of tales to the window seat. The flickering light, the waxing moon and the tossing branches of the trees just the other side of the glass would make a pleasantly atmospheric setting for another ghostly story.
It took a while to settle comfortably with his feet up on the bench seat, a pillow jammed in the small of his back and the candle illuminating the crude woodcuts that gave the book much of its charm. He had just begun The Legend of the Headless Smugglers when a bar of light fell across the grass beneath his window. Someone else was as sleepless as he was. Someone sleeping on the ground floor.
The servants were all up in the attic rooms and Mrs Bishop had a sitting room and bed chamber leading off the kitchen passage he remembered from a previous visit when Perry and he, playing cricket on the lawn, had put a ball through her window. Which only left Mrs Albright. Myrtle. An ugly name, in his opinion and a dull shrub, except when it was in flower.
Theo watched the light as a shadow crossed it, stopped, moved. The housekeeper was brushing her hair, the movement of her arm as she swept the brush down the length of it was quite clear, as was the fact that it must fall well below her shoulders.