Forbidden to Love the Duke(51)
She closed her eyes. Oliver would wake up the entire house with the racket he was making. If he had half a brain, he would find the tunnel leading to the solar. The manor walls concealed a number of cavities in which the girls had played as children until Lilac had fallen through the rungs of a rotted ladder.
She’d broken her leg in several places, and it had never healed properly. The girls had been forbidden to explore the hidden passages of Fenwick after the accident.
When they were younger, they’d listened to the noises inside the walls at night and sometimes still did.
“They’re ghosts,” Rosemary always insisted.
“They’re rats,” Ivy would counter with all the authority of her one advanced year in age.
Rosemary kicked off her shoes. Tonight Rosemary was forced to agree with her sister. That was definitely a rat in the wall. And he was still scratching. She pulled a dust-laden pillow over her head and tried to remember where she had left off in her story, the revision of Anne Boleyn’s tragic life.
* * *
Mary’s bed looked like a shipwreck, even without benefit of a visit from her unruly brother. Ivy tucked the girl in snugly and escaped to her room without incident. Then she took her time washing and changing into her nightclothes, feeling not the least bit tired.
She wanted to stay up all night savoring the memory of the duke’s every caress, the silly conversation they had shared.
She wouldn’t have slept even if her conscience let her; just as she had blown out the candle, the loudest thunderclap she’d ever heard blasted from the back fields of the estate.
She waited for rain to fall.
She waited to hear Mary call for her.
She waited to hear one of the servants in the house rouse or the dogs bark, but there was no other disturbance until, at dawn, she forced herself to stir from her chair to face the day.
And the duke—as lovely as the prior evening’s intimacy had been, it had also been illicit and could only lead to unhappiness. Ivy certainly could not allow such liberties to continue.
Determined, she recommitted herself to resisting any other advances he made. Despite how she might feel toward Sir Oliver, at least the man had offered her marriage.
* * *
What a beautiful dream. Anne Boleyn stood on the brink of her revenge, watching as Henry was led to the scaffold, his head to lose. Beside her Rosemary heard the taunts and jeers of the spectators, the cries of treason from courtiers who jostled against her and pulled her back by the arm to squeeze in for a closer look.
“Don’t,” she mumbled, one insistent hand reaching through her dream to drag her across the bed. “Leave me alone. He deserves to die, and I shall be witness to justice served.”
A shrill voice assaulted her eardrum. “Thanks to you, he might well have died in there! What came over you, Rosemary? How could you be so unkind to a man who brought food to our table? One of these days you and Rue will murder some innocent who comes to our door.”
Rosemary groaned and buried her face in the pillow, but the tirade continued. “How could you mistreat the man who hopes to marry Ivy?”
Rosemary turned her head to avoid meeting Lilac’s baleful stare, only to look across the room into the smirking face of the man she had enclosed in the wall last night. And completely forgotten. She sat up in a swelter of guilt and resentment.
“He doesn’t look dead to me.”
“He was practically unconscious when I found him,” Lilac said, darting to Sir Oliver’s chair to dab his wrists and throat with the damp towel in her hand. “What if I hadn’t woken up in the middle of the night to check in on you? This is what happens when you overimbibe.”
“What if,” Rosemary mused, stretching her arms in the air. She narrowed her eyes. “What if that man who scribbles nursery rhymes hadn’t broken into the house and sneaked into Mother’s room, doing who knows what?”
Oliver surged from his chair. “Nursery rhymes?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I misspoke. Nursery rhymes convey political messages and contribute to social improvement. Your poems are written to impress wealthy tarts and flatter flatulent old lords.”
“Oh!” Lilac’s hand flew to her mouth. “Rosemary, how can you speak such awful words?”
Sir Oliver glanced in the old looking glass to straighten his stained cravat. “She speaks the same awful words that she writes. She hasn’t the talent to become a success and so she despises those who have.”
Rosemary stilled. The smile that spread across her face felt like ice breaking in a frozen pond.
“Where is my gun, Lilac, dear?”
Lilac shook her head, disregarding this threat. “He wants to be our friend, Rosemary. The only friend we’ve had in years. What has he done to earn your distrust?”