An Unexpected Pleasure (The Mad Morelands #4)(60)

“What?” Megan turned to her, concerned by the tone of her sister’s voice. “Is something wrong? Is it Da?”

“No, he’s fine. I just didn’t want him to hear.” Deirdre cast a quick look back inside the house and moved a little farther away from the door. “I have not told him, because I didn’t want to worry him. But I have been having dreams—about you.” She looked at Megan, her blue eyes dark with worry.

“About me? What do you mean? What kind of dreams?”

“Frightening ones,” Deirdre replied, frowning.

Megan’s heart sped up a little. “Deirdre…”

“I don’t know what they mean,” Deirdre said quickly, taking hold of her sister’s hand. “I’m not sure whether they are visions or just nightmares. But they scare me. I am worried about you. I think you are in danger, or will be. And knowing that you are there in that house with the man who killed Dennis scares me. What if he discovers who you are? What would stop him from hurting you?”

“He doesn’t know who I am,” Megan told her firmly. “How could he?” She paused, not sure if she really wanted to know, then went on, “What did you dream? What did you see?”

Deirdre sighed. “I’m not sure. There was a fire burning in a sort of brazier and—a hideous face, bright…glowing. I cannot describe it, but it terrified me to see it. You were there, and—and Dennis was there, too. And there was an odd instrument. I’m not sure what it was. There was a hand holding this thing and slashing at you with it, but it wasn’t exactly a knife. It was a figure of some sort, and at the end of the figure there was a small, rounded thing that looked like a miniature shovel. A sort of semicircular shape.”

Ice crept up Megan’s spine. She stared at her sister, speechless. How could Deirdre know what that knife looked like? Megan had never seen anything like it before she saw it at the Cavendish, and she was sure that Deirdre had been equally ignorant of it.

“What?” Deirdre’s voice rose in anxiety. “Why are you looking at me like that? Do you know what it is? Is it in that house?”

“No. No. It isn’t at Broughton House. It sounds like something I saw at the museum.”

“The museum?”

“Yes. The Cavendish Museum, where Julian Coffey works.”

“You have been there?”

“Yes, and there is a ceremonial Inca knife that is shaped like that.”

“But what does it mean?” Deirdre asked.

“I am sure it doesn’t mean I am going to get stabbed with it,” Megan said flatly. She had no intention of letting Deirdre see how badly her sister’s tale of the dream had shaken her. She had never really believed in Deirdre’s visions, though she loved her sister too much to completely discount them. But this dream defied rational explanation, and she could not suppress ashiver.

“You said Dennis was in the dream, too,” Megan went on, searching for an explanation that would allay Deirdre’s fears—and perhaps her own, as well. “’Tis much more likely that it relates to his death. Maybe a knife like that is what killed him. Maybe that is the thing I should be looking for at Broughton House.”

“Instead of the pendant?”

Megan shrugged. “I don’t know. Perhaps both of them are there.”

“Megan…” Deirdre reached out and wrapped her hand around her sister’s wrist. “I am worried about you. About your being there.”

“Nothing is going to happen to me,” Megan assured her. “I promise you, I will be very careful. But I have to go back. You can see that. How else are we going to find out what happened to Dennis?”

“I’d rather we never found out what happened to him than to have you hurt!” Deirdre snapped back.

“That won’t happen. I can handle myself. Besides, the house is filled with people—the family, the servants. No one would risk doing anything to me there. I will be perfectly safe.”

Deirdre looked at her, not entirely convinced. Megan leaned over and gave her sister a quick peck on the cheek.

“Don’t worry,” she said firmly. “I’ll come back here on my next day off—or sooner, if I can find anything.”

“Write to me if anything worries you,” Deirdre replied. “Promise me.”

“I promise.”

Giving her a bright smile, Megan set off down the street. She hurried, looking neither right nor left, her mind too occupied to even think about her earlier eerie feeling of being watched. She did not stop to look behind her.

Deirdre’s dream had unnerved her, and she found herself walking ever faster, eager to get home. It did not occur to her to wonder that she thought of Broughton House as home, and when at last she saw its elegant white facade rising up before her, the windows glowing warmly in the encroaching dusk, she smiled and hurried toward it, her heart lifting.



*

LATE THAT EVENING, Theo trotted down the front steps of Broughton House. He strolled down the block and hailed a hansom, giving the driver an address that was some distance from the elegant Mayfair section in which Broughton House was located.

He went into a humble tavern there, stooping a little to enter the old door, and stood for a moment, looking around the low-ceilinged room, smoky from the pipes and cigars of its patrons, and smelling of ale and the sweat of workingmen. It was not a gin mill, but neither was it the sort of place that his peers generally frequented. That was one of the principal reasons Theo liked it.