The Lady By His Side(52)

He consoled himself with the thought that that was better—less arousing, ergo less painful—than allowing his gaze to drift higher.

Predictably, no villain had hauled barrels up to the loft, although as there was a hay door and a winch, he had to admit it wasn’t such an inaccessible hiding place as he’d thought.

The trip back down the ladder was less of a trial, given he descended first and kept his gaze away from her.

Briskly, she led the way onward—through the barn and the milking shed, both deserted at that time of day, and into an apple store. In all the buildings, he checked for concealed cellars or locked rooms, but discovered nothing to excite their interest.

“And why would there be any such place,” he said as they emerged from the apple store, the last of the outbuildings, “when there’s so much unused space in the cellars beneath the house?”

“Hmm.” Antonia glanced at him. “So to our next question. Is there anywhere in the gardens and grounds that might have been used to store gunpowder?”

He halted, reached into his pocket, and pulled out his sketch of the grounds. He unfolded it and held it so she could see. “Aside from the folly—and we’ll have to check that to see if there’s any room below it—there’s a grotto, and a dovecote, and a ruined chapel just inside the wood.”

She leaned closer, peering at his sketch; the swell of her breast briefly brushed his arm, but she shifted back immediately.

Much to his inner self’s disappointment.

She glanced at the sky, then pointed at the buildings he’d depicted on the sketch. “We can start at the dovecote, then go on to the grotto. By then, the light will have started to wane and the other ladies will have left the folly, so we can check there, then continue on our circuit to the ruins.”

He nodded and started refolding the sketch. “If there’s water in the grotto, we won’t need to search inside—it’ll be too damp for gunpowder. And going via your route, by the time we reach the ruins, the shooting party should have returned to the house, too.” He tucked the sketch into his pocket, then waved her on. “Come on. We’ll need to hurry, or we’ll run out of light.”

The dovecote was still in use, but the shadowy lower level proved to be half full of feathers and droppings and devoid of barrels. The grotto did, indeed, contain a pool fed by a small stream; they wasted no time there, but walked straight on to the folly, a typical replica of a small Grecian temple. They reached it in time to see the ladies almost back at the house. A quick examination of the folly’s tiled floor and the outside of the plinth on which it stood convinced Sebastian that there was no hidden room beneath the colonnaded structure.

They strode toward the wood and the ruins of the old chapel. The soft light of afternoon was well and truly fading by the time Antonia, reinterpreting Sebastian’s somewhat crude and inexact sketch, found the opening of the path into the wood.

The path wasn’t long and ended in the clearing in which the ruins of the chapel stood, forgotten and forlorn. They halted just inside the clearing to take stock. Judging by the wear on the walls still standing, the rounding and smoothing of the top course of stones, the roof had fallen in perhaps a hundred years ago. Lichens had encroached, forming scab-like patches here and there on the pale yellow stone. The surrounding trees had already blanketed the ground in a thick carpet of red, brown, and faded golden leaves.

There was a silence there, beneath the louring trees, that was not quite menacing, yet faintly unsettling. Atmospheric, certainly, Antonia thought. As, side by side, she and Sebastian walked forward to what appeared to be the chapel’s front façade, she murmured, “I should mention this place to the other ladies. In stronger light, it would make a good subject for a painting or a sketch.”

“Hmm.” Sebastian halted just before the arch that was all that remained of the chapel’s entrance. He put out a hand, placed his palm against the side of the arch, and pushed, then drew back his hand and dusted his palm and fingers. “What remains seems stable enough.” With that, he walked beneath the arch into the chapel.

Antonia followed, but immediately halted, her way blocked by rubble. Sebastian had halted, too.

The chapel had been a simple one. A single room with a stone altar raised on a shallow stone dais that ran across the other end of the room. Formed from a large rectangular block, the altar was still there, but any lectern or pulpit would most likely have been wooden and was long gone.

What they could see of the central aisle was paved in a herringbone pattern, with more-simply paved areas to either side that must once have played host to pews. But the pews, too, were gone, and stone blocks from various places on the walls had tumbled down and now littered the chapel’s floor, creating an obstacle course between the front door and the altar.