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CHAPTER 7
They had covered the ground floor of the house, walked the length of the elegant gallery, with its windows overlooking the parkland and the distant vista of the Derbyshire hills, and were just inspecting the enormous ballroom which opened off it, when Veronica acknowledged inwardly that Sasha might have been right to advise her to wait until after she had rested to inspect the house.
Elsinore Hall’s rooms might not possess quite the vastness of the palazzo’s marble-floored rooms, nor the fading grandeur of the Prague palace, but Veronica had already lost count of the number of salons and ante-chambers they had walked through on the lower floor.
The gallery felt as though it stretched for miles, and as she studied the dusty wooden floor of the ballroom her heart sank at the thought of inspecting
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“What? What the hell are you talking about?” Sasha demanded ominously quietly, his expression as well as his voice betraying his outrage. “Listen, Veronica, I don’t like what you’re trying to suggest,” he told her sharply. She shook her head and replied thinly.“Neither do I, Sasha. But the facts speak for themselves.”“Do they?” His mouth twisted bitterly.“I rather think it’s your overheated imagination that’s doing the ‘speaking’ through your totally mistaken interpretation of them,” Sasha added through gritted teeth.“You can say what you want at this point… But you can’t deny the evidence of this report,” Veronica reminded him sternly.“What evidence?” Sasha demanded. “This is
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