Perhaps this would not be as easy as he’d supposed.
“Thank you, Captain Archer,” she said coolly. “I do intend to enjoy my time here.”
And without taking her eyes from his, she dipped her spoon in the marrow jelly, smiled grimly at him, and took a bite.
Chapter 6
Twelve days later, Ruby peered into the depths of her teacup.
At the bottom—beneath a layer of strangely pinkish tea—rested a single, whole walnut.
She looked up at Alice and Tamsin, arrayed around her in the Pomeroy House library. “It’s getting worse,” she said. “Do you think it’s getting worse?”
Alice gazed down into the tea tray, which held a shriveled apricot, a pot of jam, and no visible flatware. “So many jellies,” she murmured. “I’ve never seen so many jellies.”
Tamsin was not attending to the horrors of the tea Gerry had brought them. At the moment, she was on her knees, sorting books into piles by subject and eating a chocolate biscuit she’d acquired down in St. Petroc’s. She had changed into trousers on their second day and, when no one had turned a hair, had promptly shoved her frocks into the bottom of her trunk to molder.
“Another one on illnesses in dogs,” she murmured. “That makes eleven.”
“That’s notsomany,” Alice said.
“Just on this shelf.”
Alice blinked.
The three of them had decided to tackle the rooms in the house one by one. They’d begun with their own chambers out of necessity—Ruby’s had been the only one with bed linens—but they’d quickly progressed to the large rooms on the lowest level of the mansion. If theywerereal ladies-in-waiting, Ruby had reasoned, they’d be tasked with readying the chambers that the princess was most likely to avail herself of whenever she did manage to visit.
The rooms, they’d quickly discovered, had been divided into either neat chambers used for bizarre and inexplicable purposes, or dust-ridden heaps that had been closed off entirely and abandoned to nature.
Over the last almost-fortnight, nature—and the Pomeroy House staff—had been forced to surrender to the combined efforts of Ruby, Alice, and Tamsin.
Tamsin had removed an entire collection of Ottoman Baroque chamber pots from a music room decorated in black marble and stars. Alice, it appeared, had discovered a heretofore unknown aggressive streak, judging by the way she had volunteered to beat the dust out of all the rolled-up rugs.
And Ruby—oh, it had been the greatest pleasure of her lifetime—had overseen the mansion’s redecorating.
Pomeroy House wasn’t terrible, not really. Unconventional, perhaps, but she liked unconventional—had always valued peculiar treasures and hidden eccentricities. She’d supervised the relocation of the immense Tudor furnishings to rooms more properly suited to their size. She’d lavished the dining table and chairs with furniture polish and had been delighted by the pattern of black roses and thorns her efforts had revealed. She’d carefully cleaned wall fabrics until they gleamed, and in the rooms that had grown faded with disuse, she’d found pigments and oils to retouch the once-colorful millwork.
And the staff had let them do it, with scarcely a word of protest. When she’d encountered Captain Malcolm Archer—which seemed to happen quite often, no matter where she was in the house, almost as though he were watching her—he hadn’t batted an eye, even when he’d found her painting at the top of a ladder with her skirts knotted up around her knees.
He’d smiled extravagantly. He’d asked her how he could be of service. He’d answered every question she’d asked—about his relationship with the di Sangro family, about Pomeroy House’s history—with a delightful torrent of words that, upon later reflection, did not seem to convey any real information.
The man’s extraordinarily,suspiciouslyattractive and pleasant demeanor, however, had not distracted her from the bizarre happenings in the rest of the house.
Ruby dropped her cup untouched back into its saucer. “I really do think it seems to be getting worse.”
Tamsin sat back on her heels. The pile of canine veterinary medicine texts wobbled precariously at her side. “How do you mean? I think we’ve done quite a lot in a short time, to be honest.”
“Not our efforts. I mean”—Ruby gestured to the tea tray at Alice’s feet—“everything else.”
Alice looked down as well. “Last week, the tea tray at least came with a spoon.”
“And a cake to deliver the jam to your mouth.”
Tamsin shuddered. “I don’t think that was cake. It tasted of celeriac. And clams.”
“It’s not just the food.” Ruby turned to take in the rest of the library. “The peculiarities of the house seem to be mounting, somehow.”
“Itwasodd,” Alice mused, “when our bedclothes disappeared.”
