Lady in the Stray by Maggie MacKeever Read Free Book Online

am glad you have inherited Mountjoy House, though I did not expect to be!” confided Minette disarmingly. “We have been dull as ditchwater here alone. Perhaps you will not wish to appear in the public rooms, since your cousin’s death is so recent—although I do not regard it, and if I don’t, neither should any other, because no one else was so close to Marmaduke!”
    The precise nature of her cousin’s relationship with this loquacious damsel, Vashti left to puzzle over another time. “Just what manner of house is this?” she asked.
    “Mon dieu! You do not know?” Minette’s green eyes opened wide. Irrepressibly, she giggled. “Ma chère, you have inherited a gaming hell!”
     
     

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    “A what?” echoed Charlot, amazed. “You are bamming me, Vashti! Uncle Marmaduke ran a gaming house?”
    “I wish I were, er, bamming you.” Vashti sought solace from Calliope, who had sufficiently recovered from the arduous journey to emit a deep rumbling purr. “It was a very popular gaming house, from all accounts— among not only wealthy gamblers but also émigrés. A pretty piece of business this is altogether! On the one side is Minette, who expects me to provide for her, and on the other is Mr. Heath, who clearly dreads that I shall be as prone to fits of folly as my cousin Marmaduke. Between the pair of them, I don’t know which way to turn.”
    “Mr. Heath was asking me some very queer questions,” volunteered Charlot, snuggling closer to Mohammed. “About you and Papa and how we escaped from France. I could make no sense of it, but I suppose he had a reason. He doesn’t look like a pudding-head!”
    To this comment, Vashti vouchsafed no comment, instead gazed in a somewhat gloomy manner around her bedroom. Previously her cousin’s province, the chamber was opulently Oriental in furnishing, with lavish display of dragons and pagodas, japanned decorations, lacquer and bamboo. On the floor was a carpet of Oriental inspiration, made at the Axminster factory. The oak mantel’s ornamental panel featured carved mandarins, the heads of which also leered from the handle of the very Gothic door. The walls were hung with Chinese papers in a large design of trees and flowers, after the manner of tapestry. The effect, in conjunction with vaulted ceiling and Gothic windows, was distinctly bizarre.
    “All the same,” continued Charlot, “there was nothing wrong with the drains.”
    “Drains?” Because Vashti had been preoccupied with the more immediate details of her inheritance, her tone was blank.
    Charlot was accustomed to his sister’s air-dreaming. “Drains,” he repeated. “You remember, Vashti. That lady—Minette—said there was something wrong with the drains, and so we all went to see. And there wasn’t! Very fine drains they are, in fact, more like tunnels, and lined with brickwork. Orphanstrange said there’s even a drain that leads out into the garden, but he wouldn’t tell me where the entrance is. The whole house is riddled with passageways and secret rooms and hidey-holes; fancy that!”
    Vashti shivered slightly; Mountjoy House was macabre enough without imagining hidden crannies which might house all manner of distasteful specimens—or from which hostile eyes might spy. That was an odd notion, surely? Somber as was the atmosphere, they had encountered no overt hostility in Mountjoy House. Minette had been positively ebullient, and Orphanstrange perfectly correct.
    “Gracious! What am I to do with a valet?” Vashti rubbed her arms, which as result of her somber reflections were covered with gooseflesh.
    “Why should you do anything at all with him?” Reluctantly, Charlot abandoned his speculations upon the fascinating topic of medieval drains and the myriad purposes they might well have served, perhaps as escape routes during the Civil War, perhaps as an excellent hiding place for the treasure of his Cousin Marmaduke. When opportunity was granted him, Charlot thought, he