“How are you feeling, sweetheart?”
“Better.”
“The tablets the doctor ordered are on that saucer. He said to take them as soon as you’ve eaten. That beverage in the glass is evaporated milk thinned with water. My poor darling, it seemed safer than what was in the bottle.”
“Everything looks delicious.” I smiled up at my husband while striving to keep my legs rigid in order not to create a tsunami.
“Georges wasn’t so appreciative. There weren’t any eggs. It looks as though the contestants are expected to prove their survival skills by going out and foraging in the woods.” He shrugged expressively. “I suppose they think they know what they’re getting themselves into.”
“At least Mrs. Malloy has the advantage of having met Lord Belfrey and getting a glimpse of the reality involved.” I studied his face as I went on to explain. When I concluded with the statement that I would hate to leave her behind when we set off in the morning, I was surprised that he merely said we would have to take tomorrow as it came.
4
I awoke in the night to the alarming sensation that I had wandered out of my life into someone else’s disordered world. I had read enough books about time travel to make this seem perilously possible, if in this particular instance undesirable. Yes, it would be intriguing to discover oneself back in a past century, but what as? Certainly not someone compelled to sleep in a nasty chill on a lumpy bed the width of a plank in a room which in the shifting moonlight resembled a cell.
Fortunately, before clutching my throat in terror and watching my eyes roll down my cheeks, I spied the charcoal-edged shape of my suitcase, which Ben had brought into the room. Memory shifted its way out of the murky morass. Before his return to the lower regions to find himself something to eat, he had watched me dutifully swallow the tablets sent up by Tommy Rowley and instructed me tenderly to get off to sleep as quickly as possible. A likely prospect, I had thought, given his evasions when I tried to get him to talk further about Mrs. Malloy’s determination to throw herself into the matrimonial fray. After a brief excursion to a bathroom that belonged in the Dark Ages, I returned to the room, inspected Ben’s cubbyhole where he had deposited his own case, took grateful note that it was blessed with a window, albeit one not much bigger than a table napkin, got out my nightdress, and decided on also wearing my flannel dressing gown into bed. The water bottle was by then cold, but I was suddenly too sleepy to toss it onto the floor. What exactly were those tablets Tommy had given me?
My dreams thrust me into an episodic chaos fraught with impending doom. Up one flight of turret steps and down the next, through mazes and tunnels stripped of color I fled, hampered by feet that wanted to go the other way, knowing that beyond every locked door waited something even more unspeakable than that which padded silently behind me. At the moment of waking, I realized that the fog had liquefied and was spreading in puddles with hideously distorted human faces around my ankles.
Now, having somewhat regained my bearings, I discovered what had prompted that specific. My feet and legs were chillily damp. The cause didn’t take prolonged pondering. The hot-water bottle had leaked. The cause? Either it was so ancient the rubber had perished or (more likely in my opinion) Mrs. Foot had failed to tighten the stopper. Shivering as much from aggravation as cold, I wiggled my way to the top of the bed to sit with my knees drawn up to my chin and try to find a bright spot.
Begrudgingly, I admitted there was one. My headache was gone. Tommy’s tablets had done their work. If Mother Nature had made her contribution, I wasn’t about to thank her. But for her fun and games I wouldn’t be currently incarcerated at Mucklesfeld. That Wisteria Whitworth had endured far worse did nothing to mellow my feelings. I was done with Gothic novels. The former wife who wasn’t quite as dead as the master had hoped-having reinvented herself as the vicar’s repressed spinster sister. The portrait of the cavalier in the ancestral gallery that came to life on the anniversary of Charles I’s beheading. The… the-my insides buckled-the evil black dog that came hurtling through the window to land on the bed of a woman who was already suffering all the emotional and physical trauma of a leaked hot-water bottle! The mattress bounced, once, twice, thrice, before flopping back like a dead flounder.
I must be imagining the animal’s thunderous leap onto a bed that had only been designed for half a person, not one full one and a dog. This appalling visitation was a delayed reaction to Tommy’s tablets. The black dog with the yellow eyes and stalactite teeth was standard in the Gothic genre. I remembered how the ambience of Mucklesfeld had summoned up the image of one earlier. If any of this were real, Ben would have heard the commotion along with my scream… I was almost sure I had screamed, although in my panic I might have forgotten to do so. I wrapped my arms tighter around my drawn-up knees in a pathetic attempt to squeeze myself into invisibility.
“You do not exist,” I informed the beast sternly. “You are a medicinal complication, for which I intend to sue Dr. Tommy Rowley if he hasn’t fled the country. I am going to close my eyes and when I open them on the count of three you will be gone. One… two… ready for the magic number?”
My children would have been horribly embarrassed by this pathetic performance. Either the moonlight had grown stronger or we were closing on morning, but I could see with painful clarity that he still was there, eyeing me as if for him it was a case of love at first sight. Well, I was far from charmed.
“You did not,” I chanted, “thrust that window free of its faulty latch. What would any real live dog be doing prowling around on a rooftop? I would summon my husband to get rid of you if there were any possible chance that he could see you.”
The look on his face was nothing short of soppy. Head to one side, ears lolling, he began a cheerful pant as though eager to inhale every sweet inflection of my voice. His tail stirred into a wag that increased in enthususiastic speed to that of an orchestra conductor’s baton. I had to blink to keep from becoming dizzy. His eyes, I realized, were not yellow but a melting brown, and I was forced to acknowledge that he actually looked more like a Labrador who lived to fetch slippers and newspapers than the hound from hell. He was wearing a collar, but there were no tags. Reaching out a hand as he inched forward, I stroked his velvet head.
“Okay,” I said, “you are real, but that makes it worse because obviously you’re a housebreaker, probably one with a record a mile long, and if I had any public spirit I would notify the police at once. But let’s pretend the phone isn’t back on, which it may not be.”
He continued to regard me with unstinting devotion. I told him he was shallow and I much preferred cats, they being creatures who preferred to be wooed than woo. What on earth was I to do with him? Should I let him stay as a replacement hot-water bottle until Ben woke and we could escort him downstairs and inquire if he was a member of the household? Surely that had to be the case. Out one window, in through another. And Mucklesfeld, like many ancient houses, must have a good-sized walkway around its roofline. I could have laughed at my silliness had my teeth not begun to chatter. With the window hanging open, I was chilled through despite my dressing gown. But closing the wretched thing, I remembered, would require standing on something and I had earlier decided that the chair was too risky. The only alternative was to drag the bed across the room.