Page 76 of The Affairs of Ashmore Castle (Ashmore Castle #2)

‘How can you bear to leave him? Oh, I’m sorry, that was rude. I didn’t mean to be – but when I think of my little Louis . . .’

‘It’s getting harder to leave him,’ Mary admitted.

‘I don’t care much for little babies, but he’s getting to be more interesting now, and I do miss him when we’re away.

But he’s always so glad when we come back, and wants to hear all about our finds.

He wants to be an archaeologist too, when he grows up.

In the summer, he did a very neat excavation of the kitchen refuse heap, and laid out all the bones very nicely. ’

Giles, while listening and responding to Talbot, watched Mary talking to Kitty, and thought how wonderful it must be to have a wife who was everything to you in that way – a constant companion who shared your passions and your thoughts.

Mary was lovely and bright and well-educated, and quite fearless on their trips: Talbot was fond of telling how they had been set upon by brigands once, and she had scared them away by firing her rifle over their heads.

He joked that if they hadn’t turned tail, the next shots would have been at their heads.

She was the sort of woman one met only once in a lifetime.

Giles thought of Nina. He imagined she would have relished the challenge of a nomadic life, too.

If only he hadn’t inherited his father’s bankrupt estate, and the responsibility thereof, he might have had a life like Talbot’s.

‘William’s back,’ Wilfrid reported to Mr Moss as he darted past with a pile of dirty plates for the scullery. ‘He’s just come in the lobby.’

‘Is he indeed?’ Moss said and, with untypically rapid steps made his way to the rear lobby, where William was just taking off his coat, his back to the butler.

‘Where have you been?’ Moss demanded.

William turned. His face was white, with a long, nasty-looking scratch down one cheek. His hair was dishevelled, and either he had dirt round one eye, or the beginnings of a black one.

‘What the dickens have you been up to?’ Moss exclaimed, diverted from the simpler question. ‘Have you been fighting?’

Fighting was a sacking offence.

‘No,’ said William woodenly. He seemed in a state of shock.

‘Well?’ Moss demanded. ‘Answer me! What have you been doing?’

William swallowed. ‘I – I fell down.’

‘ Fell down? ’

‘I slipped, going down the hill. It’s muddy. I fell into a ditch.’ He put his hand up nervously to his face.

Moss caught the hand to examine it. There were scratches across the back. ‘What’s this?’

‘Getting out of the ditch. I kept slipping. Couldn’t find anything to hold on to.’ He was talking almost as though hypnotised. ‘I must’ve – got tangled in some briars.’

Moss reverted to the principal point. ‘Where have you been? It is not your evening off. How dare you leave the house without permission?’

‘I – I got a message,’ he said, staring at nothing. ‘My ma – she had one of her turns. I had to go. She’s all right though. She was better by the time I got there. But it could’ve been bad.’

‘What message? Who brought it? Where is it?’

‘Not writ down. A boy came,’ he said. ‘A neighbour sent him. Said it was urgent. I had to go, Mr Moss. My ma, she gets these turns. Anything could happen. That’s why the neighbour sent for me. And then, and then, coming back in the dark, I slipped on the path and went into a ditch.’

‘You should have asked permission,’ Moss said. ‘In such a case, an exception can be made. I am not an unreasonable man.’

‘No, Mr Moss.’

‘But you do not walk out of the house without telling anyone. There was an important dinner tonight. You put everyone to a considerable deal of trouble. I shall have to think carefully about what punishment is appropriate. Go and get cleaned up, now. And see Mrs Webster about that scratch on your face. That’s all we need,’ he added angrily to himself, ‘another footman who can’t appear upstairs! ’

‘What’s that?’ William said vaguely, putting his hand up to his cheek.

‘Pull yourself together!’ Moss said irritably. ‘Anyone would think you’d been knocked stupid.’ Tears gathered in William’s eyes. ‘And don’t you dare start crying!’

‘Sorry, Mr Moss,’ William muttered, and wandered off, head down.

Kitty sent Hatto away, and went to look out of the window for a moment. The wind had blown the small clouds into elongated strands of silver fleece; above them, the cold moon polished the sky around it. It was almost bright enough to read by.

Then Giles came in, and crossed the room to stand behind her. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

Kitty turned her head to look at him, and smiled, delighted by his presence – he had not visited her bed for a long time – but a little apprehensive.

He had come in before dinner, too, which looked more like having something on his mind.

Something he had not felt able to tell her at the first attempt.

But she wasn’t going to waste an opportunity. She turned on the spot and put herself into his arms. He closed his round her absently, his mind obviously elsewhere, so she stretched up on tiptoe and kissed him on the lips.

He kissed her back, and then looked down at her quizzically. ‘What’s all this?’

‘If you’ve forgotten, I can remind you,’ she said. ‘Come to bed.’

Long ago, on their honeymoon, her directness, so surprising in someone usually so diffident, had excited him. It did so again. He felt his body stirring in a familiar, half-forgotten way. ‘You shameless wanton,’ he said.

‘I am, aren’t I? You used to call me your little pagan.’

‘Oh, Kitty!’ he said. It was half laughing, half sad.

But he let her draw him to the bed, and once in, stretched against her warm softness, his instincts took over.

His body, long neglected for things of the mind, wanted its way, and she responded to him so passionately that he was carried away on a flood of sensation.

Afterwards, he made as if to get up, and she tightened her arms round him and said, ‘Don’t go. Stay with me – stay all night.’

‘You are a wanton.’

‘I love you.’

The words broke the spell. He felt the chains fastening round him – like her arms, like her touch, soft as cobweb, strong enough to choke him.

Her curly head was under his chin, her warm body curled bonelessly into his.

She had always made it easy for him, not demanding anything of him, seeming happy with her own little circle of life, her own concerns.

But she loved him, and that love was another burden.

He was tangled in responsibility, like a wild creature caught in a wire, so that even to struggle against it was to hurt himself.

‘Kitty,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said; and he knew from the tone of that one word that she had guessed why he had come to her room before dinner, why he had come back again. She knew, and her knowing was coals of fire.

‘I’m going to Egypt,’ he said. At the last minute, he didn’t say, ‘I want to go,’ because that would have been to suggest she could argue him out of it, and he didn’t want to prolong her pain.

In the long, long silence that followed he could almost hear her going through the arguments and pleas inside her mind, and rejecting them all. She knew why he had phrased it that way. In the end, what she asked was, ‘How long for?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. Her kindness hurt.

He wished she could have been angry. ‘A few months.’ She digested that in silence.

‘Markham can look after everything. And Richard – it will do him good to take responsibility. They can run the estate between them.’ She said nothing, but as if she had protested, he cried softly, ‘I’m suffocating here!

I can’t help it, Kitty. I feel as if I can’t breathe. I have to go.’

‘When?’ she asked in a small voice.

‘Soon,’ he said. ‘Next week.’

She said nothing for such a long time that he thought she had fallen asleep, until she nudged closer, pushing her body into him.

He stroked her head enquiringly, and she lifted her face to be kissed.

And kissing, she caught fire, and her passion lit his, and they made love again; more slowly this time, as though they had been told it was the last time.

‘Here’s a queer thing,’ Richard said in the morning at breakfast. He’d cornered Giles at the sideboard and spoke quietly, so the Arthurs would not hear. ‘My man’s gone missing.’

‘Missing?’

‘Went out last evening and didn’t come back. I had to undress myself. Didn’t bother to ring as it was late. But this morning, in comes old Crooks with my shaving water, looking very furtive, and says no one knows where Speen is.’

Giles frowned in thought, taking his time over silver tongs and kidneys. ‘Does he drink?’

‘Oh, I’m sure he does. Crooks mumbled something about the Dog and Gun – that’s where the male servants go on their evenings off.’

‘Well, he probably got drunk and went to sleep in a barn or something,’ Giles said. ‘He’ll come back with a sore head. But we’ll sort it all out later, when Talbot and Mary have gone.’

The carriage had departed for the station, the females of the household had withdrawn, and Giles summoned Moss before himself, Richard and Sebastian.

Moss was almost wringing his hands. He knew this was a judgement on his running of the below-stairs. His authority there ought to be absolute. That someone had flouted it so obviously – and in such a way that the Family had to know – diminished him.

‘But where was he going?’ Giles asked impatiently.

‘No one knows, my lord. I don’t think anyone actually saw him leave.’

‘So he could still be in the house?’ said Richard.

‘I have, of course, undertaken a search. He is nowhere on the premises.’

‘Speaking of premises: did he go to the pub?’

Moss’s eyes slithered away. ‘There is some talk that he went to the Dog and Gun, my lord, but when he did not return this morning, I took the liberty of sending a boy over there, and the landlord says he did not see Speen there last night.’

Richard looked at Giles. ‘Well, that’s the most likely scenario scotched.’