The Secret of Pembrooke Park(139)

Miles looked at Leah. “We did wonder when you came home from school. Harriet said you looked nothing like Mac or William, though a bit like Kate Chapman, perhaps. But we never guessed . . .”

Returning his gaze to her adoptive father, Miles laid the gun on his knee and clapped lazily. “Bravo, Mac. That is quite a feat. And what do you get out of it? Fifty percent of the treasure?”

“Nothing of the kind.”

“You’re wrong, Miles,” Leah said. “It isn’t like that.”

“Does Harri know of your claim?”

“Not yet,” Leah said. “Though I plan to tell her.”

He rose, taking up his ebony stick. “Don’t bother. I shall ride over to Hunts Hall right now and tell her myself. I want to see her face when she hears. She told me she had a feeling we’d find another heir—even wished the rumor was true and one of Robert Pembrooke’s children still lived.”

He looked at Abigail, eyes glinting. “Apparently all this time I’ve been wooing the wrong cousin. . . .”

Miles turned his smile on Leah like a weapon. “And you, Le—Eleanor. Do you know where the secret room is?”

“Leah . . .” Mac warned under his breath.

“I do,” Leah acknowledged, chin high.

His eyes widened. “Where is it?”

“I shall be happy to show it to you . . . tomorrow. You want to go and speak to your sister first, and I . . . shall collect a few personal keepsakes.”

“Nothing too valuable, I trust?” His eyes glittered suspiciously.

“As you will see, there is not a great deal of value in there. Mostly family papers. A few portraits. Things that will mean more to me than to you.”

“If you say so.”

Abigail thought he might demand to go in immediately, or to extract a promise that she remove no valuables until he’d had the chance to search the room. But he did not.

Instead he drew himself up, handing Mac his gun at last. “Well.” He consulted his pocket watch. “I had better hurry over to Hunts Hall if I hope to beg a dinner invitation.” He wagged his eyebrows comically, but after the tense scene, no one smiled.

Leah and Abigail waited until he had disappeared into the stables and ridden off before making haste to Pembrooke Park.





Chapter 30


Leah wanted time to cull personal letters, her mother’s portrait, and the ruby necklace before giving over the rest to Miles’s frantic search. Abigail offered to help her, briefly wondering if there was still hope of claiming that reward, now that the jewels had been reunited with their rightful owner. Harriet had hinted as much, but somehow she doubted it.

They donned bibbed aprons and set to work inside the secret room—closing the door in case any servants entered the bedchamber. Leah gathered the family Bible, necklace, and a few other things and set them in a pile on one shelf. Then they carefully took down the portrait of Elizabeth Pembrooke from the back of the door and set it nearby. The nail the portrait had hung on clinked to the floor.

Abigail glanced up and was surprised to see the tiniest pinprick of light. “Look! It’s left a hole.” She stood on tiptoe and put her eye to it. “You can see into the bedchamber—a little.”

But Leah’s focus remained on the contents of the shelves in the hidden room.

“How can I help?” Abigail asked, joining her.

“I don’t want to miss anything personal. Letters between my parents, or to me.”

“I understand.”

Each took a stack and began reading through the correspondence. Leah spread a lap rug on the cushions and reclined back on them with a handful of letters. Abigail could easily imagine little Ellie snug in her private hideaway, reading a favorite book.

Abigail sat less comfortably on the child-size chair.

“Are you sure you don’t want to trade?” Leah offered.

“No, I’m fine.”

“Good.” Leah grinned. “I doubt my backside would fit in that chair nowadays.”

They continued to read, the silence broken by the occasional rustle of paper or birdcall outside the window.

Abigail then heard something else, from the other side of the door.

Leah must have sensed her unnatural stillness, for she glanced up at her. “What?”

“Shh . . . Someone’s out there. In my . . . our . . . bedchamber.”

“Who?” Leah asked.

Abigail rose and started to crack open the door but then remembered the nail hole. She raised herself on tiptoe and looked through it once more. At first she didn’t see anyone. She could see only a narrow shaft of the room—her side table and the edge of the bed. But then a figure walked past and opened the drawer of her side table.

“It’s Miles,” she whispered, perplexed. There hadn’t been time for him to ride out to Hunts Hall and back, let alone to talk with Harriet. Had he come back hoping to catch them entering the secret room—catch them in the act of extracting all the “treasure”?

Miles sat on the edge of her bed and lifted a stack of letters onto his lap—the letters Harriet had sent her anonymously. Letters about the past, about coming to Pembrooke Park, about the girl with the haunted eyes, about her increasingly violent father, her troubled brother, and the secret room . . .