Chapter 17
While Edmund remained in the Green Salon with his flask, everyone else split up to search separately in an attempt to cover ground in the quickest manner possible.
Evangeline headed upstairs to search the guest wings. She stopped by the nursery, where Lady Heatherbrook was slumped on a sofa, Nancy and Jane cuddled to either side.
According to almost-thirteen-year-old Jane, she’d left the room long enough to find a chamber pot, and when she returned, the girls were gone. According to Nancy, twin five-year-olds could be anywhere. Lady Heatherbrook was trembling too hard to do more than murmur that her fervent prayer was that they’d disappeared on their own, and not by the hand of the unknown killer.
Evangeline tugged off her gloves as subtly as she could before offering all three of them her deepest sympathies and giving each a heartfelt hug in the hopes of allaying some of their fears, and gaining insight into the girls’ mysterious disappearance.
The only thing she gained was a headache so intense that for a moment she couldn’t see. She winced at the over-bright shafts of dusty sunlight pouring through the windows, turned her head too sharply, blinked back tears at the explosion raging within her skull. Ever since the terrifying encounter with Lord Heatherbrook’s dead body, even the briefest of human contact had her cringing at the pain and gasping for air.
Once Evangeline’s headache abated enough for her to open her eyes more than a squint, she made her way to the hallway running alongside the guest wing. She headed down the corridor, thrusting open doors and calling for the girls.
She heard nothing but the cracking of her own voice. She saw no one in the unused chambers but the occasional startled servant peeking behind doors and bureaus.
Dare she hope the girls had hidden on their own? Thanks to her stepfather, Evangeline had learned to hide at a very young age. However, she’d never managed to hide from servants. They were too observant, too omnipresent. Which could only mean the girls couldn’t have gone far undetected. Not outside, not downstairs, not to another wing. They had to be near the nursery. But where?
After reclosing the last of the guest-room doors in an adjoining corridor, she slumped against a wall, the wainscoting digging into her hip, the side of her still-pounding head resting between two framed paintings. Something scurried behind the serpentine paper, the eerie scritching and scratching echoing in what Evangeline knew to be a larger-than-necessary crawl space between the walls. Hopefully not rats. She’d hated the vile creatures from the first time her stepfather had locked her in their old pantry.
She glanced down the long corridor toward where she recalled the secret access door to be. Already she could hear the noises getting louder, moving closer, sounding as much like fingernails against rotting wood as tiny claws from horrid little rodents. Her breath caught. What if the noiseswerefingernails?
Evangeline knocked on the wall. The noises stopped. She pressed her ear to the wall. Was her imagination coloring her perception?
A soft thud thumped near her feet. Could the girls be on the other side? Evangeline kicked the mopboard, striking her toes against the molding three times in quick succession.
Once again, the silence fell for a few seconds before three quick thuds clunked near her feet, making the unmistakable sound of a return knock. And then—thank heavens—a soft, muffled voice.
“Mama? Jane? Nancy?”
Evangeline froze for the briefest of seconds before tearing down the hall, tugging each frame in search of the false painting. One landscape fell with a bang, startling a maid carrying a tea tray from the connecting passage. The tea set shattered to the floor in a jumbled puddle of spilt tea and broken china.
“Fetch Mr. Lioncroft!” Evangeline shouted to the wide-eyed maid. “Now!”
The maid set off down the corridor at a dead run.
Evangeline skidded to a halt before a wide gilded frame as tall as she was. Was this the painting? She jerked on the frame, managing only to set it askew. How had she forgotten which canvas was the façade? Had she not been so desperate to flee the suffocating confinement of the secret passageway, she would’ve paid more attention to something other than escape.
She tried the next painting, then the next, then the next.
By the time she had the correct frame flung open, Mr. Lioncroft’s footfalls thundered fast and heavy down the corridor, the maid dropping behind him to collect the broken tea service.
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded the moment he reached Evangeline’s side.
“The twins,” she explained, pointing a trembling finger at the unrelenting blackness. “They’re trapped inside.”
Without pausing to ask more questions, he brushed past her and vanished, hurrying sideways in the opposite direction from which she’d first heard noises. His disappearance was so sudden and so complete, her breath tangled in her throat.
“No,” she called into the dark, standing at the junction between candlelight and shadow, with one hand gripping the open frame and the other splayed against the corner of the wall. “The other way. Go back the other way. They’re—”
“Mama?” came a small terrified voice from the undulating gloom to Evangeline’s right.
“No, it’s Miss Pemberton,” she called back, fighting to keep the tremor from her voice. “Come this way.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the corridor. Follow my voice, darling.”
“I can’t…It’s—it’s too dark,” came the small broken voice of a child. “Can you come get me?”
