Page 155 of Ironvine

Now? In the dark? In the rain?

He rushed down the stairs again and went to her morning room. The door was open. On her desk there lay sketches in a messy pile. He shuffled through them. All of them were drawings and watercolours of the castle and the pond, the colourful lushness of the flowering trees and vines. His gaze lifted to the large leaded glass window with the sweeping view of the valley down below to the castle ruins.

“Ah fuck.” He stormed to the front entrance. “A cloak! Someone fetch me a cloak and my gloves! Saddle a horse!”

He flung open the front door, and rain smattered the front steps as he clenched his jaw. “Dammit, Georgie.”

His fists curled at his sides. Images of his mother out alone on such a night, lost, in a fever. His heart thundered in his chest. He could not lose Georgie. He could not. He would find her and bring her home. Home. Their home.

“Sir?” Holt held out a cloak, and he snatched it from him. Jerrold came running.

“Your mistress is missing. I fear she is out in this weather, down by the castle.”

“Oh no, sir!” cried Jerrold.

“I am going to fetch her. Have a bath ready for her. Holt, find Joss, tell him to meet me there. We’ll need tools. Torches. He’ll know what to bring. Find him at once.” He charged down the staircase, and stopped, his lungs constricting. Other than his mother, the one person who had been kind to him when he needed kindness the most here at Ironvine was Joss.

“Sir?” Holt rushed to him.

“Tell Joss I need him.”

“I shall. Take care, my lord!” Holt shouted after him.

Charles’s pulse pounded with his every footstep. He had to find Georgie. He must.

ChapterSixty-Eight

Charles

Charles drovehis horse at a punishing pace across the fields, through the meadow, and finally down the valley to the ruins. The rains had tempered, and a mist hung in the air. The sweat on his brow was cold, no matter his blood storming through his veins. He signalled his horse, and the animal slowed its pace, its hooves clomping in the mud and water-logged grasses.

The storm had been swift. The pond overflowed. He dismounted quickly and tied his horse to a tree, stroking him as he took in the scene. The clouds now had cleared, and although the moon was not as bright as it previously had been, there was some light once again.

He marched through the water to get closer. “Georgina! Georgina! Where are you? Are you there? Georgie!”

But there was only the sound of rushing waters ebbing in the distance, gurgling water in the grasses, and his boots squelching in the muck. “Georgina!” He approached the courtyard, but to pass through was near impossible—it was deep in water. His only choice was the tower.

The tower where Hugh had abandoned him. The tower where he’d crawled on his hands and knees in the dark to the connecting house, scraped and wounded and so afraid a long time ago.

He’d told Georgie that story, and she had been fascinated by what he thought he’d seen that night when he was stuck here.

Charles moved around the entire stone building and finally reached the embankment by the strip of bridge which led to the tower. His cloak flying behind him, he climbed the stone parapet, his legs tensing, struggling to cling to the wet, worn stones, his wounded arm screaming as he climbed up, and finally, over. Crossing the bridge, he reached the tiny steps of the tower.

The door was his final barricade.

He tried the ancient handle. It would not budge.

Their father would tease them that he had the key to the tower door and would never give it to them, but that had only made their desire to gain entry all the more intense. That was the entire reason he and his brother had become fascinated to enter the tower. But he wasn’t that boy any longer. Now he burned with the need to find his wife behind this heavy slab of ancient wood.

“My lord!” Joss rushed toward him, a lit torch in hand.

“Joss!”

“Here we are again.”

“Yes, dammit, yes. Thank you for coming.”

“D’you know where her ladyship be, sir?”

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