“You have to. It’s a hunting party, Whit. It would look strange for you not to go. Even Mr. Hartsinger will be going, and he always has a look about him as if he’s not sure which end of the gun to hold.”
Apparently unwilling to search the kitchen over in hopes of finding a clean plate, he picked the pan off the stove and brought it to the table. “It won’t look strange if I plead a sore head after last night.”
“Perhaps not,” she conceded with a smile. “But you will look puny.”
He shrugged, but not before she saw the wince. “Can’t be helped. I need to search your uncle’s room. Eat.”
“Oh, thank you.” She picked up her fork and speared a bite of egg. “If Mr. Cunningham is still ill, you might as well go with the others, because his room is only one over from my uncle’s. I think it might have been the baroness’s room at one point, complete with a connecting door.”
“Damn it.”
She scooped up another bite. “These are really quite good, Whit.”
He merely grunted thoughtfully and stabbed at the food.
“There’s the attic,” she told him. “If he were printing counterfeit bills, he’d need a bit of space to do it, wouldn’t he?”
He looked up at her. “You’re right.”
“Of course, I doubt my uncle has managed the steps to the attic in over a decade,” she added.
He shrugged and took a greater interest in his breakfast. “It could be he has the servants carry things to and from for him and simply has the equipment stored there when others are in residence. It can’t hurt for me to look.”
“For us to look,” she corrected. “And stop scowling at me. You’ve never seen the attic. Believe me, you’ll need the extra set of hands.”
The attic was only accessible by climbing a narrow set of steps off the servants’ wing—and by the layer of dust covering those steps, Mirabelle estimated that no one had hauled anything in or out of the room in a very good while. But after discovering that Mr. Cunningham was still abed with the ague, Whit insisted they wait until the others had left, then forge ahead.
They climbed the dirty stairs and pushed open the door.
Trunks, crates, boxes, cloth bags, furniture, and every other item one might imagine finding in an attic was, in fact, to be found in that attic. They were stacked and piled and tossed about haphazardly so that the room looked something of a maze—a dusty, cobweb-ridden maze.
“Won’t this be fun,” Mirabelle said with a wry twist of her lips.
“It will certainly be time-consuming.”
“We can’t look through it all. The others will be back in only a few hours. They’re really not that dedicated to the sport.”
“Concentrate on the crates and trunks near the front of the room,” he instructed as he moved off to the side. “Keep an eye out for anything locked.”
She shrugged and picked a trunk at random. The lid opened with a load groan and a cloud of dust. She erupted into a fit of sneezing. When she finally recovered, Whit was standing over her holding out his handkerchief.
“Here you are,” he said. “Better?”
“Than what?” she laughed, and took the cloth to wipe her watering eyes. “Thank you.”
He shook his head when she tried to hand it back. “Keep it, hold it up to your nose and mouth the next time you open one of the trunks.”
“What of you?”
“I’ll manage,” he said and walked back to his crate before she could argue.
They worked in silence for the next two hours, moving from trunk to trunk and crate to crate. As she dug through another pile of moldering men’s clothing, Mirabelle came across a large lidded jar rolled up in a pair of breeches.
“How odd,” she murmured to herself. Odder yet, there was a folded piece of paper inside.
She took the lid off and tried to pull the paper free, but it was stuck to the bottom and the jar was so deep she couldn’t do more than grasp at the paper with her fingertips. She twisted her wrist and pushed until her hand popped through with a small sucking sound.
Yes !
She grasped the edge of the paper with her fingers and slowly peeled it back from the bottom. Miraculously, it came off in one piece.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
She pulled her hand back…and the bottle came back with it. Annoyed, she gripped the glass with her free hand and pulled. Nothing.
No.
She pulled harder, twisted her hand and wiggled her fingers. She tried yanking, tugging, gripping the jar by the rim and pushing. Nothing.
No! No! No!
She gaped at her hand, utterly appalled. It had to come out. It had gone through, hadn’t it? Why the devil couldn’t she get it back out again? She tried again, twisting her wrist this way and that, until finally admitting defeat. There was no possible way to get herself out of this ridiculous situation without help. She took a deep breath and concentrated on not sounding anxious.
“Er…Whit?” There, that sounded nonchalant, didn’t it? She’d hesitated a bit, but she didn’t think he’d noticed.
“Yes, what is it?” With his head still in a trunk, his voice sounded muffled and distracted.