Author: Megan Shepherd
Category: Young Adult
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/megan-shepherd/page,11,54767-a_cold_legacy.html
His little hand, stronger than I expected, grabbed my wrist. “Come, Miss Juliet. I’ll show you the narrow rooms.”
“Be careful!” McKenna called. “Remember the passages are dangerous!”
I could scarcely catch my breath before he tugged me back into the manor and through the hallways to the kitchen pantry. He twisted a hidden latch beneath the pickled beets and swung open the door, taking out a candle and match from his pocket. He crawled on hands and knees, with the rat settled on his shoulder. He stroked it with one finger and then looked at me very solemnly.
“Stay close, Miss Juliet, and you won’t die.”
THE LORD WHO HAD built Ballentyne Manor might have been mad, but he had been a genius when it came to engineering. As I followed Hensley through the walls, crawling over stone floors and through spiderweb-covered tunnels, I marveled at the clever architecture that made the passageways possible: hidden rooms under staircases, secret doors built into the wood paneling. I quickly learned what McKenna meant about the dangers: twice we passed wooden beams fitted with metal spikes, rusty now with disuse, that I imagined were some sort of trap.
“Do you have all the narrow rooms mapped in your head, Hensley?” I peered down a side hallway. “Where does this way lead?”
He spun on me and grabbed my arm, making me jump. He pointed half a pace in front of me, where I’d very nearly stepped. A chasm gaped. I cried out and scrambled backward. It would have been a three-story fall.
“Yes, miss,” he said calmly. “I know everything about the narrow rooms.”
My heart was still racing as he led me up a stone staircase as narrow as my shoulders and back down another one I had to stoop to pass through.
“Hensley, slow down!” I clambered over some ancient brick ductwork. He tossed a grin over his shoulder but didn’t slow. I caught up to him at last, and he pointed to a metal grate that was dusty with soot except for a single clean patch. It must have been recently used. I fumbled with the grate until I found a small panel that slid open. Flames roared on the other side. I jumped back in shock.
Hensley snickered. “It’s the fireplace in the library.”
I peered through again, and realized the grate looked out from the rear of the fireplace into the stately library, empty now, with a few open books resting on the green velvet couches. He pointed to the passageway’s floor, which I could make out in the firelight. There were footprints slightly larger than mine in the dust.
“Are those Valentina’s?” I asked.
He nodded and then tugged on my dress. “This way.”
He darted down another turn in the maze of passages, and I gave up on trying to memorize the map. I followed him, letting my fingers trail on the walls, hoping not to get snagged by one of those rusty metal spikes. Even with the traps, I had to marvel at the wonderful strangeness of it all. Lucy and I would have adored playing hide-and-seek in passageways like this, when we were his age.
We ran by another door with a light glowing behind it and I paused. “Which room is this?”
“Your friend in the chains. He used to say your name in his sleep. Now he calls for Miss Lucy. She visits him late at night even though he’s sick and never knows she’s there. She stole the key from Valentina.”
I started. Had Hensley been spying on all of us? But then I disregarded my worry. He was only a child, and surely it was just innocent fun. I followed him down a passageway so narrow I had to twist to pass, then up a set of stairs, and at last he pointed to another metal grate. I slid the viewing panel back, peeking within, and found a plain wooden room with a metal bed and dresser. A servant’s room, one of the bigger ones with windows on two sides. Clothing was strewn about haphazardly. One long white glove rested on the floor.
“This is Valentina’s room?” I asked.
He nodded.
I pushed on the latch until it opened. The hinges had to be ancient but didn’t groan as I opened them—they’d been freshly oiled. Valentina must have been more familiar with the passageways than she let on.
I crawled through the small fireplace and came out into her bedroom. Hensley followed me in, dusting off his little hands. There was a half-open trunk in the corner filled with belongings. I took a step toward it. At the same time, the bedroom doorknob jiggled from the other side, and I jumped.
“Juliet?” Montgomery’s voice came from the far side of the door. “Did you make it inside?”
“Yes,” I called back, and tried the door. “I’m with Hensley. I can’t unlock the door from this side either without a key.”
“Carlyle’s here. We’re going to remove the hinges. Do you see any sign of what happened to her?”
I glanced back at the trunk, taking another step closer. Hensley wandered to the side table and opened a box that let out the rich tobacco smell of her Woodbine cigarettes.
“When did you last see her, Hensley?” I asked as I knelt next to the trunk.
“After dinner night before last. She was angry, and I was worried she’d hurt my rat so I hid from her. She was writing in a book. And crying. And saying words Mother says we mustn’t say.”
The trunk held all manner of strange belongings a maid shouldn’t have, even one with as high a position as Valentina. A holster for a pistol—though the firearm itself was missing. Dozens of leather coin sacks, also now empty of money.
At the door, hinges groaned as Montgomery and Carlyle tried to remove them with a screwdriver.
“There,” Hensley said, pointing into the trunk. “That’s the book she was always writing in.”
I took out a small leather-bound book. A journal, though a handful of pages had been ripped out. The few that remained were dated months ago, and chronicled Valentina’s progress at educating the younger girls and some of her plans for improving the efficiency of various projects. And then the rest of the pages were torn out in an abrupt fury. I checked the date of the last entry: the day before I arrived at Ballentyne.
“Hensley,” I called, feeling uneasy, “check the fireplace, will you? See if you can tell if any papers have been burned.”
He poked his little fingers eagerly through the ash and came back with a few curled edges of charred paper that matched the rest of the journal. “Just a few scraps. All the bits with writing burned.”
I ran my lip between the hard edges of my teeth, thinking. I flipped back to the last page of the journal, and then the fresh one after that part she’d ripped out. In the light from the window, I could make out faint grooves. When I ran my fingers over them, I got an idea.
“Hensley, fetch some charcoal from the fireplace.” I hurried to the desk, where I snatched up a thin piece of paper and laid it over the blank journal page. Hensley handed me a piece of broken charcoal, and I started running the flat edge along the paper. “Have you ever taken a rubbing of a gravestone?” I asked him. “The charcoal will mark the paper but leave a blank where the lettering is. I think we can use the same principle here.”
He watched as, like magic, an imprint of her last words appeared on the paper. Valentina had clearly been writing furiously, because the letters had gone through several pages. This resulted in a jumble of random words that at first made no sense.
4 Whitehall Place . . .
. . . can’t run a manor . . .
. . . Juliet Moreau will ruin everything.
Seeing the scribbled imprint of my own name, written even harder than the rest, stilled my heart.
“What’s this, miss?”
Hensley had drifted back to the box of cigarettes, bored already with my work, and had unearthed a worn piece of paper that had been hidden there. There was something strangely familiar about the folds, and I pulled it open.
My face drained of color.
It was the special memorandum poster announcing a reward for my capture. The one Montgomery had carefully hidden. Valentina must have stolen it.
In that instant, the poster, and the address, and the scribbled writing all made sense. Before I could get a word
out, the door swung open as Carlyle pushed it free of its hinges. Hensley leaped back, pressing his rat tightly to his chest to protect it.
I looked up and met Montgomery’s eyes through the broken door. He darted into the room.
“What is it?”
I held up the poster. “Valentina must have found this last night. I think she’s going to the police in London. There’s an address written in her journal—she burned the pages, but I made a rubbing. I think it’s Scotland Yard. She’s going to turn us in.”
I held out the poster with my own inky face looking back.
He ripped the memorandum from my hand. “The hell she is. She won’t make it as far as Edinburgh before I get my hands on her.”
FIFTEEN
“I CAN TRACK HER,” Montgomery said. I could barely keep up with him as he stormed down the main staircase. “I tracked every beast on your father’s island, and they were far more stealthy than a twenty-year-old maid. Balthazar will come with me. His nose is better than the keenest hunting dog’s.”
“Wait!” Hensley jogged down the stairs behind us, clutching his rat impossibly tight, with Carlyle following at a distance. “You promised me a story!”
Montgomery paused just long enough to give me a look that said we couldn’t be slowed down by such nonsense. I ran back up the stairs to pat Hensley on the head. “I shall tell you one, I promise, but not right now.” I spotted Lily and Moira at the bottom of the stairs, come to look for us, and pushed him in their direction. “Lily has a story for you, I’m certain.”
He narrowed his eyes, his face turning angry red. He might have the strength of three men, but he was still just a headstrong little boy, and I could hardly be bothered with reading stories now. I caught up with Montgomery in the foyer as he was breaking open the manor’s rifle cabinet.
Elizabeth heard the noise and ran in, with Balthazar and Lucy just behind her.
“Balthazar,” Montgomery said, “hurry out to the barn. Tell me if any of the carriages are gone.”
“Are you mad?” Elizabeth said, watching Balthazar leave. “Don’t you think that’s the first thing we checked, when she went missing? And what on earth do you need a gun for?”
“We broke into Valentina’s room,” I explained. “We found evidence that she’s planning on turning us in to the police at Scotland Yard.”
Elizabeth’s face went slack. “Valentina? I’d never have imagined her capable of this.”
I held out the notebook. “Her journal. I made a rubbing of some pages she ripped out. From what I can tell, she didn’t trust me to run Ballentyne and thought turning me in to Scotland Yard would get me out of the way.”
Elizabeth let out a curse as she unfolded the poster I’d tucked into the journal. The front door slammed as Balthazar lumbered back inside.
“The hackney coach is missing,” he said. “Someone had covered blocks of hay with a tarpaulin to disguise the theft. The horses are out to pasture, but I didn’t see the bay mare anywhere. She’s the only one big enough to pull the coach.”
Montgomery scoffed. “The hackney coach? She can’t go more than a few miles an hour in that thing, especially with just the mare. Why would she risk it?”
“It’s the easiest to drive,” Elizabeth said. “And Valentina wasn’t good with the horses.”
“Well, that’s fortunate for us,” Montgomery said. “We’ll take the pony trap. It’s twice as fast, especially with the dapple stallion. She has a day on us, but she’s going slow.”
He started for the coatrack by the door, pulling on his oilskin jacket. I took a rifle out of the cabinet. He gave me a sharp look, and I gave him one right back.
“I’m coming with you. Don’t try to talk me out of it. I don’t weigh enough to slow down the pony trap and I’m a good shot.”
He sighed. “As if there was any use in trying to stop you. Come on, then.”
We raced out into the night with the rifles. The others followed. Even Lucy threw on a coat and came out.
“You should stay here, Lucy,” Montgomery said. “Someone has to watch over Edward.”
Her eyes met mine and I remembered how we had last left things: her storming out of my room, furious that I was going to let Edward suffer. I hadn’t dared to tell her about my late-night lessons with Elizabeth and that I was actually considering her plan. I wasn’t ready to give her that much hope, not yet.
“Lucy, come here a moment.” I signaled for her to follow me into the tack room. I dropped my voice. “I know you’re still angry with me.”
She wrung her hands. “Yes, I am. But I love you, too, angry or not. I’m afraid of what will happen if you find Valentina.”
“She’s no match for us,” I reassured her. “It’s important that you stay here and watch over Edward. Keep him chained tight, and maintain a close eye on him. We’ll talk more about our previous conversation when I return.”
She was so distraught, I wasn’t even sure she heard what I said. I squeezed her arm. “I’ll be back soon, I promise.”
Her eyes were watery, but she nodded. When we returned to the barn, Balthazar was already hitching the dapple stallion to the pony trap. Elizabeth threw several thick tartan blankets into the back. “It’ll dip below freezing tonight. Stay under those blankets and take sips of this to keep yourselves warm.” She pressed a flask into my hand.
McKenna came forward, wringing her hands. “Such a lonely girl, she was. I know it’s terrible that she plans on turning you in, but I’d hate to see harm come to her, just the same.”
“We won’t hurt her,” I said. “We just have to stop her from going to the police.”
“It’s time, Juliet.” Montgomery reached down a hand to pull me into the back of the pony trap. It was a tight fit between the three of us. Balthazar wrapped an arm around my back to hold me close.
“Lean toward me, miss. I’ll keep you warm.”
Montgomery snapped the reins, and the stallion took off. Lucy ran out of the barn, her fair skin flashing in the moonlight.
“Be careful!” she called.
“You, too!” I called back. For a second, I wondered if I was making a terrible mistake by leaving. Lucy had had such a wild look in her eye when she’d devised that plan to murder Edward and reanimate him. Which was the greater danger, I wondered—Valentina going to the police, or leaving Lucy alone with Edward?
Montgomery cracked the reins again, and the pony trap leaped into the night. In the lighter carriage, with only three of us, we tore down the path to Quick at twice the speed as our ride in.
“We’ll have to ride all day to catch up to her,” Montgomery said, “but with the hackney coach, she’ll be forced to stay on the main roads. Try to rest while you still can.”
WE RODE INTO THE dawn and out of it again. The morning and early afternoon passed amid endless roads that all looked identical, with the frost-coated heather reaching out of the land like crystal skeletons. McKenna had packed us a small bag of scones and apples, which we ate on the way so we wouldn’t have to stop more than necessary. Montgomery had immediately identified the hackney coach’s tracks in the muddy roads.
“Her horse is getting tired,” he said, examining the tracks. “Another hour or two and we might catch sight of her. If anyone’s going to prison, it’s her, for stealing Elizabeth’s property. Not you.”
My stomach tightened. Prison. I thought again of those socks my mother had knit for the prisoners in winter so they wouldn’t get frostbitten. Would Mother have chased down a girl who just wanted the best for the manor? Balthazar’s head turned, blinking in the cold. Frost had formed on his long eyelashes.
“What’s that, miss?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said, not realizing I had spoken aloud. “I was just thinking of my mother. I wish you’d had a chance to know her, Balthazar. She was a kind woman.”
Montgomery nodded beneath the wide brim of his hat. “When my own mother died, she took me aside after the funeral and said I would always have a place with the Mor
eau family. Beautiful and thoughtful. Just like you, Juliet.” Something caught his attention on the road ahead, and he frowned. “That’s odd. The main road to London continues to the left, but Valentina’s tracks go to the right.” He stopped the pony trap at the fork in the road. “It leads through Kielder Forest toward Brampton. Nowhere of significance.”
“Are you certain you’re following the right tracks?” I asked.
“As certain as I can be.” He cracked the reins, steering the horse in the direction of Kielder Forest.
Trees started to rise on either side, a dense forest filled with shadows. The ground was frozen solid, and we couldn’t make out her wheel tracks. I bit my lip, hoping that Montgomery’s skill as a tracker wouldn’t lead us astray.
After ten minutes of riding through the forest Balthazar sat up, on alert. “Ahead. I can smell the horse.”
Soon Montgomery and I made out the black dot on the horizon that Balthazar had sensed with his keen nose. Montgomery whipped the stallion faster.
“That’s Ballentyne’s hackney coach, all right,” Montgomery said. “She’s driving it like a madwoman. If she hasn’t yet spotted us, she will soon, but it doesn’t matter. There’s nowhere for her to go with the trees on either side. I’ll try to ride alongside her and knock her off the road. Juliet, keep that rifle ready, just in case.”
“I promised not to hurt her.”
“I didn’t,” he said.
He cracked the whip again and we gained more ground. Her coach bumped and jerked over holes in the road, moving so fast I expected it to tip at any moment.
“Get ready,” Montgomery said.
The road turned sharply ahead, hiding her from view for a few seconds. When we rounded the bend, suddenly she wasn’t there.
“Blast and damn!” Montgomery cursed.
I sat up, heart pounding. “There! She turned and drove deeper into the forest. There are pathways just wide enough for her to pass.”