A Dangerous Collaboration (A Veronica Speedwell Mystery) Deanna Raybourn (books to read for self improvement .TXT) 📖

“But—”

“Exactly,” he said with grim satisfaction.

“But that means—”

“Not now,” he cautioned. “We can discuss it when we have finished here. For now, we ought to conclude our investigation in this room and make good our escape before we are discovered.”

“I meant only to search the instrument,” I told him truthfully. “What else should we examine?”

He thought a moment, his eyes gleaming in the low light.

“Unless Helen actually conjured the dead—a possibility I refuse to countenance,” he said resolutely, “or a clockwork mechanism which we have not discovered was used, then some human took the opportunity to play the specter, picking out that melody on the harpsichord.”

“Impossible,” I told him. “How could anyone elude us so swiftly? There had been a matter of mere seconds between the playing of the last note and our arrival into the empty room, insufficient time for anyone to have escaped past us and down the corridor without notice.”

He gave me a coolly superior look. “I cannot fault your logic, Veronica, but you fail to take it to its natural conclusion. Obviously, the phantom must have found another means of egress.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but there was no point. He was right, and I chafed at my own shoddy logic. I could not account for it—the conclusion was so patently obvious—but I was deeply aware of a certain mental confusion stemming from my disordered feelings for Stoker.

A whole minute never passed that he did not touch me in some fashion—putting a hand to steady himself when he squatted to examine the base of the linenfold paneling or brushing my arm as he reached for a candle. I moved away with a decisive gesture, putting several feet between us. He gave me a quizzical look, but I ignored him until he stretched up to feel a panel some distance above his head, his shirt pulling high over his taut, muscular belly. His trousers slid a little, revealing a sharply cut iliac furrow which my fingers twitched to explore.

“Nothing there,” he said cheerfully.

I growled by way of response and bent to the panel in front of me, kicking it in my frustration. To my astonishment, it leapt open at the blow, revealing a narrow passageway behind.

“You’ve done it!” he praised, coming up behind me and putting a hand once more to my shoulder. The passage was dark and smelt of cold stone, and I was suddenly grateful for his presence.

I paused to examine the hinges, not surprised to see them gleaming with oil.

“Someone has attended to these recently,” I pointed out.

“No doubt planning their exit from the music room much as a conjurer might plot out a trick,” he agreed, coming forward to sniff the oil.

Stoker retrieved a lit candle and gestured for me to precede him into the passage. I gathered my courage along with the skirts of my nightdress. “If I am going first, I ought to take the light,” I said, taking charge of the situation. He acquiesced, handing it over and following me as obediently as a lamb as we made our way down the passage.

I was conscious of him behind me, too close for my own peace of mind, I reflected darkly, and I wrenched my attention to the task at hand—investigating the passageway.

Running the length of an interior wall, the little corridor had no doubt at one time been a means of moving from one part of the house to another. I had to push hard at the other end to force open the door. I emerged into the library, just behind a high-backed porter’s chair. The door here was neatly concealed by a narrow map case.

“Useful to have a passage such as this if the Romillys were hiding recusant priests,” Stoker said as he emerged into the library. It would have helped to move someone quietly from one part of the castle to another. In extremis, a clever Romilly might have permitted the queen’s soldiers to discover it, gambling that perhaps they would look no further and the rest of the hidden chambers would go undetected.

Without further discussion, we secured the panel and crept back the way we had come, pausing at the music room. Just as I was about to close the panel, I heard a footstep and Stoker and I turned as one to see that the doorknob was turning.

In the space of a heartbeat, he had thrust me back into the passage and pulled the panel closed behind us. In his haste, the candle blew out, plunging us into complete darkness. The passage was small and narrow, and we dared not move with only the thin oak panel between us and whoever had come into the music room. My back was pressed against the stone and my front was pressed against Stoker, a surface every bit as unyielding but much warmer. His heart beat slowly under mine and his exhalations ruffled the hair at my brow.

His mouth moved against my ear, intimate, caressing. “Veronica,” he murmured, his voice almost soundless in that small, confined space.

I turned my head to touch my lips to his cheek, whispering the words against his skin. “Yes.” It was not a question. It was a declaration, an invitation. He moved against me, and I stifled a moan, biting my lip so hard I tasted the sharp salty copper of my own blood on my tongue.

His mouth moved again. “You are standing on my foot.”

I reared back, hitting my head on the stone wall behind me. I smothered a lavish curse and realized that there was a faint glimmer of light in the passageway—a crack in the linenfold paneling. I put my eye to it just in time to see the glow of a single candle illuminating the music room, held aloft by Mrs. Trengrouse. She was wearing a sober dressing gown and nightcap. She walked forward slowly and took only two or three steps, as if steeling