Page 39 of To Swoon and to Spar
Really, now, this was taking things a bit far, Jane thought as Penvale scrambled out of bed once more and bolted across the room to secure the windows. She hadn’t instructed them to undo the latch in the bedroom, merely the sitting room—though she supposed she could not complain if Snood had got carried away in a fit of enthusiasm for his role in this drama. Snood was not a fan of country living, as it transpired, and was most eager for his employer to return to town, where life was more civilized, and he could spend his time on the all-important task of perfecting the waterfall knot for Penvale’s cravat.
“The wind here, it ruins everything,” he’d informed Jane mournfully when she had taken him into her confidence and given him a role to play in her plan for supernatural mayhem.
“That must be… very frustrating?” she had offered, and he had given a long-suffering sort of nod, obviously gratified to have someone appreciate his tale of woe.
In any case, he had clearly become overly enthusiastic about his task, which was why Jane was lying in a bed in the middle of the night watching snowflakes blow in through the window Penvale was struggling to close. She loved snow, but she ultimately preferred it to remain outdoors.
After a moment, Penvale got the window shut and returned to bed, muttering darkly all the while. “Strangely uncooperative windows this house seems to have,” he said as he climbed back into bed; in the dark,Jane couldn’t make out his expression, but there was a wry note to his voice that set her on edge.
“Mmm,” she offered noncommittally.
He rolled over immediately and gave all appearances of having fallen back into a deep slumber, but Jane lay there studying the line of his back and the breadth of his shoulders for quite a while before sleep found her again.
Chapter Thirteen
The first night, it wasirritating. The ghostly moans, the mysteriously malfunctioning windows, the interrupted sleep—an annoyance, undoubtedly. But Penvale was capable of handling annoyances. This time a year ago, he’d have given his left foot to deal with any manner of annoyance if he could do so at Trethwick Abbey.
By the second night, it surged past irritating to downright infuriating. The snow had abated that morning, but a quick trip out to survey the state of the roads confirmed that they were well and truly snowed in. Great drifts obscured the landscape, turning it unrecognizable, the tenants’ cottages looking like little gingerbread houses beneath a layer of white. It was pretty, in its own way, if one appreciated idyllic scenes of wintertime coziness.
Which Penvale did not. Not when they were so damned inconvenient, at least.
And then, late in the afternoon, it started to snowagain,which did his mood no favors. Jane had made as if to retreat to her own bedchamber that evening, but he had wordlessly gestured her through the doorway into his—he wanted her where he could keep an eye on her, despite the purple shadows under her eyes.
Soon after they retired, the noises started: the wailing, the strangethumps from overhead (in rooms that Penvale knew perfectly well were unoccupied). He resolutely ignored all of this, though it kept him awake for the better part of the night; he was certain that if he did not offer any sort of a response, the parties responsible would eventually give up and abandon their efforts.
But it was undeniable that he spent a considerable portion of that night simmering in his own anger as he listened to the wails commence and subside and resume. He was not, as a general rule, a man prone to anger; he was, however, a man who enjoyed sleeping, and being deprived of it for two nights running was more than he could stand.
By the third night, he was beginning to grow downright unhinged. He had spent a considerable portion of the day outdoors, the snow having ceased once more and the sun even having begun to make faint, largely unsuccessful attempts to peek from behind the heavy iron clouds that scuttled across the sky. He returned home—having slogged his way through snowdrifts in the company of his steward to ensure that all the tenants were safe and warm—feeling damp, cold, and wearier than he ever had in his life. It took a lengthy bath for his toes to regain feeling—he made a mental note to acquire better boots at the earliest opportunity—and he and Jane dined largely in silence.
“For heaven’s sake, go to bed,” Jane said in exasperation before the dessert course had even arrived. “I’ll join you later,” she added, and if Penvale were a more suave, charming sort of man—if he were his brother-in-law, in other words—he would have taken this opportunity to offer some sort of sly innuendo. But he was too bloody tired to consider it, so he took himself upstairs and apparently wasted no time sinking into a deep, dreamless sleep, because he didn’t realize Jane had joined him until some indeterminate amount of time later, whenhe awoke in the pitch dark of midnight to the sound of, of all things, a baby crying.
And this—for some reason,this—was finally too much.
“Jane,” he said curtly, rolling over and prodding none too gently at the lump of sheets and blankets that contained, somewhere within, his wife.
“Mphlmph,” said the blankets.
“Jane,”he repeated more insistently, because, by God, if he had to be awake for this nonsense, so did she. He reached over and shook her by the shoulder.
Jane poked an indignant head out of her nest of sheets.“What?”she demanded, blinking at him in the dim light of the bedroom.
“There’s a baby,” he informed her shortly.
“I beg your pardon?” she asked, looking entirely—and perhaps understandably—perplexed.
“At least I presume it is a baby,” he amended, and inclined his head to the side, falling silent. They regarded each other without speaking; Jane opened her mouth to reply, but Penvale reached out a single finger to shush her, resting it against her lips. She exhaled softly, her breath warming his skin, and at that precise moment, Penvale wasn’t certain he could have moved his hand—that single index finger—if his life depended on it. She looked at him with those violet eyes, and their gazes held each other’s as silence stretched between them, growing taut with each passing second.
After nearly a minute had passed, they heard the noise again. Penvale, happily, did not consider himself to be much of an expert on babies, but he was fairly confident in his ability to identify a baby’s cry when he heard one. And that was almost certainly what he was hearing. He raised his eyebrows at Jane, who looked…
Entirely puzzled.
Penvale fought the urge to frown. He wasn’t certain what Jane knew about the events transpiring around the house, but she did not present the image of a woman who had any clue what was currently happening.
Still turning this over in his mind, he climbed out of bed, shivering slightly in the chill. He darted into his dressing room and snatched up the first pair of breeches he saw, hastily flinging them on before seizing a banyan and then returning to the bedroom to find Jane out of bed, knotting a dressing gown around her waist. She ran a distracted hand through her mussed hair, watching as he lit a candle and picked it up before approaching her to offer his arm.
“Shall we investigate our apparently haunted house, Jane?”
For all his light tone, Penvale had to admit that he was beginning to feel a bit unsettled as they quietly made their way up and down the deserted hallways of Trethwick Abbey. The house was old—very, very old—and the worn wooden floors of the corridors creaked occasionally and unpredictably, though Jane had a knack for avoiding these spots, a testament to the fact that she knew the house considerably better than Penvale did.
