Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(47)

But Nance didn’t need to hear any of this.

“Lizbeth . . .” She nearly whined. The look I flashed in return suggested she should take a different approach. She did so, trying to mirror my lightness, the casualness of my dismissal. “So now we’re keeping things from one another? Such as what?”

But just this once, I was the better actress between the two of us.

I didn’t want to fight. I only wanted to distract her, and I knew precisely how to do so. “Such as . . . how the greens I ordered from McKamey’s disagreed with me terribly, or how my eyes water at garlic, besides onions. And how my knees grow weak whenever you’re present, my love.”

“You’ve told me that one already,” she replied sulkily, but it wasn’t a pure sulk. A little flattery goes a long way with her, and I’m not above it.

“I’ll likely say it again, at some point during your visit.” I took her hands and gave her a quick kiss, an act which required me to stand on my tiptoes. “Now, how is Emma? Is she settled comfortably?”

“Took her own sweet time about getting that way, but yes, she’s fine.”

“You must be patient. Depending on the weather and her lungs, she finds it difficult to move as swiftly as you or I.”

“I still can’t imagine why she asked my help. You’re the patient one,” she said with a sigh.

A hasty lie sprang to mind, and I liked it, so I let it past my lips. “I suggested it. I thought you two ought to spend some time together once in a while. I truly believe that with a better acquaintance, you could become great friends.”

“I don’t know . . . ,” she said dubiously. “We’re terribly different.”

“But you have some terribly wonderful things in common.”

“Just you,” she said with a wink. Then she took me by the hand and lured me back into the kitchen, and I thought I was in for a round of tea or perhaps something more engaging . . . and then I realized that I was wrong.

“Lizbeth, your sister is out of the way for now, and the doctor is gone . . . so there should be no visitors.” Nance leaned against the cellar door, bouncing coquettishly against it with her bottom. “Why don’t you show me what’s downstairs? There’s privacy and darkness, and just you . . . and me.”

The joy that had positively flooded my heart . . . now evaporated with her prettily phrased petition. I believe my face might’ve gone all but green. “Dearest, no,” I said slowly. “There’s nothing romantic about the cellar at all.”

“Just dust and wine and bugs, or so you’d have me think. Show me,” she insisted, and it wasn’t just another whine. It bore all the hallmarks of a demand.

I was running out of ways to defer the exploration, and I knew it, and it was awful because every excuse was a lie—but a lie that might save her life, or her soul. “Darling, I’m not even sure where the key is right now. Off the top of my head . . . it might be in the odds-and-ends basket by the back door . . .”

“No,” she said with steel in her eyes. “I already checked.”

“You . . . you checked? You went looking for the key?”

“I found several keys, stashed here and there. In drawers, and atop tables. None of them fit this lock.”

The key was safely around my neck, as always. But the fact that she’d gone looking for it chilled me to my core. “Why are you so determined to see it?”

“Because you’re so determined to keep it from me. It must be terribly interesting, if you’re so certain I shouldn’t go anywhere near it.”

“Rather the opposite,” I said with a shrug, wandering to the sink and placing my hands along the cool enamel surface. I reached for the teakettle in order to have something to do, some meaningless task to distract myself—but she took it away and set it down on the counter.

“So it’s a dull, safe, unremarkable place?”

“Entirely.”

“Prove it.”

“I don’t have to,” I said, digging in my heels. I’m at least as stubborn as she is, after all. “I don’t like going down there. It’s damp and cold, and all the wood is eaten up by rot. Every time I descend the stairs, I’m halfway convinced they’ll shatter out from under me. Mildew and mold, all the way through.”

“Doesn’t sound very safe to me.”

“Oh, stop it. You know what I mean.” I moved away from her again, and she followed me again—staying very close to me, her eyes never leaving my face. I hated it, because it meant she’d been touched by the things down there, or called by them, and I was no longer dealing merely with a woman I adored but who could be a tad insistent.

I was confronted by a woman who’d acquired a compulsion.

And I hated it because she was looming over me, and I could not shake the feeling that it was deliberate. She was intimidating me, using her size against me. Using her height to tell me, without any words, that she could wrestle me into submission if she felt the need, and she was feeling all kinds of needs right now.

I didn’t know if she could best me in a fight or not. I’m smaller, yes, but more compact. And in the previous two years, I’d learned a great deal about violence, and my capacity for it. “Nance,” I whispered, and she was hovering so close that my breath tickled her eyelashes. “You’re beginning to worry me.”