Page 85 of The Virtuoso
“If you have questions, you’ll ask me, and I’ll answer. When we’ve caught our culprit, I want to talk with you. Really talk.”
“If you are honest with me, you will expect me to be honest with you,” she said. “I want to be, I wish I could be, but I just… I can’t.”
“You won’t,” Val reiterated softly, “but when you’re ready to be, I will be too, and I promise to listen and listen well.”
She nodded, and just like that, they had a truce of sorts. Val cursed himself for his own hypocrisy but took consolation in the idea Ellen might someday be ready to tell him her secrets. It was a start, and she’d already warned him about Freddy.
That was encouraging, Val told himself—over and over again. And if a truce sometimes preceded a surrender and departure from the field, well, he ignored that over and over again, too.
The next day, Ellen took the boys to market with her, leaving Val, Darius, and Nick to assist with the roof to the hay barn. At noon, Darius called for the midday break, and the crews moved off toward the pond, there to take their meals.
“Shall we join them?” Darius asked.
“Let’s stay here with the horses,” Nick suggested. “Doesn’t seem fair everybody else gets to take a break and the beasts must stay in the traces.”
“Wearing a feed bag,” Val said. “It’s cooler inside the barn, and I could use some cool.”
“I’ll second that,” Darius said, “and a feed bag for my own face.”
They took their picnic into the lower floor of the barn, the space set aside for animals. At Val’s direction, it had recently been scrubbed, whitewashed, and the floors recobbled to the point where it was as clean as many a dwelling—for the present.
“I like this barn.” Nick looked around approvingly. “The ceiling isn’t too low. What’s for lunch?”
Darius passed each man a sandwich and watched while Nick took a long pull from the whiskey bottle.
“Save me a taste, if you please.” Darius snatched the bottle back, leaving Nick to wipe his mouth and grin.
“Damned good,” Nick allowed, leaning back to rest against a stout support beam running from floor to ceiling.
The beam shifted, and that small sound was followed by an instant’s silence. Nick’s quietly urgent “You two get the hell out” collided with Val’s equally insistent “Dare, get the team.”
Val darted to Nick’s side and added his weight to Nick’s, holding the beam in place.
Dare got the team into the barn and wrapped a stout chain around the upper portion of the beam. While the horses held it in place—no mean feat, given the delicate balance required—Val and Nick fetched trusses to provide the needed support.
When they were all outside the barn, the horses once again munching their oats, Val turned to frown at the structure.
“Somebody was very busy with a saw on Sunday,” Val murmured. “I thought you were over here much of Sunday, Dare?”
“Sunday morning.” Darius scrubbed a hand over his chin while he eyed the barn. “Sunday afternoon I accompanied Bragdoll’s sons to help clear some trees off the other tenant farms.”
“So the hay barn became an accessible target. Who knew we’d be restoring the roof so soon?”
“Bragdolls for sure,” Nick said. “What they didn’t know was you’d be stuffing all the rest of the first cutting into the barn this week, as well. Without that added weight, the center beam might have held until some unsuspecting bullock tried to give itself a good scratch.”
“More sabotage,” Val muttered, grimacing. “I wasn’t planning on moving animals in here until fall.”
“So perhaps,” Darius said slowly, “the idea was to let the thing collapse once the new roof was on, thus imperiling your entire hay crop and the lives of the animals inside the barn.”
“Another bad hay year,” Nick said, “and you’d lose your tenants.”
“If our culprit is Freddy Markham,” Val said, and there was littleifabout it, “then he has no more sense of the hay crop than he does of the roster at Almack’s. A collapsed barn is simply trouble, requiring coin to repair, as far as he’s concerned. He wouldn’t think about the loss of a few peasant lives or driving people off their land.”
“A treasure,” Nick said. “A real treasure, and you think he’s been plaguing you all along?”
“I do, though I want to know why. He was hardly likely to invest anything in this estate, and he walked away with half a sizeable kitty instead.”
“All this drama has worked up my appetite.” Nick sauntered back into the barn, retrieved the food and the bottle, and passed it to Darius. “Let’s take this to some safe, shady tree and finish our meal in peace. But where do you go from here, Val?”
