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Once again, her thoughts turned toward the strange noise she had heard earlier, and knew deep inside, that she wasn’t going to like what he was about to tell her.
“I am afraid that there appears to have been a break in.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Beatrice stared at him in horror and started to struggle to her feet. “What? Is it the study?”
“Come on,” Ben murmured gently as he swept her off her feet.
“All you seem to have done this afternoon is carry me,” she grumbled quietly but didn’t ask him to put her down. She rather enjoyed the way he seemed inclined to want to carry her everywhere.
Ben merely threw her a regretful look. Seconds later he placed her on her feet just inside the doorway of the study and stood back to allow her to see the chaos. A part of him didn’t want her to look at the mess that had been made of the room, but she needed to witness the destruction for herself before he went to fetch the constable.
“If you want to take a look around and try to identify if anything might be missing, I will take a look at this window. I cannot remember seeing any sign of damage on the back door, but whoever did this may have gotten in through one of the other downstairs windows,” Ben muttered as he carefully picked his way across the room to study the window frame.
Beatrice glanced around the room in confusion. “Ben, what makes you think this place has been broken into?”
Ben turned to stare at her in consternation and waved toward the papers and books strewn practically everywhere.
“I am afraid that it usually looks like this,” she murmured ruefully when she realised the misunderstanding. “To the untrained eye, this is nothing more than a wild mass of confusion that should be swept up and thrown away.” She studied the things her uncle had spent a lifetime collecting and sighed. “To my uncle, everything had a place and he knew exactly where that place was. Everything here meant something to him.”
It just doesn’t mean anything to me, she thought regretfully, although didn’t say as much to Ben.
When a bolt of lightning lit the sky, she looked out of the window and shivered at the sight of the darkness of the sky. The storm seem
ed to be an omen for troubled times ahead, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that the near-miss with the carriage was just the start of a whole host of troubles that were only just beginning. She quickly turned her thoughts away from her incident in the lane and looked back at Ben. For some reason, just looking at him seemed to reassure her that everything would be alright. She was so very glad he was there.
“God, I see now why you rarely ventured in here when your uncle was alive. With as many papers as this, it is inevitable that you will dislodge something.” He took a moment to reposition a pile of books that teetered warningly on the edge of the desk, and shook his head in disbelief.
“I know that at some point I need to go through it all. Unfortunately, these piles don’t just contain the papers my uncle needed for his botany work. The house paperwork is in here somewhere too.” She glanced at him. “You know, bills, details of the people we have accounts with, that kind of thing. I have no idea if there are any outstanding bills I need to settle, or other papers that I need to deal with. I must go through everything at some point but I just haven’t known where to start.”
Ben studied the vast array of books, pamphlets and paraphernalia that lay practically everywhere and didn’t envy her the task that lay ahead. He now knew just how much of an arduous task she had before her just trying to find the books that were relevant to the mysterious plant. The thought that the smooth running of the house depended on contents that were hidden in this chaos made him shudder.
Although he tried hard not to take a deep breath, the desperate need to breathe was just too much to ignore, and he sucked in a deep breath which unfortunately included a lungful of the awful aroma of the plant. His nose immediately began to twitch as the pungent smell invaded his senses and he had to struggle not to nudge the wretched thing a bit further under the desk.
“We can leave it here for the time being,” he growled when he heard Beatrice sniff. “Meantime, let’s choose a few of these books to look through to see if we can find what this plant is?”
“Pardon?”
Ben studied her. She looked vague, as though her mind was miles way. However, he rather suspected that she wasn’t thinking about the past, or her dearly departed uncle. She had started to wonder how she was going to tackle the mess before them. He couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her, and instinctively placed a comforting hand on her arm in an attempt to ease her worries.
“I am sorry, Beatrice. I didn’t realise that this was the way your uncle worked. I didn’t mean to upset you in any way.” He felt a cad now for having scared her into thinking the house had been broken into.
“You haven’t upset me,” she assured him. “I just think that I need to leave tidying this place up for a while, that’s all,” she sighed. “Look on the bright side, if anyone does break in they are likely to give this room a miss because it looks like it has already been rifled through.”
“I quite agree,” he conceded. “Fair enough. There is no rush to sorting it, is there? I mean, if there are any outstanding bills, or paperwork that requires your attention, people will contact you. You can quite legitimately explain about your uncle’s death. I am sure they will understand.”
She nodded and was, for a moment, too choked to say anything else. It wasn’t that she had been particularly close to her uncle, it was just that he was her last surviving relative – well, who she knew about at any rate. To think that she was now all alone in the world was a little daunting.
“Now, about those books?” Ben prompted when she didn’t seem inclined to focus on the task at hand.
“What about them?” She looked blankly around the room at the heavily laden shelves.
“Which ones do you want me to pick out to take into the sitting room?”
She opened her mouth to speak only for movement by the window to snare her attention. Her eyes widened and a scream escaped her before she had even finished lifting her hand to point at the dark silhouette that had been briefly outlined by a jagged flash of lightning.
“What the hell?” Ben demanded.
