Page 45 of A Dark and Stormy Knight
Pru would lie awake and listen to him putter about behind the locked doors. Sometimes it sounded as though he’d brought his enemies home to grapple with them in the middle of the night and she’d burn to know what he was about.
He’d be gone before she awoke.
She never saw him. They never spoke. But she knew her husband kept apprised of her. That the staff, meager as it was, updated him on her well-being.
After a particularly restless night where she’d vomited until the wee hours, she’d been presented an effervescent drink by the thin, birdlike cook at the lonely breakfast table.
“From the master,” the woman had told her. “To settle your ills.”
She’d not even been able to stomach her usual breakfast of toast that morning, but the moment the ginger ale had fizzed its way down her throat and spread relief in her belly, she’d thanked the stars for him.
The gesture, tiny as it was, had touched her.
He cared.
More likely about the baby rather than her, but even so. She wasn’t surprised, per se. She remembered his deference the night they’d been lovers. The tempering of his strength. The tenderness of his touch. The attentiveness to her pleasure.
To dwell on it now would drive her deeper toward madness.
A tray had appeared in her parlor, and upon it she found little treasures almost every morning. A furniture catalogue. A card of information for a staff employment company. Clothing patterns and collections for infants from which she could order.
She’d never had to send for her things from her father’s house, workmen had simply arrived and collected her. She’d gone to her parents’ house in her husband’s fine carriage, finding them conspicuously absent, and had gathered what belonged to her.
And a few things that didn’t.
They’d moved and unpacked her entire life without her having to so much as lift a finger.
Chief Inspector Sir Carlton Morley did just about everything around the house…
Except sleep. Or eat. Or live.
She might as well reside in a crypt for all the interaction she had. Ester, Lucy, and the footman, Bart, were polite but disinclined to break the barrier between mistress of the house and staff, regardless of her clumsy attempts. They treated her with careful suspicion, and in the moments they weren’t aware of her regard, open disapproval.
Mercy and Felicity had sent word that they were only allowed to call around once per week.
There’d been no word from Honoria. And Pru had not spoken to Amanda since that day in Hyde Park. All her other acquaintances assumed she’d escaped her despair to Italy.
But no. It was right here. Screaming at her through the silence and loneliness that pressed her down from all sides as she stood between two locked doors.
Dammit. She’d had enough.
Prudence waited until Ester had gone out to the market, and went below stairs to pilfer the master set of keys from their hook in the pantry. She’d done this before, on day three, and discovered that none of the master keys matched the locks for the two mysterious doors.
Morley probably kept them upon his person.
The master set did, however, grant her access to his office.
Out of respect for her husband, she’d not disturbed the room past a curious peek that day. What if he somehow discovered that she’d snooped? She’d no desire to incur his wrath.
Today she was past caring. She needed a diversion. She needed toknow.
It took her an hour and a half of rifling through his office to find what she’d somehow suspected would be there. He was so tidy for a man, so orderly, so comprehensively methodical. If he thought of everything, then he’d keep in the house just exactly what she’d been searching for.
Spare keys.
They’d been tucked into a file of legal papers in a drawer marked “security.”
Clever.
