Done. It was done. Sophie turned to leave, had already taken a few hasty steps away, and then she pivoted, impulsively catching up a length of fabric that lay on the edge of the bed and trailed to the floor – an abandoned toga, a bedcovering or Rosanna’s own gown, she did not stop to discover – and draped it carefully, delicately, over the unconscious woman. She told herself that it was only sensible – that if Lady Wyverne was not cold she’d sleep more soundly and for longer, and that the concealment the material offered was also useful, disguising the theft. But the truth was that she seemed so vulnerable lying there alone, stripped of all her jewels after an evening spent being used by a procession of men who could care nothing for her, and all this while her husband watched like the depraved monster he was. Sophie felt no remorse, she was quite sure, but she could not bear the sight of her suddenly, or the thought that the servants, men and women both, might see her thus exposed when they came in the early morning to begin tidying away the detritus of the night before.
It was time and past time that she was gone, far away from the scene of the crime. She closed up her bag and slipped out of the atrium with it, heading for the stair that led up to the place she’d chosen as the ideal temporary cache for the treasures. It was much darker here, but her night vision was good and she made her way sure-footedly upwards and through the mazeof rooms to her destination: the chamber with the big, old abandoned bed frame and the secret trapdoor under it.
She had an unpleasant moment or two in the cobwebby darkness when she was trying to get down the ladder without slipping. This was the final step before she could conceal her precious burden deep among the heaps of junk that lay in the hidden storeroom. At the bottom she barked her shin painfully on some invisible sharp object, and feared for one long agonising moment that she’d destabilised the pile of rubbish and that it would come crashing down and wake half the house, or crush her with its weight so that she suffocated slowly, trapped. What a hideous way to die. But if it tottered – she could not see as she stood holding her breath – it did not fall, and she was able to do what she had come to do and close the trapdoor securely behind her. A day or two earlier she’d swept the floors quite thoroughly with a birch broom she had borrowed and later returned, so her footprints in the dust of decades would not betray her even if someone did think to search here.
She hastened downstairs again, feeling a brief sense of exhilaration at having the whole huge, silent building apparently to herself, and carried out the final part of her plan, which was to open a set of shutters and a tall sash window in one of the rooms close to the Marble Saloon. This window led rather usefully to a broad stone ledge that would offer an easy enough climb via a drainpipe down to ground level, to someone reasonably agile. This would signal that the thief, who must surely be an enterprising member of the male sex, not a mere feeble woman encumbered by skirts, had left that way, and was no longer in the house. If anyone were outside in the moonlight watching – and she could not quite exclude the possibility, knowing Nate as she did – the opening of the shutter would also signal that she had been successful in her daring escapade and the jewels were now safely in her possession.
Her final mission – and she must not grow careless now – was to regain her room, and she had feared that this might be her hardest task, since she knew that the maids’ attic was supposed to be locked and guarded. It would be ironic, she thought as she climbed another steep set of stairs, now rather weary as her earlier excitement subsided, if the measures that the Dowager had taken to protect her and others were to be her downfall at last. If she couldn’t regain the relative safety of her room, she’d surely be suspected, and all the rest of her meticulous precautions would have been in vain.
And the doorwasguarded. A chair had been set at the top of the staircase, in a little alcove where the steep steps met the turn of the passage, and in it sat James, another of the footmen, valiantly protecting the women of the household lest some inebriated, degenerate lord should wander up here with dark purposes in mind.
But it was very late now, the house was utterly still, and the poor boy was fast asleep. He wasn’t exactly snoring, but he was breathing very heavily and regularly, and Sophie, suppressing an impulse to cross herself in thanks to a deity she didn’t believe in, stepped lightly past him and approached the lock. She already knew it was a paltry sort of a thing, and with her lockpicks ready to hand – thank heaven she had not forgotten to remove them from the bag before she hid it – she made short and almost silent work of the mechanism and secured it behind her just as easily.
She’d got away with it, she realised as she reached her chamber and closed the door very softly behind her. She did not know what tomorrow might bring, but she’d pulled it off, and fashioned a fine alibi for herself into the bargain. She could not possibly have stolen the jewels, for had not she been locked away along with all the other female servants? James could vouch for the truth of that. She concealed the picks and her trusty knife under a loose floorboard, pushing them deep, deep into thecavity – she wasn’t going to be tripped up by little things like that, after all she had achieved tonight – and rapidly undressed.
An hour or so later, Sophie lay in her mean little bed, too wound up to sleep. It had all gone so smoothly, she could hardly believe it. She attempted to ignore the nagging little internal voice that told her it was too good to be true. What had she wanted – failure, capture, disaster? Nonsense. She had planned and she had executed, and she’d been lucky besides. Nate had once told her that clever and careful scheming seemed to attract luck, while sloppiness drew ill fortune to it.
All that she’d wanted, all that she’d planned for so long with Nate’s help, all the fierce hope and focus that had sustained her while she planned it, all her wonderful revenge – she’d done it. Every bit of it. More than she could ever have hoped for. Even if the jewels were by some mischance found – and she was reasonably confident they would not be, so clever was her hiding place – there was nothing there to link her, honest Sophie Delavallois, to them. Now all she had to do was hold her nerve for a little longer and keep her face and manner impassive while she gloried in the chaos that her actions would undoubtedly create. The hard parts were done, the easy parts lay ahead. It might not be precisely simple to smuggle the jewels out of the house – but she’d done so much already, that would be child’s play.
It should be the happiest day of her life – or of her new life, in any case, the old one with its ordinary family pleasures and prospect of happiness having been left so far behind her with her old identity.
Why, then, did she feel so empty?
21
Rafe watched Sophie walk away from him with a disturbing mixture of emotions churning in his breast. She was so brave, he thought, so resolute. And undeniably reckless, in a manner that seemed to call up some echo of her wildness from him too. It must be her, because the rest of his life was so controlled and ordered.
She was, he supposed, a criminal in most people’s eyes. A thief. Moreover, she carried a knife, and seemed confident in her ability to use it. He had not the least idea how she had survived alone for so long and found her way here at last. But he found he didn’t care – no, that was wrong; he could guess at how much she must have suffered and he cared very much about that, he devoutly wished none of it had come to pass, but he didn’t care about her history otherwise. He would not dream for a moment of judging her for any of it. He’d even considered offering to help her tonight, but then instantly realised that this was something she needed to do by herself. He could see that the impulse to revenge had sustained her for years and that it would be very wrong to take any part of that away from her. This washermoment, not his. He was desperately worried forher safety, though, and prayed that all her ingenuity and fierce determination would be a match for Wyverne’s ruthlessness.
Should he spend the night here, as he never did, or ride over to the rectory as he’d originally intended? It was a dilemma – if he stayed, he’d be here in the morning when the theft was discovered, and could perhaps help Sophie if she needed him. But he had not slept here in years, and if Wyverne heard of it, as he surely would in the end, he’d think it excessively strange. Knowing the way the man’s mind worked, he thought that his instant assumption would be that Drake had been bedding someone here, and that was why he had changed his fixed habits and remained. And might not his thoughts then turn to Sophie as a likely candidate, since she was the only new arrival? Could drawing attention to her thus put her in further danger?
Rafe resolved at last that it was best to go, to behave as though there was nothing unusual at all about this night as far as he was concerned. It might be useful, if matters really grew desperate in the aftermath of the theft, to sow a tiny seed of doubt in his father’s mind, and divert attention away from Sophie and all the other inhabitants of the house. If the Marquess was busy wondering if his own heir had robbed him, had taken the jewels and instantly spirited them away from the estate to God knows where before their loss was even suspected, he might spend less time worrying about everyone else, including Sophie. He must know that Drake hated him, and why; the idea might give him a few extra anxious moments.
Having decided, he made his way through the dark, silent house towards the stables – he had his own keys and always locked up behind him, he wouldn’t contemplate leaving a door open and risking any of the staff suffering for his neglect – and saddled his sleepy mare before trotting sedately off across the moonlit lawns and around the side of the lake. He paused for a moment when he reached the great triumphal arch at the topof the rise and, almost against his will, gazed back towards the house. There was not a light to be seen anywhere inside and nothing modern or sordid about it from this distance; it looked like some magnificent and pure temple to the ancient gods. It was so piercingly beautiful as it sat there slumbering, the tall, pillared central section with its imposing flight of steps and triangular pediment cast in sharp relief by the light of the moon, that once again his heart ached to see it. He would be ambushed every now and then like this by his love for the place, and his desire that everything could be different, so that he could look on it just once with unalloyed pleasure. But he doubted that that would ever be possible, and certainly it could not be while his father lived and while Rosanna shared the house with him.
He shook his head and rode on, through the arch and down the ride to the village. The rectory was never locked and he had a standing invitation to spend the night there; it was possible that Simon, who kept very late hours and seemed to need little sleep, would still be up reading, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to face his friend just now. The Reverend Mr Venables was a curious mixture of innocence and shrewdness, and would undoubtedly be able to see at a glance that Rafe’s mind was disturbed. And there was so much he couldn’t tell him.
He stabled Cinnamon, the other horses whickering quietly in welcome, and made her comfortable, whispering to her soothingly as he went about his tasks, taking longer than he needed in the rather cowardly hope that Simon must surely be abed by now. But he wasn’t – he could see the light under the door of the study when he had closed the front entrance carefully behind him. He sighed and went to tap softly on the panel.
Simon’s cheerful face turned to him as he came in, his spectacles gleaming in the candlelight. He was perhaps ten years older than Lord Drake, his former student, a short, plump, balding little man with a sunny disposition that was writtenquite plainly on his face. ‘You’re about late, Rafe!’ he said. ‘I’m glad to see you. Will you take a glass of brandy with me? You look as though you could do with it.’
Rafe crossed to the desk and poured a small measure for each of them from the decanter that sat ready. ‘Carousing into the small hours, I see,’ he said drily, sinking into one of the comfortably shabby armchairs by the small fire and stretching out his booted legs. It had been a long day.
‘Hardly,’ said his friend with a smile. ‘I was writing my sermon, and I rather lost track of time, hunting down an interesting reference in St Augustine… But it isn’t important. You look as though you have the weight of the world on your shoulders. I hope your grandmother is not unwell?’
‘She’s fine,’ Rafe reassured him. ‘She seems most content with her new companion.’ There had been no need to add that last sentence. He hadn’t wanted to speak of Sophie, of Clemence, but he couldn’t seem to help himself.
‘Good heavens, she has another? I cannot keep track of them.’
‘I thought I’d mentioned that a new companion arrived a short while ago,’ Rafe said, a shade too airily.
‘You hadn’t, in fact.’
‘Ah.’
‘I apprehend that this new arrival is not a particularly elderly lady like some of her predecessors?’ Simon was smiling at him as he spoke, and he felt himself colouring under the benign scrutiny.
Rafe laughed ruefully. ‘It is useless to attempt to hide anything from you, is it not?’
