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Kitty grinned at her. “Could have knocked me over with a feather, too, miss. I reckon he’s courting her. ’Cause Mr. Foyle ain’t one for preaching.”
Penelope could only agree as they walked to the house together. The dogs trotted behind, clearly intending to follow them into the kitchen. Penelope gave them a stern look, which she transferred to Kitty when Jip and Jum sloped off to their outdoor quarters.
“Mrs. Hart left a steak-and-kidney pie for dinner,” said the girl quickly. “Will I ever be such a dab hand with pastry, do you think?”
Penelope doubted it, but she didn’t like to say so. Instead, she pumped water and washed her hands at the sink.
“Are they really building a great fountain over at Frithgerd?”
“Fountain? No. Lord Whitfield is installing a bath.”
Kitty cocked her head. “Mrs. Hart said there was to be pipes all over the place.”
Stories spread like wildfire in the country, Penelope thought. And just as haphazardly. Once again, she explained the plan and how it would work.
“Hot water at a touch,” Kitty marveled when she’d finished. “You really think it’ll work, miss?”
Lord Whitfield’s bathing room would become a wonder of the neighborhood, Penelope realized. Unless it didn’t work, in which case it would be a famous folly. But it would work; she had no doubt about that.
They ate their pie. As the day faded, Penelope tried to settle to some mending, but her brain craved more activity. The notebooks she’d brought back from Frithgerd sat in a pile on the large table in the front room. She went over, spread them out, and opened them all, in three rows of three. Looking back and forth, she compared the texts. She turned pages.
These were such odd documents. Any diary she’d ever seen had spoken of familiar happenings. What the writer did in a day, meals and visits and companions. Sometimes there were notes of monies spent. Lady Whitfield’s notebooks were totally different. Fragmentary, cryptic, and yet they nagged at her. Penelope turned more pages.
Some commonplace phrases were repeated from page to page and notebook to notebook. Lady Whitfield had been interested in birds, apparently, and trees. She’d often recorded the numbers and types she’d observed, and made drawings of them. Then there were notations that looked like words, but weren’t known to Penelope. And some odd symbols, too. Not signs Penelope was familiar with, like Greek letters or numbers. They were more like tiny drawings.
She read more closely, moving from one notebook to another. So many drawings of birds. Crows and gulls and owls were recognizable. They looked like English birds, however, not exotic species Lady Whitfield might have seen on her travels. The same was true of the tiny pictures of trees. They ran along in lines, interspersed with symbols and an occasional letter. The text didn’t coalesce into meaning, no matter how much she concentrated. Yet it seemed far too complicated and…persistent over such a long time to be nonsense.
All at once, Penelope began to wonder if the notebooks were written in a code, with all the drawings and phrases and symbols standing for something else. The journals were so intricate. Theyfeltso portentous. And they’d been hidden so carefully. Unless Whitfield’s mother was mad, which she’d never heard, they must meansomething. Lady Whitfield had clearly thought them important. Were they the secret record of her innermost thoughts?
Penelope turned a page, and another, then sat back and rubbed her eyes. If it was a code, there must have been a key—a list of correspondences that explained the symbols and phrases. There was no understanding these notebooks otherwise.
Penelope’s spirits sank. She’d been so eager to decipher them. But how would she and Whitfield ever find the key—one or two sheets of paper perhaps in the sea of documents at Frithgerd? They could search for weeks. If it was there at all.
Then she rallied. The person who created these notebooks had been astonishingly meticulous. She would have a system. Penelope concentrated. What would she have done in the same circumstances?
Lady Whitfield wouldn’t have hidden the key with her notebooks, she concluded. That would be stupid. So not in the trunks then. Somewhere not at all like them, under the writer’s control, readily at hand. Lady Whitfield’s personal possessions would the best place to start. Penelope stood, ready to race to Frithgerd and begin a search, but realized that the hour had grown late as she’d pored over the journals. The house was silent. Kitty was asleep. She’d have to curb her impatience for a bit.
Twelve
Daniel opened the gate at the back of Frithgerd’s gardens and ushered his party through. The walk to see the site for the new mill wheel and pump, which Daniel had anticipated as a chance to spend more time with Miss Pendleton, had somehow turned into an expedition. Henry Carson was with them of course, but Macklin and young Tom had attached themselves as well. The latter was full of questions for Carson about building methods and materials, which was no great matter. But Macklin had taken the position at Miss Pendleton’s side that Daniel had begun to think of as his rightful place. She was ethereally lovely in a muslin gown the color of peach blossoms with just a shawl over her arms on this warm summer morning.
“I’ll go ahead and find the miller,” said Carson after a while. “He’s to meet us by the stream.”
The builder strode ahead up the slope behind the house. When he was out of earshot, Macklin said, “We have some news. I believe Whitfield told you about the possibility of watchers?”
Miss Pendleton’s face grew shuttered, and Daniel nearly cursed. She’d been looking so happy these last few days, full of plans and even jokes. The past should be left in the past, he thought. Raking it up never did any good.
“Tom has been roaming about the neighborhood,” the older man added. “It’s a habit of his, and everyone is used to it by now. They scarcely notice him anymore. So he’s ideally placed to keep an eye out for strangers.”
Miss Pendleton frowned at Tom, whether in concern or disapproval Daniel couldn’t tell.
“And he’s spotted someone,” Macklin continued. “Tell them what you told me, Tom.”
The lad nodded. “It’s a fella staying above the tavern in the next village over,” he said. “Toward Rose Cottage. Said he’s here to study butterflies.”
“Butterflies?” Daniel found the excuse unlikely.
Tom nodded as if he felt the same. “But he don’t seem that sort of person, if you know what I mean. More like a military man, I’d have said. And he don’t know much more about butterflies than I do. I asked him about those little purple ones, and he didn’t seem to know which ones I meant. He walks the fields with a net and a case. But when I watched him for a bit, he didn’t catch any butterflies.”
