stone walls, or Lady Cassandra, alive and well and tucked under her coverlet as if she’d been there all this time, simply waiting for someone to discover she wasn’t dead, after all?
It was madness. Utter madness, and yet…
Even as everything inside her rebelled at it, Cecilia’s feet were moving across the floor, every step taking her closer to the bedchamber she hadn’t entered since the night Lord Darlington had caught her there.
She’d promised never to enter it again, but it seemed she was every bit the liar he’d accused her of being, because despite that promise she grasped the latch, the cold iron burning an imprint into her hand, and then she was turning it, and pushing the door open, and it was too late to pray it would be locked as it was meant to be, and too late to change her mind, and keep her promise.
She’d already broken it.
Without knowing what she was searching for, without knowing whether she hoped or dreaded she’d find it, she crept forward until she passed over the threshold and into Lady Darlington’s bedchamber.
She paused at the door, pulling her shawl tighter around her against the sudden cold, and waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Once they did, her breath left her lungs in a painful whoosh.
Nothing had been touched. There wasn’t a single item out of place.
It looked precisely as it had the last time she’d been in here. The drapes were pulled across the windows, the silk bed hangings arranged against the posts, the coverlet undisturbed by a single wrinkle, and the dressing table with a few jeweled hairpins scattered across the polished surface—
Hairpins? Had those been here the last time? Cecilia didn’t remember there being anything on the dressing table.
She crossed the room, plucked up one of the pins and turned it between her fingers. They were a delicate, silver filigree with tiny, winking sapphires at the end. No, she didn’t remember these, but she might have overlooked them. The room had been dark, and she’d been distracted by Seraphina at the time.
Seraphina, and then shortly after that, Lord Darlington.
She set the pin down on the dressing table where she’d found it, but as she turned back toward the door, the tip of her bare toe nudged up against something. At first, she thought it was the chair leg, but when she leaned down and peeked under the dressing table she saw a pair of richly embroidered blue satin slippers there, lined up neatly side by side, as if their owner would return at any moment and slip her feet into them.
Their owner being Lady Darlington. The late Lady Darlington.
Cecilia snatched her foot back, a sudden chill creeping up her neck as she turned to the dressing room on the other side of the bedchamber. She bit her lip, hesitating. There was no logical explanation why it should be so, but some inexplicable instinct was luring her toward that dressing room, urging her to explore the massive clothes press inside.
This is madness.
No good ever came from poking about in other people’s closets, but even as her brain warned against it, Cecilia was already crossing the room, easing the door of the clothes press open, and peeking inside. It was dark, but a flutter of something caught her attention. It looked like…a fold of silk or satin, very much like the skirt of a gown. “No. It’s impossible.” She reached out a shaking hand, her heart pounding. “It can’t be, it can’t—”
She broke off on a gasp as her fingertips met a fold of smooth, slippery silk.
No. She couldn’t be seeing what she thought she was seeing.
But she was. It was there, as plain as day.
An elegant blue silk ball gown was hanging on its own special hanging rack inside the clothes press. Cecilia stared at it with her feet rooted to the floor. A blue silk ball gown, embroidered slippers, and jeweled hairpins, all appearing in the marchioness’s bedchamber as if by magic?
She didn’t remember any of these things being here before, but mightn’t she have missed them the first time? The hairpins were easily overlooked, and the shadows under the dressing table would have made it impossible to see the slippers from the door.
But a blue silk ball gown? Surely, she would have noticed that the first time she’d ventured into Lady Darlington’s bedchamber? It seemed too substantial a thing for her to have missed.
Cecilia’s mind raced back to that night. She’d heard the strange scratching