The Secret of Pembrooke Park(67)

“No doubt the servants raise trays with this pulley, and lay breakfast on the sideboard before you raise your pretty head from the pillow.”

Hearing Gilbert mention her pillow felt strangely intimate. Silly female, she remonstrated herself. Had she not hit Gilbert with her pillow on several occasions when they were children?

He walked to the other side of the dining room, to a narrow door beside a recessed china cupboard. “Having looked at the older plans, I would have imagined the servants’ stairs on this side of the room.” He opened the narrow door, but it led only to a linen cupboard.

“What’s above this room?”

Abigail thought. “My bedchamber.” She hesitated. “Would you like to see upstairs as well?”

“If you don’t mind showing me.”

“Of course not.” Abigail led the way up the hall staircase, around the gallery railing, past the door to Louisa’s room. She supposed she should offer to show him, but she did not. She saw how he had looked up at the windows, and she had no wish to help him imagine Louisa in her bedchamber, or anywhere else for that matter.

“Is there a housemaid’s closet on this floor?” he asked.

“Not that I know of.”

They proceeded to her bedchamber. She opened the door and looked inside, making sure she had left no item of feminine apparel in plain view. She saw the room with new eyes—with Gilbert beside her, the flowery pink bed-curtains and dolls’ house suddenly seemed too little-girlish.

He hesitated on the threshold. “May I?”

“Of course,” she whispered, feeling self-conscious about having a man in her bedchamber—even if the man was her childhood friend. Abigail remained in the doorway. Polly walked past with an armload of linens, her eyebrows rising nearly to her hairline to see a man disappear into her mistress’s bedchamber. Abigail gave her a closed-lip smile and said quietly, “It’s all right.”

Gilbert walked slowly around the room, pausing to look at the dolls’ house. “Someone went to a lot of trouble. My employer built a scale model of his London house for his daughter. It was quite the undertaking.”

He paused again at the door to her closet. “May I?”

“If you like.”

He opened it and knocked on the wooden panels, pulling and pushing on the various shelves and gown drawers within. Then he opened her oak wardrobe cupboard beside it and pushed and prodded there as well. “No false back or moving panels.”

“No. I couldn’t find one either.”

“And the dining room is below us?”

“Yes.”

“So the kitchen hoist is on this wall downstairs.”

“Right.”

In the end, he shook his head and said, “In my professional opinion, I would say your ‘secret room’ was this closet. At some point, it might have served as a housemaid’s closet or water closet, but the pipes have been removed. Perhaps the door was not as it is now, but a hidden panel like the one used to conceal the hoist below it.”

“Ah . . .” Abigail swallowed her disappointment. “I should have known there was a logical explanation for the rumors.” She sighed.

He gave her an indulgent grin and tweaked her chin. “Not too disappointed, I hope.”

“No.” She braved a smile. “There is an attic as well, with a storeroom and a few servants’ bedchambers, if you would like to see them, but . . .”

“What time is it?” He glanced around for a clock and not finding one pulled out his pocket watch and consulted the face.

“I had better head back or I shall be late for dinner, and Mrs. Morgan will scowl at me.”

“Horrors,” Abigail teased.

He patted his pocket and said, “Before I forget, Susan sent a name you asked for. She says she’ll write a proper letter soon, once their next edition is printed.” He extracted a slip of paper from his pocketbook and handed it to her. “A writer for her magazine, I think she said?”

“Mm-hm.” Abigail read the name but didn’t recognize it: E. P. Brooks. “Thank her for me.”

Together they walked companionably back downstairs and to the front door.

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

“Better late than never, I hope.”

“Yes, definitely. I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay at Hunts Hall.”

“I don’t know how much of my time shall be my own, but if I find myself free, may I call again?”

“Of course. You are always welcome.”

“Thank you, Abby.” He reached out and gently grasped her fingers. Bending low, he pressed a slow kiss to the back of her hand for the first time in her memory.

The spot remained warm and sensitive long after Gilbert had crossed the bridge and disappeared from her view.

For nearly an hour after Gilbert departed, Abigail walked around the house and about her tasks in a contented daze, thinking she would give up her search. If Gilbert was right, there was no secret room, beyond perhaps her own closet. But the notion left her unsatisfied. Perhaps Gilbert was wrong. For all his education and experience and travel, he didn’t know everything.

Illogical or not, she put on her bonnet and clean gloves and went back outside. Again she walked slowly around the house, looking up at the rooflines, the windows, and the tower Gilbert had pointed out, perhaps eight feet square. Something caught her eye in the tower, some twenty feet or more above her. There were no windows in that narrow wall. But . . . what was that? It appeared as if the stones of a roughly rectangular section were lighter than those around it. As if there had been a window there decades ago but it had been filled in.