by Amy Corwin
He studied Miss Grace’s bodice with its clean, white trim. There were no spots of blood anywhere above the waist, nor on her sleeves. No, that wasn’t quite accurate. The cuff of her right sleeve did have some dried, powdery-looking streaks.
Of course, much of the evidence might simply not be visible in the candlelight.
Still, it was interesting, given Miss Grace’s account of her actions that evening. She apparently cultivated the unfortunate habit of grabbing the heads of unconscious persons and wrestling them into her lap.
No wonder her dress was stained.
“What happened?” Mrs. Willow asked in a weak voice. As she raised her hand to touch her temple, she glanced up into Miss Grace’s face. The widow shrieked and fainted again, her hand thudding onto the threadbare carpet.
Miss Grace’s mouth opened in surprise, though she managed to keep her grip on the widow’s shoulders. “Mrs. Willow?” She waved the silver bottle under the widow’s nose until Mrs. Willow pushed her hand away and struggled to escape from her clasp.
“Let me assist you.” Miss Martha rose to her feet. She gripped the widow’s limp wrist and pulled her to her feet.
“My head! Oh, I feel so faint,” Mrs. Willow moaned, pressing one hand to her temple and gripping Miss Martha’s arm with the other.
“You must lie down,” Miss Martha insisted. “Let me help you.”
“No! Not while that girl is in the house! None of us are safe! We shall all be murdered in our beds!” Mrs. Willow pulled away from Miss Martha and stumbled around the settee to Sir Horace. She threw herself into his arms with a terrified moan. “You must take her away at once! Arrest her!”
Sir Horace glanced helplessly at Glanville as he awkwardly patted the widow’s quivering shoulder.
After helping her sister stand, Miss Martha pushed her glasses against the bridge of her nose and studied Mrs. Willow with an exasperated frown. “Well, I must say, I would seriously object if you were to arrest my sister, Sir Horace.”
“I will not have her in my house!” Mrs. Willow declared from the safety of Sir Horace’s fatherly embrace. “I refuse to be murdered in my bed!”
“I wouldn’t murder you in your bed if you begged me to do so,” Miss Grace declared. She glanced at her sister and sighed. “Perhaps I could stay with our cousins?”
Miss Martha snorted and shook her head. “They decided our house did not suit them, after all, and sold it over a week ago. I believe they intended to move to Richmond for some reason.” She shrugged. “But no matter. Marcus shall just have to set aside his fusty old notions of propriety and provide us with rooms. After all, I have you to chaperone me, now, and it is only two more weeks until we are wed.” As the sound of her voice faded, her mouth tightened, and she once again pushed her glasses up her nose.
Clearly, it had just occurred to her that having a murderess for a sister might not be ideal if one were expecting to marry soon. Glanville hoped that Miss Martha’s Marcus would graciously overlook the tarnished reputation of the Stainton sisters when Miss Grace was hung for killing Blyth. He hated to see Miss Martha’s life ruined, as well.
Gently pushing the widow away, Sir Horace stepped around the edge of the settee. Brows raised in hope, he glanced from the ladies to Glanville. “Perhaps the simplest solution would be for you ladies to accompany me to Hornbeam Manor. My wife would be quite pleased to have guests, I’m sure.”
A crooked smile twisted Glanville’s mouth. Unlike Sir Horace, he was quite sure that Lady Branscombe would not appreciate her husband bringing two young ladies home with him. Particularly if one of the ladies were suspected of murder.
Smiling with relief, Miss Grace looked at her sister. “That is very generous of Sir Horace, is it not, Martha?”
“Generous. Yes,” Miss Martha replied in a dry voice. “I am sure everyone will be delighted with such an arrangement.”
“Indeed, yes!” Sir Horace agreed enthusiastically. Grinning, he rubbed his plump hands. “You will only need to pack a few things, Miss Martha. A matter of minutes, then we can be on our way.”
“Then it is good that I have only a few things to pack,” Miss Martha said. “May I assume we will be walking to the manor?” Her gaze strayed to the front window. “In the dark?”
Sir Horace stared at Glanville, his mouth open. With a snap, he shut it and rubbed his chin. “Well, yes. There is that. We left our horses at the church when we came here…”
“An excellent place for horses, I’m sure,” Miss Martha commented.
“We hadn’t expected…” Sir Horace raised his hands helplessly and shrugged.
“They had expected to escort me here, obtain my gown, and then be off.” Miss Grace took a step toward the door. “However, there is no reason for you to abandon your room here, Martha. I am the one not wanted here. Unless Mrs. Willow fears that my presence has corrupted you, as well.”
Miss Martha’s chin rose in a defiant habit both sisters seemed to share.
Stubborn. Both of them. No wonder Miss Grace Stainton had returned to Kendle with the intention of convincing Mr. Blyth that he should reconsider his choice of brides. She’d been too stubborn to let him go without a fight.
“I will stay with my sister.” Miss Martha nodded at Sir Horace. “If you will wait five minutes, I will pack my belongings.”
As she passed her sister on her way out of the room, she grabbed her hand and gave it a squeeze. The women exchanged glances. Miss Martha nodded, pushed her glasses up her nose, and with a twitch of her skirt, left the room.
With a heavy sigh and a hand pressed against her breast, the widow sat down on the settee. “Thank goodness. Though, of course, I am sorry to see her go.” Mrs. Willow shook her head. “I would never have expected… Well, what can you expect? Grief over their father must have affected her mind…” She glanced at Miss Grace and shivered elaborately. Gesturing toward the tiny entryway, she said, “Please—I cannot bear the sight—I beg of you to wait in the hallway.”
Miss Grace flushed, but turned on her heel and stepped quickly to the front door. The door creaked.
“I will wait with Miss Stainton on the porch,” Glanville said.
Sir Horace nodded. He patted the widow on the shoulder and then moved to the cramped entryway as Glanville stepped through the front door.
“Miss Stainton.” Glanville closed the door behind him.
Fishing around beneath the bench on the porch, she nodded to him. With a satisfied sound, she pulled out a portmanteau and turned around to sit on the bench with the bag in her lap.
She glanced up at him, her expression hidden by the shifting darkness. “Afraid I would run away?”
“No.” His lips twitched. “Afraid our delicate widow would faint again if she got a good look at my face.”
A snort of laughter greeted his words. Miss Grace hid her mouth behind one hand and quickly suppressed the sound. “You are not that horrid, as you well know.”
“You mean my very appearance does not fill you with dread and unholy terror?”
“No. And I refuse to add to your conceit by giving you the compliments you are so obviously fishing for.” Her reply began gaily enough, but by the end of it, her head had bent and her voice shook. She gazed down at her portmanteau. Her grip on it tightened until her knuckles gleamed.
He studied her silently for a minute. “Tell me again what happened.”
“I have told you several times already!” Her head jerked up, revealing that the tension in her taut body had tightened and turned her pretty bowed lips into a thin line.
“Tell me again.”
She sighed, her shoulders slumping as her fingers played with the catch of her portmanteau. Her posture spoke eloquently of despair laced with a sense of injustice. “Mr. Cavell will tell you the same thing. I arrived only a few minutes before you did. I went around the side of the church—”
“Why?”
“Because Mr. Blyth often visited the graveyard in the evening to neaten the graves. He said it
helped him to think. And he felt sorry for those whose families were gone and who had no one to remember them any longer.”
“How maudlin of him,” he commented.
“How kind, you mean!” Her head jerked up.
“Or just morbid.”
“Oh, why do I even try to speak to you? You are insufferable!”
“And have a face like a bag full of rocks. You mustn’t forget that. Must be my lack of intelligence.” He shrugged, trying not to chuckle. “Or something of the sort. It’s the only reasonable explanation.”
“I absolutely refuse to give you the satisfaction—”
“You can’t just end your story there, you know,” he said, still smiling as he returned relentlessly to his original question. “You came, you saw, you…?” He left the question dangling in the air like an apple held out to a horse.
“Well, I didn’t conquer, if that is what you’re implying. I arrived, I walked around the church, and I found Mr. Blyth lying on the ground. I knelt down to see if I could awaken him, but…” She swallowed and shook her head. “It was too late.”
“Did you see anyone else?”
“See anyone?” She stared at him. Although he could feel her gaze, the shadows hid her eyes. They were just dark holes in a face as pale as marble. “What do you mean?”
“Did you see anyone else there?” He gestured to her dress. “If you got that amount of blood on your hands and dress, he could not have been long dead, now could he?”
Her mouth opened and then snapped shut. Her brows furrowed in thought, and she shook her head again before rubbing her fingers against her left temple. The notion was clearly new to her. “I—I do not know.”
“You don’t know if you saw or heard anyone?”
She frowned at him. “I think I heard someone. I am not sure.”
“What did you hear?”
“Footsteps on the gravel path. I’m sure of it.” A smile of hope curved her lips. “I heard someone walk away.”
“Did you see them?”
“No.” She shook her head, the fleeting moment of hope gone. “I thought it might be Mr. Blyth going home.”
“And you didn’t run after him? Try to catch him? After coming all this way to see him?”
“I…” She slumped and rubbed her temple again. “No. I was tired, I suppose. I thought I could see him tomorrow.”
Something in her voice, a sense of relief perhaps, made him comment, “I wonder if you were having doubts about seeing him at all.”
“Of course not! I was sure if I could see him, talk to him—” A pleading tone entered her voice as she leaned forward and peered up at him.
“And yet when you thought he was leaving, you made no attempt to stop him.”
“No.” Her shoulders slumped.
“You do realize that your actions make one wonder if you truly heard anyone walking away.” Crossing his arms, he leaned against the side of the house as he watched her. Her lithe body was so expressive of every fleeting emotion, every surge of hope and plunge into despair. “You might merely hope that the presence of a mysterious third person might turn suspicion away from you.”
She leapt to her feet, gripping her portmanteau in front of her like a shield. “I have no hope of any such thing! You were the one who kept questioning me and made me remember. I had forgotten all about it!”
“How convenient.”
“It is not at all convenient—none of this has been convenient, except perhaps to whoever actually killed poor Mr. Blyth. I imagine my arrival was extremely convenient to him,” she replied bitterly. The portmanteau slipped down to dangle from her right hand. Her head bowed. Then she turned to gaze out at the gloomy lane. “Martha was right—I should not have come. I should have known it would all be useless.”
“A letter would certainly have been less awkward.”
A brief, choking laugh greeted his comment. The sound bordered on hysteria.
Concerned, he reached out a hand before he dropped it abruptly at the creak of the door.
The front door behind them opened. Miss Martha stepped outside onto the porch, followed quickly by Sir Horace. They had barely cleared the doorway before the door snapped shut behind them. The sound of a key turning in the lock broke the silence.
Sir Horace jerked. “Well! Well, yes. There we are, then. Just a brief walk, after all, ladies.”
The sisters exchanged glances. Miss Martha snorted inelegantly and glanced up at the night sky.
Dark gray clouds scudded overhead in thick rafts. As they watched, one massive cloudbank cut off the moon’s silvery glow. The few stars previously visible were hidden as he watched by the turbulence of thickening clouds. Over the ground, curls of mist obscured the hedges and lane.
A cold drop of rain splashed over Glanville’s cheek and trickled down his neck.
“Oh, yes. Just a brief walk into Kendle and then a short mile to Hornbeam Manor,” Miss Grace said, slipping her free arm around her sister’s elbow. She glanced up at the gathering storm clouds. “Lovely evening for a ramble, too.”
Rain pattered over the roof of Willow’s Shadow Cottage. A cold stream established itself, running merrily down the back of Glanville’s collar. He reached over and gently pried the portmanteau from Miss Grace’s grip.
“It could be worse.” Glanville offered an elbow to Miss Grace, blinking water out of his eyes.
A bolt of lightning streaked overhead, lighting up the dripping landscape before thunder exploded nearby. Wind ripped through the trees, whipping and snapping branches and flinging leaves into their faces.
Miss Grace jerked, her hand tightening on his arm as they stepped through the widow’s gate to the narrow lane. “Yes. No doubt it could be worse. I’m sure if I concentrated hard enough, I might even come up with exactly how that might be possible.”
Chapter Six
Persuaded by the increasingly violent bolts of lightning and deafening crashes of thunder, the men were easily convinced to escort Grace and her sister to Hornbeam Manor before collecting their horses from St. Mary’s. Even so, they were all drenched when they finally squelched their way into the manor’s grand hallway.
Mr. Rathbone, the Branscombe’s butler, became positively morose as he collected their dripping outer garments and handed them fastidiously to the maid, Alice.
As Grace shook out her skirt, she noticed that the stains had smeared and drifted lower to form a reddish band around the hem. As she watched, the streaks continued to drift through the wet fabric until they had almost disappeared. When she glanced up, she saw Lord Glanville studying her, a frown burrowing between his brows.
He looked like he thought she’d deliberately set out to walk through the storm in hopes of washing the stains out of her clothing.
“That walk through the rain was not my notion,” Grace said as she shook her skirt again and shifted from one soaked foot to the other. Her shoes squished and burped out a flood of muddy water. A shallow pool shimmered around her on the marble floor, sparkling in the candlelight.
“No,” Lord Glanville agreed easily. “The storm has not done us any particular favors, though, has it?”
Grace shrugged. She rather thought it had done her some good. The rain had washed away most of the blood, leaving only a few pale streaks around the hem of her skirts. She stepped out of the puddle around her feet. A shiver rippled through her as her wet clothing slapped coldly at her ankles. Glancing at her sister, she saw that Martha’s lips were already turning blue.
Cold had always affected Martha the most. Grace stepped closer to her sister, concerned lest she become ill.
“I beg your pardon, but may we retire to our room?” Grace asked, her gaze fixed on Martha’s damp face. “My sister has received a chill.”
“Yes, yes. Of course,” Sir Horace agreed hastily, glancing around as if he wasn’t sure about what he should do with the two very damp young ladies.
To his evident relief, his wife, Lady Branscombe, came hurrying down the grand staircase
. Her worried gaze fixed upon her portly husband, and a worried frown lined her face. Years younger than her husband, Edith Branscombe was tall and slender, with an athletic grace that contrasted oddly with the bearlike form of her husband, but there was no denying the strong bond between the two. Lady Branscombe barely nodded to the others as she ran across the marble to her husband and began yanking on his saturated jacket.
“You must remove these wet things at once or you will become ill!” she exclaimed. “Whatever were you thinking to go out on a night like this?”
“Leave off, woman!” Sir Horace exclaimed, dancing around in an effort to keep his wife from stripping him right there in the hallway before everyone’s startled glance. “There is no point in removing my jacket.” He slapped her hand away when she tugged on his collar. “Lord Glanville and I must go out again—”
“You will do no such thing! I simply will not allow it!” Her mouth tightening, she eyed Lord Glanville. “You cannot expect my husband to go out again—not on a night like this!”
“Certainly not,” Lord Glanville agreed. His dark blue eyes danced with merriment, although his expression remained serious. “I’ll collect the horses. They can stay in my stable tonight. I’ll bring your mare back in the morning, Sir Horace.”
“I am perfectly capable of fetching my own horse—will you desist from these attempts to unclothe me!?” Sir Horace pushed his wife’s hands away from his jacket and dashed around to the other side of Lord Glanville. “I have a responsibility! I am a magistrate—”
“Your responsibility will cease if you are dead,” Lady Branscombe pointed out, fists resting on her hips. “And I fail to see how fetching a horse in the middle of a storm can be considered the duty of a magistrate.”
“Madam,” Sir Horace said in lofty tones, his double chin wobbling in the air. “You appear to have overlooked the fact that we have guests who require your attention.” He waved a hand toward Grace and Martha. “I suggest you tend to them. In the meantime—”
“In the meantime, I will take care of the horses, Sir Horace, and return in the morning,” Lord Glanville cut in smoothly.