A Dangerous Observer by Amanda DeWees

Author:Amanda DeWees
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: gothic romance, historical gothic romance, gothic suspense, romantic suspense, historical romantic suspense, gothic romantic suspense, Victorian fiction, Victorian romantic suspense, Victorian gothic, historical mystery, Victorian mystery, romantic mystery, historical romantic mystery, Victorian England
Publisher: Amanda DeWees
Published: 2020-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

AFTER THAT NIGHT THEY both seemed to avoid each other. Eleanor was haunted by the memory that he had not denied murdering her father. The idea of Connor deliberately crushing her father’s skull was too horrible to bear, yet she must not dismiss it. After all, Eleanor herself had spoken of the dangers of the work site in Connor’s hearing. It was not too great a stretch of the imagination that he had taken inspiration from her words. And if he was capable of that ruthless violence against her father, what might Eleanor now expect him to do when he had wearied of her?

In her efforts to avoid him, she found an unexpected resource.

Her grandfather had liked to frighten her with tales of secret passages and hidden chambers used by the wreckers of old for hiding their booty and evading capture. Now that she was grown, Eleanor assumed those tales were simply invented. But one day she made an unexpected discovery.

The interior of the house was of a much more recent vintage than the exterior, which was not surprising; some former owner, no doubt wearying of dark Tudor decoration, had had new paneling put up. But the rooms had a symmetry that was at odds with the structure of the house, and here and there were odd little makeshifts that might have been created to make the new interior fit. The doorway between parlor and entry hall, for example, was so deep it was nearly a hallway. And when Eleanor once observed a manservant hammering a new nail into the paneling of the morning room, the sound was oddly hollow. Was there space behind the wall?

Since Connor was occupying himself elsewhere, as had become his custom, Eleanor took advantage of the solitude to examine these areas more closely. To her fascination, she found that in the dining room there were narrow doors hidden in the paneling that admitted her into the space between the new walls and the old. When she ventured into one of these spaces, hiking her crinoline up on one side to fit into the narrow dimensions, she found that although it was dark and stuffy, cracks between the panels and occasional peepholes admitted some light.

The peepholes suggested that the hidden spaces had been adopted for servants’ use at some point. Indeed, it was silly to think of these hidden byways as secret passages at all. But Eleanor still felt a thrill at being able to move unseen between and behind many of the rooms. It took her back to her childhood days, only this was even better, since there was no frightening grandfather to scare her with ghost stories.

On her first venture she did not go far, merely past the parlor and her husband’s study. The only people she saw were two maids, engaged in a dull conversation about cleaning the lamp chimneys.

The second time she went exploring behind the walls was a dull, rainy day. She knew Connor would be meeting with the landscape architect

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