Lord of Scoundrels - Loretta Chase [127]
Mary Murdock, who'd been selected as nursemaid, was sorting through a trunkful of His Lordship's boyhood belongings for enough garments to see an active child through the days before a wardrobe could be made up for him. Bridget was removing the lace collar from a small nightshirt, because her mistress had told her that no boy of the present generation would be caught dead in that fussy thing.
They were working in the North Tower storage room, which had become the campaign's head-quarters, for it was to this place the previous marquess had consigned most of the artifacts of his second wife's brief reign. Jessica had just unearthed a handsome set of picture books. She was piling them onto the windowsill when, out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flash of light in the darkness beyond.
She bent close to the thick glass. "Mrs. Ingleby," she said sharply. "Come here and tell me what that is."
The housekeeper hurried across the room to the west-facing window. She looked out. Then her hand went to her throat. "Mercy on us. That must be the little gatehouse, my lady. And it looks to be…on fire."
* * *
The alarm was sounded immediately, and the house swiftly emptied as its inhabitants raced out to the gatehouse.
The small pepperbox structure guarded one of Athcourt's lesser-used gates. Its gatekeeper normally spent Sunday evenings at a prayer meeting. If it burnt to the ground— which was likely, for the fire must rise high before anyone could see it— the loss would be no catastrophe.
However, His Lordship's timber yard was not far from that gate. If the fire spread thither, the timber stacks would be lost, along with the sheds filled with sawyers' tools. Since the timberyard supplied the lumber used to build and repair the homes of most of the estate's dependents, the fire was a community concern, drawing every able-bodied man, woman, and child from the village as well.
Everything happened, in other words, just as Charity Graves had promised Vawtry it would.
All of the small world of Athton descended upon the blazing gatehouse. In the excitement, Vawtry had no difficulty slipping into Lord Dain's house unnoticed.
It was not as easy, though, as it would have been a week hence, as originally planned. For one, Vawtry couldn't pick his moment, but had to set the fire soon after a rainstorm. The wood and stone pepperbox was stubbornly slow to take fire at all, let alone blaze up to the heights necessary to be seen from miles around. Thanks to the damp, the blaze would also be slow to spread, which meant it would be under control a good deal more quickly than was comfortable for Mr. Vawtry.
Furthermore, the original scheme had required him only to make the conflagration. Charity had been responsible for getting into Athcourt and making off with the icon. Instead, Mr. Vawtry was obliged to play both roles, which meant a mad race from one end of the estate to the other— all the while praying the concealing darkness wouldn't also conceal an obstacle that would cause him to break his neck.
Thirdly, Charity had been in the house several times and knew the general layout. Vawtry had been there once, for the previous marquess's funeral, and one overnight stay was not enough to master the scores of stairways and passages of one of the largest houses in England.
The good news was that, as Charity had promised, no one had bothered to lock all the doors and windows before running off for firefighting heroics, and Mr. Vawtry got into the proper end of the house with no trouble.
The bad news was that he had to wander from one room to another before he discovered that the north backstairs route Charity had described lay behind a door disguised as part of a wall of well-preserved Tudor-era printed paneling.
Not until after he'd found it did he recall Charity's laughing remark that all the servants' exits