He didn’t hear. He set off across the turning circle toward the main entrance, boots crunching on the gravel. “You’re American, then?” he called back. “Living in the UK, or just visiting?”
A distant bang sounded, followed by an echoing retort. A rifle shot. Some distance away, but she hurried to catch up. “On vacation, for a few weeks.”
“You picked a strange time of year.”
“A last-minute thing. Plus, fewer crowds.”
“Cheaper too, I suppose.” He stopped at the steps to the columned portico and peeled the tour flyer off the face of a stone lion. Its mood wasn’t improved by the liberation. “She doesn’t look like she did on the telly, sorry to say,” he said, peering up at the house. “Even I didn’t recognize her at first, when we watched the program, and I’ve lived here all me life. She’s crumbled some more since it was made, plus they did all that CBS tomfoolery.”
“CGI?” Amelia offered.
“Don’t know why they bothered to come all the way out here when they could have made the lot on the computer. But it paid my wages for a good couple of years, so…”
Another gunshot cracked. Amelia flinched. It seemed nearer, like an advancing thunderstorm.
“Nothing to worry about, love, unless you go and sprout antlers—the bloody neighbors, hunting in our wood again. But I wouldn’t go wandering about. Those Pritchard boys have a habit of straying, when they’re chasing a stag.”
He climbed the steps and stopped at two huge wooden doors. He retrieved a black velvet bag from a pocket, drew a medieval-looking key from it and slotted it into an ancient lock. The lock looked way too easy to pick, not that she had experience with breaking and entering—at least, not as a perpetrator. She looked for evidence of security cameras and alarms and found none. She resisted the urge to ask about security. It might sound like she was casing the place. And what use would an alarm be out here?
Safety was an illusion, as she now knew, though that didn’t stop her assessing her relationship with it everywhere she went. Like the stone wall that marked the estate’s perimeter. A year ago, she might have wondered about its age or the long-dead craftspeople who’d built it. Now, she noticed its insufficient height and the potential handholds and footholds. Which was silly, seeing as an intruder could roll straight on in between the rusted metal gates she’d passed through at the top of the drive. By the look of them, they hadn’t been closed in decades.
“Miss?” the man said. He was holding one of the doors open for her. She hesitated. Was it wise to enter an apparently deserted and objectively creepy old mansion in the middle of nowhere with a strange man?
The sound of an approaching vehicle saved her from the fight-or-flight call. She would have defaulted to “freak out” anyway, going by previous experience.
“Ah, and here’s the van now,” the man said.
There was no vehicle in sight, but then the tunnel-like glade that passed for a drive zigzagged like a roped-off airport queue, as if designed to drag out the distance from point A to point B for as long as possible. Since emerging from it, Amelia had lost her internal compass, and the anemic sun shrouded by low cloud was no help. But sure enough, the glade spat out a white van signwritten with Sundew Tours, followed by a couple of nondescript hatchbacks similar to Amelia’s.
“The tour begins in the grand entrance hall, so you might as well wait there. Xanthe won’t muck around getting indoors, in this weather.”
As Amelia stepped inside, he touched his cap—doffedit, she supposed, though it was a beaten-up Yankees cap rather than a ye olde newsboy hat. She mentally rolled her eyes at herself for pegging a 60-something armed with a blunt garden implement as a potential serial killer. So much for taking a break from paranoia.
She straightened her hunched back, but her expectations of a reprieve from the chill were optimistic. Instead, an icy draft crawled up her sleeves. No white-gloved butler to retrieve her coat and lead her to a crackling fire.
“This entrance was in the TV show, wasn’t it?” she said, turning. A gust caught the door and it slammed with an echoing shudder. She was alone. She didn’t need a stethoscope to know her heart was racing. “Cool it,” she said to her nerves, and an echoed whisper swished up a wide oak staircase. There was no logical reason that loud noises in the daytime should spook her. Quiet scuffles at night, sure, but right here, right now, she was safe. “Safe,” she announced, and the echo backed her up. “Relatively.” The echo agreed.
Despite the cold, the entrance hall was “lofty and handsome,” as in Austen’s novel. The staircase cleaved the space precisely in two and drew the eye up to a grand chandelier, and anenormous tapestry on the landing. The plasterwork on the soaring ceiling could use a repair and repaint, but the elegant, swirling details were mostly intact. The marble floor undulated, and numerous cracked or missing tiles broke up the gray and white checkerboard. Beside the staircase, an actual suit of armor stood to attention. There were marble columns, and statues on plinths—Amelia was prepared to believe their various missing limbs were design choices. It might not be CGI-perfect, but it was authentic. Even the light switches appeared to date from the beginnings of electricity. If she let her vision blur, she could imagine Darcy himself striding?—
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a good man in possession of a single wife, must be in want of a fortune.”
Amelia swiveled, frowning, as a very pregnant woman wearing a name tag that introduced her as “Xanthe” swept in through the doors, followed by a dozen visitors. By the exchange of puzzled looks and raised eyebrows, Amelia figured they too had noted the botched opening line fromPride and Prejudice.
“Welcome to Sundew Abbey,” the guide proclaimed, “largely untouched since the seventeenth century. Or is it the seventeen-hundreds? I never remember which is which. Is the seventeenth century the sixteen-hundreds, the seventeen-hundreds, or the eighteen-hundreds?” She shrugged. “Whatever, it’s old. This area was used as the entrance hall on the telly, and that right there was the ‘great staircase.’”
“A right do-up,” someone muttered, unimpressed.
“Which is what made it perfect for the show,” the tour guide said, undeterred, as she led the group up the staircase to the landing. “They didn’t have to be precious about nothing. Most of the really pricey bits and bobs were flogged off long ago.”
That explained the dark rectangles in the otherwise faded wallpaper where artworks had once hung. Some had been replaced with smaller pieces. Amelia headed for the tapestry, butwas stopped by a pointed “this way, please” from the guide. With a longing glance at the artwork, she followed the group through double doors into the next room.
Xanthe’s expertise didn’t improve as they walked through rooms that had doubled as Pemberley’s drawing room, saloon, and gallery, all of which looked disappointingly like a movie set in a Hollywood studio, with wallpaper and curtains that were obvious replicas. A sofa in the drawing room had a price tag hanging from it. Amelia made a mental note to watch the TV show for the twentieth time to see if she could spot it. As they moved through the smoking room, her gaze snagged on a swag and tail silk curtain framing a window seat.
She went for a closer look, as the rest of the group trailed into the next room. Nowthatwas an original. The floral and leaf pattern had to have been hand-embroidered with silk thread, with no repeat of a single motif on the entire fall of creamy fabric. Amelia checked over her shoulder. There were no velvet ropes or security guards, so she held out a single fingertip to touch the curtain, getting an illicit thrill even before she made contact. She was never allowed to touch valuable fabric without gloves. And yes, it was faded and might disintegrate if you tried to clean the tide mark of dust from the bottom, but it had to date back to when the house was built around the original medieval abbey in the mid-seventeen-hundreds—theeighteenthcentury.
If only she could be left alone with the house for a day or two. There had to be dozens of pieces like this. Silk cocoons that long-dead humans had spun around themselves—protective, soothing, warming.
Reluctantly, she left the curtain and caught up to the group in the music room, just in time to catch a cataloging of the estate’s various ghosts: a figure who stood on the lane, a Catholic priest, a particularly terrifying countess…
