Page 42 of The Housebreaker's Assistant
Greer nearly shouted in relief. His labors wouldn’t be in vain after all.
The only thing that marred his sense of renewed confidence in his plan was that he did not see Penny anywhere in the village as he worked with the farmers at the market. He didn’t see the red-headed menace anywhere along the road as they made their way back to the farm either. The only thought more disturbing than Penny reaching the castle before him and finding out what they needed to know was the awful idea that his sweet thief had changed his mind about everything and abandoned Greer entirely.
That fear only grew as they loaded up the wagon again. By the time they approached the ancient walls of Trebarral Castle around mid-afternoon, those worries were the only thing Greer could think about.
“Afternoon, Mistress Anne,” the older farmer, Bob, greeted a middle-aged woman who must have been Trebarral’s housekeeper, with a flirty wink. “You’re looking lovely in this summer light.”
“Robert, you old fool,” the woman chuckled, slapping Bob on the arm.
Ironically, the flirtation was exactly what Greer needed as he assisted Michael, the younger farmer, in unloading the wagon and carrying stores into the castle’s kitchen. Not a soul questioned whether he should be there. He was able to stare up at the castle wall from the kitchen courtyard, pretending to be in awe, but really gauging how difficult the walls would be to climb. The answer was that it would not be difficult at all, as they had enough age to them that he would be able to gain purchase between the stones. He contemplated how exposed he might be as he whisked Lord Fabian from his prison—fairly exposed, since there was very little around the castle in all directions for a mile—and how many servants the castle employed. The answer to that was too many for his liking.
He was even happier to have an excuse to step inside the castle’s kitchen with a sack of potatoes so that he might learn how alert and numerous the castle’s servants were.
He did not expect to hear Penny’s voice coming from the servants’ dining hall.
“What you see here is the finest cotton, all the way from Egypt,” he was in the middle of saying, much to Greer’s confusion. “And here’s a silk handkerchief. It would look right pretty held against your nose when you sneeze.”
A pair of feminine giggles answered that ridiculous statement. Greer stepped into the servants’ dining room only to see Penny standing at the end of the long table, which was spread with an array of trinkets and nonsense. Two maids in dull black uniforms stood to one side, alternately gazing at the things on the table and Penny with coquettish eyes.
“Surely, you can part with a farthing or two for the luxury of a silk handkerchief,” the rascal said, leaning closer to one of the maids with a heated look.
So many emotions welled up in Greer simultaneously that he didn’t know which one to grasp hold of. Disbelief that Pennyhad reached the castle before him and gained entrance. Pride in Penny’s cheek and cleverness. Jealousy that the man was flirting with maids when he should have been on his knees, sucking Greer’s cock.
He shook all those things aside when Penny casually glanced right at him and subtly nodded. “Or perhaps one of these fine cigars to give to your sweetheart,” he went on, teasing the maids. “I bet you sneak out of the castle all the time of a night to kiss and cuddle under the moonlight.”
One of the maids elbowed the other, who squeaked. “I do not!” she protested, pink in the face.
“Yes, you do,” the other maid whispered.
“What’s this I hear?” Penny joined in the teasing. “And how do you accomplish that, miss? A lovely maid like you must have a room high up in a castle like this. How do you climb down from your tower in the middle of the night to enjoy the moonlight with, what is his name? Arthur? Neville? Benjamin?”
“It’s Billy,” the maid whispered, then giggled.
Penny feigned amused shock. “And what do you do to throw yourself into Billy’s arms? Tie your bedsheets together to climb down?”
“I use the door,” the maid confessed, then covered her face as her friend poked and laughed at her.
That clever bastard. Greer watched, floored, as Penny pumped the two young women for information about how to sneak out of the castle in the middle of the night without being caught.
“Surely, lovely Mistress Anne would catch you on your way out the door,” he said, pretending he was merely flirting.
“Mistress Anne sleeps like the dead,” the maid told him in a whisper.
“Greer, a bit of help,” Bob called from the other end of the kitchen.
Greer swore under his breath, half through irritation that Penny had been right about his ploy to gain entrance into the castle and knowledge of it, and headed back to the kitchen courtyard to finish with the load. He hated being wrong, and it was beginning to dawn on him that he’d been dead wrong to think he didn’t need Penny for this particular housebreak.
It stung to know he wasn’t as capable of breaching a castle to rescue a captive lord as singlehandedly as he’d thought, but seeing Penny well on his way to learning about the inside of the castle left him free to make more observations about the outside.
Trebarral Castle stood near but not directly on the edge of a cliff that looked out over the sea. As Brutus and Titus had informed them, it was an ancient structure that had once had a moat, but that was little more than a divot in the ground now. It had walls, but they were so ancient that they could not have held off a stray flock of sheep, let alone marauding hordes. That actually made them more of an obstacle, as they were crumbling and looked to be filled with loose stones. They would prove to be a challenge if he and Penny and Lord Fabian needed to climb over them in the dead of night. Particularly if Lord Fabian was not a good climber.
Greer had another stroke of luck when he was asked to fetch a barrel of salted fish from one of the more remote storehouses around the corner from the kitchen. It gave him a chance to see another of the castle’s faces, the one that looked out over the sea.
He couldn’t say why, but Greer would have wagered everything he had that Lord Fabian was being kept on that side of the castle. The walls were higher and sheerer on that side. There didn’t seem to be any doors or exits. Half the windows were narrow, as if archers might have fired at ships approaching the shore hundreds of years before, although some looked as though they had been installed more recently and were wider.
Most telling of all, high up on the wall, a window was open and soft, sheer curtains billowed out in the breeze. Perhaps it was entirely false logic, but in Greer’s mind, whatever room an enslaved young nobleman would be kept in would be more finely decorated than the others. Lord Fabian was undoubtedly in that tower room.
“Underhill can wait until I tell him to come.”
