“Then where could she be?” Emily demanded, her panic getting the better of her. “You don’t understand—we havenothing. Even if we had family somewhere for her to visit, she could not have afforded to travel there.”
“There could be a wholly reasonable explanation.”
There could be, but that creeping feeling of dread was crawling up her spine again, the feeling that something was terribly wrong.
There had been enough food for the week, if Isabella had been careful—she wouldn’t have starved. But could she have fallen ill? Without Emily, there was no one to look after her.
“Do you want to come back to theRose & Crownwith me?” Oliver asked.
She shook her head. “I want to find a way inside. If she isn’t there—surely she’d have left a note for in case I came back.” Unless she had assumed Emily would not be coming back at all.
“All right.” He reached out to tap a window she had boarded. “May I?”
“Break it?”
“It strikes me as being rather easier than attempting to kick down a door.”
“I thought you were leaving?”
He huffed a derisive breath, his hair plastered to his scalp. “I can leave after we discover where Isabella is.”
“Thank you.”
He said nothing, just gripped the boards nailed across the window and yanked them free. Emily had evidently done a poor job fixing them down, as they came away almost immediately.
“Let me,” she said once the empty window was revealed. With Oliver’s bad arm, she didn’t want him climbing inside and potentially hurting himself. Besides, she knew the layout of the house far better. Before he could protest, she climbed inside andlanded on the hard stone floor. Inside was almost as cold as the air outside—had Isabella not been laying the fires?
Perhaps shewaslying ill upstairs somewhere.
No, she couldn’t think like that.
This was the pantry. Using her hands, she felt her way out and down the corridor into the main kitchen. There, she navigated the large table she had sat at so many times, and reached the back door. Once, this had been where the servants had received the deliveries, but there were no deliveries to be had any longer, so she had bolted it shut years ago. They rarely opened it.
She gripped the large bolt and tugged. Rust briefly held it in place, and she despaired of getting it open, especially with the wood swelling in the rain, but eventually she yanked it open.
Oliver hurried inside and shut the door again, slamming it against the howl of the wind. By the sound of it, the weather was working itself up to be a veritable storm.
“Wait there,” she said, moving to the fireplace where the tinderbox resided. From there, she found a candle and lit it, struggling for a moment with her cold, wet fingers.
Finally, light bloomed, and she looked around at the empty kitchen. She hadn’t expected anyone to be here in the dark, yet her heart somehow sank at the distinct lack of human life.
“Is there another candle?” Oliver asked. “We should search the house.”
She didn’t question hiswe. Until she found Isabella, she would take all the help she could get. “I think so,” she said. “Hold on . . .” She found a stub, the tallow greasy against her fingers, and lit it with the first. Then she handed the first candle to Oliver. “You check downstairs and I’ll go up. We don’t use most of the downstairs rooms, but check them anyway, just in case. I’ll meet you back here if I don’t find anything.”
He nodded, expression grim, and left the room. She hurried for the closer servants’ stairs. At this time of night, Isabellashouldn’t be asleep, but she couldn’t suppress the small nub of hope that she might be, and all this would be over.
Upstairs felt just as dark and dank as downstairs. The wooden floor underneath the carpet creaked as she walked past. “Isabella?” she called, making her way to the bedroom they shared. “Isabella, where are you?”
The door hung slightly ajar, and Emily’s heart squeezed in her chest as she pushed it fully open with a squeak of the hinges.
A rush of cool, still air greeted her. Silence. As she’d expected, the room was empty, the covers thrown back on the bed, and a pillow dislodged and sitting at an angle. Judging from the staleness of the air, no one had been here for several days.
So Isabellahadleft, after all.
Emily closed her eyes, pressing a hand to her stomach. She had tothink.
Isabella could be somewhere in the village. If she was, that likely meant everyone knew of her disappearance, which would be another hurdle to face.
