Lady Leanora as the evil villainess didn’t quite fall into place, yet Cecilia’s brain had seized on it with a familiar dogged determination born of instinct. She couldn’t let it go. Her hands were shaking as she rose from her chair and replaced the book on the shelf. She hurried down the deserted corridor, surprised to find she’d been in the library for hours, and the afternoon was waning.
The stillroom was through an arched door off the back of the kitchen and down a narrow stone hallway that let out onto the kitchen garden. Cecilia had never ventured inside it. Given the shortage of servants, no one seemed to make much use of it anymore, but Lady Leanora would have been mistress of it in the years she’d been the ladyof the castle.
It was much like every other stillroom Cecilia had ever seen, but bigger and grander, with a large stone fireplace at one end, and a huge cabinet made up of neat little drawers and topped with a counter that ran the entire length of one wall. Beside the counter was a long table with a dusty wooden top, likely put there for mixing herbs.
There was no window, but the beamed ceilings were high, to help disperse any smoke from the kitchens, and dried herbs were hung from the beams. Cecilia reached up to pinch a few leaves from one of the bundles. She crumbled the leaves between her fingers, raised them to her nose, and inhaled the woody scent of rosemary.
She wandered to the cabinet, opened a few of the drawers, and peered inside. Fennel, sage, comfrey—the usual herbs one would expect to find in a stillroom. Another drawer held bunches of lavender wrapped in silk and tied with string, sachets for scenting drawers or closets, and a few bottles lined up on the counter held lavender oil, the scent faded now.
There was nothing unusual or sinister in any of it. Even if she did find pennyroyal, it wouldn’t prove anything. According to Culpeper, it had a number of perfectly innocent medicinal uses, and many households favored an herb with such a strong scent of spearmint for use in soap.
Cecilia turned in a circle, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. The stillroom fire hadn’t been lit in months, but for a room right off the kitchen it was colder thanit should be.
The draft was coming from this side of the room. The temperature here was at least a degree or two colder than the side closest to the kitchen. Not so surprising, perhaps, given all the cooking that took place there, yet Cassandra’s bedchamber was cold in this same drafty way, as if a window or door had been left open. But where? There was no window in this room, and only the one door—
She crossed to the door that led out into the kitchen garden, thinking the draft must be coming from there, but a quick inspection revealed it to be locked and tightly sealed. Well, perhaps it wasn’t all that mysterious. Castles were drafty places. She turned from the door with a sigh and made her way back across the stillroom toward the kitchen.
That was when she saw it. Hidden in a shallow alcove in the darkest and coldest part of the room was a stack of wooden boxes containing messy piles of glass jars,and behind it…
Behind it was the edge of a door. Only the merest sliver of it was visible—if she’d blinked, she would have missed it. She approached the stack of wooden crates, her heart pounding. They looked heavy, much too heavy for her to move them, but just as she was trying to make up her mind whether to fetch Duncan or not, she noticed the dust pattern on the floor.
Grime had accumulated over every surface in the abandoned stillroom, and the floor was no exception, but there was a wide space just in front of the boxes that was clear of dust and dirt, as if someone had shoved the crates out of the way of the door, leaving a lengthof bare floor.
Cecilia nudged her toe against the corner of one of the crates, and to her surprise, it shifted easily out of her way. A quick rummage through them soon revealed why. The jars had been carefully arranged along the tops of the crates, but underneath they were filled with sawdust and hay.
Cecilia pushed them aside just enough to slip behind them. There was a bolt lock on this side of the door, but it wasn’t bolted. Just as she went to open it, she noticed a smear of something white on the iron latch. She touched it, then rubbed the substance between her fingers and thumb. It was thick and white, and a bit sticky, rather like…
White face paint. The sort of paint ladies and gentlemen used to achieve the perfectly white skin considered fashionable some years earlier. No one had much use for it anymore, now that a more natural look had taken precedence.
Unless…
Cecilia stared down at her white fingertips, her heart rushing into her throat. Unless one was a white ghost, and then it might prove very useful, indeed.
But she didn’t have time to consider it now. She turned her attention back to the secret door. A quick twist of her wrist revealed it to be, as she’d hoped, unlocked. It creaked open, but beyond was a darkness so thick Cecilia couldn’t see a thing. It was cold, too, terribly cold, with wallsof damp stone.
It was a passageway. Cecilia’s heart pounded with dread at the thought of being trapped inside it, but she wasn’t going to turn coward now. It was so narrow and so low she was forced to duck to pass through. It seemed to her as though she crept along it for miles, but it likely wasn’t more than ten minutes before a thin line of weak lightappeared ahead.
A few dozen steps more, and she came to a steep stone staircase, and embedded in the stone ceiling above them was a wooden plank fitted with an iron ring that served as a makeshift handle. A thin strip of light peeked around the edges, and as she drew nearer, Cecilia saw it was open just a crack, and a branch stuck into the gap to keep it from slamming shut again.
Cecilia heaved it up the rest of the way, and with a little cry threw one arm up to shade her eyes. She knew at once it led outside, because the snow was still falling. The cold drops landed on the bare skin of her hands and neck, and the wind whipped her hair around her head.
It wasn’t terribly bright, the sky being dark with snow, but after the tunnel it took a few moments for Cecilia’s eyes to adjust. Once they did, she knew where she was at first glance.
She’d come out just beyond the wall that surrounded the kitchen garden. From here one could easily disappear into the rose walk without being seen, and from there to the edge of the tree line and into the woods beyond. She fell back a bit, stumbling on the step as the pieces of the puzzle clicked suddenly into place.
Of course. The mysterious lantern light weaving among the trees in the wood, the White Lady with her filmy gown, scarlet lips, and pale face, who always appeared near the tree line, and then seemed to disappear as if into thin air when she neared the kitchen garden. The Darlington Castle ghost, the specter all of Edenbridge believed to float on air and vanish at will, was making use of a secret passageway leading from the edge of the rose walk into the castle.
A secret passageway only a person who’d spent a great deal of time at Darlington Castle could possibly know about. Not Gideon, who’d only come to live here after his brother’s death.
No, someone else. Someone who knew every inch of Darlington Castle, and every hidden door leading into and out of it. Someone who was in a position to have a key to those doors, and might unlock them at will, justas she pleased.
Someone like Lady Leanora.
Cecilia swept her gaze over her surroundings again, and noticed something else.
Footprints in the snow.
Not just human footprints, but neat little paw prints, of the sort that might belong to a dainty, fastidious feline who’d found a secret way into Darlington Castle that led from the kitchen garden, past the stillroom, and straight to…
