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night in one of your bedchambers while Harold was on the scene as chaperone,” she shot back testily before just a small bit of the smile returned and she ended more softly, “but you may call me Alix.” Once more the Earl’s insides were sent topsy-turvy.
    Heedless of Mannering’s emotional ups and downs, Alexandra began looking around the courtyard where they were now standing. Nicholas explained that this was called the inner bailey, the carriage having already passed through the outer bailey—which was the name given to the courtyard that lay just inside the high curtain wall that surrounded the whole of the castle grounds. Along this curtain wall were placed several round towers with turretlike roofs—once employed as lookouts—he continued as she murmured her approval.
    Within these walls, he went on, and surrounded by the lower stone wall that made up the inner bailey, lay the donjon—or castle keep. What had from a distance looked to her to be a grand, sprawling pile was, in reality, she now saw, just a lot of stone and empty spaces surrounded by more stone. The donjon itself was not nearly so romantic a sight when viewed head-on. Oh yes, it did rise a majestic seventy feet or more into the air, but its ancient blackened stone and scarcity of windows made it much more opposing than welcoming. It did not even have a door on its ground floor! Chas’s birthplace could scarcely be called cozy.
    While Alexandra looked vainly about for an entrance, Nicholas instructed the coachman to walk the horses and motioned to Harold to follow him as he walked round the corner to where a wizened-looking old man dressed in green velvet livery was laboriously limping his way toward them. “Nutter, old fellow,” the Earl called out in way of greeting, “don’t exert yourself so. We would have made our way to you in time. Rest a moment, won’t you, and then be so good as to take my friend here to the kitchens and give him something to gnaw on. As far as I know, he hasn’t broken his fast yet from last night, and with a body that size, I’d hate to be anywhere around if he decides to swoon.”
    By now Alexandra, her neck already stiff from craning it up at the donjon looking for some sort of entrance, had joined their little group and she added, “Something for me too, Nicholas, if you please. I can’t remember when last I ate. Your English food—at least that offered at the posting inns where we stopped—is so bland as to put me almost totally off my feed. Tell me, do you English boil everything ?”
    At Nutter’s offended look, Nicholas turned to Alexandra and observed mildly, “You certainly do know how to make a good first impression, Miss Saxon. You’ll have Nutter here fairly eating out of your hand if you keep up this flattery.”
    Alexandra turned to apologize to the servant, but the old man was already limping away, muttering under his breath. Harold walked at his side, leaning down and nodding as if in full agreement with everything the man had to say.
    “It would seem your Harold is a bit of a diplomat,” Mannering observed dryly. “It would be a pity to tell Nutter his companion doesn’t understand a word he’s saying.”
    Alexandra’s mouth opened as if she were about to say something, but suddenly thinking better of it, she hesitated before finally saying, “Nutter seems singularly unimpressed with Harold. You’d think he saw Indians every day of the week.”
    “Nutter sees barely anything, Alix,” Nicholas informed her. “To him Harold is nothing but a large shape. That’s why I was so quick to approach him—he knows me by voice, and I wanted to assure him as to who I was. But never fear—he is a capable servant for all his nearsightedness. He knows every stone in this great pile, having lived here with your grandfather for all his life.”
    Mention of her grandfather brought Alexandra back to the business at hand. “How do we get inside this ‘pile of stones’?” she asked, hands on