Impatiently, she moved an apple-embroidered fireplace screen out of the way in order to crouch down and peer up the empty flue. No reasonable person would store an important slip of paper in a place where a fire was likely to be lit, but if life had taught Elizabeth anything, it was never to assume that other people were reasonable.
She felt around for nooks, crannies, or loose stones—but there were none. Just as there hadn’t been in any of the other chimneys she’d doggedly checked.
With a sigh, she backed away from the unlit grate. After pushing the embroidered fire screen back where she’d found it, Elizabeth reopened her journal to mark off yet another fruitless fireplace. Her pencil paused in the act of drawing a tick mark next to the current room on the list. She froze in place.
Fruitless. Fruit.Apples.
Every fireplace in the castle had an embroidered fire screen. And every design was decorated with a different fruit. This one was apples, but the others were… She flipped through her journal, heart beating rapidly. Blackberries, cherries, dates, elderberries, figs. Was that another hint? Almost every letter of the alphabet seemed to be represented, and there was otherwise no indication of what these disparate fruits had in common.
She glared at the beautifully embroidered fire screen. Maybe its design wasn’t a clue after all. Maybe embroidery was just embroidery, and there was so damn much of it because embroidery was one of thefew things gently bred women were allowed to do with their time. Not that Arminia was particularly skilled at it.
Despite the impressive quantity, the still life scenes themselves didn’t make much sense. The fruits were recognizable enough, but the embroideries in the bedchambers also contained baby animals completely out of perspective compared to the relative size of the fruits. There was a sheep half the size of a pear in Arminia’s old room, and a little lamb no bigger than a bowl of gooseberries in the one belonging to her husband.
“It’s a good thing you were a countess,” Elizabeth grumbled. “If you’d tried to make your mark as a serious artist, they would’ve taken one look at your pear and berries… Pair of berries… Sheepskin… Baby lamb…” She burst out laughing. “Why, you delightfully saucy wench!”
She’d solved the first clue!
Fire, like the heat generated between passionate lovers. Fruit, as in the fruit of their loins. Pair of berries, as in male genitalia. Sheepskin, like the “French letters” some men wore for protection during lovemaking.
This wasn’t a hint. It was the giant, red-letter sign Elizabeth had been searching for. Directing her to… wherever the earl and the countess were most likely to make love?
“I hope this compass is pointing to a bed here in the castle and not some random log in the middle of the forest,” she muttered as she rushed out of the nursery and into the countess’s old bedchamber.
With a sinking feeling, she remembered that she and Stephen had already searched every inch of Arminia’s private quarters and come up empty. Any erstwhile clues had either been cleared away by overzealous servants or had never been present in this room to begin with.
Elizabeth hurried to the earl’s private chambers and began her search anew. Bedclothes, pillows, mattress. All unadulterated, just like the countess’s room.
But she would not give up. She tossed her sword stick onto the prior earl’s mattress and climbed up onto the bed. She ran her fingers up the wood of all four bedposts. Nothing. Then she checked each hem of the blue silk canopy, inch by inch.
One of the edges was lumpier than the other.
“Either that’s a dead mouse, or you’ve hidden something in the hem,” Elizabeth murmured. “Please don’t have hidden a dead mouse. I’d rather that wasn’t the next clue.”
She pulled the tiny throwing knife her sister-in-law had given her out from its secret compartment in her stays and carefully sliced open the hem.
A scrap of embroidery no larger than a playing card fell into her palm.
“I did it!” She spun in delight. “I made it to the next clue!”
Once she’d twirled herself out of breath, she stumbled over to the wall and rested her shoulders against the cold stone so she could inspect her prize. The square of cloth contained an embroidered unicorn.
“Ababyunicorn, so at least we’re still on theme,” Elizabeth said out loud.
Now that she thought about it, maybe all the baby references weren’t referring to the fruits of the countess and the earl’s personal loins—after all, nothing seemed to specifically point toward their runaway offspring. The child motif might rather be indicating theraison d’êtreat the end of the treasure hunt: a school and home for orphans.
“Brilliant,” Elizabeth muttered. “But what the devil does this bit of needleworkmean?”
The soft tap of leather boots sounded just outside the earl’s bedchamber.
Elizabeth jerked upright, then wished she hadn’t. The suddenmotion dropped her from eighty percent down to seventy-five. Still high enough for swashbuckling, which meant it was also high enough to straighten her wrinkled skirts and adjust her knifeless bodice and throw back her shoulders and plump up her—
Stephen stepped into the room.
“Oh, good day,” said Elizabeth. “I didn’t hear you coming. I was just…”
“… casually assuming a deliberately provocative pose, with one hand on your curvaceous hip and your head thrown back just so to catch the sunlight in your blond curls? Ah, yes, that makes perfect sense. I carry out searches in exactly the same pose.”
She didn’t change position. “Provocative, you say? Is it working?”
