Cecilia gasped. “But that’s awful, Amy!”
“It is,” Amy agreed with a sigh. “First poor Lady Darlington dies, thenIsabella’s mother goes away, and then her nursemaid turns out to be a thief. All of them gone, one after the next, just like that.” Amy snapped her fingers.
Cecilia glanced atIsabella, tucked so sweetly into her bed, and a tiny fissure opened in her heart. She was no stranger to tragedy, having lost her parents in a fire when she was four. She only remembered them in broken images, or in traces she caught here and there of familiar scents. She did remember the miserable years she’d spent in London at the Foundling Hospital, and later, trying to dig a living from the muddy depthsof the Thames.
If it hadn’t been for Lady Clifford, she’d likely be dead by now. Cecilia was tremendously grateful to her, but as much as she loved Lady Clifford, there’d always been an ache inside her, a blank space where her memories of her parents should have been. She hated to thinkIsabellawas destined to suffer thatsame emptiness.
Amy tutted. “You get on to bed now, Cecilia. Youlook done in.”
Cecilia rose unsteadily to her feet. “Yes, all right. Good night, Amy.”
Amy patted her arm. “Good night.”
Cecilia closed the door quietly behind her and made her way down the hallway toward the other side of Lady Darlington’s bedchamber, where her own little room was, her head spinning with a thousand thoughtsand questions.
What had happened to Lord Darlington’s elder brother, and why did Lord Darlington refuse to let anyone enter his late wife’s bedchamber?
Today had brought more questions than answers.
Cecilia let out a weary sigh as she stripped off her clothing, hurried into her night rail and dove under the covers, shivering. She couldn’t understand why such a tiny chamber as this should be so unaccountably cold. It was hardly bigger than a closet, but despite her thick coverlet and the blazing fire in the grate, her feet and the tip of her nose were half frozen.
But exhaustion caught up with her despite the cold, and before long her limbs relaxed and her breathing deepened. She was just tumbling off into the oddest dream, where she and Lord Darlington were singing “The Irish Girl” to Isabella, with Cecilia enthroned on Lord Darlington’s knee, when a peculiar sound startled her awake.
It sounded like…scratching? Like fingernails on wood. She struggled up onto one elbow and listened, but all she heard was the crackling of the fire. Cecilia waited, her ears perked for the strange noise, but the silence stretched on, and soon enough she settled back against her pillow. Her eyelids grew heavy once again, but just as she was aboutto drift off…
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
She opened her eyes and turned her head slowly toward the sound, her heart pounding. It was coming from the other side of the connecting door, the one that led from the lady’s maid’s closet into…
The Marchioness of Darlington’s bedchamber.
A bedchamber that had remained locked since the marchioness had met her mysterious and untimely end there. A bedchamber no one had dared enter since her death, on orders of the Marquessof Darlington.
If you disobey me in this, you will be sent away from the castle immediately.
It wasn’t a loud noise, only a faint scratching. Cecilia wasn’t certain why she’d noticed it at all, unless it was that one didn’t expect to hear such a sound from an empty bedchamber. She huddled into a ball, drew her knees up to her chest, and tugged the coverlet over her head. She squeezed her eyes closed, blocked her ears with her fingers, and ordered herself to go to sleep.
It didn’t work.
No sooner had she closed her eyes than she was awake again, every muscle in her body pulling tight. That sound—
Yes, there it was again!
There was no mistaking that distinctive scratching, as if something had been locked behind a wooden door, and was clawing feeblyto be let out.
Something, or someone.
Chapter Six
It was nothing. Of course, it was nothing, just a figment of her imagination—
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
A disturbingly clear, persistent, and distinctive figment, but a figment, nonetheless. She wasn’t going to let a figment frighten her off, was she?
Cecilia swallowed, then eased the coverlet aside, and paused by the bed. A shudder rolled over her and goosebumps chased up and down her arms, but she took a breath, rushed across the room, and pressed her ear bravely against the door.
Shedidn’tbelieve in ghosts, no matter if all of Edenbridge swore they’d seen the Marchioness of Darlington’s phantom floating through the woods behind Darlington Castle, here to wreak vengeance on the husband who’d sent her toan early grave.
