Ready Set Rogue

by Manda Collins

  Hurrying up into the kitchens, he ignored the odd looks from the kitchen maids, and made his way to the library where he found Maitland, Sophia, Gemma, and Daphne poring over the diaries, just as they’d been when he left.

  “What did you learn from Reverend Devereaux?” the duke asked, putting a finger in the book he was reading. “And where is Miss Wareham?”

  Quickly, Quill related what had happened when they arrived at the vicarage, and how he and Ivy had discovered what they suspected had been Celeste and Ian’s trysting place. “I’d like you to come back with me through the tunnel,” he told his cousin. “Just in case you see some clue I might have missed. And I daresay Ivy, Miss Wareham that is, is growing impatient.”

  Looking more than eager to leave the journals behind, Maitland stood. “I remember searching for the smugglers’ tunnels when we were boys,” he said ruefully. “I suppose we weren’t very good detectives if we couldn’t find them given how many hours we spent looking.”

  “I think that was likely because Greaves kept the wine cellar locked,” Quill said with a quirk of his lips. “He knew better than to leave it open with curious boys running about.”

  “What about us?” Sophia demanded as the two men began to walk toward the door. “We would like to see the tunnel too. I’ve spent the past four hours reading these journals, and aside from a few mentions of Lady Celeste’s investigations of us four, they have been sadly mundane. I need some fresh air.”

  Daphne and Gemma echoed her frustration.

  “And I am quite good with noticing details,” Daphne added hopefully.

  “And as a fossil hunter,” Gemma said with a chiding tone, “I really should be allowed to examine the cave. There may be some important findings there.”

  Quill exchanged a look with Maitland, who opened his hands in a speaking gesture.

  “Fine,” Quill said with a sigh. “But you must all do precisely as I say. This is serious business, not a day adventure. And I would not like it if one of you was to be hurt while I’m in charge of you.”

  One of the ladies gave a whoop of triumph, and they all three hurried from the room to fetch their hats and coats.

  “You’re a more patient man than I,” Maitland said, clapping Quill on the shoulder. “They’ll likely take a half hour at least to decide which hats to wear.”

  “Lady Daphne will not, I daresay,” Quill said with a wink. “She seems quite sensible except for her unaccountable wish to bed you.”

  Before Maitland could respond to that, they heard the noise of approaching footsteps and turned to see Serena hurrying toward them.

  “Dr. Vance’s wife has disappeared,” she said without preamble. “I’ve just had a visit from one of his servants asking if we’d seen her. And now the doctor himself is in the drawing room.”

  “Ivy and I just saw her at the vicarage,” Quill said with a frown. “She had gone to fetch the vicar to a sick bed. On Dr. Vance’s orders, no less. Why is he not there himself?”

  Something about the situation made him uneasy. And without waiting to hear Serena’s response, he hurried away from them toward the drawing room.

  When he entered, he found the doctor there, pacing back and forth, as if under the weight of some great worry. Upon seeing Quill he stopped and said, “She has lied to me, my lord. And now she’s gone.”

  The unease in Quill’s gut turned into full-blown panic. “What do you mean, man?”

  “I was searching for a pen knife in her sitting room this afternoon,” Dr. Vance said. “And I found a bottle of aconite powder hidden in one of her desk drawers. As well as a journal containing all sorts of details about Lady Celeste—her interests, her direction, and any number of personal details about her life. There was also a description of Reverend Deveraux and the name of his wife, his children. And each church where he’d been posted over his career.”

  “Why was she keeping a journal about Aunt Celeste?” Maitland asked. “And what the devil is aconite powder?”

  “The journal entries were dated two years before I ever met her,” Dr. Vance said, his mouth tight. “I think she may have married me to get close to them.”

  “And aconite poisoning shares many of the same symptoms with the illness that killed Celeste,” Quill stated. “You weren’t called out to a sickbed today were you?”

  “No,” the doctor said, looking puzzled. “Why?”

  “The last I saw your wife,” Quill said curtly, “she was at the vicarage, saying she’d just come on your orders to send him to a deathbed in the village.”

  Turning to his cousin, he said, “Maitland, you should go with Dr. Vance to see if she’s still there.”

  “Where are you going?” his cousin asked, even as Quill walked away

  “To get Ivy,” Quill said over his shoulder, beginning to run toward the wine cellar.

  Because his gut was churning now with very real fear. Fear that Mrs. Vance might get to Ivy before he did.

  And that lady was a stone cold killer.

  * * *

  Ivy came to back to consciousness with the feeling that the earth was shifting under her. She would have moved, but she found her limbs uncooperative and her head aching as if it had come into contact with something quite heavy. A grunt of exertion made her open her heavy eyelids, and she saw Mrs. Vance’s face contort as she tried to move something heavy.

  That something heavy was Ivy.

  She tried to feel beneath her with her hands, but found to her dismay that they were tied together. And her gunshot wound hurt like the very devil. It felt on fire. And if she wasn’t mistaken, it was bleeding again.

  And though there were lit candles along the walls, she saw that they were in a dark tunnel. The memory of the cave, of Quill, came rushing back. Could they be in the same tunnel he’d told her about? The one leading up to Beauchamp House?

  Deciding that her best chance at freedom lay in feigning unconsciousness, she closed her eyes again, and soon felt the cart, or whatever device Mrs. Vance had used to move her, come to a stop. A hinge squeaked loudly, and soon she was being trundled forward again, over a threshold of some sort and through a doorway so narrow she could feel the scrape of it against her shoulders.

  “There,” said the doctor’s wife with a sigh of relief, letting the cart drop down onto the floor.

  Ivy was unable to keep from crying out at the sudden movement.

  “So,” said Mrs. Vance with mock cheerfulness. “Someone is awake. Look, Father, I’ve brought you a visitor.”

  Not bothering to continue pretending to sleep, Ivy opened her eyes and looked around. They were in a damp-smelling chamber with no windows. A quick scan of the room revealed a man she presumed was the Reverend Ian Devereaux judging by his collar.

  The vicar, who was tied to a chair with a handkerchief stuffed into his mouth, only moaned in response to his long-lost daughter’s taunt.

  “You haven’t met yet, I don’t think,” Mrs. Vance continued, “but this is Miss Ivy Wareham. She’s been making things difficult for me, these past few days. Putting her nose into things that don’t concern her.”

  “I should think the deliberate murder of two women and an attempt upon my own life is just cause for concern,” Ivy said, her voice scratchy from her dry throat.

  “None of it concerned you.” Mrs. Vance was pacing now, with a frenetic energy that told she was feeling threatened by the presence of someone who talked back. Ivy considered her options and decided that it might be best to placate the woman rather than challenge her. A calm Mrs. Vance was less likely to kill her prisoners, she thought.

  “You are right, I suppose,” Ivy said, trying to infuse her voice with apology. “I was simply concerned about Lady Celeste’s untimely death. I should have left it alone and applied my interest to my studies.”

  “Yes, you should have,” Mrs. Vance said smugly. “Now look at where you are. You might have simply gone about your business, and married that handsome marquess of yours, but instead you’re here. And I’m
afraid I’m going to have to kill you along with my father, here. Because I can hardly let you live now that you know I’m the one who killed Celeste and that fool Elsie.”

  Ivy blinked at hearing the confirmation so clearly from the murderess’s lips. “You cannot know how much I wish I’d kept to my own affairs,” she said with feigned regret. She might not be in this predicament if she’d not decided to listen to Lady Celeste’s letter, but she could not in good conscience have ignored her benefactress’s request that she find her killer. She could only imagine what that lady’s response would have been to the knowledge it was her own daughter who had poisoned her to death. Poor Lady Celeste.

  “But why did you do it?” Ivy asked, truly wanting to know what had prompted this woman, who seemed to have a comfortable life as the wife of a prosperous country doctor, to kill her birth parents. “They certainly did not give you up because they wished to, Marianne.” She used the woman’s Christian name in an attempt to build a bond between them. Anything that might make her see Ivy as less of an enemy and more like a friend.

  A flicker of unease passed through Mrs. Vance’s eyes. “What do you mean they didn’t wish to? They did it, didn’t they? This hypocrite has spent his life preaching godliness to people while he himself is a fornicator who didn’t even deign to marry my mother when she fell pregnant. I hardly think running away from responsibility is the action of a man doing his Christian duty.” She shook her head in disgust. “And Lady Celeste, a wealthy duke’s daughter, who was so ashamed of me that she didn’t even deign to place me with a family befitting my rank as her daughter—she doesn’t deserve my sympathy. If anything I hold her more accountable than this miscreant.” She gestured toward where the vicar was looking at her through eyes that were at once horrified and mournful. “At least he didn’t give me up after carrying me for months inside his body. It takes a very despicable sort of woman to give away her child.”

  “But Lady Celeste wanted to keep you,” Ivy insisted, though she knew there was little chance Marianne Vance would believe her. She was far too accustomed to the narrative of her abandonment that she’d built up in her head. “It was her parents, the Duke and Duchess of Maitland who insisted that you be given to the couple who raised you. And it was they who sent your father away to Yorkshire to a church on the Earl of Moreland’s estate. They were powerful enough to have him banished from this part of the country. And they did.”

  “How do you know any of this?” Marianne spat out. “You never even met the exalted Lady Celeste. And yet, you and those other three ungrateful bluestockings came here to take possession of her house. Her home. The place I should have, would have, inherited if I had been given my birthright.”

  Ignoring the jibe against her and the other bluestockings, Ivy said, “Because I’ve read her journals from that time. She was devastated by what her parents did. And she even went so far as to search for you for several years. But the duke and duchess were quite good about erasing all traces of you. It was as if you’d never existed.” She had no proof that Lady Celeste had, in fact, looked for her child, but Ivy had a feeling that the woman she’d come to know through her journals would not have sat idly by while her child was raised by strangers.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Vance said with contempt, “that’s because the couple they gave me to were rotten to the core. They were cold and unfeeling. And they forced me to work like a dog on their farm from the time I could walk until they had the good grace to die when I was seventeen. The only good thing they did was leave that despicable farm to me so that I could sell it the first chance I got and use the money to set myself up in Bath. Which is where I lived for nearly a decade before I met the good Dr. Vance.”

  Curious in spite of herself, Ivy asked, “How did you know that he worked in the same village Lady Celeste lived in?” Shifting her weight to ease the discomfort of her arm, she felt the bonds around her hands were looser than she’d thought before. Maybe she could get them off herself?

  Not daring to show what she’d discovered, she turned her attention on Marianne Vance and listened to her answer while she pulled against the rope behind her back.

  “I didn’t, not at first,” Marianne said with a laugh. “I had found several letters from the old Duke of Maitland in my father’s papers, and he had mentioned Celeste and the vicar, here. It was really just a matter of serendipity that Dr. Vance mentioned the grand lady in his county—Lady Celeste Beauchamp. And I knew I had to get there. Vance was already taken with me, so it was just a matter of making myself pleasing to him before he was falling all over himself to marry me. That the recently widowed Reverend Devereaux had only just moved into the area was a happy coincidence I discovered when Dr. Vance brought me to my new home.”

  “But why did you decide to kill Celeste?” Ivy asked, aghast at the cold calculation that had led Marianne to marry a man she didn’t love for the sole purpose of getting close to the mother who abandoned her. “If you had only told her who you were she would have welcomed you with open arms. She loved you. She looked for you for years.”

  “Not. Hard. Enough,” Marianne said coldly. “And why should I introduce myself to the woman who let me be taken from her when I was a defenseless babe? That sort of person doesn’t deserve sympathy, certainly not mine. By the time I met her, I was already planning her downfall. The couple who raised me died of a stomach complaint, or so the doctor believed, shortly after Serena’s husband died in hunting accident. So I already knew how much easier it was to put a dose of aconite into an herbal tisane, when compared with engineering lying in wait with a gun—though both have their uses. And when my dear husband mentioned that Lady Celeste suffered from dreadful headaches, it was only a matter of suggesting to her that she try the tisane recipe that I’d used for my own dear mother to set things in motion. I made sure to tell her that Elsie should get the ingredients from the gypsy woman, of course. After, I’d given the maid herself my own little powder to add to the mix, telling her that Dr. Vance had given it to me expressly for Lady Celeste’s use. Vance is too much of a snob to speak to the likes of Elsie, so I knew he’d never find out, and I knew that adding the gypsy woman to the mix would throw suspicion her way before it ever came back to me.” She smirked. “And I was right of course.”

  “But how did you know Lady Celeste would even drink the tonic?” Ivy wanted to know. She kept her gaze focused on Marianne while she tried to work her hands against the ropes. She’d crush her own fingers if it meant getting out of this cellar with her life intact.

  “I didn’t,” the doctor’s wife said with a shrug. “But fortunately for me, her headaches got worse. And by that point she was willing to try anything that promised to give her relief. If she’d continued being recalcitrant, of course, I’d have had Elsie give her something to make them worse. I know any number of herbs and powders that could have done the trick.”

  “But why kill Elsie?” Ivy asked, wondering what could possibly have got the maid killed. As far as she knew there was no reason for Mrs. Vance to wish her dead.

  “Because once Lady Celeste died and you began asking your questions,” Marianne said grimly, “she figured out that I’d been the one to help Lady Celeste along the road to her demise. After you and Lord Kerr visited her on the night of the dinner party, she sought me out to let me know what she suspected. And demanded that I pay her to keep quiet. I couldn’t have that, could I? So I sent her some pastries I’d laced with rat poison—far more efficient than the slow death I’d devised for Lady Celeste. Fortunately, I knew Elsie had a sweet tooth. The sugar disguised the taste of the poison quite nicely. At least I suspect it did since she was found dead the next morning.”

  The dispassionate tone Marianne Vance used to relate the details of her crimes was more chilling to Ivy than outright glee would have been. There was something amiss with the other woman. Some lack of feeling for her fellow human beings that made her lack the capacity for empathy. A woman like this would not feel even a flinch of conscience at taking a lif
e. And she certainly would not be talked out of her plans.

  Still, Ivy knew she had to keep her boasting about her own cleverness if she was to survive this. Quill had surely got back to the cave entrance by now and discovered she was missing. Hopefully he would recall how odd Mrs. Vance’s behavior had been at the vicarage and go back there for answers.

  She was making some headway with the ropes, and had managed to get one hand out almost to the palm. But she was beginning to lose hope.

  “And what of the gypsy fortune teller?” she asked aloud. “Surely you didn’t pay her to tell me I was in danger.”

  Marianne laughed. “No, not at all. She was just being her own foolish, gypsy self. And I’d never even spoken to her, so I knew if she mentioned anyone it would be Elsie. It was good of you to tell the servants at Beauchamp House that you all were going to visit her caravan that day, though. My dear friend, the kitchen maid, was able to get word to me as soon as you set out, so I was able to hide along the path.”

  “You’re the one who shot me?” Ivy demanded. She’s thought perhaps Marianne had hired someone—a local man, or a lover—to shoot at her. The news that she’d done the deed herself was startling somehow.

  “Do not sound so surprised, Miss Bluestocking,” said the doctor’s wife with a laugh. “For someone who is a champion of the female sex, you sound quite skeptical that a lady would be a good enough shot to wound you. I learned to shoot on the farm. Got quite good at it, though it was never my favorite sport. Too bloody for my taste. I much prefer the safe distance poison provides. Not to mention that it makes the victim suffer for quite a bit longer.”

  As she at last managed to get one hand free, then the other, of her bonds, Ivy couldn’t help but say to her would-be killer, “And yet you missed, if you wished your shot to take my life.” She was careful not to let her triumph at freeing her hands show in her face. It would do little good to alert Marianne to the fact that she’d worked her way loose before she had a chance to do anything with her newfound freedom.