Much Ado In the Moonlight (7 page)

Connor almost made an exclamation of triumph before he could stop himself. He
knew
it! ’Twas one of Thomas McKinnon’s relations come to put on the play.

His elation, but not surprise, at being correct was immediately extinguished by the realization that he had been correct. One of Thomas’s kin was coming to put on a play.

Connor pulled his head back outside with a curse. Damnation, but would he never rid himself of that blasted family? Everywhere he turned, there was another one cropping up like a poisonous mushroom. Obviously, this would require a newer, more unpleasant strategy. He would have his peace and quiet that summer, no matter the cost. He turned to walk away . . .

Only then realizing that he was not alone. That damned innkeeper, Mrs. Pruitt, stood there, dressed all in black, loaded down with all sorts of modern gear that beeped and blinked and, truth be told, startled him so badly that a manly shout of surprise was wrenched from him against his will.

Mrs. Pruitt whipped herself around to look up at him. Her mouth dropped open and a look of astonishment descended upon her features.

Connor scowled. Had she never heard a lad bellow before? Aye, well, so that might have been considered a scream, but who was this woman to judge?

Then again, perhaps she wasn’t judging. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped to the ground, senseless.

Connor briefly considered ascertaining the extent of her injuries, but two things stopped him: He did not care; and Ambrose and his mates were coming out the door. Connor hastened away before they saw him.

So, he had not been mistaken in what was to come. It appeased him only slightly, for he had yet the matter of that McKinnon lad to deal with. Not that such troubled him. He would greet the man with his sword bared, leaving him with no choice but to flee.

He had not paid for the stones beneath his feet with his blood like another specter he’d once known, or with his gold, as Thomas McKinnon claimed to have, but he had damned well paid for it with his will to hold it.

And hold it he would.

And pity the next McKinnon who thought otherwise.

“Vikki
, we’re here.”

Victoria struggled to wake. She knew she had a good reason to open her eyes, but she’d been lost in the most delicious dream and wanted to savor it a bit longer. Shakespeare had been involved somehow. She thought Michael Fellini had been starring in the production. She was almost positive there had been a Tony award and rave reviews in the background.

She was certain it hadn’t included ghosts, ghosts in prop rooms, or prop rooms that she no longer had access to.

She opened her eyes. It took her several minutes to reconcile herself to the fact that she was sitting on a train and the train was no longer moving. Her sister Megan was struggling to get out of her own seat. Victoria frowned. Megan was only five months pregnant with her first child but one would have thought she was on the verge of delivery. Why was she waddling like a duck already?

It was probably better not to ask. Megan had picked her up at the airport, chauffeured her to the train station, joined her on the train, and kept her purse from getting ripped off while she slept. Now a car was picking them up at the station and taking them to the inn. Megan could waddle all she wanted in return for all those favors.

She got into the back of the car with her sister and stared out the window, feeling as if she were in some sort of French Impressionist painting of the English countryside. The whole experience was surreal. Gone was the smell, the busyness, the comforting closeness of skyscrapers and other buildings stacked up next to each other. In their places were rolling hills, a quaint village, and a road that led out of town to heaven only knew where.

“The inn’s not far,” Megan assured her. “I’m sure supper will be waiting. If you can stay awake for it.”

“I probably should,” Victoria said with a yawn. “If nothing else, I should make sure everything’s ready.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Megan said. “Mrs. Pruitt runs the place like a boot camp. Everything will be in order.”

Victoria looked at her sister and had to shake her head, though she didn’t do it too vigorously; jet lag wasn’t all that bad from New York to London and beyond, but she hadn’t had all that much sleep in the previous seventy-two hours, so she wasn’t exactly fully functional.

But in spite of her impaired mental state, she did manage to look at her sister and marvel at the change. At twenty-nine, Megan was three years younger than Victoria and had been struggling to find her place for years. She’d worked at all kinds of jobs; gone to and moved past college; tried her hand at all the family businesses, including Victoria’s theater troupe and their mother’s clothing company. Nothing had fit. Then Thomas had sent her to England to check out the castle he’d bought himself, sort of as a last-ditch effort to give Megan something to do.

Instead of failing yet again, Megan had wound up owning a little country inn and marrying some titled Brit who was so filthy rich that even Thomas genuflected when they met.

That had been a serious deviation from the script, but since it was Megan’s life and not hers, Victoria hadn’t said anything about it. Of course, she wouldn’t have the tolerance for that kind of detour herself, but to each her own.

She found herself distracted by the countryside as they wound their way through it and then up a small road to what was indeed a quaint, Tudor-style inn. They pulled to a graceful, dignified stop.

“Like it?” Megan asked.

“It’s wonderful,” Victoria said honestly.

“You were here before, you know,” Megan pointed out. “For my wedding.”

Victoria yawned. “Megan, I flew in the morning of your wedding, went straight to the church to put on my brides-maid dress, watched you get married, vaguely remember lunch at a very dark pub in the village, then I got back on a plane to close a very satisfying run of
Romeo and Juliet
.”

Megan laughed. “I suppose you never made it this far, did you? It’s probably just as well.”

The chauffeur opened Megan’s door for her. Megan leaned over and whispered, “It’s haunted,” before she leaped gracefully from the car as if she hadn’t spent the first five months of her pregnancy eating and puking for two.

Victoria sat there for several moments with her jaw hanging down before she realized that if she didn’t do something soon, she was going to drool on her shirt. She shut her mouth, clambered out of the car on shaky legs, and looked at the inn in front of her.

Haunted?

Perhaps all that smog in London had gone to Megan’s head and withered her brain. Then again, hadn’t their dad warned her there were otherworldly things going on here? She’d assumed he’d been kidding . . .

She hoisted her bag farther up on her shoulder and made her way uneasily through the front door. And then she came to a sudden standstill.

She stood in the entryway of a place that looked as if it had been lifted straight from a movie set. The furniture and paintings were perfectly period. The carpet was less so, but who was she to quibble? The innkeeper, doubtless the intrepid Mrs. Pruitt, was holding her feather duster over her shoulder like a bayonet and commanding a hapless teenager to be about settling Lady Blythwood as quick as might be.

Victoria realized with a start that Megan was Lady Blythwood. If all the people who had fired Megan over the years could have had an earful of that . . .

“That’s my sister, Victoria,” Megan was saying. She retrieved Victoria from the doorway and pulled her over to the reception desk. “Vikki, this is Mrs. Pruitt. She’ll be keeping your actors in line for you while they’re staying here.”

Mrs. Pruitt put her free hand over her ample bosom. “I’ll do what I can for the cause, Miss. We can’t have a proper play without proper rest for the players now, can we? Not that ye’ll need worry about that,” she said, lowering her voice conspiratorially. “We have lights out on time here at the inn.”

Victoria leaned in closer, in spite of herself. “We do?”

Mrs. Pruitt nodded knowingly. “I need peace and quiet for me investigations.”

Victoria immediately had a vision of an Inland Revenue audit that would make the IRS look like a bunch of third-grade math students. “Investigations?” she asked warily.

“Don’t ye know?”

Victoria blinked. “Know what?”

Mrs. Pruitt looked her over, then straightened suddenly. “Nothing,” she said in a businesslike tone. “Nothing to trouble yourself over, Miss. Your room is up the stairs. Last one on the right. The nicest—after Lady Blythwood’s, of course. I’ve a map where I’ve placed the rest of your troupe, if you’d care to study it. I daresay you could use a bit of supper first, though, then a good rest tonight.”

Victoria found herself with a key in her hand and Megan’s hand on her back, pushing her toward the stairs before she could slow things down long enough to ask just what kind of investigations Mrs. Pruitt was talking about. She would have stopped on the stairs, but Megan was now pulling her.

“Later,” Megan said. “Go take a shower. I’ll meet you downstairs in an hour for dinner and we’ll talk then.”

“Why didn’t we talk on the train?” Victoria asked, hoping she would make it to the shower before she fell asleep.

“You were drooling. And snoring. Not conducive to conversations of full disclosure.”

Victoria managed to stop in front of her room. She looked at her sister. “Full disclosure? What have I gotten myself into?”

“Something it’s too late to get out of. The roller coaster has already left the station,” Megan said with an unwhole-somely amused smile. “All you can do now is hang on for the ride.”

Victoria clutched her key. “I’m going to blame Thomas for this.”

“It worked for me.”

And with that Megan sailed, in a wobbly sort of way, into her room, leaving Victoria standing out in the hallway, wondering what she was supposed to do now.

“Oh,” she said, non-plussed. “Thank you.”

She was standing in the shower before she realized that the voice hadn’t been her sister’s.

 
Victoria
discovered she had fallen asleep on the way back from the shower only because she woke up in the dark, starving and disoriented. Then again, she’d been disoriented for most of the day, so maybe that was nothing new. But the hunger she might be able to fix.

She felt around for the lamp. After she’d managed to get that on, she sat up and dragged her fingers through hair that was no doubt matted on one side and riotously curly on the other. Well, there was surely no one left awake to see. She dressed in dirty jeans and walked to the door. She paused.

She
had
heard a voice, hadn’t she?

She left her room before she could think about it too seriously. Obviously, she was having a hypoglycemic hallucination brought on by airline food and exacerbated by no sleep. She would be more rational after raiding the fridge and returning immediately to bed.

She made her way down the stairs, thanks to the night-light on the reception desk tucked back under the staircase. She walked across the entryway and began trying doors. Sitting room, library, parlor; she examined each in turn. They were wonderful, looking as if they’d been plucked from the past and set down in the present with tender care. She closed the door on the parlor and continued her search for sustenance.

It took only one more door before she found the dining room. She walked through it, with its tables already laid for breakfast, then pushed her way into the kitchen.

Megan sat in a chair, toasting her toes against an Aga stove. Three older gentlemen sat with her, nursing something in rustic mugs. Interesting, but not exactly what she was looking for. Megan looked over her shoulder.

“Hey, Vikki,” she said warmly. “Nice nap?”

“I’ll tell you about it after I don’t want to gnaw your arm off. Where’s the fridge?”

“Over there,” Megan said, pointing to the far end of the kitchen. “Help yourself.”

“I thought I would,” Victoria said. She made quick mental notes about Megan’s companions on her way by. She wouldn’t have normally, but the men were wearing authentic-looking period costumes: kilts, rustic-looking shirts, caps tilted jauntily atop heads. Well, at least two of them were in Scottish dress. The third was dressed in something made for Elizabethan nobility, though perhaps not as bedecked with baubles and lace as she might have expected for full-blown court attire.

She shook her head wryly. Would there ever come a time when people didn’t throw themselves in front of her in hopes of becoming part of her next play?

She turned her back on the wannabes, opened the fridge, and began looking inside for something edible. She poached some cheese and bread, then looked around for something to go with it.

“Fruit on the table,” Megan said.

Victoria frowned at her sister. She sounded as if she were on the verge of laughing. Why? She surreptitiously felt her hair. Was it that traumatized by her unexpected nap? Megan’s hair was just as curly as hers, and presently looked just as napped on. Victoria pursed her lips as she stomped back across the kitchen and put her things down on the table. She reached for an apple.

Then she froze, her hand outstretched. She looked at the men sitting with Megan. Again, it wouldn’t have been the first time would-be actors had dressed up and put themselves in her path, hoping for an audition. These three certainly looked the part. But it wasn’t that. It was that she recognized one of them.

Hugh McKinnon.

The same Hugh McKinnon who had stroked the purple cape and feathered cap in her prop room.

She sat down. Hard. Fortunately, there seemed to have been a bench put there for just such an exigency.

“What’s wrong?” Megan asked innocently.