I nodded and he went on, speaking of things that mattered not at all.
“They were reluctant to go, but in the end, they overcame their fears and if it were not for them—” He broke off and his grip upon me tightened so that I knew I would never breathe again.
“Stoker.” The word was weighted with everything I meant to say and could not voice. I retrieved Chester from my pocket. I held the little mouse towards him on my palm with a question in my eyes.
“You were clutching him when they hauled you aboard. One of his ears was nearly off and the eyes were gone, but I still know my way around a needle,” he said lightly. I thought of the hours he must have spent, sitting at my bedside, putting each stitch into the velvet, slowly and methodically, marking them off like the pearls on a string of prayer beads.
“Stoker,” I repeated, turning my face to his, offering, asking, waiting.
He ducked his head, suddenly elusive.
I turned his face towards mine, almost able to master my emotion. “You think we will not speak of what you did?” I asked.
“Not now,” he said, and there was a harsh note of pleading I had never heard in his voice before. “I cannot bear to remember, much less to speak of it.”
“You risked your life to save us,” I reminded him. “Do you regret what you said?” I asked.
“No. I regret that you heard it,” he countered.
“Did you not mean it?”
He drew in a deep breath and leveled his gaze at me. “Veronica Speedwell, I meant it then and I mean it now and I shall mean it with every breath until my last. I love you.”
I opened my mouth, but he laid a finger upon it. “Not now,” he repeated. “Not here with my brother at hand and murderers lurking in the hedgerows. We have played a thousand games with one another, but the time for that is past. Whatever we mean to be to one another, we will speak of it when these other distractions are no more. We will speak of it—when we are free to act upon it,” he finished, rubbing his thumb across my lower lip.
His eyes promised much and I shivered with anticipation as I nodded slowly.
“You are right, of course. This is hardly the place for that sort of thing. Does this mean you will stop torturing me by displaying yourself in various states of undress?”
“Not a chance.” He grinned. I kissed him again. I did not think of Caroline. She was in his past, buried the moment he dove into the sea to save me. She would not haunt us again.
•••
We gathered Caspian and his mother and Mertensia in the drawing room for a council of war. Tiberius explained what Mrs. Trengrouse had done, breaking the news as gently as possible, but Mertensia took it poorly, dissolving into an unaccustomed bout of weeping. Helen, her fears eased, took it upon herself to console her sister-in-law, putting an arm around her shoulders and murmuring soothing platitudes.
Caspian, to my surprise, rose to the occasion. “We ought to search again,” he said. “We can press the entire island into service.”
“Where do you suggest we look?” I asked Caspian. He shrugged.
“Damn me if I know, if you will pardon my language. We played sardines all over this house, but apart from the priest’s holes, there are few proper hiding places and none large enough to hold a man for any length of time.”
I jumped to my feet. “Damn us all for blind fools,” I muttered, takingto my heels. Tiberius and Stoker were hard behind, following as I made my way to Malcolm’s bedchamber.
“We have already looked here,” Tiberius reminded me. I ignored him as I searched for the mechanism to expose the priest’s hole.
“Here.” Stoker reached past me to press the bit of carving. The panel shifted and I squeezed into the hideaway. Stoker pushed in behind me, holding a lamp aloft.
“Look there,” I said in triumph. On the dust of the floorboard was the clear imprint of a shoe, small and pointed. “A woman’s,” I said. “And left since we were here last.”
“What made you think of this place?” Stoker demanded.
“That,” I said, pointing to the back of the priest’s hole. “It is paneled where it ought to be stone. I only remembered it when Caspian mentioned the priest’s holes. It struck me as odd at the time, but I was too interested in the traveling bag to explore further.”
Stoker felt the panel on the back of the priest’s hole, running his hands carefully over the moldings.
Tiberius stuck his head into the stuffy little compartment. “What the devil are you doing? It is obviously empty.”
“And it is obviously only an antechamber,” Stoker told him. “Sometimes priest’s holes were made up of more than one chamber, and we ought to have realized it sooner.”
