The Lost Heiress of Hawkscliffe by Joyce C. Ware

Author:Joyce C. Ware [Ware, Joyce C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gothic Romance
Publisher: Belgrave House
Published: 1990-09-16T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I closed the door behind me when I entered the top floor storeroom so I could finish my work among the rugs undisturbed. I completed the last sketch in short order, and although it lacked the dash of Lance’s gifted hand, it was workmanlike and accurate, which sufficed for the purpose. Slowed by my yawns, the recording of the knot count took longer. Before long the temptation to rest my eyes for just a moment became too much to resist.

I awoke with a crick in my neck, the coarse weave of a bird-patterned Ushak pebbling my cheek and a dull ache in my head. I retrieved the journal that had slipped from my hand and shook my skirt into some sort of order before slipping out into the hall. The house was very still. The doors to Lance’s and Louise’s rooms were closed, as they had been when I came up, but I could not tell if the rooms were occupied. As I felt too dull either for repartee with Lance or for sparring with Louise, I made my way downstairs as quietly as I could.

Pausing briefly to deposit my notes and sketches in my room, I was heartened to see through the window a brightening heralding an end to the imprisoning mist. I snatched up a wrap and hurried downstairs in the hopes that a walk through the grounds might refresh me.

As I approached the massively arched front door beyond whose porte cochere stretched a formal allee I had not yet explored, the great clock in the court hall struck three. As the deep bonging notes reverberated through the long corridor, the vibrating echoes set in play among the crystal prisms dangling from the chandeliers fell upon my ears like distant mocking laughter.

I whirled. My hands flew up to ward off the sense of a haunting presence, insubstantial yet chilling, that once again proved to have no reality except in my overwrought imagination. I exhaled slowly, and as I looked about me, my senses sharply attuned for any irregularity, all I heard was the loud, monotonous, strangely reassuring ticking of the clock.

The ragged shreds of fog that still clung to Hawkscliffe’s walls and spires like the drowning hands of ghosts emphasized rather than softened the sad neglect I had noted upon my arrival.

I turned my back on the looming mansion and walked down the avenue lined with pin oaks, whose downswept lower branches extended as gracefully as the legs of a Degas ballerina. Lost in thought, I strolled slowly between the curtsying limbs until the sound of approaching voices attracted my attention.

Pausing near a sheltering oak, I spied Cora and Harry Braunfels advancing toward me uphill from the right, deep in conversation. Cora, burdened with a spade and a basket, was wearing stout boots and a coarse enveloping garment of uncertain design, somewhere between an apron and a coat, which made her look more like a dusty-feathered crow than a neat little sparrow. Armed with a pruning hook,

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