Search for the letters that spell out his name.
I stood back a step, a wave of realization crashing over my shoulders. The riddle had told me to search for letters, but there had been two meanings to the clue. The letters of his name were on Lady Tottenham’sletters: all the dreaded letters that had been slipped under my door. There were six.
I checked the date on each one, arranging them in order from the first to the last. The letters in the top corners aligned, and I gasped with delight.
WALTER
I checked the corresponding letters on the bottom corners, which came together to form one word.
RABBIT
My eyes rounded, and I covered my mouth with one hand. Lady Tottenham had led Octavia and Victoria to the same conclusion, but with a different riddle. The key to her heart was a rabbit according to the clue she had given the Colborne sisters, but according to my riddle, I would find the key ‘underfoot of the game.’ My mind raced back to that morning at ten when we had gathered for the first half of the story game. We had played the game in the hexagon room.
Could that have been part of the Colborne sisters’ clue as well?
Lady Tottenham’s lie had been the story about the rifle, which she claimed was the one hanging on the wall in the hexagon room. If the true key to her heart was her pet rabbit…was it also in that room? The six walls flashed through my mind.
The doorway.
The fireplace with Lord Tottenham’s portrait.
The rifle with the sofa beneath it.
The ornate wallpaper and wood carvings.
The window.
The large animal heads, and the glass case filled with small animals and birds.
Was her pet rabbit among them?
My mind was going in the right direction. I knew it. I paced across the room, desperate to keep the momentum. I recited my own riddle out loud.
“To find the prize which you now seek to claim
Search for the letters that spell out his name.
You’ll find the keyunderfoot of the game
With which you’ll unlock her heart in its frame.”
I stopped. There was more than one word with a double meaning in that riddle.
You’llfind the key underfoot of the game.
It wasn’t referring to the games we played at Birch House. They were a diversion. It must have referred to term for the wild animals that had been hunted by Lord Tottenham.Gameanimals. Why had I not seen that before? We had played so many other games, I had wrongly assumed that they were what the riddle referred to.
I paused to gather my racing thoughts, walking back to the pile of letters on my bed. It all made sense now. I was closer to the prize than I had ever been before. It was nearly midnight, but it couldn’t wait until the next day. I hadn’t received an invitation to the midnight parlor game that night. With any luck, Octavia and Victoriahadbeen invited, and wouldn’t be able to search for their clue until the next morning.
I couldn’t waste another moment.
My hand shook as I picked up the candle beside my bed and slipped into the corridor.
CHAPTER 19
ALEXANDER
The painting on the drawing room ceiling was blurry. I had been staring at it for too long. The other guests had all retired for the evening, but I hadn’t moved from my place on the settee. The minutes had been passing, but my mind was still frozen at ten o’clock. I had kissed Anne. She had run away.
