After allowing their eyes to adjust to the light, Marcus blew out the candles. Setting his candelabra aside he made a step with his hands.
‘Come,’ he said to Hilary. ‘I will help you up.’
She needed no second bidding. She was eager to be free of the dark, dank tunnel, and setting down her own candlestick she placed her foot in his clasped hands so that he could raise her up. Once her head and shoulders had emerged, she looked about her. The scene was a familiar one. All around her were ivy-clad stones.
‘We’re in the folly,’ she said.
The ruined temple had never seemed more welcoming.
She put her palms down flat on the earth and, with Marcus pushing from below, she pulled herself out.
She straightened up and brushed the dirt from her pelisse, then resettled her bonnet, which had been knocked askew, and looked around her once again. She had actually emerged in the middle of the folly. Beyond it she could see the tangled shrubbery, and in the distance the abbey.
She stepped aside from the hole, giving Marcus room to follow her.
He caught at the sides and pulled himself up, his great height allowing him to climb out without help.
As they stood once more in the daylight, above the ground, Hilary felt a rush of elation. They had escaped!
Marcus joined her in her exclamations of relief.
‘We’ll return to the abbey at once,’ he said. ‘We’ll go by way of the cottage. If Esmerelda has tired of playing, she might well have gone back there of her own accord.’
‘And if not?’ asked Hilary.
‘Then we must look for her. It is not safe to leave her on her own.’
Hilary nodded. Overjoyed though she was to be betrothed to Marcus, and to have escaped their terrifying predicament, she knew they would not be able to rest until Esmerelda had been found.
Marcus took her hand, and together they went through the grounds. They moved cautiously in case they came across Esmerelda on the way, but there was no sign of her. They came to the track leading to the cottage and looked down its length. The door of the cottage was closed.
‘That’s odd,’ said Marcus. He dropped Hilary’s hand. ‘Wait here,’ he said.
He approached the door warily.
Hilary was glad of his caution, for there was a noise coming from inside.
‘Esmerelda?’ called Marcus softly.
To Hilary’s surprise, it was not Esmerelda’s voice that answered him. It was Lund’s.
‘Your lordship?’ came Lund’s cracked tones.
‘Lund?’ asked Marcus in astonishment.
‘Heaven be praised!’ said Lund. ‘It’s Lady Esmerelda. She’s locked me in.’
Marcus drew back the bolt on the outside of the door and Lund emerged from the cottage, looking distressed.
‘How did this happen?’ asked Marcus.
‘I don’t rightly know,’ said Lund, shaking his head. ‘I came out to the cottage to take care of Lady Esmerelda whilst Mrs Lund brought the last of her things from the room behind the tapestry, but when I got here I found the door already open. I put my head round it, cautious like, and someone pushed me inside, then bolted the door behind me.’
‘Esmerelda must have found another way out.’
‘I don’t see how she can have done. I checked the cottage myself.’
‘Well, no matter. We have other, more important things to think about,’ said Marcus. ‘Such as finding Esmerelda. You begin searching the grounds, Lund. We have come from the folly, and she is not there, but she might have gone down to the river. The bridge has always been a favourite haunt of hers. Caesar is also missing. He might be with Esmerelda, so listen for his bark. Miss Wentworth and I will search the abbey. If we can find Mrs Lund, she can help us in our search, too.’
Lund departed, heading for the river.
Marcus took Hilary’s hand once more and they continued on their way to the abbey. In the fading light it seemed menacing. Its gaunt architecture promised no respite from their troubles.
Hilary shivered.
She had no idea what they were going to find when they went inside.
Chapter Thirteen
Hilary and Marcus stood for a minute outside the door. But they knew they could not delay.
‘Courage,’ said Marcus.
Hilary nodded.
They passed through the heavy oak door and into the hall.
‘I am going to search downstairs first,’ said Marcus. ‘If Esmerelda shut the secret door she might well be in the drawing-room waiting for us to emerge, so that is where I am going to begin.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Hilary.
‘No. I want you to remain here. She might not be in the drawing-room. She might be in the kitchens, or up in the attics, and I don’t want her to be able to slip out of the abbey without our being aware of it. If you remain in the hall, then she cannot leave without you seeing her. If you do, call me, but don’t try to stop her yourself, not even if she is making for the door. She is stronger than she looks, and she will not hesitate to harm you if you get in her way.’
Hilary did not protest. She had seen too much of Esmerelda’s madness to disagree.
‘I won’t be long,’ he said.
He disappeared in the direction of the drawing-room.
It was cold in the hall. The fire had burned down low. Hilary would have liked to hold her hands out to the glowing embers, but she did not want to turn her back on the hall. The cavernous space seemed threatening. In the fading light it was full of shadows. Any one of them could hide Esmerelda.
She set her back to the fireplace and stood looking outwards, so that she could not be taken by surprise.
Several times her eyes played tricks on her, telling her that there was someone in the dark recess under the galleried landing, hiding behind one of the suits of armour. But there was no one there.
She heard noises, too. A creaking sound, which turned out to be the drawing-room door as Marcus opened it, and a tapping, which was nothing more than the sound of his footsteps, greatly magnified, crossing the stone hall.
He returned after a few minutes to tell her that he could not find Esmerelda in any of the main rooms, and that he was going down to search the kitchens.
‘She has fond memories of them dating from her childhood,’ said Marcus. ‘She might well have gone there.’
His footsteps faded away again.
Hilary pulled her pelisse more closely around herself and tried to calm her nerves.
A few minutes later she heard a sound from above.
She looked up, fearing to see Esmerelda on the landing ... but instead, she saw Mr Ulverstone.
She was astonished. What was Mr Ulverstone doing there?
Whatever it was, she must warn him of his danger. If Esmerelda was upstairs ....
She moved towards the staircase and began to ascend.
At that moment he looked down and saw her, and a look of pure anger spread across his face.
‘How did you escape?’ he demanded, his brow thunderous.
His words were so unexpected that she did not immediately take them in. She had been expecting him to say, ‘What are you doing at the abbey?’ or, ‘Miss Wentworth, I did not expect you find you here.’ But instead he had said, How did you escape.
But how did he know that she had been trapped? Unless ... unless he had been the one to trap her.
But why would he do such a thing?
She had no time to think about it, for he started to walk along the landing, towards the stairs.
‘You seem to make a habit of escaping from perilous situations,’ he said.
At his words, Hilary’s thoughts flew back to another perilous situation, when she had been trapped on the roof, and the light of understanding dawned.
‘It was you who locked me out,’ she gasped.
‘Of course. Why else do you think I would ignore your shouts and waves when you tried to attract my attention as I crossed the stable yard? If it hadn’t
been me, I would have sprung to your assistance.’
So he had seen her after all.
‘But why?’ she asked, beginning to retreat backwards down the stairs without taking her eyes from him.
She had suspected the Palmers of being involved because they had had a motive for removing her, but she could not think why Mr Ulverstone should want to do her harm.
‘Why? To prevent you getting too close to Marcus, of course. I’d seen him kissing you in the library, and I knew that he was falling in love with you, but a marriage between the two of you did not suit my plans.’
‘Plans?’ Hilary felt herself go cold and for a moment she stopped edging backwards. ‘What plans?’
ilaryHilary
‘To inherit. And to that end, Marcus had to die childless - not with a wife, and a child on the way. I’d already tried to prevent such a situation arising by asking you to marry me - even before I saw the two of you embracing in the library, I could tell that Marcus was attracted to you - but that hadn’t worked, so I had to used more drastic means. I was just wondering what to do when I saw you heading towards the attic and decided to follow you. When you climbed out on the roof it was too good an opportunity to miss. If I locked you out, I could be rid of you without anyone suspecting foul play. As the door is old and it sticks, your entrapment on the roof and subsequent death would have been regarded as an accident, for I would have unlocked the door the following morning to remove all suspicion of anything else. It’s just a pity Marcus found you. Otherwise I could have been rid of you permanently.’
‘Are you really so envious of his title that you would go to such lengths to make sure you remain his heir?’ asked Hilary, edging backwards once again down another stair.
‘His title?’ Mr Ulverstone laughed. ‘I don’t want his title. I never wanted his title. I want his money.’
And then a couple of memories flashed suddenly before Hilary’s mind’s eye, memories she had never before connected but which now seemed to have a terrible logic. Mr Ulverstone’s casual remark that fortunes could be won or lost on the turn of a card, and the names of Howard and Gibbs that had been scrawled on the back of the card he had given her. Howard and Gibbs. She remembered who they were now.
‘You were in the clutches of the moneylenders,’ she said out loud. ‘You’ve lost your fortune. You lost it on a game of cards.’
‘My, my, you are sharp. Yes. I lost everything at White’s. Two hundred thousand pounds on the turn of a card. I thought my hand was unbeatable, but I was wrong.’
‘So you had to raise money in order to pay your gambling debt, and now you can’t pay back the loan,’ said Hilary, seeing how it must have been.
‘You’re sharp,’ he said appraisingly, ‘but not sharp enough. You’re right when you say I had to raise a loan to pay the debt, but wrong to say I can’t pay it back. I can. Just as soon as I’ve disposed of Marcus.’
And Hilary saw it all. Mr Ulverstone was Marcus’s heir. And ... ‘You mean to kill him,’ she gasped.
‘I do.’ He stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at her. ‘Once he’s out of the way the money will be mine.’
‘But I still don’t understand how you came here,’ she said, perplexed. ‘You were going to London. I saw you leave the abbey.’
He sneered. ‘I took the Palmers home, but as for going to London, that was nothing but a tale. I spent the night at a nearby inn and returned to the abbey on horseback the following day, only to see Marcus’s coach leaving. I bribed one of the stable hands to tell me when he returned, then went back to the inn. As luck would have it, I saw him return myself, when his coach rolled past the inn. By riding across country I was able to reach the abbey before him.’
‘But why trap him in the passage?’
‘Marcus is much larger than I am. An open attack would not succeed. But I knew he’d venture into the passage if he thought Esmerelda had escaped, and a few days without food and water will kill even the strongest man.’
So that would have been Marcus’s fate if they had not escaped. And hers.
‘I’m surprised you had the courage to do it yourself,’ said Hilary scathingly.
‘I must confess I thought of hiring someone, but underlings can be so unreliable. Besides, I enjoyed doing it myself. Or would have done, if you hadn’t escaped. Still, there’s more than one way to commit murder,’ he said. ‘You should have accepted my hand whilst you had the chance. I would have taken you to London and abandoned you there, but still, you would have been alive. Now you know too much.’
Reaching beneath his tailcoat he pulled out a knife.
Hilary felt her palms grow damp.
She was nearly at the bottom of the staircase, and once she had reached it she knew she would have to turn and run.
But just as she was about to edge down the last two stairs, she caught a sight of movement behind him. It was a ghostly figure, dressed all in white.
‘Esmerelda!’
‘Oh, no, you don’t distract me like that,’ he sneered. ‘Esmerelda’s playing with Caesar - poor hound! She’s been very useful, one way or another. Particularly when I gave her a knife and left her in the drawing-room to wait for you. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t manage to kill you. She certainly tried hard enough. And to think, at one time I tried to persuade Marcus to put her in an asylum! If I’d managed to convince him, then this whole plan would have been impossible. I could still have killed Marcus, of course, but I wouldn’t have had a ready made scapegoat to hand.’
‘So that’s why you freed her.’
‘Of course. I needed someone to blame, and who better than a madwoman? Even better, a dead madwoman - the dead tell no tales. She would have been in the river by now, like her father, but she ran off. Never mind, she can wait.’
He raised the knife - and then a plaintive cry stopped him in his tracks. ‘Laurence!’
Hilary saw his startled look, before he turned to face Esmerelda.
The mad young woman was walking towards him along the landing with a purposeful air.
‘Esmerelda.’ His voice wavered. ‘I thought you were playing with Caesar in the tapestry room.’
‘Caesar didn’t want to play,’ she said sulkily.
‘Never mind,’ said Mr Ulverstone, recovering from his shock and walking towards her along the landing, away from his precarious position at the top of the stairs. ‘Why don’t we go and find Marcus? I’m sure he’ll want to play.’
‘I don’t want to play with Marcus,’ she said. ‘I want to play with the knife.’
‘Now, Esmerelda,’ he said, his voice trembling, ‘this isn’t yours.’
Hilary watched in horror as Esmerelda closed on him and the two of them grappled for possession of the knife. It should have been an uneven contest, for he was a man and she was a woman, but she had the strength of the mad.
The struggle became more desperate. It carried them backwards and forwards and across the landing, to the wall, to the banister ....
Hilary stood frozen to the spot.
They were leaning over the banister now. Mr Ulverstone was being pressed further and further back, locked in a life-or-death struggle with Esmerelda, overbalancing, toppling, falling ....
‘No!’
The cry was torn from Hilary as the two combatants plunged from the landing. She froze as she watched them fall. They seemed to spend an eternity in mid air before landing with a sickening series of cracks on the stone-flagged floor.
And then there was nothing.
Hilary stood in shocked silence, trying to take it all in. And then slowly, as her limbs came back under her control she went back down the stairs and across the hall. The two bodies, lying twisted on the floor, looked like broken dolls. She knelt down beside them.
Her heart was filled with pity as she felt for Esmerelda’s pulse and discovered that the beautiful, mad young woman was dead.
And Mr Ulverstone, the architect of the tragedy. He, too, was dead.
Hilary began
to shiver.
She drew away from the bodies. She turned ... to see Marcus striding towards her across the hall. And then he was beside her, and she leant against him, feeling his strong arms close round her as she buried her face in his chest.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, when she had at last recovered herself and lifted her head.
‘Hush, my dearest. ‘It’s all right.’
‘It was your cousin ... ‘
‘I know. I was there.’
She looked at him questioningly.
‘I found Mrs Lund locked in the kitchen, and together we searched the basement. When we found nothing, she went to help Lund outside, slipping out of the kitchen door. I intended to continue my search for Esmerelda upstairs, and arrived in the hall in time to see everything.’
‘Then you know it all.’
‘Yes.’
‘I should have done something,’ said Hilary.
‘Hush, my love, there was nothing you could do. And if you had tried to intervene, matters might have been worse. You might have fallen, too.’
Hilary nodded. She knew what he said was true.
‘Come. You’re shivering,’ he said. ‘This has been a terrible shock.’
He guided her through into the library and sat her in front of the fire, then sat down beside her. The embers of the fire were glowing and gave out some welcome heat.
‘So it was Laurence who was behind the attacks on you,’ he said. ‘And Laurence who freed Esmerelda. And, of course, it was Laurence who locked the Lunds in so that they could not worry about Esmerelda’s absence, or mine, and begin a search. I wonder if he meant to kill them, too?’
‘I don’t think he cared about them,’ sighed Hilary. ‘Whether they lived or died was unimportant to him. It was your death he cared about. I only hope he didn’t imprison the outdoor staff as well.’
‘I think it unlikely. They often go for days without seeing either myself or the Lunds, so they would not have been a threat to his plan. By the time they’d noticed my absence, I would have already been dead.’
He fell silent.
Hilary knew he was thinking of Esmerelda. He had loved her as a brother should, and had tried to protect her from the consequences of her own madness. He had kept her at the abbey, where she could be cared for kindly by people who loved her, and although she had caused him a great deal of anguish, Hilary knew he was devastated by her death.