He pulled again, and his leg finally came free. He scrambled away, backward, his elbows digging into the cold mulch underneath him. It was over. He’d survived. His lungs burned and he fell back on the cold ground, expelling the breath he seemed to have been holding.
He was light-headed. He lay, a thousand little twigs poking his spine. He was a mass of cuts and bruises. Just beyond him, his horse let out one last panicked whinny before surging to its feet.
Ned felt a momentary flit of pleasure that whatever had caused the fall had done no permanent damage to his mount. But before he could clamber to his feet and rescue the reins, his mare raced off again. He heard her hoofbeats echoing into the distance.
Oh, yes. The evening had wanted just that.
This was not yet a total disaster. The beast was familiar with the area; he’d ridden her to Berkswift before. She’d go there now—and Ned would perforce need to walk behind. It would take him longer on foot, but he was no more than five miles distant at this point. Once his heart slowed down—once his breath ceased slamming into his lungs—he’d follow after. The schedule… He would make it work. Walking would mean delay, but there were more horses and a carriage at Berkswift. He would have needed them, in any event, to bring Louisa and her infant home. He’d be back in London hours before eleven in the morning. It was a delay, but it was only a delay. Just an unfortunate setback, not a catastrophe.
Ned took another deep, calming lungful of air. With that breath, he came to a very odd realization—his leg hurt. He noticed it as an intellectual curiosity before he truly felt the pain. And then it hurt like hell.
He vaguely recalled the twist of his hip as he’d fallen, the slam of his horse’s weight atop him. Now, with every last respiration, it felt as if his lungs were taking in acid in place of oxygen. It was a sharp pain, like a thousand shards of glass all stabbing his ankle with vicious glee. Beneath that, there was a dull, persistent throb, a pressure where his leg seemed to swell against his thick riding boot.
Deeper than any of the coruscating sparks of hurt, lay an exceedingly bad feeling in his gut. This was not good. It was so not good that he couldn’t even bring himself to think of what had occurred. He could only act.
His gloves had shredded when he hit the rocky earth. Slowly, he pushed himself to his knees. His breath caught against his ribs. From his knees, he pushed himself upright onto one foot. His ankle dissolved into a fire of pain from even that tiny amount of weight.
“Holy Christ,” he swore aloud.
Blasphemy didn’t make the pain any better. It sure as hell didn’t make the truth any more palatable.
He didn’t want to admit it, didn’t want to take off his damned boot to feel the telltale fracture. But he knew with a sick, sure certainty, knew it with the grinding pattern of pain he felt, pressing his foot into the ground.
Somewhere in that fall, he’d broken his leg.
The black despair that seeped into him was all too familiar. At least this time he actually had a reason to feel it. It felt like little tearing claws, that sure knowledge that he’d failed, that he’d made Kate another promise he couldn’t keep. He’d thought he was good enough. He’d imagined he could do anything. But that had been sheer pride. Reality now stripped him of his arrogance.
Failure settled about him like a lead cloak. He wasn’t good enough. Wasn’t strong enough. He was an idiot to have allowed Kate to rely on him, and now she—and Louisa—were going to pay the price of depending upon someone who was fool enough to think he could be a hero.
At that moment, Ned should have given up. Any reasonable man would have done so. He wanted to give up, to simply declare this task impossible so that he wouldn’t have to stagger through the pain that awaited.
But then, this wasn’t the worst thing to happen to Ned.
He shut his eyes. A privy, a dunking, a boat on the ocean. In some ways he felt he’d left a part of himself there on the water. The sun on that boat had scoured away so many of Ned’s illusions, all except one—when you needed to live, you kept on going, no matter how impossible the future seemed. And you didn’t stop.
Kate didn’t need a hero who could slay dragons. At the moment, she needed one who could stand up and walk.
And so Ned took the fear and pain yammering in his head and set them to the side.
“If I can do this,” he said aloud. “I can do anything.”
It could have been worse. Compared to that moment in the boat at sea, when his own will had betrayed him, a little thing like a broken leg was a picnic in the park, complete with beribboned basket. It was a baby dragon, belching tepid puffs of flameless smoke.
Ned didn’t want to stand—but then, he’d practiced doing what he didn’t want to do for a good long while. His leg hurt. Good thing he’d practiced pushing through physical pain before. When he shifted his weight, his breath hissed in.
On its own, he doubted his ankle could have supported him. But the stiff leather of his riding boot was as good as a cast. Well. He thought it would do. It was going to have to.
Before he put his full weight on it, however, he felt around the forest floor.
“Damn,” he said aloud, as if talking to himself would make the pain leach away. “I encountered enough branches on my way down. There has to be one here.” The leaves rustled around him in grim appreciation of the joke. He found a suitable piece a few feet away. It was crooked, and the bark rasped roughly against his skin. But it was long enough to lean on, and strong enough not to snap if he put his full weight on it.
He was going to make it to Berkswift.
One step was agony. Two steps sent shooting pains up his leg. Three… The pain didn’t get better as he went along; it got worse. It invaded his bones, his tendons; the strain of holding himself upright tested muscles he’d rarely used.
If he could do this, he could do anything.
He would never again need to flinch when he thought of his early years. He could win, step by step, yard by yard. Ned kept going. The first mile gave way to the second. The second, more slowly, gave way to the third. The third turned into a bone-jarring, fatiguing crawl uphill, where even the thought of success couldn’t drive him on. By the fourth mile, the pain had deranged him enough that he imagined the sound of bone grinding against bone with every step.
He reached the top of the hill, much relieved. There was the fence of the old goat pasture where Champion was kept. Ned paused and grabbed for the rail. It supported his weight better than the battered branch he’d been using. He shut his eyes, and tried to remember if the fence wound all the way to the stables. It did—but unless he crossed into the pasture, he’d be diverted an extra half mile. If he could just cross this final acre, he might finally be within shouting distance of the house.
Climbing over the stile into the pasture was even harder than struggling uphill. He slipped on the last rung of the descent, and his bad leg slammed into the ground on the other side. His hands grabbed the splintered wood of the fence rail, just as his limb twisted underneath him. He barely kept from toppling over. Instead, he grasped the post and breathed in.
He could do this.
He could do this.
And perhaps the only reason he was muttering that he could do this in the gray of near dawn was that he couldn’t. The world swayed dizzily about him, even as he clung to the fence. He had no notion of balance any longer. He wasn’t sure which direction was forward. His mind was fuzzing around the edges, everything turning to uniform gray with the pain.
He wasn’t capable of taking another step. It really couldn’t get any worse.
And then, in the darkness of the night, he heard a sound. The stamping of hooves. A challenge, from an animal frightened because its sleep had been interrupted.
Stay away, that noise proclaimed. I am a dangerous stallion.
Chapter Twenty-one
KATE COUNTED CLOSE TO A HUNDRED unfamiliar faces in the courtroom just before eleven the next morning. Word of the trial must have spread overnigh
t. Perhaps the drunkard had not been so drunk. Or more likely, the sergeants who had been on duty the previous day had boasted of the coming spectacle.
Most of the people in the room Kate could identify only by function. The back two rows were taken up by men, pencils at the ready. Gossip-columnists, caricature artists, no doubt all determined that his version of the most sensational trial to grace the police magistrate’s bench would appear in the evening paper. No doubt they would reach their verdict before the magistrate’s gavel even took up the matter.
Kate sat for them, properly polite, her spine straight, her stance relaxed. Nobody would write that she was in tears, or that she’d broken down under the weight of the matter. No doubt there was another set of wagers running about her in the gentlemen’s betting books, and she’d not give those idiots the satisfaction of showing fear.
Besides that, in the front rows sat several people she knew very well.
The Marquess of Blakely and his wife sat on the left. Lord Blakely watched Kate intently. He was not frowning at her—which was a good start. He was peering at her, as if there were something to see.
He sat close to his wife, both of them meticulously dressed in sober attire. But their faces told the story of a sleepless, troubled night.
For once, Kate knew precisely how Lord and Lady Blakely felt.
In the police courts, Harcroft himself was the one who had to prosecute the case. Even with the jury and the crowded courtroom, she could not count on him to tell the truth. In fact, with half of London guaranteed to learn of this through the gossip rags, it was rather a given that he would lie. Despite—or perhaps because of—that, Harcroft looked as if he had slept the sleep of the innocent. If Kate hadn’t already hated him, she would have despised him now.
Beyond that first row sat a smattering of people Kate knew quite well—Lady Bettony, Lord Worthington—and some she knew by sight and name only, from one of the million ton parties.
If they’d cleared away the oaken magistrate’s bench and thrown in an orchestra, this courtroom could have been mistaken for a ball.
But of all the hundred souls packed into this room, not one of them was her husband. She glanced toward the entrance for the seventeenth time. When she did so, she held her chin high, as if she were a lady expecting a morning call.
But, of course, she was. Where was Ned? He’d been riding alone at night. Anything could have happened to him. He might have broken his neck, could have been set upon by footpads. If she’d been thinking clearly the previous evening, she would have insisted that someone accompany him. As if Ned would have brooked any assistance.
Kate met Lord Blakely’s eyes across the crowded courtroom again. And for a second, it was as if all of her greatest fears were coming true. He looked at her, and she could imagine what he was thinking. He was castigating her for not telling him, cursing her for letting him waste his time, shaming her for those days of silence while he searched. He could not be thinking kindly of her.
To her surprise, he gave her one simple nod.
The magistrate entered. A jury was sworn. But instead of looking somber at the prospect of deciding her fate, the men exchanged tight smiles, as if to celebrate their luck, to be deciding one of the most talked-of affairs in all of London. Their apparent glee didn’t make Kate feel better about the likelihood of justice.
And then Harcroft began to speak. In the weeks since his wife’s disappearance, Harcroft had actually done an incredible job of scouring up information—better than Kate had expected. He had brought witnesses—the Yorkshire nursemaid’s husband, who brought along the note sent from the agency Kate had used to find her.
Then there was testimony from the stagecoach workers, who testified that Kate had met the nursemaid upon her arrival in London; a statement from one of her grooms, who’d conveyed Kate and an infant in a carriage to Berkswift. Finally, there was a seamstress who’d testified about parcels ordered by Lady Harcroft, but delivered on Kate’s orders to Kate’s house.
Kate had done her best to hide her traces, but once the eye of suspicion had fallen on her, her tracks were indelibly marked. She’d have been convinced of her own guilt, given that evidence.
And by the eyes of the jurors, they agreed with that assessment. After the first fifteen minutes of testimony, not one of them would meet her gaze. They had already come to a decision. She could not even blame them. She was guilty. She had stolen Harcroft’s wife. She’d just done it for a very good reason.
With that tide of evidence damning her, there was almost no reason for her to speak. Still, it was half eleven when the magistrate motioned Kate forward.
Magistrate Fang eyed her uneasily. He could not want a lady convicted, but Kate knew how suspicious the evidence seemed. That he appeared nervous was a good sign—he would be looking for ways to interpret the evidence he’d heard to exonerate her, to avoid any difficulties her father or her cousin might cause.
Finally, he sighed and began questioning her. “Lady Kathleen, did you hire Mrs. Watson as a nursemaid?”
Nothing but the truth would do. “Yes, Your Worship.”
He bit his lip and looked about, still looking for an escape. “And did you do so because you had a child of your own?” he asked hopefully.
“No, Your Worship.”
More silence. Magistrate Fang rubbed his wig. “Perhaps it was a sister you were assisting?”
“I have no sisters,” Kate answered.
“A favored servant?”
“No.”
He had just stripped Kate of any possible legitimate reason for hiring the woman. The magistrate almost pouted, and then folded his arms on the bench. “For whom, then, did you hire the nursemaid?”
With Ned absent, Kate’s only choice was to tell the truth. The question was how much of it she would have to tell before he arrived. Kate shook her head in confusion. “For Louisa, of course. Lady Harcroft. I thought we had already established that, Your Worship.”
A soft susurrus of surprise spread through the courtroom at those words.
The magistrate frowned. “And where is the nursemaid at present?”
Kate gave him a sunny smile. “I imagine she is with Lady Harcroft, although it has been some time since I last saw either of them.”
The jurors had lifted their heads at Kate’s cheerful words. She was not cringing or ducking her head. She was speaking in a pleasant tone. In short, she was not speaking as if she were a guilty woman. Kate was waltzing precariously close to the edge of the cliff. Still, she forced herself to look Harcroft in the eyes and smile.
He looked away first. A tiny victory, that, but it seemed as if an extra ray of sunshine cut through the gloom in Queen Square.
“Where,” the magistrate asked her, “is Lady Harcroft?”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly say,” Kate replied.
Another murmur from the crowd, this one louder.
“You can’t say, or you won’t?” Harcroft moved toward her. She didn’t have to pretend to shrink from him. Standing above her, tall as he was, he seemed dark and menacing. Precisely how she wanted everyone to remember him.
“Lady Kathleen,” he growled, “must I remind you that you’ve pledged yourself to tell the whole truth?”
Kate looked up, widening her eyes in pretend innocence. “Why, I am telling the truth! I truly can’t say. I believe Lady Harcroft is in transit at this moment.” At least, she hoped she was—unless something terribly untoward had happened to Ned. “Of course, as she’s not with me in London, and I’ve not had a post from her, I can’t say for sure.”
Harcroft folded his arms and glared at her. “If you hired her nursemaid and abducted her, you know her whereabouts. Divulge them, Lady Kathleen.”
“She’s in a carriage.” Kate smiled brightly. “Or—maybe she is not. It is so hard to say. If I could see her now, surely I could say where she was.”
He frowned at that bit of stupidity. “The prisoner,” he said tightly, “is mocking the honor of this court—
of you, Your Worship, in front of all of London. Demand that she tell where my wife is. Demand it now.”
The magistrate reached for a handkerchief and dabbed at the sweat that trickled down his forehead. “Lady Kathleen?” he asked faintly.
At those words, the courtroom doors opened on the far edge of the crowd. As they did, a blast of midmorning sun spilled into the room. Dust motes sparkled in the sudden light, suspended in air. Then two figures, dark silhouettes against that sunlight, appeared. Kate went breathless with hope.
They moved into the room. Ned was in front. He moved slowly, deliberately placing each foot, as if every step had meaning. He paused, resting one hand on the bench.
That incandescent warmth she felt, seeing him for the first time that morning, was barely marred by the utter filth of his attire. Her husband was dirty, missing a cravat, and his trousers were ripped at the knee. Louisa came up beside him. In stark contrast to Ned’s ragged clothing, she wore a dove-gray traveling dress, its edges trimmed in falls of black lace. She seemed poised, as she never had before in her husband’s company.
One of the earnest young reporters in the back row lifted his head at the draft of air—but he only glared at the entering company before bending back down to scribble on his paper.
“Lady Kathleen?” the magistrate asked. “Are you saying you can’t tell me where Lady Harcroft’s wife is?”
Kate smiled sunnily. “No, Your Worship. Now I can.”
Harcroft leaned toward Kate, his fingers curled, as if he could claw the knowledge from her. He was so intent on Kate that he did not hear the footsteps behind him, proceeding up the aisle.
“Is it necessary for me to do so, Your Worship?” Kate asked.
“It would be advisable,” Magistrate Fang said dryly.
Kate raised her hand gracefully. “She’s right there,” she said, pointing at Louisa.
Half the room stood, all at once. The judge banged his gavel to no avail a first time, and then louder. But it was only when he shouted a threat to have them all carried away that everyone subsided in their seats. In comparison with that roar, the silence that followed was so absolute Kate could hear the scritch of the reporters’ pencils against foolscap.
The Carhart Series Page 62