The Exploits & Adventures of Miss Alethea Darcy by Elizabeth Aston

Shutters closed, lights extinguished, the villagers slept the sleep of those who work hard from daybreak to sundown, while the travellers enjoyed less solid slumbers.
    Mrs. Vineham’s active mind brought her strange dreams and her eyes twitched under the dark shade she wore across them to keep out the least glint of too-early morning light. The Lessinis’ bed was not a restful one, but its inhabitants enjoyed the other pleasures of the bedchamber with an ardour that did credit to a pair hardly in the first flush of youth; they might, so Lessini fondly told his wife in caressing Italian, be young lovers on their honeymoon, enraptured by the novel delights of wedded bliss. In the adjacent chamber, heedless of the sounds of love and laughter coming through the wooden walls, Lord Lucius tossed and turned, his mind fuddled still with the fumes of too much brandy.
    Figgins slept the sound but wary sleep of the experienced servant, envied by Alethea, who could not sleep at all. She felt a heaviness in the air about her, an inexplicable sense of unease that kept her wide awake. She rose from her bed and went to the window. However cold the air, its freshness would clear her head. She opened the casement window and pushed back a shutter. The road lay gleaming in the dim moonlight, and it seemed to Alethea that the way they had come was darker than the way that wound up the valley to the gap in the soaring mountains, the way they were to go.
    Out of the darkness came the sound of hooves. A horse. No, two horses. She craned out of the window to see who was arriving at the inn at this ungodly hour. The first horseman was a tall man, cloaked and hatted and muffled so that his face was hidden. With him came a shorter man, a servant, judging by his actions as he jumped from his horse and ran to hold the other man’s bridle.
    Knocking at the door below. A long wait, then the sound of bolts being drawn back, the light from a candle spilling out over the threshold, voices, and then the door closing as the servant led the two horses round to the side of the inn where the stables were.
    Intrigued by this late arrival, and now even more wide awake, Alethea was about to close the window when she heard the sound of more hooves and of carriage wheels. Another late arrival? Was it like this every night at the inn? No one but her stirred; how could they be so soundly asleep?
    It was another man, this time in a long drab coat, who descended from the chaise. He, too, was accompanied by a servant, and he, too, knocked on the door. His knock was loud and peremptory, the knock of a man who knows he has to arouse a sleeping house and does not care, thought Alethea.
    Once again, the door opened. The voices were louder this time, and the language spoken was English. The man in the coat cursed the landlord for keeping him waiting, flung an order over his shoulder to his manservant, and entered the inn.
    Alethea could not contain her curiosity. She pulled the shutter back across the window, flung her coat over her nightshirt, and quietly opened the door of her bedchamber.
    The rooms in this part of the inn were arranged around three sides of a gallery, and Alethea looked down into the hall. There was the landlord, still in his night-cap, and a sleepy chambermaid in a dress she had clearly dragged on over her night shift.
    The tall man, the first one, was talking now, in English, which was clearly his native tongue. He knew the second man, that was clear.
    â€œYou’re making the devil of a row, Warren. This is an inn, not a bear house.”
    Warren ignored this remark. “A large chamber, your best room, if you please,” he said to the landlord.
    Alethea judged that the landlord was more than used to such requests; he spoke to the chambermaid in the dialect of the region, unintelligible to her and probably to the two men below. The tall man had the prior claim, but the landlord knew which of the two new guests was a troublemaker, and he