Love's Tangle by Isabelle Goddard

of his needs but hopefully by then she would be out of earshot. She dropped the cream into the kitchen, making sure it was not easily visible, and then found the small passage she had wandered into by mistake on her second evening at Allingham. She was in the stone-flagged Great Hall. A temporary hush had descended on the house as it did every day at this time. Half the servants’ work had been done and there was a brief rest before they began again on the hours of toil that still awaited them. She darted across the hall, deliberately avoiding the beak-like stares of Gabriel’s ancestors, and carefully tried the door to the study. The handle turned easily. Slipping inside, she closed the door very, very quietly. The room faced towards the rear of the house looking out on a vista of rolling lawns, a lake with a fountain at its center and to the right a well-tended rose garden. Beyond the Capability Brown inspired hills and hollows stretched pasture land and grazing cattle. Of human beings there was not a sign.
    She would have to work fast but this time she was unencumbered by candlelight, the sun shining broadly through large casements and illuminating every corner of the room. A couple of mahogany cabinets were positioned against the wall while a modest bookcase took up another and several small tables and a scattering of easy chairs were dotted here and there. She was surprised to think this was Gabriel’s study. It was a room devoid of his presence, a room in fact from which all personality had fled. It was also disconcertingly tidy and if there were papers here, they had been stored well out of sight. The cabinets offered an invitation but there was one other piece of furniture that dominated the room: a large desk sat in the window enclave and looked outwards to the demesne beyond. This was where she would start.
    She was in luck. The drawers were unlocked. She opened them one by one and skimmed their contents: discarded pens, old envelopes, several visiting cards and a few crumpled bills which appeared to have lain there forever. Nothing of any interest. One drawer left, positioned at the side of the desk rather than the front, and it appeared to be locked. She felt a rising excitement. She had seen a key in the first drawer she’d opened and with fumbling hands fitted it to the lock. It turned easily. That cannot be right. And it wasn’t. The drawer was completely empty and why it had been locked was a mystery. A hurried glance around. Should she move on to the mahogany cabinets? But no, this desk held the clues she sought although she could not see how. She tipped out the contents of the pen container but all she found was a collection of battered quills. She turned the blotter upside down but it remained disappointingly intact. She felt beneath the desk rim for a possible secret drawer. Not a creak or a grind of hinges. Disgusted, she was about to give up on the desk and begin on the rest of the room when her foot accidentally caught in one of its carved legs. There was a sharp click and a small compartment shot out from inside of the desk’s writing surface, from what she had taken to be a simple leather inlay.
    Her face grew pink with anticipation. There was a secret drawer! Might there also be secret papers? But when she eagerly pulled out the compartment to its fullest extent, not a scrap was to be seen. She jiggled the drawer urgently and a slight metallic sound answered. A silver object curled into a small heap, slid to the front of the drawer. Carefully she drew it out and laid it on her palm. Her heart almost stopped as she realized what she was staring at—a locket or rather one half of a locket on a broken chain and inside a beautifully executed miniature of a young man, fresh faced and blue eyed. She studied the face intently, looked and looked again as though by sheer looking she could draw out his very spirit and urge him to speak. It was the mirror image of the broken locket she carried on her