by Mary Balogh
“Hush, my love,” he said. “I have you safe. No one is going to harm you now. You see? Anna and Luke are here too.” Why was it that he could never seem to protect the women in his life?
The wailing stopped finally. She stared blankly at him and then looked over his shoulder at her sister and Luke.
“Emmy,” Anna said. “Oh, Emmy, what happened?”
“Set them down beside the bed,” Luke was instructing the maid. “Then you may leave.”
“I am going to let you go, love,” Ashley said, “and get up so that we can attend to your hand.”
Her eyes moved to it and stared blankly. He eased away from her and stood up beside the bed, but her hysteria did not return. Her face and even her lips were chalk white. She winced but did not make a sound when Anna spread a towel beside her and gently spread her hand on it.
“Oh, Emmy,” she said.
“It looks worse than it is,” Luke said, setting a hand on Anna’s shoulder. “When the blood is sponged away, my dear, you will see that ’tis no mortal wound.”
Anna was dabbing with a damp cloth about the long gash across the back of Emily’s hand.
“Emmy?” Ashley said when her eyes found him. “You fell?”
No, she had not fallen.
“You scraped it?” he asked. “Against a tree? A rock? A building?”
No. It suddenly occurred to him that a mere cut incurred in such a manner, even if rather a deep one and even given the amount of blood lost, would not have sent her into such deep shock anyway. Not Emmy.
“What happened?” he asked. “Can you tell me?”
She stared at him for a long time. Then she lifted her free hand, seemed not to know quite how to explain, and finally formed it into the unmistakable shape of a pistol and pointed it at the window opposite.
“Zounds,” Luke said.
“Someone shot at you?” Ashley felt suddenly as if all the blood had drained out of his head. “You saw him, Emmy?”
No. She shook her head.
She would not have heard a shot. How could she know, then? Ashley wondered. But cuts like that did not simply appear from nowhere. “How do you know?” he asked her. Anna, he could see, had looked up from her task, her face as white as her sister’s.
There had been something behind her. Something big.
“A tree?” he asked.
Yes, a tree. And something small and round—she formed it with her forefinger curled into the base of her thumb—against the tree.
“A bullet,” Luke said quietly. She was not looking at him.
“A bullet?” Ashley asked.
Yes, a bullet. Lodged in the trunk of the tree behind her. It had cut a swath across the back of her hand. No more than a few inches from her body. From her heart—it was her left hand that had been hurt. Someone had shot at Emmy and had missed killing her by only a few inches.
“But you saw no one?” he asked her. “Either before or after it happened?”
No, no one. She winced again. Anna was crying and dabbing at the cut. Luke squeezed her shoulder and reached for the jar of ointment.
“Move aside, my dear,” he said. “I will finish this and bind up her hand. Some laudanum would not be amiss, I believe.”
“Emmy,” Ashley said, “we are going to need to know what happened to frighten you two mornings ago. We need to know who wishes you harm.”
Who could want to harm Emmy? Ashley asked himself. Verney? But why? Had Verney shot Gregory Kersey after all? In the same hills? With the same gun? But why Emmy?
Her eyes closed and her teeth bit into her lower lip as Luke applied a liberal dose of ointment to her hand and began to bandage it.
“I believe a physician’s services will be unnecessary,” he said, “unless the shock has still not worn off after she has slept. But the questions will have to wait, Ash.”
“I need to know,” Ashley said. “I am going to kill him, whoever he is.”
“I shall help you,” Anna said fiercely.
“You will stay close to your sister while she has need of you, madam,” Luke said quietly and gently, “and to our children, who have a right to your attentions.”
“And leave the serious business of guarding our safety to the men in the family,” she said sharply, her eyes flashing. “’Tis always the way of the world. And what if the men fail?”
Ashley watched in some astonishment as his brother and his brother’s wife, the models of marital love and affection, proceeded to quarrel. Luke, his task completed, looked coolly at Anna.
“To my knowledge I have not failed you yet, madam,” he said.
“But once you needed my help,” she said. “Once I helped you kill a man who needed to be killed.”
Luke raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips. “And so you did, madam,” he said.
“Then do not tell me that I have no further use in life than to comfort my sister and play with my children,” she said.
Luke had killed Anna’s kidnapper years ago, after Ashley went to India. He had not heard before now of Anna’s having had any part in that killing.
“I ask your pardon,” Luke said. “If you wish to continue this difference of opinion, Anna, I shall be at your service later in the privacy of our own rooms.”
She flushed, opened her mouth, and closed it again.
Ashley sat on the side of the bed and took Emily’s good hand in his own. She opened her eyes and looked at him.
“You are in pain?” he asked. “I shall have some laudanum brought up.”
She shook her head.
“But you will stay here and sleep?” he asked her.
She nodded, but her hand tightened about his.
“You must not fear,” he said. “I shall see that someone is always with you, night and day. I shall have a maid sent to sit with you.” He would have stayed himself, but there were proprieties to be observed. He wondered what Anna and Luke had made of his lying on the bed with her when he had carried her in. And had he not been calling her his love? For Emmy’s sake, he did not wish to arouse their suspicions. Perhaps she would still refuse to marry him when he next offered.
“I shall stay with her, of course,” Anna said. “I intended to do so even before I was informed that ’tis my function in life.” There was a definite edge to her voice. “Harry will not need me for a few hours.”
“I have a strong premonition,” Luke said, sounding both bored and haughty, “that I have just fashioned a scourge with which I am to be whipped mercilessly for the next eternity or two.”
“Anna will stay with you,” Ashley told Emily. “Both Luke and I will be in the house—and Roderick too, I daresay. He will be waiting to hear what happened. He is a military officer, well experienced at defending people in danger. And there are many servants here. You are quite safe. Do you believe that?” If she did not, then he would stay himself and to hell with propriety.
She nodded.
He raised her hand to his lips. “Try to sleep,” he said. “Later we will talk and get to the bottom of what has been happening here. I will put everything right for you so that you will never have to fear again.” It was perhaps a rash promise, he mused. “I swear it, little fawn. On my honor.”
She smiled—a mere ghost of a smile—for the first time since he had picked her up downstairs in the hall and carried her up here to her room. And she closed her eyes.
Luke, looking somewhat grim about the mouth and eyes, was holding the door open for him. He closed it behind them after they had left the room.
Roderick Cunningham was pacing back and forth in the corridor outside, a look of deep concern on his face.
24
ANNA was suckling Harry, who had been crying lustily when she arrived in the main room of the nursery. He had been playing happily with his sister until his stomach suddenly told him that his mama was
late and he was hungry. He was now contentedly sucking. The housekeeper was sitting with a sleeping Emily, who had been persuaded after all to take a small dose of laudanum to ease the pain in her hand.
Anna did not look up when the door opened and closed or when her husband seated himself in a chair close to hers. She was quite out of charity with him—especially over the fact that he had had to point out to her in his usual oblique way the distasteful nature of quarreling in public.
“Your only function in life is not to care for my children, Anna,” he said after several minutes had passed in silence. “Or even to bear them. Nor is it to give pleasure to my bed. Though you perform all of those functions superlatively. You are the joy of my heart and half of my soul. Yet your function is not even to be those things. ’Tis merely to be, as a person worthy of my respect, regardless of your gender or your relationship to me.”
“Oh.” She still refused to look up. She watched Harry pull on one of his ears as he sucked. “You were always magnificently clever with words. And you have rehearsed this speech. ’Tis not fair.”
“Rehearsals take time and effort,” he said. “And commitment and conviction. I belittled you and I hurt you and I beg your pardon.”
She looked at him and her lips quirked. “I wish your Paris acquaintances could hear you apologize to a woman,” she said. “To your own wife.”
“They would assume that I had been corrupted by English beef and English ale,” he said. “They would be immensely saddened. Forgive me?”
She smiled, but she sobered instantly. “Someone is trying to kill Emmy,” she said. “Who could possibly wish to do such a thing?”
“Perhaps,” he said, his elbows on the chair arms, his fingers steepled, “someone who knows that she is precious to Ashley.”
She frowned and lifted Harry against one shoulder so that she could rub his back and pat it to dislodge the wind he never failed to swallow. “But who would wish to hurt Ashley?” she asked. “No one here has even known him for long.”
“He was Alice’s husband,” he said. “Ashley tells me that Alice dismissed Mr. Binchley as steward here before she left for India. Mr. Binchley and his daughter now live in near poverty outside the gates of Penshurst. Someone appears to have shot Alice’s brother. The verdict was that ’twas an accident, though no one ever admitted to doing the shooting. Ashley believes ’twas murder. And now soon after Ashley has returned, someone has been frightening the woman he loves.”
“Trying to kill her,” she said.
“I doubt it.” Luke considered for a moment. “It was misty this morning. Whoever did the shooting must have been close. Emily’s deafness would enable him to draw quite close without much fear of detection. Unless he was a very poor shot, ’tis surprising that he hit so far from his mark, assuming that he was close and that his mark was her heart. I believe the intention was merely to frighten her. If so, then ’twas brilliantly successful.”
Anna shuddered. She set Harry to her other breast, the wind having been quite audibly dislodged. “But who?” she said. “And why? What does Emmy—or Ashley—have to do with what happened here before he even met Alice?”
“We will have to hope, my dear,” he said, “that Emily can enlighten us as to the nature of the first frightening experience she had. If she saw someone and can tell us his identity—or her identity, for that matter—then perhaps we can proceed further.”
“Was Ashley serious when he said he would kill the man responsible?” she asked.
“Were you serious,” he asked, looking steadily at her, “when you said you would help?”
“Yes,” she said after a pause.
“I believe, my dear,” he said, “that Ashley has a stronger motivation even than yours to stake his life on Emily’s protection.”
She said no more but lowered her gaze to Harry, who was beginning to tire and lose some interest in his meal. Luke sat quietly watching them. Wisely he did not reflect aloud on the fact that a man would willingly die to protect the peace and safety of his woman and of the children they had begotten together in love.
• • •
“Come with me, Rod?” Ashley asked. The two of them were sitting in the study, waiting. Waiting for Emily to wake up, Ashley supposed. There was little else to do. He had walked about on the hill behind the house with his friend while Luke had stayed at the house at his request, and it seemed to him that they had looked at every tree. They had found no bullet. And what would have been solved if they had, he did not know. Now his butler had brought word that Sir Henry Verney and Miss Verney had come to call on her grace and Lady Emily and that he had shown them into the visitors’ salon. Ashley’s first instinct had been to send word back simply that the ladies were not receiving.
“Of course. It would be my pleasure.” Major Cunningham got to his feet. But he clapped a hand on Ashley’s shoulder before they reached the door. “But ’twould be as well to keep a cool head, Ash. Despite what you have told me, there is nothing to prove that Verney has any reason to wish Lady Emily harm, or you either. Besides, I like the man.”
Barbara Verney was rising to her feet when they walked through the doorway of the salon. Sir Henry Verney was standing before the window, his back to it. Both looked somewhat surprised to see neither Anna nor Emily.
“Miss Verney.” Ashley made her a bow. “Verney. This is a pleasure my sister-in-law and Lady Emily will regret having missed.”
“Oh,” Miss Verney said, after curtsying to both him and the major, “they are from home. What a disappointment. You see, Henry? I told you this was rather a late hour of the morning to be paying a call.”
“Please do have a seat,” Ashley said, indicating the one she had risen from at his entrance. “I shall have some tea brought in. They are not from home. Lady Emily is indisposed and her grace is tending her.”
Both looked instantly and politely concerned. “I hope ’tis not a serious indisposition,” Sir Henry said.
“No,” Ashley said. “Not serious.”
“I do believe,” Major Cunningham said, smiling appreciatively at Barbara Verney, “that I must have been from England altogether too long. The styles of ladies’ hair and hats are far more becoming now than they used to be. Or perhaps ’tis just that the few ladies I have seen since my return have superior beauty and taste.”
Miss Verney laughed. “If you flatter the enemy as you flatter my sex, Major,” she said, “’tis no wonder France was defeated in the recent war.”
But the major insisted that she describe to him how ladies succeeded in dressing their hair so high and keeping its height.
“Pads,” he said after she had explained. “Ingenious, madam, and altogether enchanting.”
They drank their tea and conversed on a wide range of topics, all decidedly frivolous and all directed by Major Cunningham.
“’Tis a good thing, Henry,” Miss Verney said, setting down her cup and saucer and signaling an early departure, “that you did not leave me at the door as you suggested in order to go about your own business before returning for me. I would have been an embarrassment to Lord Ashley.”
“Not at all, Miss Verney,” he said. “I would have been pleased to show you the park and the river walk. Are you familiar with them?”
“From childhood,” she said, getting to her feet. “I am sorry about Lady Emily. You will convey our good wishes to her for her restored health, my lord? We would have called earlier this morning, but Henry was from home from first light until little more than an hour ago. ’Twas most provoking when he had promised to escort me on several visits in addition to this one.” She smiled at her brother to indicate that she was teasing rather than seriously scolding.
Ashley drew a slow breath. “Where were you?” he asked Sir Henry.
“I beg your pardon?” Sir Henry looked back at him with raised eyebrows.
“I asked where you were th
is morning between first light and one hour ago,” Ashley said. “I ask again. Where were you?”
“Ash—,” Major Cunningham said, touching him lightly on the arm. They were all on their feet.
Ashley jerked his arm away. “Where were you?” he asked again.
Sir Henry’s eyes narrowed. “I am not convinced that I owe you or anyone else an explanation for my movements, Kendrick,” he said. “And if you will excuse me, there is a lady in the room. I will escort her home.”
“I believe,” Major Cunningham said, “it might be wise to tell them what happened this morning, Ash.”
“‘What happened’?” Miss Verney was looking bewildered and rather pale. “What did happen this morning?”
“Perhaps you can tell us,” Ashley said, not taking his eyes from Sir Henry.
“Ash.” The major’s voice had taken on a note of authority. “Sit down. Miss Verney, please do seat yourself again. Lady Emily was shot at this morning up on the hill.”
Barbara Verney pressed both hands to her mouth.
“Fortunately,” the major said, “apart from a badly grazed hand and badly shocked nerves, she is unharmed.”
“And you think I did it,” Sir Henry said almost in a whisper. “Egad, you still think I killed Greg Kersey. And you think now I tried to kill Lady Emily. Do you believe I make a career of shooting people, even when they have done nothing to offend me? I will meet you for this, Kendrick.” He drew an audible breath through his nose. “But this is not for a lady’s ears. Come, Barbara. I will take you home and deal with this later.”
“No,” she said, her voice shaking. She sat down. “Let us deal with it now and without foolish talk of duels. Lord Ashley is upset, Henry. Lady Emily is his guest here, and we all know that even besides that point he has an affection for her. And all he did was ask you a question—which you refused to answer. I believe ’tis time for some plain speaking.”
“Bravo, madam,” Major Cunningham said. “Sir Henry, sit down, if you please. Sit down, Ash. Perhaps you would prefer that I leave?”