It was silly of me to become upset. Just two days prior I had seen one of Lord Buchan’s gardeners down in the grave and it had not unsettled me. There was no reason I should be upset now seeing Gage down there.
But irrational as it was, I couldn’t seem to shake the disquieting feeling that had overcome me. That Gage had just placed one foot in his own grave.
Still oblivious to my distress, Gage moved forward to stand beside me. “Have you already searched the rest of the abbey ruins?”
I turned to him with a start and he nodded at the stairs leading away from the abbey church down into the cloister. “I . . . no.” I fumbled, mentally castigating myself for not thinking of it. “I can’t believe we failed to do so.”
Gage turned back to me. “I’d glad you didn’t.”
I bit back the self-recriminating thought I was about to utter and scowled at him. Just what did he mean by that?
“It would have been dangerous to conduct a search on the night the crime took place,” he replied, clearly trying to placate me. “Those stairs look none too steady, and I can’t imagine the rest of the abbey is in much better condition.”
“And the morning after? When Trevor and I returned?”
“Well . . .” He paused uncomfortably. “It’s unlikely your efforts would have turned up much.”
I arched my brows angrily. “But we still should have looked.”
I turned to stride across the distance toward the staircase, frustrated with myself for not having done so earlier. Here I was trying to prove how capable an investigator I could be on my own, and I’d neglected to do something so obvious. Gage was right. It was unlikely we would have found anything to assist with our inquiry—there was no reason the grave robbers should have visited the other parts of the abbey—but it still needed to be searched. And now that three days had passed since the murder and robbery, it was doubtful we would find anything even if something had been left to find. The rain and wind and time would have washed it away.
Gage caught up with me before the stairs, taking hold of my elbow as we picked our way down the chipped sandstone steps. We passed through an archway overgrown with creeping plants and into the cloister, now completely open to the sky. The roof had long ago fallen in, probably during the destruction wrought by Henry VIII’s army in the mid-sixteenth century. The stone and wood had been carted away to be used elsewhere, but the holes in the walls where the roof beams had once been supported still remained. Now a patch of green grass spread out across the enclosed courtyard, with trees and shrubs hugging the walls.
Trevor followed behind us and we all paused, studying our surroundings before turning to the block of buildings on our left. We passed a large arched ledge built into the wall and strolled by several rooms, some of which were in too much disrepair to enter. The library, a narrow barrel-vaulted room with only a few decorative accents remaining, was empty.
But the Chapter House was not.
Gage and I cautiously crossed through the doorway flanked with ornate pillars and halted at the top of the stairs that led down into the echoing chamber. The musty stench of mold assailed our nostrils. As our eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see that the room featured several lovely Gothic pointed-arch windows. However, the heaviness of the stone walls and vaulted ceiling and the trees shading the abbey ruins made it next to impossible for these meager light sources to brighten the chamber.
I couldn’t help but admire the plaster ornamental arches and scrolls on the walls at the far end of the chamber, even as I shivered from the chill that seemed to pervade the room. Staring up at the rounded vaulted ceiling as we descended the steps into the gloom, I could almost hear the canons’ voices resonating around us in the space. It must have been a glorious sound when they were alive, but now the memory of those reverberations only prickled over my skin, as if the canons’ ghosts were brushing past me.
Gage pulled me closer as I shivered a second time, but then his attention was captured by something to our left. A bundle of cloth rested on the low stone ledge that spanned the length of the walls where the canons had sat in contemplation.
Gage guided us toward it, enabling me to see that the bundle appeared to be made of a course woolen cloth of some kind. I did not object when Gage released my arm and reached out to examine it, not wanting to touch it myself. I leaned in cautiously as he folded back the cloth, half afraid some woodland creature bedded down inside would leap out. When all he uncovered was the fine pink muslin of a lady’s gown, I rocked back on my heels in confusion.
Gage glanced back at me, his brow furrowed, sharing my puzzlement. Then he carefully lifted the dress to find a set of women’s undergarments, including a frilly shift and petticoat. At the bottom of the pile rested a dainty pair of women’s slippers.
Neither of us seemed to know what to say, and ultimately it was Trevor who broke the silence.
“Who the devil’s clothes are those?”