ached, and sweat poured off him, plastering his shirt to his chest and back. If he hadn’t quite managed to silence the lingering notes of “The Irish Girl,” it echoed less insistently now, allowing other thoughts to drift into the places Cecilia had seized inside his head.
When he arrived back at the castle, he took the stairs two at a time, stripping off his coat and cravat as he went. He discarded both along with his riding crop and hat, a smile hovering on his lips as he strode toward the connecting door. It was nearly teatime, and there was nothing Isabella adored more than being permitted to have tea in the drawing room with her uncle.
“Good afternoon.” Gideon forced a smile as he paused beside the door, ignoring the sinking feeling in his chest when he saw it was Amy, not Cecilia with Isabella. “Do you fancy having tea with me downstairs today, Isabella?”
“Oh yes, Uncle!” Isabella climbed down from Amy’s lap, excited at the rare treat. “But we have to wait for Miss Cecilia, so she may come with us, too.”
“Where is Cecilia?” Gideon asked, on Isabella’s behalf only, of course. It wasn’t as if he wanted to know where she was.
Amy was sitting in the rocking chair with a storybook open in her lap, but she leapt up, a guilty flush rising in her cheeks. “She, ah, had an errand to run, my lord. I daresay she’ll be back soon. May I send her down to the drawing room when—”
“She’s in the attics!” Isabella cried, clearly taken with the novelty of anyone venturing into such an exotic place.
“The attics?” What the devil was she doing there? Gideon raised an eyebrow at Amy, who was looking more uneasy with every passing moment. “I can’t think why. She does know that part of the castle is closed, doesn’t she?”
She did, of course. Mrs. Briggs made certain all the servants did. To Gideon’s knowledge, none of them had ever ventured up there, but then Cecilia wasn’t anything like his other servants, with her talent for poking her nose into places it had no business being.
Amy was biting her lip. “Mrs. Briggs said she might go up to the old schoolroom to search out some storybooks for Isabella, my lord.”
“She said she’d look for some pretty paper to make me a crown, and a stick, too!” Isabella jumped up and down with excitement. “A stick with jewels, like a king has.”
“Did she? How…resourceful of her.” Gideon gave one of Isabella’s curls a playful tug, but his eyes narrowed on Amy, who was shifting from one foot to the other, and looking very much as if she’d rather be anywhere but here.
Somehow, he doubted Cecilia was only looking for storybooks and paper. “Please see Isabella is readied for tea in the drawing room, Amy.” Gideon turned on his heel and strode to the door. “I’ll fetch Cecilia myself.”
* * * *
It began innocently enough. Or at least as innocently as anything else at Darlington Castle did, which is to say, not innocently at all.
There was nothing innocent about a murdered marchioness and a missing portrait, and Cecilia would do well to remember that, instead of mooning over how handsome Lord Darlington looked in the firelight. Silly romantic notions were all very well in novels, but despite the crumbling castle and the White Lady, this was no Gothic fiction.
Cecilia was no swooning virgin, and Lord Darlington no brooding hero.
If there’d ever been a time to put sentiment aside in favor of facts and evidence, it was now. So, here she was, in the last place she should be, poking about among centuries of Darlington family secrets. If she didn’t quite like it—if being here left a bitter, guilty taste in her mouth—she’d just have to choke it back, wouldn’t she?
This was what Lady Clifford had sent her here to do, and she was running out of time to get it done. Each day that passed brought Fanny Honeywell ever closer to Darlington Castle, and marriage to Lord Darlington.
A man who might, or might not, be a murderer.
Cecilia had taken a cursory turn through the schoolroom and found a few books and some sheets of pretty marbled paper that would do for a crown and scepter for Isabella, but she’d come up to the attics in search of something else. Something she hoped she’d find here, buried somewhere among a castle’s worth of discarded furnishings, each hulking piece covered with a sheet turned gray