Silent Night by Deanna Raybourn Read Free Book Online Page A

settling into the stones. It was a curious feeling. For as long as I had lived in the Abbey, I had thought it a happy place. It had always been colourful and loud, filled with music and laughter and the petty squabbles of too many children. I believed the monks had been happy there as well, toiling soberly at their carp ponds and fruit orchards, polishing the stones with prayerful knees. There were cycles in the life of a great house such as ours. When a lord is young, his family is boisterous and the house comes alive. But the wheel turns, as it must, and a quiet settles over the place as softly as a snowfall, muffling its gaiety as the lord ages and his family is flown. And then the wheel turns again and the house his handed over to the new lord and it stirs to life again, sheltering the family as it has so many before.
    I toyed with the idea of sharing my thoughts with Father, but when I went to his study, his door was still locked. I heard a peculiar noise from within, so I bent swiftly and put my eye to the keyhole. Father sat at his desk, his handsome features maudlin and drawn. On top of the desk stood a modest bust of Shakespeare and on top of that perched Grim. He eyed Father and canted his head.
    “Tragedy and woe,” he intoned.
    “Indeed,” Father replied. “Rather a clever fellow, aren’t you?”
    Grim bobbed his head.
    With a tender hand, Father reached out and stroked the silken feathers. Grim suffered him to do so, not because he liked being touched. Grim was, in fact, somewhat aloof. But he was acutely sympathetic for a bird, and he had at one time saved my life. I was not surprised he offered father his feathery consolations.
    I rose from my spying, wiped at my eyes and hurried up to my room to have a think. I fetched the ring box from the desk where Brisbane had left it and scrutinised it carefully. As I pondered, my eyes fell to a pair of Brisbane’s boots, so much larger than my own slender slippers, and an idea began to form. A quick trip to the lumber room to inspect the pattens strengthened my suspicions, and I returned to my room to compose a series of telegrams.
    When I finished, I hunted down William IV in the great hall and bade him take the messages to the village telegraph office and wait for replies. He hurried off, and I turned just in time to find Nin twining herself sinuously about my legs. I bent and scooped her up.
    “Where have you been, miss? I have not seen you for the better part of a day,” I scolded. She put out a velvety paw, touching my earring and I scratched her ears until she purred ecstatically. “Mind you tell your master that I have treated you with exceedingly good care,” I told her. I put her down and she scampered off again, disappearing into a narrow gap between the fireplace in the great hall and the carved walnut panelling of the wall beside it. It had once been used by the abbot as a sort of hidey-hole for caching his valuables. Since the Dissolution, it had been put to rather more prosaic use as a cats’ nursery. Christopher Sly in particular liked to give birth there as the stones held the warmth of the fireplace and she was never disturbed. I could only hope Nin was not about to follow suit. I should not like to explain to Sir Morgan Fielding that his extremely valuable and virginal Siamese had been willfully violated.
    Suddenly, a familiar voice rang out behind me.
    “Do not turn around, Julia,” my husband ordered. “And close your eyes.”
    I did as I was told. “What on earth are you up to?”
    “Do. Not. Ask.” His voice was strained and there was a series of strange sounds, scraping and straining, and under it all a fluent if subdued litany of modest swear words.
    “There. Now turn around, wife.”
    I did and nearly tripped over a felled tree lying in the middle of the great hall. Brisbane stood next to it, his usually pristine clothing deeply soiled and torn, his ebony hair tumbled wildly. Leaves clung to him, and he looked like an