Page 40 of To Swoon and to Spar
As yet.
The house was deserted, all the servants long abed, candles extinguished. The small circle of light provided by the candle Penvale carried only allowed them to see a couple of feet before them, leading to the unnerving feeling that they were walking into some sort of dark labyrinth, one with unknown dangers ahead. Which was absurd, since the only dangers Penvale expected to encounter were perhaps a pair of servants with too much time on their hands.
And a baby? Where the hell did they get a baby, of all things?
Although common sense urged him to do otherwise, Penvale recalled the conversation he’d had with Jane and Mrs. Ash about the mysterious christening gown in his uncle’s bed. His imagination took this as a sign that it had been given free rein, and he envisioned all sorts of ghostly baby apparitions wafting around the halls of Trethwick Abbey by night, wailing ghostly baby wails.
He was feeling a bit nervy.
Beneath his foot, a floorboard gave a particularly loudcreakand Penvale jumped as though he’d heard a gunshot.
Jane regarded him with an expression he could only honestly describe as vaguely patronizing.
And then: a wail.
He set off at a brisk pace in the direction from which he thought it had come; they had made their way to the opposite wing of the second floor from their bedrooms, which was where they had gone on their fruitless chase a few nights earlier. He thought the baby’s wails might have been coming from the far corner of the floor, where Jane’s morning room was—it received lovely morning sunlight, and Jane had once remarked that she felt rather like a cat basking in the sun when she was curled up in the window seat reading. Penvale, more charmed by this image than he cared to examine—or even fully admit—had filed away this description in the mental dossier he was keeping on his wife, one which grew fatter and more distracting by the day.
The cry had stopped as abruptly as it had started, and the only sounds were his footsteps on the floor, the whisper of Jane’s dressing gown against the floorboards. Penvale halted outside the morning room, listening intently. “It came from here, didn’t it?” he asked Jane, shutting his eyes and listening hard.
“I… I think so,” she whispered, and he cracked an eye open tosee that she was leaning forward slightly, her gaze focused ahead, though Penvale couldn’t guess what might have her attention, given their limited pool of candlelight. “It sounded… terriblyreal,didn’t it?” she asked softly, and he detected a note of unease in her voice that mirrored the feeling creeping up his spine. He was forcefully aware of how little they could see of their surroundings, just the two of them and a candle in this enormous, dark, empty house. He was suddenly conscious of the remoteness of the house, set atop a windswept cliff, surrounded by snowdrifts, even the small comforts of the nearest village as unreachable as the moon.
“It did,” he said, equally softly, and at that moment the baby—or whatever the hell it was—let out another unnerving wail, this one so close that Penvale knew, beyond a doubt, if he were to reach out and seize the doorknob just to his right, open the door to the morning room, he would find it within.
Jane beat him to it. She took two hasty steps forward and flung the door open.
As one, they peered into the dark room—it was brighter here than it had been in the hallway, thanks to the large window above the very seat that Jane was so fond of, through which moonlight spilled into the room. Not seeing any evidence of a person, Penvale took a step forward, Jane clutching his arm. Was he imagining it, or had her grip tightened? In the combination of moonlight and candlelight, the room appeared full of hulking shadows, which, upon drawing near, vanished to reveal pieces of furniture. They made a slow circuit of the room, finding no evidence of any presence, ghostly or otherwise.
Penvale had a strange sensation, however, of being watched. The hairs along the back of his neck rose, as if there were a pair of eyes on him, and he turned sharply, holding his candle before him, its meagerlight revealing nothing but a settee against the far wall, bracketed on either end by a pair of mismatched end tables, atop one of which teetered a stack of books.
“What is it?” Jane breathed, as if she, too, sensed some strange other presence within the room that she was hesitant to disturb.
Penvale shook his head and, without fully realizing what he was doing, tugged Jane closer to his side, so that he could feel the soft press of the side of her breast against his arm.Nota terribly helpful thing to notice at the moment, it must be said, but… well.
Well.
He led her toward the window seat and sank down upon it, drawing Jane down next to him, and leaned back against the cold pane of glass, his gaze alert on the room before him.
All was quiet and still. After a minute or so of contemplation of his surroundings, he felt Jane’s eyes on the side of his face, and he turned to look at her. He opened his mouth to ask if she detected anything amiss, but before he could do so, a rending wail split the silence.
Jane jumped as badly as he did this time, her breath coming in great uneven gasps that matched the pounding of his pulse. As one, they hopped to their feet, making for the north-facing wall, where the noise had originated from.
There was absolutely nothing obviously amiss.
Penvale spent a good deal of time scrutinizing that stretch of wall, searching for something—anything—that might explain why he’d just heard a baby’s cry as loud and clear as if it were in the room with them. But there was nothing visible that suggested that the wall was anything other than a wall.
By this point, the clock above the fireplace was chiming the one o’clock hour, Jane was stifling a yawn, and Penvale was growing tooweary to care if there was an entire nursery’s worth of invisible crying babies. In unspoken agreement, they retreated from the room, back down the corridor, and to the western wing, not speaking until they were within the warmth and comfort of Penvale’s bedchamber. Jane removed her dressing gown, neatly laying it across the tufted bench at the foot of the bed, while Penvale—without even sparing a thought for her maidenly virtue—removed banyan, breeches,andnightshirt until he was wearing nothing but his smalls, a sight which caused Jane’s eyes to momentarily widen as she glanced over at him while climbing into bed. He followed suit, settling down and extinguishing his candle, and rolling over to face her just as she rolled to face him, so that they wound up a bit closer together than either of them had likely intended, only a few inches of bedsheet separating their faces.
Penvale looked at her, her features slowly coming into focus as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. A stubborn lock of dark hair had fallen onto her cheek, and without thinking—without even realizing what he was doing, as if his hand had a mind of its own and was inexorably drawn toward her skin like a magnet—he reached out and tucked that strand of hair behind her ear.
His hand grazed her cheek as he withdrew it, and her eyes were wide on his as she let out an exhale that was notquitesteady. Somehow, it was only the sound of that slightly unsteady exhalation that made him realize he was holding his own breath.
His hand burned where it had touched her skin.
“Where did the noise come from, Jane?” he asked, his voice soft.
“I don’t know,” she replied.
He held her gaze as if searching for something, some answer, though he couldn’t have said what it was. He believed her.
