“Where is he?” Miss Morrow grasped Honore’s arm and drew her into the hall.
“Kitchen.” Honore swallowed hard. “We were thinking . . . the cellar.”
“Of course.”
Calm, decisive, sure of herself, Miss Morrow led the way down the back steps and into the kitchen. “My lord, how bad is it?”
He did not answer. He was slumped over the table, his head on one arm. The faint light from the hearth coals revealed none of the extent of his wounds, but the metallic stench of blood filled the kitchen.
“Let us get him downstairs. Where down there?” Miss Morrow asked.
“He suggested behind the brandy barrels, but we can’t move those.”
“The coal room then.”
Honore stared at her companion, though her face was merely a blur in the dark. “That is a terrible idea. It’s dirty. It will be uncomfortable.”
“It is only half full, and its very dirtiness will keep anyone from looking further.” Miss Morrow’s shudder ran through Honore. “Besides, coal dust will absorb the blood.”
If he were still bleeding. If he were not, then either the wound was indeed a mere scratch or he was dead. If he still bled, he could soon be dead if they did not stop it.
A whimper escaped Honore’s lips.
“We have time.” Miss Morrow’s tone soothed. “No one is looking for him.”
“Yet.”
“Precisely. Let us get him downstairs.”
Getting him to his feet proved nearly impossible. He had lost consciousness, a bad sign. Talking and tugging, patting his face, and attempting to lift him did nothing but come too close to toppling him from the chair.
“Get some cold water,” Miss Morrow suggested. “I will see what I can find of this wound.”
In the far corner of the kitchen, Honore located a cup and a barrel of cold water. She dipped the former into the latter and carried them back to Miss Morrow.
Her companion leaned over Ashmoor, muttering beneath her breath. “It is not good, but it could be worse,” she said aloud. “Where is that water?”
Honore gave her the cup. “It is not much for cleaning a wound.”
“I do not intend to clean a wound with it.” Instead of explaining, she simply upended the cup over Ashmoor’s head.
He gasped and spluttered, then jerked upright with a muffled groan. “What in the—ohhh.”
“My apologies, my lord,” Miss Morrow said, “but we had to get you awake. I have padded your wound with my shawl. It is not the doctoring you need but has slowed the bleeding.”
And how did Miss Morrow know so much about wounds?
She would ask later. For now they needed to get Ashmoor on his feet and down a steep flight of steps.
“I’m all right.” The thready consistency of his voice spoke volumes to the contrary.
Yet he pressed his right hand onto the table and levered himself to his feet. Honore slipped her arm around his waist on one side and Miss Morrow on the other. Between the two of them and his own flagging strength, they got him across the kitchen and into the passage from which led the cellar door. There they stopped to figure out how to get him down the steps.
“We will go first,” Honore decided. “You can lean on us, and if we are together, we can stop you from falling.”
She hoped. They were more likely to all three of them fall into a broken heap at the bottom of the flight.
But they did not. Each step seeming to take a full minute, they maneuvered the stairway from coal-lit gloom to stygian darkness. Not one of them had thought to bring a candle. Too late. Ashmoor could not wait any longer before settling in one place.
Honore still balked at the coal room door. “I do not think this place is good for him.”
“Prison would be less good for him,” Miss Morrow countered.
Briefly, Ashmoor’s arm tightened on Honore’s shoulders. “She’s right, my dear.”
His dear. The second time he had called her that this night. For the second time, her heart stopped, warming with a spark of hope.
All the more reason to keep him alive and out of prison until she found proof that her suspect was indeed the culprit. All the more reason to keep herself alive and out of prison.
Honore opened the door to the coal room. The oily stench stung her nostrils. Surely it was no place for a well man, let alone a wounded one. The smell would be overwhelming with the door closed. Except a draft rushed through the room, possibly from the wooden chute high up near the ceiling that Tuckfield had had unstuck for a coal delivery.
A meager coal delivery. As Miss Morrow had said, half the room lay empty. Their shuffling feet encountered mere clumps of obsidian. Honore kicked those aside to make a clear place on the floor in one corner. Then they eased Ashmoor to the ground, Honore and Miss Morrow breathing hard from balancing his weight, him dragging breaths through his teeth.
“We will return with blankets.” Honore rested her hand on his head, the thick, soft hair. With all her will, she turned away without leaning down and kissing him.
They would return if they could.
She closed the door behind her and Miss Morrow. In silence, they groped their way to the steps and climbed back to the kitchen.
“I need to light some candles and wash up any blood,” Miss Morrow said.
“I will help.”
“No, you go change and wash. You are all over blood.”
Honore gasped and looked down. She could not see the stains against the black gown, but she felt the drying substance. “What do I do with this dress? If someone looks here and finds it . . .”
“Hang it in the wardrobe under another gown. Always hide in plain sight.”
Honore opened her mouth to ask Miss Morrow how she knew so much about subterfuge, but that, like wound care, needed to wait until later when they could talk over tea and crumpets.
Honore fled upstairs. Through the fanlight above the front door, she caught a flash of light. She ran into the front bedroom, the one facing the main house. Her heart dropped into her middle. Lights flared in window after window there, as though everyone had awakened or people moved from room to room without extinguishing lights in the previous chamber searched.
The riding officers had gained entrance and permission to search her brother’s house for miscreants—for her and Ashmoor. Their arrival at the dower house loomed in mere moments.
She spun on her heel and reached her own chamber as thunderous knocking sounded on the front door.
27
Buttons flew as Honore tore off her gown. No matter. The king’s officers were not searching for something as small as a button. They wanted Ashmoor and his companion—her. They would know she was with him, or suspect it, from the blood on her hands.
She tucked her gown into the wardrobe beneath another black dress. While the knocking continued, accompanied by some shouting, she poured water into her basin and scrubbed her hands and right arm. They came clean, but the water glistened pink. She must get rid of it. The knocking had ceased, and voices rose in a low rumble from the entryway.
Nothing for it. She opened her window and poured the contents onto the plants below. No one would notice in the dark—she hoped.
She reached for her nightgown with its dozen tiny buttons down the front. She would look as though disturbed from bed—
But her bed was undisturbed.
She dragged back the covers and once again started to don her nightgown.
“Honore? Honore Bainbridge, get out here,” her brother roared from the hallway, then pounded on her door.
She shoved her nightgown beneath the bedclothes and dragged on her dressing gown. No gentleman would look too closely to see what she wore beneath the heavy brocade robe.
Not that riding officers were gentlemen. On the other hand, they would not want to offend her brother, a peer of the realm.
She yanked open her door, hoping her disheveled appearance would be taken for having been aroused from her bed. “What is wrong?�
��
“I have been rousted from my bed by these gentlemen”—he cast a sneer over his shoulder—“who claim a renegade has come this way.”
“How could they with the gates locked?” She pretended to rub sleep from her eyes.
“The gate isn’t locked,” Beau said.
“Not locked?” Honore covered a yawn with her hand.
Beau knew as well as she did that few people had access to a key, and two of them stood in her doorway—but she had not unlocked it.
From the look of her brother, his hair standing on end, his eyes red-rimmed and puffy, his clothes haphazardly donned, he had been sound asleep indeed and had likely been with Deborah and her mother before that. The aging butler or housekeeper leaving the gate unlocked? Not likely. But one or two others . . .
“What do they want with us?” Honore thought to ask.
“They have already searched Bainbridge.” Beau grimaced. “As if we would harbor a traitor, and a wounded one at that.”
“A traitor? Wounded?” Honore covered her mouth to hide her trembling chin. “How could they think that of a peer?”
“Because the peer’s sister has been known to consort with traitors,” Beau snapped.
Honore staggered back a step as though he had struck her. “I never consorted . . . I did not know . . .” Tears spilled down her cheeks.
“Now, my lord, we ain’t that cruel to a young lady.” The sergeant of the revenue troop moved into sight behind Beau. “We just want a bit of a look around so we can tell our commanding officer we made a thorough search. We’ll never find anything here, I told him, but he insisted.”
“Of course, sir.” Honore smiled through her tears and widened her eyes. “Look all you like, though I can assure you there are no traitors or anyone else in my chamber.”
But in her cellar . . .
She pressed one hand to her middle to calm her jumping stomach. She could not be sick in front of these men.
They treated her with more courtesy than had her own brother. Each man touched his hand to his hat as he passed her. They barely touched her possessions, mainly looking under the bed and giving the armoire a cursory glance. Taking up a candle, she followed the officers and her brother from room to room. Miss Morrow joined them downstairs in the kitchen, where she and Mavis were calmly brewing tea and slicing up a plum cake.
Dark plums. Dark like dried blood. Surely a trail of it led right down to the cellar. She looked but saw none. But the yawning opening to the cellar gaped in front of her like an abyss, the very pit about which the psalmists wrote.
God, if You protect us—
No bargaining with God. All she knew to do was ask purely and simply. God, I have made amok of this, of everything. I do not deserve Your help, but I am asking for it anyway. This time I am simply going to believe You are here with me.
The sergeant began the descent into the depths of the house. The stench of that spilled brandy invaded Honore’s nostrils again, though she was certain she had cleaned thoroughly. They would be led right toward it. Accusations would fly. Surely she already felt iron shackles binding her feet, felt the noose tightening around her neck. Even her own brother would not try to gain her a pardon. He had reminded her of her folly with Frobisher right in front of the riding officers. He would be well rid of her.
If only Father had not died. He had never wanted to be rid of her despite her mistakes with men. He had loved her.
No one would love her in about two minutes when the revenue men found Ashmoor tucked into the coal room. She was not going to love herself when she was sick on the cellar floor. She shrank back against the wall at the foot of the steps and waited for the axe to fall.
Candles glowing in the blackness, the officers and her brother tramped from room to room. In five, four, three, two seconds they would open the one with the contraband brandy.
Miss Morrow tucked her hand beneath Honore’s elbow and squeezed. She said nothing, simply stood there with her calm, quiet strength and unwavering loyalty.
The door opened. The officers stomped in. Honore pressed the back of her hand to her mouth.
“Nothin’ ’ere, sir,” one man called.
Nothing? Honore’s knees buckled.
Miss Morrow held her upright. “How did ten barrels of brandy vanish?” She asked the question so softly it was a mere brush of air around Honore’s ear.
She shook her head, light-headed and confused.
And still shaking with fright. The coal room came next. Perhaps if she fainted she would distract them. Or she might simply give away everything.
Blood roared more loudly in her ears with each passing moment in which the revenue officers drew closer to the coal room door. It took forever but happened in the blink of an eye. They opened the door. A few chunks of coal dribbled from a pile inside the opening. A pile that had not been there earlier.
“Coal room,” one of the men crowed. “Good way to get inside—through the chute and all.”
The sergeant stepped over the threshold and raised his candle. “Too small for a man to get through that opening.”
And Ashmoor was not a small man. Indeed, he was so big they should have seen him by now, or they would as soon as the sergeant lowered his candle.
He lowered the candle. Honore wondered how fast and far she could run before they captured her and hauled her off to Bridewell or some other place where they housed women prisoners. Perhaps they would be lenient because of her social rank and just send her to Australia. Or perhaps hanging was quick enough not to hurt too much.
Papa, if you were here this never would have happened.
No, she would be wed to Ashmoor by now, a respected lady, a countess like Cassandra. She would not be on the verge of expiring from sheer terror.
“Nothing here,” the sergeant announced. He turned to a tight-lipped Beau. “Our apologies for disturbing you and your fair sister tonight, milord. You are right. No one came this way.”
“You are simply doing your duty.” Beau sounded more weary than annoyed. “Now will you leave us to get what sleep we can?”
They left, refusing Miss Morrow’s offer of tea and cake before they continued their searching. The front door closed behind the men. Mavis shot the bolt home and burst into tears.
“I never been so afrighted in my life,” the maid sobbed.
Honore held her. “It is all right. They would never have harmed you anyway. Now you have a nice cup of tea and slice of cake and return to your bed. Sleep as late as you like in the morning.”
“But the cake be for you, Miss Bainbridge.”
“And I give it to you.”
She would never be able to stomach plum cake again.
Her head would explode from the blood pounding into it if she did not get down to the cellar and look. She met Miss Morrow’s gaze over the top of Mavis’s head and read the same confusion, concern, and relief.
At last they got Mavis calmed down and tucked into her bed. Then Honore and Miss Morrow took candles and descended the steps to the coal room. They would look at the room where the barrels should be later. Ashmoor came first.
Honore opened the door. Nothing but coal lay in the room. Ashmoor had vanished. Unless he had vanished beneath a pile of the fuel. The configuration of the pile looked different than it had earlier.
Honore began to paw through the coal, sending lumps of obsidian flying and rolling and ricocheting off the walls. Not that much coal lay in the chamber. Surely not enough to crush him. But in his weakened condition, his wound . . .
She began to kick at the lumps, sending clouds of dust up to choke her.
“Miss Bainbridge, Honore, stop it.” Miss Morrow grasped her arm. “You will set us all alight if that dust reaches your candle.”
“Oh, oh, of course.” Honore allowed Miss Morrow to remove the candle from her hands, then dropped to her knees and began to dig through the mess with her hands. “He will not die. He will not die instead of that treacherous, lying—”
Except
surely the true traitor had already died. He could not possibly have survived those seas in that little fishing boat. But if he did not live, how would they ever prove it was him?
Haphazardly, she flung a large lump of coal against the wall. A shower of dust and bits of plaster rained upon her head.
“Come away, Honore.” Miss Morrow spoke with gentle care. “He is not in there.”
“Buried?”
“I do not see how. Now come. You need half a dozen buckets of water to wash away the coal dust.”
“I will keep looking. Save the water.”
“And what will the riding officers think if they come back?”
Honore stopped tossing coal about and hauled herself to her feet. “Of course, you are right.” She glanced at Miss Morrow. “How do you know so much about intrigue and wounds?”
“I, um—” She looked away so her loosened hair hid her face. “I had a brief attachment with a man involved with the Luddites. He was wounded and fled the country to avoid hanging.”
Honore stared at her quiet, sober companion in awe. “A renegade?”
“Yes, and I am not proud of it. I am only fortunate that no one but my cousin, your brother-in-law, knows.”
“Which is why he thought we would suit.”
Miss Morrow smiled. “He knew I had learned my lesson and thought I could bring pressure to bear on you, as well as urge you to wed. I never thought I would fall in love.”
Miss Morrow’s words yanked Honore’s thoughts away from Ashmoor and her fears for him. “With whom have you fallen in love?” She posed the question with exaggerated care.
“Nigel Chilcott, of course. He is—”
Honore waved her hand. “I need not hear his virtues. He is an excellent man. I am so, so very happy for you.”
“But I will not wed him.” Miss Morrow turned away and headed for the steps. “Water.”
“Why will you not?” Honore ran after her.
“I will not leave you, especially now that your brother has banished you here.”
“And is likely to send me to Somerset tomorrow. Not that I will go. First I must find Ashmoor and find out where—where a certain person has gone.”
If he had survived his bucketing about on the sea.
A Reluctant Courtship Page 27