Page 82 of Exile's Return

Agnes fixed the girl with a hard stare. ‘I will answer to Mistress Turner. I have the consent of the children’s guardian to spend some time alone with them. Go.’

Mumbling to herself, the nursery maid left the room, no doubt in search of Leah Turner.

At once the atmosphere lightened. Henry ran to Agnes, almost tripping over his skirts in his haste. She took him in her arms and held him tight, pressing her face into his soft, downy head until he began to squirm. Lizzie set her needlework down and, with more dignity than Henry, crossed the floor to Agnes’s embrace.

‘Are you staying, Aunt Agnes?’ Lizzie asked.

‘I’m just here on a very short visit,’ she said.

‘You’re not coming back to live here?’ Henry’s lower lip began to tremble.

‘Not for a little while,’ Agnes replied, conscious that her smile lacked conviction.

‘But you will come back?’ Lizzie insisted.

Agnes looked into the girl’s knowing eyes. ‘I can’t make promises, Lizzie,’ she said. ‘Believe me when I say this is not my doing.’

Lizzie pouted. ‘No, it’s Cousin Tobias. He wants Father’s title.’

‘Lizzie! You will not speak ill of Cousin Tobias. He is your legal guardian.’ She smiled. ‘I’m here now. Shall we play a game?’

‘A game? But Mistress Turner has forbidden—’ Lizzie began.

‘Mistress Turner is not here and she does not need to know.’

‘Spillikins?’ suggested Henry.

‘How about hide and go seek?’ Agnes said. ‘I will count to fifty and you two must hide somewhere in this room.’

The children grinned at her.

Agnes covered her eyes and began to count. She smiled at the sound of giggling and the children’s feet pattering on the floorboards.

‘No, Henry, you can’t hide with me,’ she heard Lizzie whisper.

‘Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty…coming, ready or not!’ Agnes said.

The entrance to the hidden cavity had to be concealed somewhere in the wall adjoining the room next door, a wall lined with heavy oak panelling of some age and covered in a large, moth-eaten tapestry of Noah’s Ark. She wondered if Tobias in his searching had even thought of looking in the children’s nursery. As she contemplated the length of the wall, she hoped it would not take her too long to find.

‘Are you hiding?’ she called out and was rewarded by Henry’s squeak from behind the bed hangings.

She made a show of searching out the two children, finding Lizzie hiding under the bed. They both pretended to be stumped about Henry’s whereabouts, despite the shoes peeping out from beneath the hangings and the barely stifled chuckles.

The children begged her to play again, which she was happy to do. After the third round, Lizzie looked up at her with a frown.

‘Why do you keep looking at the tapestry?’ she said. ‘I won’t hide there. That’s where the ghost lives.’

Agnes blinked. The ghost? It was the first she’d heard of a ghost — at least in this part of the house.

‘When did you see the ghost?’ she asked, trying to keep her voice neutral.

Lizzie frowned in concentration. ‘A long time ago…before Father went to London. It was summer and I was hot in the bed, so I had pulled back the curtain a little way.’

‘What did you see?’

‘A man all in black. He walked straight through that wall.’ Lizzie pointed melodramatically at the tapestry.

‘Were you scared?’ Agnes asked.