Louise Allen - Moonlight And Mistletoe

‘We have been for a drive.’ Hester felt flustered at having to account for her movements, but even more so by the obvious alarm of Maria, Susan and Jethro. ‘Jethro, what has happened? You said more roses?’

‘Come upstairs.’ He led the way, but in the hall Guy strode past him and took the stairs two at a time.

‘Stay there, Hester.’

Stubbornly Hester mounted the stairs in his wake. Whatever had occurred, seeing it could not be worse than imagining it. Guy was standing on the landing outside her room, looking at the floor. A trail of evenly spaced roses led halfway across the landing.

With a calm she was far from feeling, Hester stooped and picked up the flowers. ‘Eight,’ she counted. ‘He keeps to his pattern, does he not? And they are where you predicted-approaching my door.’

‘He is thinking as I would if I wanted to frighten you,’ Guy remarked dispassionately, standing hand on hips surveying the corridor. ‘I will send a footman over this evening to spend the night in the kitchen again, but I think he will have a peaceful time-after this you should be safe for a night and a day.’

Guy opened the chamber door and raised an eyebrow at Hester. ‘May I? I would feel more comfortable if I checked the room.’

Hester nodded and followed him in. His tall figure in boots and riding coat seemed to overpower the feminine room and she was almost more conscious of him as a male creature than she had been in his arms on the downs.

She waited, standing quietly while he checked under the bed, in the dressing room, flicked back the bedclothes to run a hand over the sheets, lifted the pillows.

‘All clear, it seems.’ He paused, his hand on the door knob. ‘And Nugent was here this afternoon. I wonder if he has been just a little too clever this time. Let us go and see what your gallant household observed.’

Hester nodded, wishing she felt as gallant. Guy took the roses that she was still holding. ‘The kitchen range for these.’ He touched her lips lightly with one finger. ‘You are a soldier’s daughter, Hester. Your father would have been proud of you.’

H ester led the way into the kitchen. Somehow the warmth of the range, the homely gleam of pewter and brass and the scrubbed simplicity of the long table were a comfort. What her neighbours would think of her entertaining an earl there she could only imagine.

Guy tossed the roses on the fire and watched them sombrely as they crackled and burned. ‘What happened when Sir Lewis called? Was he alone at any time, Ackland?’

‘No, my lord.’ Jethro shifted his arm in its sling and concentrated. ‘He came to the front door and knocked. I answered it and he said he had a book he had forgotten to give you this morning. I thanked him and said that Miss Hester was not at home. When I told him that he looked very serious and said that surely you would have returned by that time.’

‘Then I came out of the front room,’ Miss Prudhome chimed in. ‘And I invited him in for tea, which he accepted. So I rang for Susan…’

‘You were all in the front room by this point?’

‘Yes.’ Jethro closed his eyes the better to picture the scene. ‘I stepped in to clear the tea table, which Miss Prudhome had been using for her sewing things. Susan came in to ask what Miss Prudhome required.’

‘And I was sitting by the hearth with Sir Lewis opposite,’ Maria finished.

‘Not long,’ Hester observed. ‘But I suppose long enough for someone to come in through the secret way and hide in the dining room. From there they could go upstairs as soon as Jethro and Susan went back to the kitchen.’

‘And that would explain why he brought the book to you,’ Guy added. Hester smiled at him, enjoying the bittersweet sensation of shared thoughts, of watching him thinking and reasoning and joining her mind with his in this puzzle. ‘I had asked for the books-the only reason not to take it to the Old Manor would be to distract the household here.’

‘And if he knew about the footman in the kitchen he would know he could not get in at night. He must be getting desperate,’ Hester added.

‘I’ll give him desperate,’ Susan muttered.

‘We need to catch him red-handed,’ Miss Prudhome announced, her face grim. Beside her Jethro picked up the vegetable paring knife and ran a thumb thoughtfully down the blade.

‘Well, unless we sit here all day and night, that may be easier said than done.’ Hester smiled at her bloodthirsty allies. ‘I think you are going to have to withdraw your footman from the kitchen at night and give the ghost a clear run, my lord.’

Guy fought down his instinctive retort that, on the contrary, he would also install a groom with a blunderbuss in the hallway and told himself to stop thinking with his heart and instead to apply his head. Miss Hester Lattimer was turning both his resolve and his intellect head over heels. She was right- another trap was the only way of resolving this, but somehow it had to be contrived without putting her in danger. An idea was stirring at the back of his mind.

Susan gave the burning roses a vicious poke and set the kettle down on the range with a thump while, without speaking, Miss Prudhome began to gather up the teapot and caddy and measure out tea. Guy suppressed a smile. The automatic reaction of the household to any emergency appeared to be to put the kettle on.

The desire to smile faded as he looked at Hester. She had cast off her outer clothes and was sitting speaking quietly with Jethro about his shoulder. Any casual visitor would have noticed nothing amiss, but to his eyes there were clear signs of strain.

The delicate skin under her eyes looked bruised and almost fragile, her natural grace held something of a braced alertness now and her hands were clasped, the long, elegant fingers more eloquent in their rigid stillness than if she had been twisting them in anguish.

Since that moment of revelation, when they had sat in the darkened front room waiting for the ghost, he had wrestled with his feelings for her. Desire, of course. Affection, admiration, and frequently exasperation-all those certainly. But this new, unsettling feeling, this awareness of her and what she was thinking, the spark of understanding when their eyes met, this desire to tell her his thoughts and his hopes without reservation-this was something else. This, he was coming to realise, was love.

Was it possible that Hester felt it too? She fought what she quite frankly admitted was a physical attraction, she was outspoken enough to inform him she would not accept a carte blanche-but then she was a gently bred young lady with undoubtedly firm moral principles.

Guy Westrope had never before considered making a declaration of marriage. He considered it now, sitting at the scrubbed kitchen table, a mug of tea in his hand and the love of his life seated opposite briskly persuading her adolescent butler that balancing hot oil on top of half-open doors or sawing halfway through stair treads were not stratagems likely to succeed. It was not, he readily admitted, the sort of environment in which earls normally contemplated marriage. Which, he supposed, only went to show that it must, indeed, he love he was feeling.

‘Why are you smiling, my lord?’ Hester had finally convinced Jethro that his schemes were likely to be more dangerous to the household than to any intruder and was regarding Guy like an alert robin, head on one side, brown eyes twinkling. The strain and fatigue were gone, or, at least, well under control. Once more admiration for her courage gripped him and the desire to pulverise Lewis Nugent hardened into a hard knot of fury.

‘I was enjoying Ackland’s imagination.’ Now, even if he could get her alone, was not the time for protestations of love. Her eyes said quite plainly that she did not believe him and that she suspected him of something, if only of teasing her.

‘I think…’ Hester said slowly, sipping her tea, ‘I think we have been too much on the defensive. If something of value is hidden here, then we can find it as well as the Nugents. Where, my lord, do you think it could be?’

Guy found himself transfixed by that intelligent brown gaze once more. ‘I have no idea, Miss Lattimer.’

‘No, my lord, that will not wash.’ She put down the mug firmly. ‘You know something about this house you have not told me, else why would you wish to buy it?’

Guy was conscious of four pairs of eyes fixed intently on him and was thankful for years of card playing and the ability to maintain a straight face. ‘I know who used to live here after it was built, that is all. I have no more knowledge of treasure or hiding places than you, I swear it. And before you ask me, I cannot tell you who that occupant was.’ And as soon as he could speak to Georgiana and secure her consent to tell Hester everything, the happier he would be.

‘Then we will search,’ Hester announced with determination. ‘Starting on Monday, from attics to scullery. A least we have no cellars to worry about.’

‘I will help if I can,’ Guy offered, ‘but tomorrow I must go back to London to escort my sister Lady Broome who is set on visiting me-chiefly to convince me to accompany her and her family to Broome Hall in Essex for Christmas, which she knows I have not the slightest intention of doing!’

Georgy would have at last two other aims in mind, of that he was sure. One was to distract him from what she considered his dangerous obsession with the Moon House and its possibilities for family scandal and the other was doubtless to introduce him to yet another ‘suitable’ young lady. Miss Lattimer, he was only too well aware, she would regard as anything but suitable-no title, no ‘family’, no wealth.

He rose with a word of farewell and was not surprised when Hester followed him through into the front hail with a word to Jethro to stay where he was.

‘I will send over a footman again tonight. No-’ he held up a hand when she opened her mouth to protest ‘-if you do not let him into the kitchen then he will have to sit outside the back door all night and I am sure you would not inflict that on him in this weather.’

Hester glared at him, then let her mouth relax into a reluctant smile. ‘Very well, thank you, Guy. But we are never going to trap the ghost this way.’

‘You may be right, but I have an idea. What is it your intention to do at Christmas? Will you visit relatives?’

‘I have none,’ Hester admitted simply. ‘We will stay here and have a quiet holiday, I expect. I had not given it much thought.’

‘I think you should have an evening party-say, on the twenty-second. Carols and buttered rum punch-a conversable evening around the fire with all your new friends and neighbours, including, of course, the Nugents. And I think there should also be some seasonal story telling. Do you not agree?’

‘Ghost stories?’ Hester asked, trying to read Guy’s face as he nodded. ‘Have you a plan?’

‘I think I have.’ He smiled wickedly. ‘A lot depends on the Nugents accepting. Goodbye, Hester, and take care of yourself.’ He paused, looking down at her, and Hester fought back the impulse to stand on tiptoe and press her lips to his. ‘Take care,’ he repeated and was gone.

Hester went back into the kitchen, counting on her fingers. ‘Do you realise it is only twelve days to Christmas? It has just crept up on me this year and we haven’t made any preparations for it at all!’

The others looked up from their various tasks and Hester could see the thought of the holiday was a welcome diversion from the other preoccupations they had been wrestling with.

‘Mrs Bunting asked me to help in decorating the church, Maria remarked.

‘I had best order a goose and I don’t know what else.’ Susan reached for a scrap of paper and a pencil and began to scratch a list. ‘Plum puddings.’

‘I’ll get Aston to cut more logs and the silver’ll need polishing,’ was Jethro’s contribution.

‘I think I will hold a party here,’ Hester announced. ‘On the twenty-second. Something quite informal… a supper party, probably. We must have the piano tuned and I will make a guest list.’

By the time the Moon House party trooped over to the church next morning, Hester had made her list and written her invitations. Fortunately her acquaintance was still not large, for, if everyone accepted, the front rooms would hardly hold the company.

Both Nugents could be glimpsed in their front pew and Hester timed her exit from the church to catch them as they shook Mr Bunting’s hand.

‘Miss Nugent! How do you go on? I was so sorry to hear about your tooth.’

The slender figure turned, a fine, dense veil shielding her face. ‘Miss Lattimer, good day. I am much better, thank you. Only rather sore still and the bruising has still not gone down.’