He’d have to buy Hattie a second dressing gown, he realized. For when the weather turned colder.
He wouldn’t mind that task at all.
“Miss French!” came a panicked voice, the new head maid bursting into the dining room and startling them all into staring up at her. “My… My lord? I don’t know who to tell, but we’ve had an incident.”
“Oh, thank God for that,” Rhys muttered.
“What’s happened?” Hattie asked, half out of her chair already. “What’s the matter?”
“There’s someone upstairs!” the girl exclaimed, her face sheet white. “We were cleaning out the master suite, as we were told, of course, and… Well, someone’s up there. Someone who’s not us!”
“That’s impossible,” Malcolm Lennox said, frowning. “Unless… Has anyone brought someone else into the house tonight?”
One by one, they shook their heads.
“My girls have gone home,” Monica insisted.
“My people won’t arrive for another day or two,” Libba snapped. “Stop looking at me.”
“Why do you think there’s someone upstairs?” Errol asked, his voice soothing as he stood and ushered the young woman into his chair, moving to pour her a glass of wine. “What frightened you?”
“We heard… well, whispers, my lord,” she said, blinking her big eyes up at him with a softening in her face as she accepted the glass. “And rustling. Like people were hiding and afraid of being discovered. Spooked us all!”
“Hattie!” Elias snapped, only just realizing that she was on her way out of the room. “Where are you going?”
She startled, turning on her heel to stare at him. “There!” she said, shrill as you please. “You’ve done it again!”
He grimaced at her, pushing his chair back. “Going to fight them off with your bare hands?” he demanded. “You should let the men go up and check.”
“What men?” Rhys demanded, frowning.
“It is my room,” she reminded him, bunching her skirts into her hands and turning. “I am going.”
“God in heaven,” he muttered, flinging the chair away and scrambling after her as it clattered to the floor. “You are impossible!”
“Someone pass me the jelly?” Rhys’s voice said behind them. “What? They’re handling it.”
Elias stomped after her, annoyed with how quickly she was moving, those burnished-peach skirts of hers swishing over the floors as she clipped away from him. He wasn’t going to run. He wasn’t going to chase after her like some lovesick swain.
“Hattie!” he boomed again, his jaw aching from how badly his teeth wished to smash into one another.
“I am Hattie to you now,” she sang over her shoulder. “Harriet no more!”
“Harriet!” he corrected, grasping the banister and bounding up the stairs after her. “Slow down!”
She ignored him, marching past the piles of sheets the staff had removed from the suite, and the pianoforte that now sat in the hall.
The doors hung open, with two young women in maid uniforms retreating to the end of the hall observing them warily from the shadows. The rooms had been lit, even as the summer sun was still setting, likely in preparation for an evening of devoted cleaning.
The flamelight danced down the hall in a cacophony of combating shadows, likely doing nothing to alleviate the anxiety of the spooked cleaners.
“You may go rest,” Hattie said to them without pausing, flicking her wrist like an empress well accustomed to giving orders. “I shall see to this!”
He wondered exactly what sort of trouble he would get in for running ahead and locking her out of her own rooms.
He stopped, holding a hand up to the two servants before they could flee. “Where exactly,” he said through his teeth, “did you hear the sounds?”
“Near the bed, sir,” one maid said. “Lord. My lord. Near the bed. On the side with the wardrobe.”
