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Ben grinned at her. “I am not going there tonight,” he assured her, completely unrepentant at his less than holy association with the daughter of the church warden across the valley.
“You will panic if you get caught,” she worried. “If you don’t get up in jail, you will end up in front of the vicar. Either way, you are doomed. We can’t afford another mouth to feed.”
“I shudder at the thought,” Ben teased with a theatrical shudder. “Well, I am off to bed. Good night, sis.”
Jess watched the scullery door close behind him and sighed. The silence within the kitchen was deafening. Night-time was usually her favourite time of day. A time when her chores had been completed, and everyone in the house was well-fed. A time when she could close up the house, and retire to her room so she could return to being herself for a while. She didn’t have to worry about food and the endless round of chores that she had to do.
Today, though, not having her bedroom any more stung. She felt at a loss, especially given that she had a lot to mull over. She needed that sanctuary to think in because she suspected that Ben was up to something, and it wasn’t just stealing game from the local estate, or bedding the warden’s daughter. There was something else, something a little more sinister. She just wished she knew what that was.
In addition to that, the rather unusual mix of guests in the house at the moment was starting to give her the collywobbles. They were all odd in their own right and, while she usually didn’t have a problem with people’s individual eccent
ricities, there was something a little curious about them all. She had yet to be able to engage any of them in a full or meaningful conversation about, well, practically anything. Not only that but while all of them had a reason to be elsewhere throughout the day, their explanations about what they did all day didn’t fit their characteristics.
The birdwatcher appeared to be nearly blind. The accountant appeared to be poor sighted as well. But, he had been able to see a penny someone had dropped in the corner of the hallway the other day and had scooped it up like a hawk swooping on its prey.
Then there was the new guest.
“How stupid,” she whispered as she thought about the wild flurry of attraction she had felt at first seeing him. “He is a guest. Not only that but you have no idea why he is in a quiet, out-of-the-way place like this. What brought him to the village? You don’t know. Why is he here? You don’t know. Does he have connections in the area? You don’t have a clue.”
“Go to bed, Jessica,” Ben murmured.
Jessica gasped and whirled to face him. She hadn’t realised he was there but knew he had overheard her talking to herself. She shook her head at him.
“Do you know?” she asked as she studied the casual way he stood in the doorway.
While he had been in the room he had taken his shirt off, and how stood bare chested with one shoulder propped against the door jamb in an entirely masculine pose that made him look like a man rather than her little brother.
“I know as much about him as you do, Jess. We will find out, though, in the fullness of time. For now, stop worrying. Put the money away and get some sleep. The morning will be upon us soon enough. We can ask him what you want to know then,” Ben replied.
She eyed the beef curiously. Her brother seemed to sense she was going to ask where it had come from again. He suddenly pushed away from the door and turned toward his room.
“Goodnight,” he called and promptly shut the door.
Jess opened her mouth to call him back but suspected he would just ignore her. She turned toward the meat and glared at it accusingly before she turned away. If she had the will, she would throw the wretched thing into the fire, but she just couldn’t bring herself to let good food go to waste. It was something she could never afford to purchase.
Once it was cooked and eaten, who was to say where it had been found?
“You could also put the pheasant into a stew,” she whispered.
If she spun out the finances a little more this week and bought a pheasant from the market on Thursday, then she could feed everyone one or two meals, get rid of the other pheasants in the process, and nobody needs ever know anything untoward had happened.
“If only life is ever that simple,” she whispered.
Quickly closing up the kitchen, she ignored her aching head and blew out the candle. Once the bolt on the front door was across, she closed the shutters and made her way to the back of the house.
She got half way up the stairs when a rapid series of knocks rapped loudly on the door. Jess turned to study the wood. She knew who it was. There was only one person in the village – well, two – who had no regard for respect or decency, and would think nothing of calling by at this ungodly hour.
As if to reiterate her point, the clock on the mantle in the study chimed eleven times.
“Well, you can go to Hell,” she whispered with a sniff and ignored the second series of thumps as she climbed the stairs to her new bedroom.
Downstairs, a man dressed entirely in black watched her disappear out of sight at the top of the stairs. The sight of her rounded curves sashaying this way and that as she moseyed on up to bed was mesmerising, and had a predictable impact on his libido. Still, there was no time for that now. Peering through a crack in the shutter, he watched the magistrate step backwards to look up at the front façade of the house. Whatever he wanted, the scowl on his face warned of dire consequences for someone inside. It was clear that he wasn’t going to gain access to this house tonight, and that clearly didn’t sit well with the magistrate.
The man’s smile was mirthless.
The landlady’s hatred of what farcically constituted as the authorities around these parts worked in his favour as well, but she would never know it. As long as she continued to thwart Lloyd’s rather determined efforts to pry into the lives of the guests, then he would remain a paying guest. Should the magistrate step inside, and proceed to pester anybody for details about why they were there then he would have to take matters into his hands.
If someone ended up dead then so be it.
