The Carhart Series

by Courtney Milan

  It was a silver-tooled pistol. The stuff of his nightmares. And she was aiming it at Ned’s midsection with hands that seemed surprisingly steady.

  His good humor evaporated. That sense of unease he’d entertained last night returned, this time in full-blown panic.

  “Damn me.” His lips seemed to move of their own accord. He let go of the door handle.

  Lady Harcroft didn’t respond. Her lips pressed together.

  “Of all the—Lady Harcroft, you’re the gang of ruffians?”

  She didn’t seem to be hearing what he said, which was just as well, because his world had narrowed to the ice-cold beat of his pulse. Her shoulders squared, and she brought the barrel up to point directly at Ned’s chest.

  “You realize that was a joke. About bringing you to justice.” It didn’t seem funny anymore. It didn’t even seem embarrassing. It was just absurdly frightening.

  “Mr. Carhart.” Lady Harcroft’s voice trembled, where her hands had not. “I am sorry. Truly.”

  “Wait. No.”

  But she’d already squeezed her eyes shut, and before Ned could throw himself out of the way, she pulled the trigger.

  Chapter Nine

  THE HAMMER HIT THE PISTOL with a metallic, percussive click. The sound echoed about Ned—but it was quieter than the explosion of black powder he’d expected.

  She stared at him down the barrel of the firearm, her eyes widening. “Damn you, Kate.” Her voice was low. “Don’t come any closer, Mr. Carhart. Or I’ll—” She grimaced. “I have a knife.” Her voice quavered up on the final syllable, as if she were on the brink of asking a question.

  Ned was not so distracted by his unexpected survival as to overlook the singular fact that Lady Harcroft had cursed his wife.

  “This is not what it seems,” he said.

  She glanced across the room—no doubt searching out a grubby knife she could use on him.

  “I’m here to help,” Ned continued. He stepped into the room, brushing aside the cloths that hung from the line. They were an infant’s napkins, he realized. By the state of their dampness, they’d no doubt been cleaned down at the stream a half mile away in the early morning.

  “Did Kate send you? She promised not to tell.”

  “Kate…” Ned glanced at the firearm she clutched. Come to think of it, that was his pistol. He’d brought it back with him from China and had tossed it in a cabinet. He’d hoped never to see it again.

  “Kate,” Ned continued dryly, “has been sending you assistance, courtesy of me, for a very long while.”

  Lady Harcroft met his eyes. “Tell your wife that next time, she needs to load the gun.”

  Ned stepped forward. He’d only seen Lady Harcroft before in her husband’s company. This woman—short but stately—did not seem anything like the pale, sickly shadow he’d met at Harcroft’s side.

  Now, as he walked toward her, her knuckles whitened on the pistol. She hadn’t lowered it yet. Instead, she clutched it wildly, as if she might wring some use out of it, even after she’d fired.

  “Are you planning to bludgeon me with that?” He smiled to show he was joking.

  She hesitated, which meant that she might have been.

  Ned shook his head and reached to pluck the weapon from her hands before she embarrassed them both. He’d meant to make a joke about her shoulders becoming weary. But as he extended his hand, she flinched backward, her arm flying between them. He froze, midreach; she looked up into his eyes in horror.

  She must have seen the shock in his own eyes.

  He’d not wanted to think of it. In the frozen aftermath of nearly being shot, he’d not sorted out the implications of her presence. Lady Harcroft wasn’t insane. She hadn’t been abducted. But she was frightened. And when he’d reached for her, she had brought up her hand to protect her face.

  Kate was involved. Kate had separated Mrs. Alcot from her husband. Lady Harcroft was here, on Ned’s property—on Kate’s property—flinching from him as if she expected a blow.

  Oh.

  God.

  It made an awful, horrific sense out of everything—Harcroft’s comments last night, Kate’s reaction at meeting Ned last afternoon.

  Lady Harcroft’s flinch betrayed more than a thousand bruises. Someone had hit her, and often enough that even friendly gestures now seemed menacing. Ned moved back, giving her room.

  “God,” Louisa choked, letting the firearm finally fall. “I am so stupid.” And she burst into tears.

  Ned had no idea what to say in response. He didn’t dare come forward and comfort her, not when a mere reach toward her gave her such a start. Instead, he could do nothing but slip a handkerchief from his pocket and slide it down the table toward her. She sat down and cried in the most ladylike manner, choking back her obvious sobs, dabbing at her eyes with the cloth he’d given her. Ned waited in uncomfortable silence.

  “If I weren’t such a wretch, I would not be here. If only I hadn’t let it come to this. If I’d had the strength to…to…” She gave a quiet hiccough and winced again.

  “To what?” Ned enquired mildly.

  “To stop this whole thing, before it even started.” She set her jaw. “If I were not such a weakling, none of this would ever have happened. You knew me. I was such a timid, foolish—”

  Ned held up one hand, interrupting the flow of self-berating before it could get started. “You’ve used the word this a great deal here. By this, are you referring to Harcroft’s treatment of you?”

  She sniffed once, and nodded. “That would be it.”

  “And by it, you mean…” The world slowed, and Ned swallowed. It didn’t clear the damnable dryness in his throat. “You mean the fact that he hit you.”

  It was not a question, but she nodded anyway.

  “How long?”

  “Never more than fifteen minutes at any one time,” she replied earnestly. “I know. It could have been much worse.”

  Ned met her gaze, unable to look away. “That wasn’t what I meant. Has this been going on since I first met you?”

  “Oh. It started after our first year of marriage. It wouldn’t have if I had been a better wife. You see, there was a gentleman—a friend, only, but…”

  She trailed off, and Ned shook his head. She’d been sixteen then, for God’s sake, and newly married. Harcroft had shaped her entire adult existence. He must have tried to do so forcibly.

  He would have flinched himself. He understood all too well how her thinking went.

  How many times had he wondered that about himself? What if he had been different? If he had been better? If he hadn’t been betrayed by his own weaknesses? Those doubts would debilitate him if he ever gave them full sway. It had taken him years to learn to discard them, to keep going in the face of his own fears. He could imagine all too well how Lady Harcroft must have felt.

  Her husband had been Ned’s friend—and it was unsurprising how quickly that sentence properly became phrased in the past tense. But Harcroft could not have understood the degree to which Ned would find himself in sympathy with his wife.

  He knew what it was like to feel powerless, at the mercy of others. And he didn’t like seeing it in anyone else.

  It was a sentiment as idiotic as kicking her door down would have been. After all that, he still saw himself as some sort of a hero—a strange and useless one, no doubt. He was no Bow Street Runner, no knight in shining armor. If he’d had chain mail, it would all have rusted at sea. But Ned wasn’t the sort of knight who perished in glorious battle for the sake of a poetic ending.

  He had prevailed. He’d beaten back those doubts. He’d found his place and he’d learned to stand on his own two feet, free from that cloying hint of bitter dependence.

  It looked as if Lady Harcroft—and by extension, Ned’s own wife—needed a hero. If he could bring Lady Harcroft the kind of peace he’d found, it would prove once and for all that his victory had not been temporary. It would be proof that he’d truly won, that he’d tamed his own respon
se. It would be like a medieval tourney, his very own trial.

  She looked at him with quiet eyes. “I should have been different.”

  “Hold that thought.” Ned couldn’t touch her, not without risking another flinch. Instead, he knelt before her, making himself seem small and harmless. He looked up in her eyes from his vantage point on the floor. “Hold that thought tightly, with both hands. Can you feel it?”

  She clasped her hands together.

  “I believe what you just said was that if you had been a different person, your husband might not have hit you.”

  She gave a second jerky nod.

  “Well, let me show you something I’ve learned. Now, are you still holding on to that thought? Gather it all up in your hands—don’t leave any of it out. Have it? Good. Now stand up.”

  She stared at him suspiciously. “Is this some sort of trick?”

  “Lady Harcroft, if I wanted to betray you, I wouldn’t need any tricks. I would have come here with twelve men and your husband. I’ll stay here with my knee on the floor for now—you stand up.”

  Warily she clambered to her feet; as she did, she started to drop her hands to her waist.

  “Careful,” Ned warned teasingly. “You’ll drop the thought, and I specifically told you to hold it with both hands.”

  “But there’s nothing there.”

  “Nonsense. You can feel that thought in your hands, even if you can’t see it. You’re holding it, all one great weight. It’s bowing your shoulders. And if you run your thumbs over it, you can feel the surface. What does it feel like?”

  Lady Harcroft glanced down at her empty hands. “It’s a harsh, spiked thing,” she said softly, “full of bitterness and recrimination.”

  “I’m going to stand up now.” Ned did, and then, giving her a wide berth, he walked to the door and threw it open. He took three steps back, so that she could stand in the doorway without coming too close to him. Then he motioned her forward.

  She crossed over to him.

  “Now this is the hard part. Draw back your arm—yes, like that—and throw the thought as far away as you can.”

  “But—”

  “Just toss whatever you were thinking right out the door, like the slimy piece of refuse that it is. That sort of thinking has no place in your life. It wasn’t your fault. It’s never your fault if a man hits you.”

  She glanced at him in hesitation.

  “Go on. Throw it.”

  “But I’m not holding on to anything.”

  “Then it shouldn’t bother you to discard it.”

  Tenuous logic, but then, doubts that wormed into his own heart had little truck with logic. Ned had discovered a thousand ways to cast out that legion on his own.

  Louisa drew in a tremulous breath, and then looked out the door. Her gaze sharpened, and she focused on the valley that lay below. Slowly she raised her hands to her waist. Then she mimed a throw—a girl’s throw, halfhearted and tentative, the sort that would have made him toss up his hands in outrage if she had been bowling in cricket—but a throw nonetheless. And then she turned and gave him a faltering smile. It was the first smile he’d seen on her since he’d arrived.

  “There. Now don’t you feel better?”

  “That,” she said, stepping backward, “should not have worked. It was entirely irrational.”

  Ned shut the door behind her. “It helped, didn’t it?”

  “You’re a black magician, Mr. Carhart. How did you know? Did Kate send you to cheer me up?”

  Ned shrugged. He knew because…he knew. He’d known doubt and uncertainty. He’d grappled with fear. And he’d won, damn it. Eventually.

  It shouldn’t have mattered that he needed to employ such cheap tricks to claim his own triumph. It shouldn’t have mattered that in the worst of times he still needed every scrap of dark magic he could conjure, just to maintain his illusions. All that mattered was that he won, every damned time.

  “It’s my job to know irrationality,” Ned replied with more airiness than he felt. “As for my wife…” He looked around the cabin and a second truth struck him. Someone had thought of everything. There were provisions. A little washtub stood to the side—no doubt where the infant’s napkins had been cleaned this morning, something Ned would never have thought of in a million years. She’d planned for this as carefully as for a siege. Now that he glanced into the small adjoining room, he could see the shadowed form of a nursemaid, holding a child in her arms.

  And he’d thought Kate was delicate. He felt as if he’d glanced into a room, expecting to see a china tea set, and found instead an intricate mass of gears, silently running the clock tower to which every man set his watch.

  “My wife,” Ned said, “will handle the eggs.”

  Lady Harcroft raised her chin. “Tell Kate thank you, then. This was as good as eggs for breakfast.”

  THE MILES BACK TO BERKSWIFT blurred in Ned’s mind, dust and the scent of burning leaves commingling into a confusion in his mind. The slow trot of his horse seemed to drum the important points into his mind.

  Lady Harcroft had escaped her husband.

  Kate had helped. And she’d not said a word of it to Ned—or, as far as Ned could tell, to anyone else.

  She didn’t trust him. She didn’t trust anyone, so far as he could tell. And it was probably partially Ned’s own fault.

  Whatever their marriage might have been, he’d destroyed those nascent seeds of hope when he had left. Their marriage had been a convenience, an accident. It had only seemed polite to leave her alone, to not inflict on her the worst of his faults. He hadn’t wanted to burden her.

  But now he wanted to be more than a burden.

  It was in this mood that he arrived at home and handed his horse off to Plum. He headed round to Champion’s pasture, armed with a bag of peppermints. Easier, perhaps, to talk to a horse than to carry on a conversation with his wife. Anything he could imagine saying to her came out in his mind as a confrontation. And the last thing he wanted to do at this point was engage in recriminations.

  But it was not Kate who found him as he leaned against the railing. It was Harcroft. Ned had not had time to sort his thoughts about his wife into place. He wasn’t ready to think of Harcroft. He strode through the thick grass, his boots gleaming as if even the cow shards made way before his shining magnificence.

  He walked up to Ned and stared through the fence rails. “That’s the most flea-bitten, mange-ridden, hollow-chested mongrel of a horse I’ve ever seen. Why was it never gelded?”

  “His name,” Ned said in abstraction, “is Champion.”

  Harcroft sighed. “You always did have an odd sense of humor, Carhart.” He spoke those words as if he were hurling insults.

  Ned shrugged. “You always didn’t.”

  Once, Harcroft’s epithets might have stung Ned, along with the implication that Ned was too frivolous, too ready to make a joke. If Ned had just pledged himself to knighthood, Harcroft was his enemy. He was the dark knight across the field.

  He didn’t look much like a villain.

  A pause.

  “Any luck?” Harcroft finally asked.

  “Nothing.” Ned had gone on to visit Mrs. Alcot after he saw Lady Harcroft. “Just an ancient widow, who insisted on talking my ear off. She was delighted to answer my questions—and to tell me about the health of her pigs, her ducks and Kevin.”

  Harcroft frowned in puzzlement. “Her grandson?”

  A point to Ned. He smiled grimly. “Her rooster.”

  “Ah.” Harcroft’s lip curled. “Women. Always talking. Naming things.”

  Harcroft’s wife had surely kept her silence long enough. Years and years. And all this time, Ned had known the man and never guessed. It made him feel queasy.

  What he finally said was, “And your day?”

  Harcroft didn’t answer. “Where did you get this horse?”

  “I bought him for ten pounds.” If Ned were a knight in rusted armor, Champion—mangy, distrustful Champion
—might have made an appropriate steed.

  “So the story I heard today was true. You happened upon a carter struggling to control a vicious animal, and you intervened to save the brute from a beating.”

  Ned nodded. “Talking about that in the village, are they?”

  “You always were too soft-hearted.” Harcroft spoke in smoldering disdain.

  “It’s true. I’m funny and modest. I really shouldn’t be kind, too—it makes life difficult for the rest of you fellows, who never will measure up.”

  Harcroft’s eyes narrowed, and his face scrunched up. He peered at Ned in confusion. Slowly his expression cleared. “Oh,” he said flatly. “You’re joking again.”

  Go ahead and believe that. “We’ll talk tonight,” Ned said. “I’m more than willing to help you continue the search. The faster we work, the less likely that any trail will grow cold. I want to make sure you finish what needs to be done here, as quickly as possible.” And that last was no joke.

  Harcroft stared at Champion one last time. Finally he shook his head. “Was Lady Kathleen with you when you purchased this beast?”

  Ned put his head to one side, unsure how to respond. The truth seemed innocent enough, though, and if he were caught in a lie, Harcroft might begin to suspect that Ned knew something. “Yes,” he finally said.

  “Thought so. Trying to impress her?” He snorted. “Women. They’ll make you weak, Carhart, if you allow them to sway your actions. Be careful of her.”

  “And here I thought she did nothing but shop.”

  Harcroft shrugged. “Well, there’s that wager about her. You might have heard. Whoever seduces her, and produces one of her undergarments as proof, will win five thousand pounds.”

  Ned felt his sense of humor rapidly evaporating. “Nobody’s collected.”

  “Where there’s smoke…” Harcroft trailed off, spreading his hands suggestively.

  “Where there’s smoke, there’s arson.” Ned’s hands gripped the rail. “And arsonists will be dealt with. Let me assure you, Harcroft—for all my humor and kindness, I’m not weak. Just slow to anger. I won’t brook any insults. Not even from you.”