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“To be deliberately incomprehensible,” he continued, voice rising. “And then, as if that was not enough, to hide her notebooks in the lining of trunks where I was bound never to find them. She must have known I never would. Was she insane?”
“Well, perhaps she had some reason,” Penelope began.
“What possible reason could she have had?” He started walking again, very fast.
Penelope nearly had to run to keep up with him. “And anyway, you did find them.”
“Youdid. She didn’t count on you. Nobody could have imagined you.” With a humorless laugh, Whitfield strode down to the garden gate, opened it, and started back toward the house.
She trotted after him, wanting to ask what he’d meant by that last remark. It hadn’t sounded like a compliment. Nor had it seemed to be a criticism exactly. She gazed up at him as they raced along. His face was grim and closed. Perhaps it would be better to drop this subject. But she was driven to solve the puzzle of the journals. He must feel the same, surely? They contained his mother’s thoughts. “So, if it is a code, which I really think it is, there must be a key.”
“A key? To unlock what exactly?”
“Not an actual physical key. It would be a list of the phrases and symbols that she used over and over again. She did, you know. You can see the repetition if you look through the notebooks. So the key would have an explanation of what each one stands for. Substitutions.”
“Substitutions,” Whitfield echoed. His sidelong glance was darkly skeptical.
“Yes.” In her hurry, Penelope tripped on a stone in the garden path. She stumbled, trying to catch her lost balance.
Whitfield caught her, effortlessly holding her upright with one arm and pressing her close against his chest. He felt like a bulwark. There were his lips, inches from hers. There was the line of his jaw and the breadth of his shoulder. The anger drained from his expression as he stared down at her. “You really believe they’re meant to be…deciphered?”
“I think it’s a strong possibility.” She was breathless. Her hands had gripped his upper arms as if they belonged there. She didn’t want to let go.
“You do know how strange that sounds.”
The cloth of his coat was smooth under her fingertips. She couldn’t look away. And seemingly, neither could he. “The notebooks are rather strange.”
He gave a bark of laughter. “An understatement, Miss Pendleton. And why, we ask? Uselessly.”
“We might learn the reason if we decode them.”
He let her go. Did he regret that as much as she did? Penelope inhaled the sweet scent of some flowering bushes at the edge of the path. The heady perfume would always remind her of him.
“How do you propose to do that?” he asked, his voice gone flat again.
“By finding the key, of course.”
“Finding. We haven’t had much luck at that so far. Nothing about the Rose Cottage legacy. Just a mountain of moldering paper.”
Something had certainly soured his mood. Penelope wanted to raise it. “I think the key would be among your mother’s personal things.” She explained her reasoning to him.
“My parents’ possessions were packed up and stored in the attic,” he said when she’d finished.
“Shall we go and look at them?”
Daniel was reluctant. He didn’t want to go through his mother’s things. Nor did he care what her diaries said, or so he told himself. When had anything gone right with his parents? But Miss Pendleton was practically vibrating with curiosity. The bright enthusiasm was back in her face, and he couldn’t deny her. Daniel nodded and walked on.
They made a brief stop to question his housekeeper and snag a branch of candles, and then he led the way upstairs to the attic.
“Mrs. Phipps said they put my mother’s things over here when they cleared out her room.” He walked around bits of old furniture and stacks of boxes to the west side of the main attic. As his housekeeper had promised, he could easily identify the recent additions to storage. To one side was his father’s old shaving stand. He hadn’t wanted to look at it every day, and anyway he had a newer, more efficient one. “These should be hers,” he added, indicating a neat row of trunks and boxes and a dressing table that he hadn’t wanted to see again either. He lit the candles, augmenting the light from the dormer windows, and put them on the dressing table. Melancholy threatened. He pushed it aside.
“Right.” Miss Pendleton surveyed the prospects like a workman rolling up his sleeves. “Do you want to—”
“You look,” said Daniel.
Sympathy and uncertainty seemed mingled in the glance she gave him. She opened a trunk and began lifting out gowns swathed in linen. Unfolding the coverings, she examined each one. “No pockets,” she said. “You have no idea how lucky you are to have so many pockets in your clothes.”
The scent his mother had used drifted over them. Daniel was besieged by fragments of memories, glimpses of his parents flitting in and out of his life. Mostly out. Without a backward glance.
