Page 17 of A Scandal In July
“Wait here,” he whispered. “I’ll go and open the other door.”
He stepped away, and could hear him scrabbling around, and then a shaft of light illuminated the tunnel as he opened another small door ahead of him. He climbed out, and Lenore followed, accepting his hand as she straightened.
The scent of fresh straw and the contented whicker of horses indicated he’d been right about where the tunnel led—they were in the empty last stall in the large Trellech stables—but Lenore sent him a confused look.
“Why are we here? There weren’t any clues about horses or stables.”
Rhys grinned, his teeth flashing white. “One should always take the opportunity to harass the opposition. In the army, we used to all sorts of things to disrupt the French supply lines. We’d steal their artillery, pilfer their food, and bribe the locals to give them false directions. If we knew they were following us, we’d remove all the road signs to make it harder for them to figure out where they were on a map.”
“Brilliant! But I’m assuming your siblings already know their way around here without any kind of signage.”
“They do, but if they were planning to make their way to the lake and the boat house on horseback, we can slow them down.” He peered over the wooden stall divider to make sure no grooms were loitering about, then strode over to the wall that contained the tack, including saddles, bridles and reins.
“Quick, come and help me.”
He hefted a saddle from its hook and placed it on the floor, next to a huge mound of clean hay. “We’ll put some of the saddles under this hay, and hide all the bridles in the tunnel. They won’t know where to look.”
Lenore grinned as she scooped up an armful of hay and used it to conceal the saddles he placed on the straw-covered ground.
She loved being his partner in crime. She’d pulled equally silly tricks on Caro and Lucy in her time, and that fact that Rhys obviously had a mischievous streak of his own was delightful.
A sense of humor was an absolute necessity in a man, in her opinion, and one of the reasons she’d rejected so many suitors over the years was because most men she’d encountered were either sadly lacking in any kind of light-heartedness, or, on the other end of the scale, found humor in the most childish of things, like passing wind in public places, and pushing people into puddles.
“There.” Rhys clapped his hands, then lifted an assortment of bridles and reins from the hooks and gestured to her to re-enter the secret passageway. She did so, lifting her skirts so they wouldn’t get too dusty, and he closed the door behind him—not a moment too soon.
Morgan and Harriet entered the stables with one of the Trellech grooms, and Rhys let out a gleeful little snort as he placed the leather straps on the ground at his feet, then followed Lenore back out into the paneled hallway and shut the little door with a click.
“Mission accomplished!” he crowed. “Now, let’s get some flags. I think should forget about trying to find Geoffrey and the other peacocks. Carys always has much better luck in finding her animals, because they actuallylikeher. Geoffrey’s given me a wide berth ever since I chased him off with a broomstick a few years ago. We could waste hours looking for him, and the other peacocks could be anywhere on the grounds.”
“Agreed. We’d be better to concentrate on the flags we have a decent chance of finding. There was that clue about a clock. How do we get up to that clock-tower you mentioned?”
“There’s a trap door in the east wing, but first we should try the library, since we didn’t find anything in the one at Newstead.”
He led her along the hall, past a billiard room, and into a library with a huge, vaulted ceiling and a fireplace big enough to roast an ox.
“Right. Get to work.”
They both searched high and low, with Lenore even looking under the large celestial globes and Rhys climbing up the rolling ladders to peer along the top of the uppermost shelves, but there was no sign of a flag.
“Someone’s found it,” Rhys grumbled, dusting his hands. “Either that, or it was in the library back at Newstead and someone else beat us to it.”
Lenore shrugged. “Or Caro was lying when she said it wasn’t there. That’s more likely. She’s a devious thing. The clock, then?”
“This way.”
Chapter Nine
Lenore looked around with undisguised interest as Rhys led her up an impressive carved wooden staircase, with snarling lions guarding the newel posts at the bottom of each banister.
Ancient tapestries and suits of armor vied for position with gorgeous paintings and elegant gilt furniture, none of which matched, but which somehow managed to give the impression of being the perfect eclectic combination.
The place was a hodgepodge of at least six centuries, with sections built on top of one another, and little thought to aesthetic harmony. One draughty stone corridor had glazed arrow slits for windows, while another, far more comfortable, had huge panes of leaded glass giving picture-prefect views over the rolling green hills beyond the walls.
Lenore had seen all manner of interesting architectural styles in her travels and had stayed in everything from mud huts to royal palaces, but nowhere had been quite so eccentric nor as interesting as Trellech. It made her glad that Rhys’s childhood here had been just as unusual as her own.
She’dloveto live somewhere like this.
They passed a whole wing of bedrooms—she spied an ancient four-poster through a door that had been left ajar—and her heart leapt at the thought that one of them might be Rhys’s.