did, but we have to consider it a possibility.”
George turned to look at me. He cocked his head to one side.
“On the other hand, there is simply no way you would have imagined her as well.
I saw you looking at her, barking your head off. You were as scared as I was,
but you were ready to leap for her throat, weren’t you, my brave lad?”
He gave me a light wuff.
I began to pet George’s head, and he stood there, staring out over the stream,
trembling slightly because he loved me to pet him, to scratch here and there, in
places he had trouble reaching.
“Wouldn’t you say that it was also rather impossible for a violent spirit to
return the knife so very carefully to John’s collection that just so happens to
be in his bedchamber?”
George wuffed again, probably at the sound of John’s name.
“But you know, George, we are considering two very different things that are
happening here. There was something awful in that wretched Black Chamber, and it
scares me to my toes because I can’t imagine what it is. But that old woman?she
was very human. Even if I lost my wits and dreamed her up, you couldn’t have. No,
she was real, she exists, she is here.
“And then there is what happened to Amelia in that other room. Well, you and I
will look into that when we go back to the Manor, although I am not all that
certain I wish to go back there. Someone either tried to kill me or scare me
into leaving. I am to pay for all of it. What does that mean? And who said it
and why, George?”
George remained silent.
I picked him up and held him tightly against me. He allowed it for a few seconds,
then pulled free and ran to chase a pheasant that had just burst from a thicket
of brush.
I eventually collected George and remounted Small Bess. I did not ride to the
small village of Devbridge-on-Ashton. It frankly seemed a silly thing to do when
someone had come at me with a Moorish dagger in the middle of the night. I
returned to Devbridge Manor. I now knew what I was going to do.
I stood in the middle of the empty room Amelia had entered the previous day.
There were two long, narrow windows, no draperies to soften them, that gave onto
the front of the house. If you looked off to the right, you could see the
stables, the left, the home wood.
The room, which had a nicely polished wooden floor, was completely empty. I went
into each and every chamber around it. They were either bedchambers, charmingly
furnished, or they were small sitting rooms, likewise nicely furnished.
Only the small room Amelia had entered was stark and empty. I felt nothing as I
stood there, nothing at all. But there had been something there the day before,
something that had slammed the door in my face. Yet it wasn’t the solid, very
real, old woman who’d come at me with John’s Moorish ceremonial knife the night
before.
I had brought George with me. He sniffed about, but he didn’t feel any more in
that small room than I did. No hair stood up on either of our necks.
I returned to The Blue Room with George, shut and locked the door. This had been
Caroline’s room. She had climbed out through one of the large windows in this
room and made her way along the ledge until she could get back inside the Manor.
Then she had walked to the north tower and thrown herself off.
The old woman of last night?could she not have also climbed out those windows
and walked along the ledge until she could climb back into the house, into
another room?
Thomas had told about the woman he had seen here very briefly when he’d been
younger. Had it been Caroline’s ghost? Why would she come back here? Why would
she want to come back here, to this particular room? Was Caroline the reason the
servants believed this chamber was haunted? Or was Caroline in that other room,