Page 20 of Ten Rules for Loving the Wrong Rake

The entries spanned years. Strangers arriving in twos and threes. Kit dealing with them before Marian could intervene, and Marian recording it all with the steady hand of a woman keeping a war diary in her own home. There were mentions of a tunnel beneath the house, of a captain who ran cargo through it, of bargains struck and broken and struck again. Through it all, the same refrain: The boy will not rest. He guards this house as though it were a fortress and I were the queen inside it.

The final entry was dated six years before Audrey's own arrival.

He left this morning. He took nothing but the clothes I gave him and the knife he has carried since the cellar. He did not say goodbye. He stood in the doorway for a long while and then he walked away, and I watched from the window until I could not see him, and I am not ashamed to say I wept.

Audrey sat back. She pressed her fingers to her mouth.

She untied the bundle of letters.

There were perhaps thirty, spanning the Five years Kit had been away. The names at the bottom changed—Thomas Marsh, then J. Cole, then simply K.—and the cramped, cautious hand of the early letters relaxed into something looser as the years passed. Kit's voice emerged from the formal phrasing: blunt, observant, unexpectedly warm. He asked after the orchard, the stable, the east wall. He did not ask if anyone had come looking for him. Marian's margin notes answered anyway: Told him no visitors. A lie. Three in September.

Audrey slowed when she reached the passages about the Lintons.

Victoria is the only sensible one in the house. She manages the servants, keeps the accounts her father ruins, feeds the younger ones when the money is thin, and does it all without complaint. She reminds me of you, Marian. The same spine. The same refusal to bend.

The final letter was the shortest.

Victoria is to marry the Duke of Iredell. I am glad. He is a good man, and she will want for nothing. I am coming home, Marian. The papers write of nothing but the Linton girl and her duke, and the attention will bring the wrong eyes to the household. I cannot stay.

Audrey set the letter down. Her chest was tight and her throat was dry. She told herself it was the dust in the room.

Victoria. Brave, capable, beautiful Victoria, who needed no cane, who managed a household at twenty, who reminded Kit of Marian. Audrey thought of her own reflection in the kitchen window that morning: thin, pale, lopsided, soot on her collar.

She pushed the thought away firmly, because she had no claim on him. The ache beneath her ribs was irrelevant and would be treated as such. She would not sit in a dead woman's study and compare herself to a duchess. There was a house to know, and rooms in it she had not entered, and a cellar she had been told to avoid by a man who had no right to tell her anything.

She took the lantern and went down. Past the planks. Past the opening. The cellar floor was dry. Against the far wall, behind a stack of rotten crates arranged to look untouched, she found it. A passage. Stone-vaulted, wide enough for two men, stretching into darkness. A draught came through it, steady and slow, carrying the smell of rain and orchard soil and something faintly sweet. Faintly wrong.

She stepped inside. The vaulting was old, chisel marks still visible in the stone. Twenty paces in, she found a barrier: loose stone stacked dry, floor to ceiling.

"Out. Now."

She turned. Kit stood at the mouth of the passage, without a lantern, breathing hard. In her lantern light his face was half-lit, half in shadow.

"This tunnel goes outside," she said. "Anyone could come through."

"Which is why you shouldn't be down here." He took her arm. "Come. I'll show you where it ends."

He didn't lead her back toward the cellar. He led her forward through a gap she hadn't seen, into the passage beyond. The air grew colder, then warmer, then the ground sloped upward and she smelled wet grass and earth and evening, and the passage opened into a shallow ditch behind the orchard wall, screened by hawthorn and elder.

October light. The sky wide and grey above the bare trees. She breathed.

The exit had a door, heavy oak banded with iron, set into the stone. Kit had tools here already: a plane, a chisel, new timber propped against the wall.

"What is all this?"

"Reinforcing the frame. Fitting a heavier lock." He released her arm, picked up the plane, and began shaving the doorframe as though she weren't there.

She leaned against the orchard wall as she could not risk sitting. If she sat, she might not get up again.

"I was in Aunt Marian's study today. Did you know she kept a record of men who came looking for you?" Her voice was steady. Her hands were not. "Years of them. Descriptions, dates, how many."

He drew the plane along the frame. A curl of pale wood fell to the ground. He said nothing.

"Who were they? Why were they looking for you?"

His hands stilled on the frame. He was quiet for a moment. "I was running cargo through a tunnel beneath this house. Another man and I were working for a man called Reeve." He picked up the plane again, but the stroke was slower now. "Marian was exploring the monks' passage and walked straight into us. The other man drew a knife and went for her."

He set the plane down. Looked at the doorframe.