Page 51 of To Swoon and to Spar
“And so you don’t try at all,” he finished, still watching her closely, his tone indicating that she was some sort of puzzle he was slowly solving.
And Jane didn’twantto be solved. She didn’t want to be treated like something to be worked out, to be understood—she just wanted to be herself.
Jane meant to make an elegant, stately departure at this juncture, but at that moment, she came to learn a truth—perhaps not universally acknowledged but undeniable all the same: It is impossible for a lady to extract herself from straddling a gentleman’s lap with anything approaching grace.
“For heaven’s sake,” she muttered as she flailed. Jane was not very tall, but she suddenly seemed to have far too many limbs, a fact that was not aided by the pesky skirts getting in her way. At last, Penvale—acting out of gentlemanly chivalry or perhaps a self-preserving desire not to get kneed in a sensitive portion of his anatomy—took mattersinto his own hands, literally, and hoisted her bodily from the chair and set her gently on the floor.
“Thank you,” Jane said, in exceedingly ill temper by this point, and swept from the room without giving Penvale even the slightest chance to reply.
Chapter Seventeen
As they moved from Marchsteadily into April and the reality of the approaching house party loomed larger in Jane’s mind, she realized that she was running out of time.
“Have you mentioned anything about our ghost to your friends?” she asked over dinner one evening in the second week of April, having that afternoon received a scrupulously polite acceptance of her invitation from the Marquess of Weston.
Penvale laid down his fork, regarding her consideringly.Tooconsideringly. She didn’t like or trust it. “I haven’t,” he said slowly. “I didn’t think it worthy of note—a few noises in the night, a bit of lost sleep. Hardly newsworthy.”
He spoke casually, but Jane was on her guard. Something about the way he was looking at her made her decidedly uneasy, and she thought it best not to press the matter.
“Of course,” she agreed, returning her attention to the roast pheasant on her plate. Clearly, if Penvale didn’t even think it worth noting—yet—then it was time to escalate things. It would be May before she knew it, and she’d have a houseful of unwanted guests.
It was time to resort to a possibility Jane had held as a last resort: She would have to impersonate a ghost.
“You’re going to do what?” Mrs. Ash asked, extremely skeptically, when Jane confided this plan the following afternoon.
“I’m going to be a ghost,” Jane said, stirring her tea. They were tucked away in the butler’s pantry, enjoying a pot of tea and a plate of rather delicious cakes. Penvale was occupied with tenant visits that afternoon, meaning they could speak freely without any risk of being overheard.
“And how, precisely, do you intend to convince your husband that he is seeing a ghost and not merely his wife in an old nightgown?” Mrs. Ash asked, taking a sip of tea.
“I’m not going to let him get a proper look at me.” Jane was pleased to have a ready response. “I will lure him from his bedroom with my ghostly wails—”
“This, I look forward to hearing.”
“—and then once he is in a dark corridor, I will allow him to catch a glimpse of me vanishing around a corner.”
“Won’t he immediately think to check your bedchamber to see if you are safely asleep and not roaming the halls?”
“That,” Jane said smugly, “is where the hidden staircase comes in.”
The staircases: the key to their entire plot. The hidden staircases that Jane had lived in fear of Penvale discovering, the ones that had allowed mysterious ghostly noises to emanate seemingly from the walls themselves. The ones that would permit her, if she chose her location very, very carefully, to easily make it back to her bedchamber before Penvale did.
Because the convenient thing was that there was an entrance to one of these staircases in Penvale’s bedroom.
Jane had discovered the staircases the first year she’d lived at Trethwick Abbey; with her guardian often absent, leaving her to her owndevices, she hadn’t had much to do other than explore her home. The fact that it wasn’t truly hers made this quest all the more exciting; she felt as though, by learning this house better than the man who owned it, she was making it hers in this one small way. She might not own this house, but shelovedit, and sheknewit.
And, less nobly, she now knew it well enough to aid in the staging of a haunting. This had not been her original intent, but it was an undeniable benefit. And the fact that there was a matching set of hidden staircases within the interior walls in opposite corners of the house—evidently built to make it easier for servants to move from floor to floor rapidly, but which had at some point been abandoned—was quite convenient when it came to said haunting.
Mrs. Ash, meanwhile, was regarding her with a considerable degree of skepticism, but all she said was a doubtful “Whatever you think is best, dear,” which was not quite the rousing show of support that Jane had envisioned.
Jane decided to pick her moment carefully, not wishing to leave anything to chance. First were the practical considerations: She’d want to choose a night that wasn’t very clear, just to ensure the corridors of Trethwick Abbey were as dark as possible. The house boasted a series of mullioned windows at the eastern end of various hallways that, under ordinary circumstances, Jane was fond of, providing as they did lovely views of the hills, but they undeniably made the halls brighter, particularly on nights when the skies were clear and moonlight was allowed to spill through the windows unobstructed by any clouds.
As her luck would have it, April was uncommonly mild that year, full of lengthening days resplendent with afternoon sunshine, clear evenings with a low-hanging moon and thousands of stars twinkling overhead.
Jane was very irritated.
Or, rather, as irritated as it was possible to be when one was emerging from a gray Cornish winter into a world of green grass and bleating lambs and soft breezes under sunny skies.
Penvale, for his part, seemed inordinately cheerful. He was often gone from early in the morning until late in the afternoon, visiting tenants, observing lambing, trudging around the muddy lanes in boots that had lost almost all their London polish.
