CHAPTER SEVEN K ONE: THE BELL IN THE KITCHEN
The servants’ bell rang twice while Elias and Martha crossed the garden.
Ruth stopped at the kitchen steps because the sound came from the west wing, where no guest had slept for years.
Elias knew the bell wire had been disconnected during the previous winter.
He had helped remove the broken pulley himself.
Someone had therefore found another way to ring it.
Martha looked toward the window above the washhouse.
“We are being called somewhere,” she said.
“Or someone wants us to believe we are,” Elias answered.
Ruth held the folded directions beneath her apron and asked whether she should take them to Jonah.
Elias considered the paper in her hand and the darkened stable yard beyond the house.
“Give them to Dinah first,” he said.
“She knows which riders belong here.”
Ruth disappeared through the pantry door.
Martha waited until the door closed before speaking again.
“You used to answer every bell in that house,” she said.
“I still have to answer most of them,” Elias replied.
“Tonight you have a choice about this one.”
Elias watched a light appear behind the west-wing curtains.
“I want to know who is pulling it,” he said.
They entered through the scullery, where Dinah stood beside a cooling kettle.
She was holding a length of new cord that had been cut from a bundle used to secure laundry.
“Someone tied this to the old bell lever,” Dinah said.
“I found the other end outside the window.”
Martha examined the frayed knot.
“A child could have pulled it,” she said.
“A grown man could have pulled it from the garden,” Dinah replied.
Elias asked whether anyone had seen the person responsible.
Dinah pointed toward a muddy mark beneath the sill.
“Someone stood there long enough to scrape the paint with his boot,” she said.
“I heard the bell and came around from the kitchen.
”
“Did he run?” Elias asked.
“I heard a horse moving away, but I saw no rider.”
Elias looked at the fresh cord and remembered Adelaide’s warning about a bell in the orchard.
“There is more than one signal tonight,” he said.
Dinah put the cord on the table.
“Then stop following the signals and start asking who benefits when you leave your work,” she replied.
The answer came sooner than Elias expected.
A young stable hand named Samuel hurried through the back door with a bruise forming beneath one eye.
“Ralston sent me to fetch you,” Samuel told Elias.
“He said the master wanted you in the carriage house.
”
“Did the master speak to you?” Dinah asked.
Samuel shook his head.
“Ralston said he spoke for him.”
“And who struck you?” Martha asked.
Samuel glanced at the floor.
“I refused to lead the gray mare out without a lantern.”
Elias pulled a chair away from the table.
“Sit down,” he said.
Samuel remained standing.
“I cannot stay here.”
“You can stay long enough to tell us whether anyone is waiting by the carriage house,” Dinah answered.
Samuel swallowed and nodded.
“Two men are there, and one has a length of chain.”
Martha gripped the edge of the table.
“They wanted Elias alone,
” she said.
“They told me to say the master was waiting,” Samuel replied.
Elias understood that Ralston had abandoned any hope of persuading him.
The former overseer was arranging a private confrontation before Thomas could hear the competing accounts.
“Go back to the stable without looking for Ralston,” Elias told Samuel.
“Tell Jonah if he returns, and stay where the other hands can see you.”
Samuel hesitated.
“What if they ask where you are?”
“Tell them you delivered the message,” Elias said.
“That part is true.”
Samuel left through the pantry.
Dinah took the cord from the table and handed it to Martha.
“We will not go to the carriage house,” she said.
“We will go through the front door together.”
Elias looked at the women standing around him.
He had spent months being summoned alone into locked rooms, and the habit had taught him to expect danger without witnesses.
Now every attempt to isolate him was making more people willing to stand beside him.
“There is something else,” Dinah said.
She drew a small brass bell from the cupboard.
“This came from the west corridor yesterday, before Ralston arrived.”
Elias recognized it as the bell once used by the children’s nurse.
“Who brought it here?” he asked.
“Adelaide,” Dinah replied.
“She asked me to hide it because Thomas had ordered the nursery cleared.”
Martha touched the handle.
“Why would she hide a bell?”
“She said someone had been using its sound to frighten her,” Dinah answered.
Elias remembered Adelaide checking the bedroom door while footsteps passed outside.
“Perhaps she was frightened because she recognized the person ringing it,” he said.
Dinah returned the bell to the cupboard.
“Then ask her when she is standing in a room where she cannot lock anyone inside,” she said.
