“You were wrong too!” Hilda pointed out, whisper abandoned in favor of bluster as she took a step toward Mavis. Glancing at each other nervously, Amelia and Caleb attempted to lean even farther backward, despite the solid wood behind them—
CREAK.
Suddenly, the wall at their backs disappeared as someone yanked open what was evidently a secret door.“Stop being so nois—”began an irate demand that was cut off when Amelia and Caleb stumbled backward, colliding with the speaker. A tumult of voices and limbs ensued, ending horizontally on thefloor. Dazed, Amelia looked up through streaks of her hair to see Mavis’s embarrassed face.
“Oops, sorry, knocked in the wrong place,” the woman said.
“We need to mark it better,” Hilda added.
“Then it wouldn’t be a secret door,” pointed out the woman currently lying beneath Amelia. She shoved and wriggled, and Amelia hastily clambered up as Caleb did the same beside her.
“Are you all right?” he asked, touching her face, tidying her hair. Amelia did not have time to answer before a familiar voice whipped sharply between them.
“What areyoudoing here?!”
Turning, clutching hands again automatically, Amelia and Caleb faced the dramatic and rather bewildering sight of Lady Ruperta enthroned like the Queen of the Dead upon an elegant and overtly expensive mahogany chair (Chippendale, cabriole legs, eighteenth century,Amelia estimated) at the center of some five other senior ladies, all of whom were seated on velveteen chaise lounges of lesser value. Amelia thought back to the murmured voices she’d heard at various times inside the house walls and realized they were not ghosts after all but a secret society of women lurking in the darkness.
Although it wasn’t actually darkness. The chamber they occupied was in fact a cozy, chintz-papered salon, warmly illuminated by lamplight. Potted ferns, gilded mirrors, and several portraits of female nudes decorated the space. Delicate melodies drifted through the exotically scented air from a music box in one corner. On a side table, plush iced cakes, doughnuts, and biscuits quickly became the focus of Amelia’s interest, considering the last thing she’d eaten was half a sardine hors d’oeuvre, more than an hour ago.
Altogether the scene seemed vaguely risqué, despite the fact that the women were not only dressed in sturdy woolens and gum boots but also busily working on knitting projects. The only exception to this was Lady Ruperta, in whose hands rested a small gilded book.
“We caught these two in the field,” Mavis announced.
“We were organizing the combustibles when they appeared,” Hilda said. “Magic was triggered somehow, and they got caught in it.”
“Then they found a necklace,” Hilda added. “We couldn’t risk them giving it back tohim.”
“So we brought them here,” Mavis concluded.
Lady Ruperta slammed shut her book. Amelia glimpsed the title,Poems of Sappho, and felt a belated curiosity about her hostess.
“I told you to not go outside, Professors,” Lady Ruperta growled. “You could have been killed.” Judging from the tone of her voice, this option remained on the table.
“It was all my fault,” Caleb said, as he always did when the two of them were brought up in front of authority for some misdeed or another. Then he paused, shrugged, and gave Lady Ruperta a look sorealthat Amelia’s nerves tingled. For a moment, he stopped being her Caleb and became instead a mystery, a man with connections to other people that didn’t include her. She couldn’t decide if she felt intrigued or upset by it. Lady Ruperta, on the other hand, watched him with narrowed eyes, seeing whatever it was that Amelia could not.
“Actually, no, it wasn’t my fault,” he contradicted himself suddenly, all the endearing charm stripped from his voice. “Vanity Tunnicliffe stole something belonging to us. We weretrying to get it back when the locket’s enchantment caught us.” He angled his head to regard Lady Ruperta thoughtfully. “Why have you buried your husband’s treasures outside?”
A gasp went through the salon at this question, followed by taut silence as everyone waited for Lady Ruperta to inflict some violent punishment on Caleb for his impertinence. It was not so much his words that had been bold, but the sense beneath them that he understood something about her on a more personal level than a stranger—a man—ought to.
Then Lady Ruperta huffed a dry laugh. “Because I could not bury my husband there,” she said in simple response.
Clack clack. Knitting needles began operating at speed, like a Greek chorus that utilized yarn instead of words.
“He is a villain of the most dangerous kind,” Lady Ruperta continued.
“What has he done?” Caleb asked.
“He has been dull, and stodgy, without the slightest portion of humor.”
Caleb’s expression wavered between confusion and amusement. “That is unpleasant indeed,” he agreed, “but not what I would call dangerous.”
Nine pairs of female eyes raised heavenward in despair at this ignorance, including Amelia’s. Had the man not listened during secondary school lectures about the English Civil War and the Puritans who murdered the king, despite being so dull and stodgy they even banned Christmas? (Actually, no, he hadn’t.)
“Sure, I wouldn’t want to be married to him,” he amended, “but…?”
“Nigel was considered an excellent husband for me,” Lady Ruperta said. “Wealthy, titled, unlikely to take mistresses. Idisliked him from the start, but that was of no consequence. My family needed money, and he wanted someone to manage his house. So he acquired me like an antique.”
“You could leave him,” Caleb said.
