My body is overwhelmed, but my mind is more alive than it’s been in months, perhaps years. I laugh as I ascend the last of the hills between me and the manor. Look at me running around like a girl. I haven’t done anything like this in as long as I can remember.

  I decide I like Lucas. He really is a charming and eager young lad. Perhaps a touch immature for his age, but that’s to be expected considering his upbringing. At least his immaturity expresses itself as innocence and curiosity and not as arrogance and vindictiveness.

  I think back to our conversation about his family. I am disturbed by his insistence that his siblings don’t love him. As I replay his words, a few things stand out to me.

  Dad left his first wife for my mother. Not our mother, my mother. They think I don’t belong.

  When I think of the arrogant, handsome Oliver and the regal, confident Eliza, I have to say I agree. I don’t feel this in a negative light, of course, but it’s easy to see the family resemblance between the other two Carlton children. Eliza is not as brash as Oliver and Oliver is not as poised as Eliza, but they both comport themselves with an air of superiority that I don’t think they’re even aware of. They remind me in a manner of their father. Sebastian has had time to temper his arrogance and so it doesn’t show as much as theirs does, but the regal bearing and confident demeanor are entirely his.

  Lucas, in contrast, is reserved and quiet at first and very awkward socially. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed today, but it certainly isn’t the sort of activity I would expect a boy his age to engage in. He does talk—rather effusively, in fact—once he is comfortable with you, but his conversation can be quite abrupt and inappropriate. In this manner, he resembles neither Sebastian nor Veronica. Veronica is effusive, but her anxiety is born of nervous tension, not the flattened deflation Lucas showed the first two days I was here. Neither she nor Sebastian is awkward with others, while Lucas doesn’t appear to have any concern at all with propriety or social grace.

  My mind begins to wander to speculations it should not entertain. My mother, he said. Not our mother. The two older children definitely show more signs of their father’s ancestry in their behavior. And they don’t get along well with Veronica. For her part, she seems almost antagonized by them.

  And she was overseas when Lucas was conceived and, according to Lucas, when he was born as well.

  I wonder about that. Eliza told me that she came back pregnant, but Lucas told me he was born in South Africa. I suppose it’s possible that Veronica returned to Johannesburg to deliver him, but why? Is it possible that Sebastian is not Lucas’s father?

  Damn it, I keep breaking my promise to myself that I wouldn’t get involved. This is none of my business.

  I look up to see I’ve reached the house and release a sigh of relief. I’ll make myself a cup of tea to settle my body, then perhaps I’ll shower while the rest of the family is still out.

  I head to the kitchen and begin to brew the tea. As I set the kettle to boil, I hear the front door open. I head out to see who it is, and my eyes widen when I see Eliza. I check the clock on the wall of the foyer. It’s barely noon. Why is she home so early?

  “So call Horace to pick you up! It was your choice to let your license expire.”

  I stare at her, dumbfounded for a moment. Then it occurs to me that she’s on the phone and not speaking to me directly. I redden a bit and head back to the kitchen. Behind me, I hear her say, “So figure it out! Be an adult! You can do that, right?”

  I decide she’ll need some tea as well. I prepare a second cup, and when the kettle boils, I pour the water over the bags and add cream and sugar to Eliza’s.

  I carry the tea to the parlor and find Eliza sitting on the couch, a pensive expression on her face. She has her feet up but quickly sits up straight and smooths her skirt when I arrive. She smiles at me apologetically, and when she notices the tea, her eyes widen. Then she blushes. “I guess you heard me.”

  “No need to worry about that, dear,” I say. “I know how to mind my own business.” And if you believe that…

  She chuckles bitterly. “I wish everyone did. I suppose the proper thing to do would be to scold you for eavesdropping, but I’m in a bit of a mood, and tea does sound wonderful, so I’ll save the scolding and thank you for the consideration.”

  I smile—not too awkwardly, I hope—and say, “Well, thank you for sparing me the scolding. I’ve just had a rather exhausting day following Lucas all over the estate, and I don’t know if I could handle a scolding on top of all of that.”

  She looks at me with amazement. “Really? Lucas left his room?”

  “He did. He showed me a number of his favorite places and talked my ear off about his photography. He’s a very bright and inquisitive boy.”

  She gives me an odd look and doesn’t say anything for a moment. Finally, she says, “Hmm. It’s amazing what a person can do when they’re not suffocating under Veronica’s attentions.”

  There it is again. Not my mother. Veronica.

  “Well, mothers are like that sometimes,” she continues. “I suppose, in my own way, I’m as stifled as Lucas. She simply chose to frame her suffocation as profound disappointment in my case.”

  I don’t know how to respond—a distressingly common occurrence when talking with this family—so I sip my tea instead. If only it were wine.

  “Has Lucas told you about the girl in the wall yet?”

  I gasp when she says that. Unfortunately, I do so with my cup to my lips and inhale a healthy half-ounce of Assam tea into my nose. I cough and splutter, and only decades of experience and wisdom allow me to set the cup down without spilling more.

  “I see he has,” Eliza says ruefully. “He imagines he sees Minnie in our walls at night. He’s convinced that she was killed and buried somewhere on the estate.”

  “Goodness,” I say through more coughing. “How horrible!”

  Her lower lip trembles briefly. “It was.” She shrugs. “But life is horrible, isn’t it? Nothing beautiful exists without decay. Not even for lovely young women like Minnie.”

  “Were you two friends?” I ask.

  She smiles, and again her lower lip briefly trembles. She regains her composure quickly, though. “We were. I was older than her, but… well, there aren’t many girls my age in this part of the Cotswolds. She and I grew close because we could talk to each other about things girls talk about. It was refreshing to have someone to chat with.” She looks wryly at me. “I think you can tell how important good conversation is to me.”

  “Good conversation is important to everyone,” I reply, slowly gaining my composure. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  She scoffs. “Don’t be sorry for me. Her parents were so devastated they moved to South Africa.”

  An image crosses my mind of Annie laughing and pulling me along with her on one of our many childhood adventures. A lump forms in my throat, and I take another sip of tea to loosen it before saying, “It’s a terrible thing to lose a loved one.”

  She shrugs. “I wouldn’t know.”

  The bitterness in her voice tells me she does know and very well. I should be respectful of her grief and mindful of my commitment to stay out of the drama this family suffers. I should do a great many things, but as always, my curiosity gets the best of me, and I ask the question I should leave unasked.

  “Why does Lucas feel that she went missing on the grounds?”

  She meets my eyes, and there’s a coldness in her gaze that chills me. I’m about to apologize for going too far when she says, “I forget sometimes that you’re not from around here, so you can’t be aware of the news.”

  “The news?”

  “Yes. She was last seen alive here, in the Carlton estate.”

  The temperature in the house drops precipitously, and the sip of tea I take does little to dispel the chill. The drama surrounding this family instantly takes on a far darker and more sinister turn.

  “Not here in the house,” Eliza clarifies, “but here, on the estate. Depending on who you ask, I was the last person to see her alive. Or it was Oliver. Or my parents. More likely than not, it was Lucas creeping around with his camera and trying to see if he could get an angle down her shirt.”

  I really should scold her for saying that about her brother, but my curiosity still has me in a tight grip. “What happened?”

  Eliza sighs. “She left for home and never arrived. The police never found her. They tried to get a warrant for the estate so they could have dogs sniff for her, but my father fought that and eventually they backed off. Said there was no reason for them to hunt for a body when everyone agrees they saw her leave the estate.”

  “Did you all see her leave?”

  Eliza looks down at her tea and doesn’t answer. After a moment, she stands.

  “I feel like baking,” she says. “Mother says it’s unbecoming for a lady of class to work in a kitchen, but I feel like ignoring my mother’s wishes today. Thank you for the tea.”

  She heads for the kitchen but pauses at the entry to the parlor and turns to me. “You seem like a good woman, Mary, but not everyone is worth saving.”

  She leaves without another word. I remain where I am for several minutes, trying to process everything I’ve heard.

  So Minnie was last seen on the Carlton estate. She was friends with Eliza, and her portrait at one point was hung in this house before being buried in the attic and then disposed of. There’s a picture of her in Lucas’s collection, and a mysterious gardener whom Lucas caught gazing at her with what appears to be a mixture of lust and hate.

  I try to convince myself—again—that it’s not my business, and I should just let it go, but Annie’s face flashes across my mind, and I know I can’t walk away from this mystery. Perhaps not everyone is worth saving, but everyone deserves justice.

  And I will find justice for Minerva.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Eliza joins Lucas and me for a lunch of cheese pudding. Eliza informs me that the muffins will have to wait until dinner but promises me they will be worth it.

  “I’m sure they will be. What do you say, Lucas? Muffins for dessert?”

  Lucas shrugs and tinkers with his camera. With his elder sister present, he has shut down once again.

  If she is his older sister. I hate holding that suspicion, but both he and Eliza have referred to Veronica as though she is Lucas’s mother, but not Eliza’s or Oliver’s. Then again, Eliza has also referred to Veronica as her own mother. And neither of them seem to care much for her.

  Layers upon layers upon layers. Deceit upon deceit upon deceit.

  “Make sure Mother doesn’t see you eat them,” Eliza says. “She’ll give you trouble about your digestion.”

  She smiles tauntingly at Lucas, and I see the relationship between her and Oliver in that sneering glance. Lucas surprises me by meeting Eliza’s eyes and saying, “I’ll have one if she wants me to or not.”

  Eliza seems equally surprised. She even nods approvingly and says, “Well, if you’re that insistent, I suppose I must make some. I wouldn’t want to disappoint a big, strong man like you.”

  Her words taunt, but her tone, again, is approving. Lucas offers the ghost of a smile and turns to me. “I’m still working on that photo collage. If it’s all right with you, I’ll do that for the afternoon so I can concentrate. You’re welcome anywhere on the grounds if you’d care to do some more exploring.”

  “Why thank you, Lord Carlton,” Eliza teases.

  He rolls his eyes and turns back to his camera. She laughs and says, “But he’s right. Feel free to go anywhere. The estate is yours.”

  I wonder for a moment why the other servants don’t have this same freedom. Or perhaps they do, and they simply use it to stay away from the family as much as possible.

  In any case, that is the least of my questions. My hips and knees ache, and my ankles are sore from the morning’s excursions, but I think I will take the afternoon to explore. My mind is restless, and if I don’t work that restlessness out now, I’ll spend the evening wandering the house again. I’d just as soon not run into any more paintings of my sister.

  Superstition aside, I would like to rest tonight, so after lunch, I bid farewell to the two Carlton children and set off to explore the grounds. I’ve seen much of the east garden, the arboretum, and the north woods, so I head west, across the rolling hills toward the meadows beyond. The ground here isn’t as manicured as the other gardens, but the grass is still uniform, and the flowers are contained to planters or orderly rows along either side of the several footpaths that wind through the hills and meadows.

  Niall could not have done all of this himself. The estate is six hundred thirty-two acres, nearly a full square mile of landscaping. It would take a whole team of people to handle this. I don’t know why that stands out to me, but it does.

  “You’re the governess.”

  The thick, coarse voice startles me so badly that I leap into the air and shriek. I spin around and find myself facing a man of perhaps forty with tanned, leathery skin and narrow, deep-set eyes. His form is thin, almost scrawny, but his hands are large and strong.

  He looks at me with an expression that reminds me far too much of the one he cast on Minerva Montclair. “Name’s Niall Weaver,” he says. “I’m the gardener.”

  I stare at him in shock for a moment longer, then find my voice. “Y—yes. I’m the governess. Mary Wilcox. Are you in the habit of sneaking up on women unawares?”

  He laughs—a harsh, cackling sound—and a chill runs down my spine. I am all at once very aware of the fact that I’m alone.

  “I don’t sneak up,” he says. “It’s just that most people don’t pay attention.”

  He fixes me with a grin that is not quite a sneer and not quite a leer. I decide it’s better for me not to remain alone with him. I want to find out who killed Minerva, but I don’t want to end up another victim in the process.

  “Well, I’ll spare you my lack of attention,” I say. “Good day, Mr. Weaver.”

  “Ain’t no need to be afraid of me,” he said. “I’m not as harmful as I look.”

  I offer a smile I don’t feel. “I’m happy to hear that.”

  I head away from him, but a moment later, I hear his footsteps behind me. I turn quickly and see him walking with me, just far enough apart that I don’t feel the need to shriek and sprint away.

  “That’s a dark home,” he says unprompted. “With a dark family. It’s funny how the prettiest creatures are so often the deadliest.”

  “Do you have a fascination with pretty creatures, Mr. Weaver?”

  “Call me Niall. And everyone likes pretty things, Miss Mary. Not that anyone cares what I like. People only talk to me when they don’t want to hear something back. That’s the nature of being a servant. You’re not quite considered a person, but you look like one. If you’re quiet enough, you can hear things you wouldn’t believe. Secrets people wouldn’t tell their own mothers.”

  I think back to Eliza’s and Lucas’s and even Veronica’s confidences. At the time, I was shocked that they would talk about these things with me, but I just assumed they’re desperate for anyone to talk to. I don’t consider that part of it might be the fact that I am, when it comes to it, unimportant in the grand scheme of their lives.

  But what Niall says makes sense.

  I am well aware that I could be talking to a murderer, but the chance to discover information that might lend insight to this family is too much to pass up. And perhaps I can get him to admit something that will either prove his involvement or clear his name.

  “What secrets have you heard?”

  He laughs and grins at me again. “So you’re interested in secrets? Ha-ha. It’s always the proper ones that want the gossip.”

  My cheeks start to burn, and I say, “If you’re only following me to taunt me, then I bid you good day.”

  “Not at all,” he says. “But I ain’t gonna tell you everything I know. It’s for your own safety, you understand. People like the Carltons wield power that common folk like you and I can’t begin to grasp. Best to stay in the good graces of people like that.”

  “And are you in their good graces?”

  He grins at me. “Ain’t you seen how pretty their gardens are?”

  “And you expect me to believe that you’re responsible for all of that?”

  “Not meself, no. I have a team of people that work for me.”

  “That work for you?”

  He laughs. “Surprised? My speech might be coarse, and my look rough, but I have a master’s degree from Oxford, and I own a landscaping company that makes twelve million a year. That might pale in comparison to the wealth of a tech mogul like Sebastian Carlton, but it’s nothing to sneer at.”

  “I… I see.” My cheeks burn again. “I apologize.”

  “No need to be sorry,” he says easily. “No one would look at me and think that in any other part of England, I’d be the one putting on airs and getting a French chef to cook me suppers. But in the Cotswolds, I am what you see before you. Just a lowly gardener. And that’s how I like it.”

  I should let the conversation end there, but I’m close enough to the house that if I were to scream, Eliza and Lucas would hear it. It’s foolish to ask what I ask next, but I suppose it’s time to stop pretending that understanding the foolishness of my actions will stop me.

  “What do you know of the missing girl? Minerva Montclair?”

  His smile fades. A thrill of fear runs down my spine. I glance toward the house and prepare to run, but he makes no move toward me. After a moment, he says, “I’m going to say this once more, Miss Wilcox. It’s best to stay in the Carltons’ good graces. They’re the type of family that can make people disappear when they want, and it don’t matter if they were your friends before. This is the Cotswolds. People live different lives here. The politicians would like you to believe that the aristocracy is dead, but it ain’t. Best to think of the Carltons as royalty and yourself as a common serf. It ain’t good for your pride, but it’s good for your health.”

 

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