Her frown got deeper. He almost shook her, to get her to finish.

“Well?” he demanded.

“Well, if the wind didn’t gust once more in that corner, rattling the lid on the trunk something fierce. I swear, it seemed almost as if the wind was trying to open it. It really was the strangest damned thing. Gave me the chills, I don’t mind telling you. And that’s when I remembered that old leather-wrapped thing I’d put in that trunk long before I ever came to Haverston to work—and that I was supposed to give it to your family as a gift. Stranger yet, soon as I did open the trunk, the wind stopped completely.”

He laughed suddenly. “I can just hear what Amy would say about that if she’d been there. She’d insist it was my grandmother’s ghost, or perhaps even her grandmother’s ghost, making sure the journal got delivered. Good God, don’t ever tell her about that wind, Molly. She really will think this old place is haunted.”

“Nonsense. It was just a wind, likely stirred up by the heat in the room.”

“Yes, obviously, yet my niece is a bit fanciful, so let’s keep that part of your discovery to ourselves, shall we?” he suggested with a smile.

“If you insist.”

“Now tell me who gave it to you all those years ago. You aren’t old enough to have known my grandmother.”

“No, but my grandmum was. And it all came back to me when I found it again, what she’d told me when she gave the present into my keeping. She’d been Anna Malory’s personal maid, you know.”

He grinned at her. “Now, how would I have known that, when you never bothered to mention it before?”

She blushed. “Well, I’d forgotten about that, too. I don’t remember much about my grandmum, since I was so young when I knew her, and she died soon after she gave me that journal. And my mother never worked here at Haverston, so she’d had no dealings with the Malorys herself, nor ever had reason to mention them, which made it all the easier for me to forget about it. And it was more than ten years later before I came to work here myself, but even that didn’t stir my memory.”

“So Anna Malory gave it to your grandmother to deliver?”