Page 35 of The Thorn and the Rose

Thorn didn’t move, just watched the animal, whose wary eyes fixed on him. Neither of them moved for a long moment. Then the horse harrumphed and wandered away, but Thorn knew the foundations had been laid. Now he could begin.

23rd September 1846. Magpie Hall, Winchelsea, East Sussex.

Rosemarie stared down at the letter in her hand and gave a little cry of shock. Her mother looked up from her embroidery with a start.

“Whatever is the matter, child?”

“N-Nothing, Mama,” Rosemarie assured her with a smile, getting to her feet. “Why don’t I fetch the tea things?”

“But it’s not four o’clock yet,” her mother objected, diverted from the letter by this extraordinary deviation from the norm.

“Oh, let’s live wildly for once and have it a half hour early. I’m parched,” Rosemarie said glibly, rushing out of the room as quickly as she could.

Clutching the letter, she ran down the stairs to the kitchen, bursting into the room with such haste Mrs Mills almost dropped the mixing bowl she was holding.

“Good heavens, miss!” she exclaimed. “You frightened the wits out of me.”

“Look!” Rosemarie said, thrusting the letter at the cook.

Mrs Mills gaped, never having been privy to her personal correspondence before. Rosemarie waited, clutching her arms about herself as the cook read.

“Good Lord,” she said quietly. “Baron Childe, in prison! Whatever is to become of us?”

Rosemarie shook her head. “I have no idea. Though at least I am safe from his tempers and vile plans, and so are those who were suffering at his hands.”

The truth of that dawned on her then, giving her a sense of freedom she’d not had for months. No doubt she would suffer for not leaping to his aid, but for now she could breathe again. She would not think about the shame of it. Gossip would spread soon enough and the endless lengths she had gone to in order to hide their poverty from their neighbours and the world they inhabited would have been for naught. She laughed, knowing she was kidding herself. Everyone must know by now. They had let go all of their servants save Mills and a laundry maid, they’d not paid the butcher this month, and they’d barely eaten anything but the cheapest cuts, and rarely at that.

“We’ll manage, Mills. We always do. But I shall have to get him out eventually,” she admitted with regret.

“Sooner rather than later, miss! Good Lord, the King’s Bench Prison for debt? Oh, the shame of it to such a respected family name,” Mrs Mills said in awed tones. “Lord, if the old baron were alive to see this, it would kill him.”

“Never mind that,” Rosemarie said, having no patience for such talk when the man had died long before she was born. “I’m in no hurry to see him released so he can continue to ruin us. But what are we to do?”

“What can we do?” Mrs Mills asked with a prosaic shrug. “I think you’re storing up trouble, miss. Ought you not get him out?”

“So he can bully me some more? No, I thank you. Even if I wanted to, I don’t have twenty-five pounds to spend on repaying his debts and getting him out.” Rosemarie said, the lie making her skin prickle. “I shall have to think about it. For now, I think it will do him a deal of good to have time to consider what he’s doing to us. And if he thinks I’m going to drop everything and sell every stick of furniture we have left to free him, he’s got a shock in store.”

“Aye, reckon so,” Mrs Mills said, regarding her with dawning respect.

Rosemarie nodded, calmer now, and appreciating all the benefits of having her brother out of the picture, at least for a while. “Take Mama some tea, would you, Mills?” she asked, heading for the door.

She left the kitchen, ignoring Mrs Mill’s exclamation that it wasn’t yet four o’clock even as it followed her out of the door.

Rosemarie made her way to the ground floor and opened the door to the servants’ staircase. At least, with so few staff in the house, she no longer had to worry about surprising a footman or a maid. She felt along the panelled wall, seeking the edge of the hidden door and giving a sharp shove. It moved easily, thanks to the care she had taken to oil the hinges. Taking up the candle and the lucifer matches she had left in a nook just inside, she lit the candle and closed the door behind her. The odiferous scent of the matches momentarily overpowered the musty smell of damp earth and dust and the frequent passage of small scurrying bodies. Rosemarie put that thought out of her head and followed the stairs down into the inky darkness.

At the bottom of the stairs, the ground sloped gently away as she walked into the under-reach, following the fall of the land behind the house. She did not think there was anyone living who remembered these tunnels. She had discovered them quite by accident. Her voracious appetite for reading had led her to devour every book in the house, including a battered and ancient looking notebook which had belonged to Everett’s great-grandfather and contained several maps. Like most of the inhabitants of Winchelsea, the old man had been involved in smuggling, which had been rife along the coast of Rye and Pett Level. Most people knew of the tunnels that ran below the town, crisscrossing between buildings out of sight of the revenue men. A collapse at the far end of a tunnel that joined Magpie Hall to the main tunnel beneath Monk’s Walk—the road that ran through Winchelsea—had cut the hall off. According to the old baron, the collapse had been too devastating and had made many of the other tunnels unstable. Other arrangements had been made, and the goods stored at the Hall taken instead to the church. From what Rosemarie had gathered from his notebook, this had suited the baron well enough, for he could continue to profit from his investments whilst taking none of the risk.

Rosemarie went as far as she dared into the winding blackness of the tunnel, aware of the salt tang upon the air. There were narrower paths here that she knew led down to the beach at Pett Level. She hadn’t been in them for years, not after she’d very nearly killed herself. Once, when exploring as a child, she had seen the first gleam of daylight at the end of the tunnel and heard the rush of the sea ahead of her. A strong breeze had funnelled down the tunnel and blown out her candle. Too excited to turn back, she had hurried blindly on, rushing towards the exit, and almost pitched headfirst into a great, gaping hole. Only the faintest gleam on the water below had halted her foot, poised in midair. She had screamed and scrambled backward. When she had recovered herself, she had felt about for a pebble and dropped it, waiting a heart-stopping amount of time for the faint splash as it hit the water far, far below. She’d had nightmares about falling into that hole for weeks afterwards and had never dared try to find the beach that way again. Rosemarie wondered if Everett’s great-grandfather had used that tunnel as a trap to lure the revenue men to their doom. She did not know, though her curiosity and imagination had been fired by the thought of the desperate men thronging beneath Magpie Hall, hiding their contraband of tea, wine, brandy, and fine silks and lace from France and Belgium.

She stopped as she reached her own stack of contraband, the boxes she had filled with goods from the Hall. Silver cutlery, the bronze horse Everett had remarked upon; anything portable that had a value, she secreted away whenever she could. If Everett asked her to sell something—for he would not undertake that grubby business himself—she took the things he gave her, depositing one or two of them down here and selling the rest. He would complain the pawnbroker had robbed them, but she would simply shrug and tell him to do his own dirty work if he did not like it, for they were bound to take advantage of a mere woman.

He would give such looks then, scrolling, considering looks that made her blood feel as though it congealed in her veins, until he shook his head and let it go. Everett had little imagination when it came to women. They were beautiful dolls to him, either sweet innocents—sisters, wives, and mothers—or the other sort. He had no respect for female intelligence and would never consider that she might be cleverer than he was, no matter the evidence to prove it. That had been the trouble with his beloved Miss Nichols. He had simply not understood her. Rosemarie had. She had tried to explain why the woman would not marry him, would not even entertain the notion when she had no better options, but Everett could not see it. He blamed others, as he always did, for nothing was ever his own fault.

More fool him.

Rosemarie was making her own plans, and having Everett securely tucked up in prison suited her very well indeed.

Chapter 12