A Perilous Perspective (Lady Darby Mystery #10)(68)

I hadn’t thought of the cloak in years, but now I wondered what had happened to it. Perhaps Alana knew. Perhaps she’d kept it.

The woman didn’t move for a long time but simply stood there, half in the shadow of the trees and half out. I couldn’t see her face, but I somehow felt that she was watching me. When I shifted across the roof to be nearer to her, she whirled about in a graceful movement. Then with one last look over her shoulder, which raised gooseflesh across my skin, she vanished into the trees.

My heart pounding in my ears, I raised my hand to stop her, though what I intended to do then I couldn’t fathom. All I knew was that look, that twirling movement was so familiar, and for a moment I thought for certain the woman was my mother.

Which was impossible! My mother had been dead for eighteen years. At eight years old, I’d not been allowed to view her body, but my father and dozens of other family members had. There was no doubt that her remains lay in a grave beneath the branches of an old oak tree in the graveyard next to St. Cuthbert’s Church in Elwick, Northumberland. So the very idea that she was here now, watching me from the trees, was not only absurd, it also bordered on mad.

I forced a deep breath past the tightness in my chest, feeling it flutter in my lungs as I tried to dismiss the unsettling feelings that had crept over me. The woman had to be someone else. Why she had been standing at the edge of the trees, I didn’t know, but she must have been there for a reason. Perhaps she had information for us. Information she was hesitant to share. Or else why hadn’t she simply rapped on the door to the manor and asked to speak with us?

I scanned the trees one last time and then allowed my gaze to trail up over the boulder-strewn Corlach crag which rose above them, but there was no further sign of the woman or her azurite cloak. Forcibly turning my back on the sight, I retreated to the stairs, regaining some of my equilibrium as I entered the castle and began to descend.

A tight laugh escaped from my lungs at my silliness. Of course, it made sense that the distinctive shade of the cloak would have invoked my mother’s memory, especially after learning just that morning that my mother had once been wed to a man who hailed from the castle a short distance away. But to let my imagination run rampant, to actually consider the woman might be my mother, or her ghost even, was daft.

I shook my head, hastening down the next flight of steps, and nearly collided with Miss Ferguson as I emerged in the corridor outside the long gallery. She stumbled back, pressing a hand to her chest.

“My apologies,” I told the governess, reaching out a hand to steady her, but she shrugged it away. “I misjudged how fast I was moving.”

She nodded, smoothing back a strand of blond hair that had come loose from its pins, and eyed me warily.

It was clear I’d given her a great fright, and no wonder. She had stumbled across Mairi’s body in the adjacent room nearly twenty-four hours before, and it was evident that it still troubled her.

“Would you like to sit with me for a moment?” I asked, hoping to soothe the woman and also take advantage of the opportunity to question her.

But she shook her head and began to back away. “The children. I must return.”

“Of course,” I replied. I would have to ask Rye what—if anything—they had been told of the incident, and how they were handling the news. When a murder had taken place at the seat of my brother-in-law’s earldom, he and my sister had agreed to keep the disturbing occurrence from their children, but with Rye’s children’s governess being the one who had found the body, less than a hundred feet from the nursery, that changed matters.

Before I could say more, she disappeared into the long gallery. I supposed this answered my question about whether she often used the chamber as a shortcut to the rooms and stairs on the opposite side of the castle. Not that I begrudged her its use. There was no reason she shouldn’t do so. But it helped explain her presence there the previous night.

With that discovery filed away in my brain, as well as my observations about Miss Ferguson’s demeanor, I continued to my own chamber and Emma.



* * *




*

By the time Gage returned with Henry from their errands, there wasn’t time for a lengthy chat before dinner about what they’d uncovered. Moreover, the taut line of his lips as he hurried into our bedchamber from the dressing room gave me some indication that such a chat wasn’t even necessary.

I reached up to adjust his cravat and affix his garnet stickpin deep within its snowy depths while he straightened his cuffs. “No luck?” I asked sympathetically.

“Liam Gillies still eludes us,” he muttered in response. “There was no sign of him at his mother’s croft or Lord Alisdair’s cottage. We didn’t enter, but the dirt hadn’t been disturbed before the entrances, nor the grass from under the windows.”

His jaw still glistened from his shave, and the hair at his temples was damp. I reached up to give the artful toss of curls that fell over his brow a further twist. “Well, have patience,” I reminded him as well as myself. “It’s only been a day, and this land isn’t exactly the most hospitable or easy to search. There are any number of places he could have concealed himself, at least for a short time.”

He exhaled a long breath, and some of the tension eased from his shoulders. “The stable master warned us the inland terrain is some of the roughest in Britain. Boggy valleys between rocky ridges. And that being unfamiliar with the landscape, we should be careful.”