She broke off when she heard a sound she’d never heard before. She stopped and listened, but she heard nothing unusual. She turned toward the house again. Just a few more feet. What if the old door into the house that was concealed in the paneling now had a heavy piece of furniture in front of it? That had happened once and she’d had to wait until those owners moved out before she could go snooping again. Not that she ever went into the house when people were in residence, but…Well, maybe she had once, but that was when she was thirteen and the seventeen-year-old boy who lived there was gorgeous. He—
Nigh almost cried out in relief when she reached the end of the tunnel, then cautiously pushed on the door. Please let it open, she prayed. Please, please. The door swung open with a loud creak, but she wasn’t worried because she knew that it opened onto a narrow stone spiral staircase, a leftover from when the house was a monastery. No one inside the house would hear the rusty hinges. The stairs led straight up to the top tower, to a door cleverly hidden in the wooden floor.
When she at last stood on the stone steps, she let out a sigh of relief. She wouldn’t do that again. Those timbers were too old to risk it again. The stone steps up to the tower were dirty and cold and Nigh wished she hadn’t come through the tunnel. She was suddenly aware that she was very cold, very hungry, and very dirty. She longed for a tub full of hot water and lavender-scented soap.
She started up the stairs, planning to leave the tower at the door that led into the chintz bedroom, when she heard a noise behind her in the tunnel. Did she leave the door open? Had some animal followed her into the tunnel? A dog? A wolf?
“Damn!” she heard and her mouth dropped open. It couldn’t be!
Bending, she pulled open the four-foot-tall door she’d entered the staircase by and held her candle inside as far as she could. In the dark she saw movement, then Jace Montgomery came into the light.
“Damned dangerous,” he said, scowling. “I think half those timbers are rotten. They’re staying up by memory. That was really stupid of you to go through there. And to think that you did that when you were a kid! Your father should have taken a belt to you.”
Nigh was too astonished at his presence to say a word. Heedless of what was left of her new dress, she sat down on the stone step and looked up at him while he brushed cobwebs off his body.
“How…?” she began.
“How did I follow you? Pioneer ancestors. But then you made as much noise as a herd of water buffalo. I had an idea that if I challenged you, you’d want to show off and enter the house in your secret way. You seem to want to beat everybody at every game. Damnation, but that was a scary thing. I’m going to have engineers shore that thing up with some good ol’ American steel. Forget those old beams.” He glared at her. “You should have better sense than to go through something like that. So how do we get out of here? I don’t know about you, but I’m freezing and I’m hungry.”
“Up one flight,” she managed to say, still in shock from her fear of the tunnel and his following her.
He stepped over her, swinging one long leg over her head to reach the step above her. “Well, come on. Don’t just sit there. You have the candle. Speaking of which, I think I’ll put electric lights in that tunnel.”
“Sure, why not?” she said, recovering herself. “How about a bar too? Ice maker, some cut-glass liquor dispensers. What about a barbecue?”
“Not a bad idea, although we have England’s weather, so what do we need with an ice maker? Okay, so where’s the door?”
“I found it when I was nine, so why can’t you find it at your age?”
“Guess I’m not as clever as you are,” he said.
Smiling, she reached down about knee level and pressed a little piece of iron that couldn’t be seen from above. She’d been able to see it more clearly when she was younger because she’d been shorter.
“Cute,” Jace said as the door swung open and they were in the chintz room. Ann’s room. He half expected to see her there, but it was empty except for the furnishings he and Gladys and Mick had put in there. Closing his eyes for a moment, he inhaled. He could smell her.
“I’ve always loved the smell of this room,” Nigh said.
Jace looked at her sharply, but he didn’t tell her that the lovely fragrance came from Ann Stuart.
“I don’t know about you, but I want a shower before I eat.” He looked her up and down pointedly.
Nigh looked down at herself. Her dress was ruined. There were three torn places along the hem and there was too much dirt to ever fully come clean.
“You want the master bedroom bath?” he asked, then laughed at her expression. “You can have it all to yourself. I’ll use this one.”
She looked at him a moment. “Ann’s bath.”
“Didn’t I tell you that she gets in the shower with me?”
He laughed when Nigh frowned. “Go on. Look in the drawers in the bedroom and get some clean clothes. I have some sweats in there that you can tie on. I’ll meet you downstairs as fast as possible.” With that he half pushed her out of the room and shut the door behind her.
Standing in the hallway, Nigh hesitated. It was really, really stupid of her, but she almost felt jealous of a ghost.
She shook her head to clear it, then headed for the master bathroom. If she remembered correctly, there was a huge bathtub in there. She hoped there was enough hot water to fill it.
“You took long enough,” Jace said when she entered the kitchen. “The English love of bathtubs.”
“The English love of warmth in any form,” she said as she looked at the food spread on the big oak kitchen table. “I see you didn’t wait for me.” She picked up a black olive and ate it, which only served to reminded her how hungry she truly was. In the next minute she was at the table stuffing herself, and the more she ate, the more Jace piled on her plate.
“Have you tried this?” he asked repeatedly as he ladled something else onto her plate. “What about this?”
“Are you trying to get me fat?”
“You’re skin and bones. Do you eat anything besides cucumber sandwiches?”
She started to tell him that she was too often in Jeeps racing across a desert while helping the cameraman haul hundreds of pounds of equipment to be able to eat three squares a day. But she didn’t tell him. “Better than fried chicken.”
“Touché,” he said, smiling and dishing out more buttered parsnips.
“So what do you think Ann wants?” Jace asked as he refilled Nigh’s wineglass for the third time.
From the emphasis on “you,” she could tell that he had his own ideas of what Ann’s restless spirit wanted. “To at last be buried in the sanctified grounds of the churchyard?” she asked. “Isn’t that what spirits falsely accused of suicide usually want?”
“So how do we do that?”
Nigh looked down to cover her smile. She liked that he said “we.” “If any of what you’ve said is true, then the important thing is to find proof that she didn’t kill herself. If she wasn’t a suicide, then she could be buried in consecrated ground. What about you? What do you think she wants?”
“The burying thing was my first idea too, but I don’t know…sometimes I think it’s something else. In the vision I had, when I saw her with her cousin, I got the idea that she was pretty spunky.”
“Spunky?”
“Sassy. Cheeky, I guess you Brits would call it. She really seemed to know herself well. She knew what her life was going to be like if she didn’t marry, and she was a realist about her future with the philandering Danny Longstreet. I wonder what he was like?”
“Probably like his descendant.”
Jace paused with his hand reaching for a piece of bread—homemade whole wheat rolls with honey in them. “You mean there are Longstreets still in the village?”
“Only one. Most of them have moved away.”
“So what’s this one like?”
“We’re the same age and we went to school together. Very handsome,”
Nigh said, watching Jace intently. “He looks like a short Superman, with glossy black hair, dark blue eyes, and a body that’s all muscle. He runs a repair garage. It’s down a side street so you’ve probably not seen it, but it’s called ‘Longstreet’s.’”
“Handsome, self-supporting, but I feel a ‘but’ coming on.”
“Right. He’s a rogue. Girls love him. Don’t look at me like that. I like men who can put sentences together. Girls who like, say, only the physical side of love, go for Gerald in a big way. The real problem with him is that he wants all the women all the time, or at least three at a time.”
“Not exactly the faithful type, then?” Jace said.
“Not at all. What about you?”
“Me what?” Jace asked.
“Are you the faithful type?”
“Oh yeah. An absolute bulldog. One woman and that’s it.”
“I see. And who is the woman?’
“Right now, it’s Ann Stuart. How are you related to her?”
“I don’t think I am, really. My mother said we were, but I don’t see how. I think she was so horrified at marrying a man named Smith that she gave me the most outrageous name she could come up with, so I got stuck with Nightingale. She probably read it in a book about Priory House.”
“The name suits you since you run around in the dark like a night bird.”
“Mmmm. You said I made more noise than…what was it? ‘A herd of water buffalo.’”
Jace smiled and refilled her wineglass. “Maybe not quite that much noise. You can sure slip through some small places! I thought I was going to get stuck in that little door in that little brick building. You think ol’ Hatch knows about that place?”
“I think Mr. Hatch knows every inch of this property. He must have seen the ground where the door scraped it when I was a kid.”
“I hope he checked those timbers for dry rot.”
“Me too.” Nigh drained the last of her glass of wine, then pushed back her chair. “It’s late, so I’d better go.” When she stood up, she had to catch the edge of the table to steady herself.
“Yes, indeed, I’m going to put you in a car and let you drive,” Jace said. “Come on, you can sleep in any of half a dozen beds in this oversized, unheated house. Which bedroom do you want?”
“Ann’s room, of course.” She put her hand to her head. She was dizzy and…well, she wouldn’t mind if this beautiful man touched her.
“No, Ann’s room is mine.”
“You’re in love with her, aren’t you?” Nigh said, still holding onto the table.
“Yeah, that I am,” Jace said, his tone sarcastic but amused. “I pine for a woman who died well over a hundred years ago.”
“A hundred and twenty-eight, to be precise.” Nigh took a step and almost fell. “I do believe I’m drunk.”
“Very drunk,” Jace said, then moved to put his arm around her shoulders.
“Ooooh, nice,” she said, looking up at him and batting her lashes. “You’re not bad to look at, Mr. Montgomery.”
“You’re not either,” he said, but didn’t look at her as he led her toward the staircase.
“If I like you and you like me, then why don’t we…”
“I hope you don’t remember this in the morning. Put your foot up on the stair. That’s a good girl. Now the other foot. That’s good. Next one.”
“So who are you in love with?” Nigh asked. “I mean, someone who is alive, that is.”
“I am in love with no one who is alive,” Jace said softly.
“But everyone needs someone to love,” she said, leaning back on his arm as he guided her up the stairs.
“Yes, they do.”
“Then why don’t you have anyone?”
“I don’t see you with a ring on your finger. So who’s the someone for you?”
Nigh gave a great sigh. “Men can’t take my career. They’re jealous. I’m better at the job than they are. Fearless. That’s what they call me to my face. But I hear them. They think I’m crazy. And eaten with ambition. But you know what?” she asked drunkenly.
“What?”
“They only say that out of sour grapes. I won’t go to bed with them. I hold myself in very high esteem.”
“Do you?” Jace asked, smiling. “We’re almost at the top now.”
She stopped on the staircase and looked at him. “It’s true. High esteem, that’s what I have. And I also have a low threshold for jerks.”
“I’m glad to hear it. If you’ll just—” He was trying to get her to take two more steps, but when she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, he swept her into his arms and carried her to the landing, then down the hall to the master bedroom, where he set her on a chair while he turned down the bed.
“If I were Ann I’d want someone to love,” Nigh said. “I wouldn’t haunt a house to get my rotten old body inside the fence of the graveyard. You know what I think?”
“What?” he asked as he pulled down the coverlet.
“I think that it doesn’t matter where men put a body or what they do to it while it’s on earth. I think it’s up to God to sort it all out. Besides, who decides what property is holy or not? Some man, just a mere man, says it’s holy here, but over there under that tree it’s not holy. Does that make sense?”
“None at all.”
Jace stood in front of her. “Can you get up by yourself or do you need my help?”
“Help,” she said. “Lots of help.”
Smiling, Jace bent down to put his arms around her to help her stand up.
For a moment, Nigh leaned against him—and Jace held her close to him. It was only a second, but it was there and she felt it.
“You do like me, don’t you?” she whispered against his chest.
Brusquely, he pushed her to arm’s length. “Yeah, I like you. I must be a masochist after what you wrote about me, but I like you.”
“Not my fault,” she said as she climbed into bed. “Lewis and Ray did it to get me back. I beat Lewis up when I was six.”
“Did you?” Jace said, chuckling as he pulled the covers over her. “Lewis and Ray told me terrible things about you. I believed them. I wrote that for Ralph’s paper. He didn’t want to print it, but I said the village needed to be saved.”
Jace sat down on the bed beside her. “Ralph’s paper? You don’t work there?”
“No.” Her eyes were closing. “Did when I was a kid, but not now. Now I fly.”
“You’re flying right now,” he said as he watched her close her eyes and go to sleep.
He turned out the light and left the room, shutting the door behind him. For a moment he leaned against the door and closed his eyes. He did like her. Liked her very much. She was the first woman he’d met since Stacy had…left who he’d liked.
“What are you doing, Montgomery?” he said out loud. He knew that tonight he’d tested her. But tested her for what? he asked himself.
He well remembered that he’d invited her to dinner. At the time he’d done it, he’d wanted to kick himself, but she was the first person he’d met who actually talked to him. Seeing the happy marriage of Emma and George Carew, and seeing the way Gladys and Mick couldn’t keep their hands off each other, had made him feel his loneliness of being in a foreign country by himself.
Then he met this beautiful young woman with a smart-aleck mouth and an irreverent sense of humor, and in spite of the fact that she’d just done a rotten thing to him, he wanted to sit in her tiny kitchen all day. It was certainly better than being with Mrs. Browne and her incessant complaining.
Before he could stop himself, he found a reason for her to come to his house and he’d asked her to dinner—without asking her to dinner. He hadn’t even given her a time to arrive!
By six, after a day spent reading more about the history of Margate, he’d been so restless that he needed hard physical labor to quiet him, so he’d tackled what Hatch called the “stone round,” the gazebo.
When Nigh showed up wearing an incredibly sexy dress
and high heels that made her wiggle when she walked, he’d been determined to keep working. He thought that if he stopped and had dinner with her, if he saw her lovely face across a candle-lit table, he’d end up in bed with her. But he wasn’t ready to do that now.
Besides, he thought with a smile, after three years of celibacy, if he went to bed with a woman…. He didn’t like to think what could happen.
Now he went to the chintz bedroom, Ann’s room, as Nigh called it. He smiled at the memory of the jealousy in her tone. She made him feel good. He looked in the closet, moved his shoes about, then pried up a floorboard. He’d hidden the photo of Stacy under the board. Holding it, he held it under the light and looked at the face he’d loved so much.
Was he doing the right thing? he wondered. Maybe he should do what everyone had told him to: “Get on with your life.” He always said that he had no life to get on with, but in the last hours he’d seen that there were possibilities. He’d seen…He hesitated. It was the first time in three years that he’d thought that there could be life after Stacy.
He put the picture back in the hole, then carefully slipped the old piece of wood back over it, then put his shoes back in place.
He undressed, then, on impulse, he took a quick, cold shower, put on a clean pair of sweatpants, and got into bed and turned out the light.
Moonlight was streaming in through the windows over the seat. He looked about the old room, saw the narrow bit of paneling that he now knew held a secret door. The catch was ingenious and well hidden. He would never have found it unless he were imprisoned in the room.
The thought of that made him think about Ann and even the lady highwayman—if she had ever existed. Had they been imprisoned in this room?
“Were you willing to do anything to get out of here?” he asked aloud to Ann. “Is that why you were willing to marry a kid like Danny Longstreet? Half your IQ, probably belched at the table. Was it escape or was it novelty? Or was it just the excitement?” He was quiet for a moment, but he heard nothing. Not that he expected to. He knew Ann was angry that he’d tried to re-create her room. He looked about and saw the little glass bottles on the dressing table, saw the portrait of her cousin Catherine over the mantelpiece. She was smiling slightly, but Jace still felt he saw sadness in her eyes.