Aurora (27 page)

“Naturally I will give you all I have. All I can lay my hands on, but it isn’t much. You must go away, Horace. Far away. Back to America would be best.”

“I didn’t like it in America, Clare. It’s devilish hot in the summertime and perishing cold in the winter.”

“America is a huge country. You wrote your mama from Boston. You should go farther west. Far enough away that Kenelm can never find you. He plans to kill you. He says it in so many words.”

“I’ll tell him what really happened. Tell him I didn’t take the necklace.”

Clare swallowed nervously. “He wouldn’t believe a word of it. He is become positively deranged. What we must do is hide you. Get you out of here at once, tonight.”

“I haven’t been off the road for two whole days. I’m too tired to go on tonight, and my nag is winded too. I’ll have to sleep here tonight. Oh, but I can’t leave in the daylight. I’ll hide tonight and tomorrow, and leave the next night after dark. How much money can you let me have?”

“Enough to see you on a boat to America, and something to get you started. I’ll scrimp and save, do whatever I must to help you, Horace. It is hard to have to part with you so soon, but I must not be selfish. Your safety must come before anything else.”

“I don’t like America,” he tried, hoping for a reprieve, since Clare seemed still to love him.

“You will like it better with some money in your pocket. Open an inn—that will be something for you, my dear. You are too good to be an ostler. You are a Raiker. You must be the proprietor.”

Horace considered this with some satisfaction. “I suppose I could do that,” he said at length, not happily, but resigned.

“I’ll go to the stable to sleep, shall I?” he asked.

Clare was in a quandary as to what to do with Rutley in the immediate future. She dared not let him stay in the house, with Wilkins nosing around, and the stables were even more dangerous. He would be out of her surveillance completely there. But he must be kept on the premises. She needed a little time to collect sufficient money to get him packed off far away, and wanted to talk to him a good deal more—to impress on him the necessity of never returning, never writing his mother, never daring to return here. With the house full of servants, she didn’t know where to conceal him.

“I’m famished,” Horace remarked, in the middle of her deep thinking. Yet another problem. She didn’t wish to arouse the servants’ curiosity. They had already seen too much. Some story must be made to satisfy them. Glancing at Rutley, she doubted they would recognize him. The footman who brought him up had been with her only five years, but if Wilkins were to catch a glimpse,
he
might recognize the man. No, getting food was too risky. Horace must go hungry for one night. It wouldn’t hurt him—he’d run to fat.

With her mind darting a dozen ways, she suddenly recalled the mount Rutley had spoken of, even now in her stable. That too must be gotten rid of. Horace and the horse must both be sent off to some safe corner to hide, and in importance she didn’t rate one much higher than the other, except as a nuisance. Somewhere Kenelm would not discover them. After a rapid calculation of her options, Clare decided on the abandoned shepherd’s hut, a good two miles away from the house and the road. Bernard had gotten rid of the small herd; so far as she knew, the place was now sitting idle. Not so sheltered as she would like, but off the beaten track, with some trees that could hide the mount. Horace must not light a fire or in any way attract attention to his presence.

She impressed these facts on him several times, and finally sent him off, still clamouring for food. He was not to return. She would go to him tomorrow at dawn with food, return later with money. At his last objection that he was awfully hungry, she relented, not through pity, but for fear he would risk going into town for a meal. She asked for some bread and cheese for herself, and with this meager repast, Horace was made to do.

The taking of food delayed his departure; in all he was at the house for over an hour. Time for the stableboy to get to the inn, and to discover that Lord Raiker was not there. It was believed he was visiting the younger Lady Raiker. The boy considered the message urgent enough to deliver it to the Dower House without first consulting Wilkins. There too he drew a blank. Raiker had been there, but had left, presumably to return to the inn. Becoming panic-stricken, the boy left the message in all its detail—that Rutley was at the Hall—then returned to the inn. He had taken the short cut through the fields, and must have missed Raiker, who would have used the road back to the inn. Eventually, Kenelm was run to earth, and the news given.

“By God!” he said, laughing in delight. “A better piece of luck than I dared hope for. We’ll see her squirm now. There’s a handsome reward in this for you and your uncle, my lad.” He immediately went to the inn stable and had his mount saddled up to gallop back to Raiker Hall.

There was no point in going to Clare. Raiker went instead to the back door to discover of Wilkins, lurking in readiness for him, that man and horse had been and were gone. Wilkins thought the bird was Rutley right enough, but gone to pot and seed, and looking a wretched enough fellow. He had set off to the northwest alone, and there was nothing there at all, unless he meant to go cross the country to Ashford, which made no sense to any of them. To Kenelm it indicated not Ashford but London, for Horace to lose himself in the crowded back alleys of that teeming city. He must overtake him before he got there, and he wasted not a minute in setting out in pursuit.

Chapter Nineteen

The minute the boy had left the Dower House after delivering his news, Malone took charge. She was highly perturbed, and secretly delighted. Words gushed out of her mouth, with little attention to accuracy, but much attempt at a vocabulary exalted enough to honour the occasion. “What we’ve got to do is get over to the Hall at once to be a collaboration of the testimony that Rutley is there. She’ll do away with him in the batting of an eye. We’ll be lucky if he ain’t slaughtered already and stuck in a hole in the ground.”

“Wilkins saw him, and Kenelm is on his way. There is no need for us to go,” Marnie pointed out.

“We’ve no idea where Kenelm is, or if the moll-dawdling lad that was here will ever find him in time. We will look no-how come the dawn, if Rutley has slipped off into obscenity again, and not a one of us can take the stand and lay an affeydavey we saw him. It’s imperious that at least one of us goes to see, and if you haven’t the stomach for it, I’ll go myself.” This threat was delivered to Aurora, who was less anxious not to go than her sister.

“I think she’s right,” Rorie said.

“Of course I’m right, and there’s not a second to waste. Get your pelisse and let’s be off. And we have to go quietly, too.”

“Take a footman with you at least,” Marnie cautioned.

“We don’t want a whole brigade creeping up to the window. To take a peek and be sure it’s him is all we’re doing.”

“You don’t know him. You can’t give an identification,” Marnie pointed out.

“I can indemnify that the corpse Clare will have killed before morning is the selfsame one we’re going to see through the windows, if we only hurry,” Malone answered stoutly. “He won’t last through the night. That’s a foregone concussion. She’ll swear on a stack of Bibles she never saw hide nor hair of the fellow before in her life, and get a dead man to vilify it. Time’s wasting. Come on.”

“I’ll go,” Rorie said, and jumped up.

Malone grabbed up her rolling pin as she hastened through the kitchen, and handed a meat cleaver to Aurora, who replaced it and seized a butcher knife instead. They did not arrive in time to see Rutley actually in conversation with Clare through a window, as Malone had intended. But they saw plain enough a large, dark man lead a dispirited horse from the stable and look carefully about him before striking off into the shadowy park.

“What do we do now?” Rorie asked in a whisper.

“Follow him. We must be able to tell Kenelm where to find him.”

“He has a horse. Oh, why didn’t I ride my mount?”

Rutley mounted his nag as they spoke, and in a flash Malone had taken her decision. “Steal one from the stable and follow him. I’ll taggle along as fast as I can on foot. He ain’t setting any hot pace. He’ll end up carrying that nag before he’s gone a mile if I know anything.”

“There will be stableboys in the barn.”

“No there won’t. The lad that sleeps out is off looking for Ken. This is your chance to deserve Kenelm, my girl. Show him what you’re made of.”

With this bracing encouragement, Rorie slipped into the stable and untied Clare’s mount. She didn’t bother with a saddle, but put on the bit and bridle and mounted bareback, which necessitated her riding astride. Clare’s mount was fast and strong, well able to outdistance the hack Rutley had. There was no fear of losing him, but as she crept along through the darkness with the eerie sounds of nocturnal animals magnified in the silence around, she felt other fears.

A rag of cloud sailed over the moon, momentarily increasing the blackness and her fear. She clutched at the butcher knife with one hand and the reins with the other, having some trouble to hold the horse back as far as she would have liked. Over her shoulder, she saw Malone running as fast as she could. She was highly visible, as her white apron flapped about her legs, with only her shoulders and chest covered by a dark shawl. She was a reassuring sight.

With Clare’s warnings of the gibbet awaiting him should he be discovered, Rutley urged his animal on to a canter. Rorie followed at a safe distance, but as they wended their way through the park, Malone found her stamina didn’t keep pace with her desire. She lost sight of them entirely, and stood undecided whether it was better to continue giving chase, returning for Kenelm, or calling out a posse. She decided to forge ahead, but had by this time no idea even in which direction the others were proceeding.

It seemed a long time she straggled on, cocking her ears forward and aft without hearing a thing but owls and night creatures.

Rutley was keenly aware that he was in constant jeopardy while he was in the neighborhood. He took the notion he was even then being followed, and pulled in behind a bunch of bushes to look behind him. He thought he heard hoofbeats, then decided he was imagining it. He was about to go on, when he saw faintly in the darkness the outline of a horse. He felt it could be none other than Kenelm, already in some magical way on his scent, and he cowered behind the bushes, hoping with all his heart the rider would go on past him. By patting his nag in a comforting way, he kept it silent while the horse and rider passed by, then he saw that it was a woman. Wasn’t that the mount he had seen in Clare’s stable? It looked like it, and the rider was a woman. It must be Clare, come after him. “Clare. Clare, I’m here,” he called. “What is it? What’s happened?”

Rorie didn’t recognize the voice, of course, but to her it sounded positively lethal. She trembled so she hardly knew what to do. Her instinct was to bolt, but this was her chance to help Kenelm. She must get a look at the man, so that she could identify him again. And he had called her Clare—that was some proof that it was the man the stableboy had spoken of. She turned her mount around, thinking she would just get a look at his face, then dash her mount back home. As she advanced, she gripped the knife under the fold of her pelisse. He’ll have a gun, she thought, and her hands were trembling, but she kept going toward the man and horse and the bushes.

“Clare, I hope you brought some food, I’m—” Rutley cut his speech off abruptly. “You ain’t Clare,” he charged, frightened to death, but the sharp edge to his voice sounded like anger to his pursuer. “Who are you?” he demanded. He took a quick step forward and got hold of the horse’s bridle before she could retreat. Whoever she was, she was just a young girl, and he had to silence her.

At close range, he recognized Clare’s horse from the stable. He had been right about that. He quickly concluded that Clare had sent a servant after him for some purpose. “Who are you? Why are you following me?” he asked, becoming more suspicious and frightened by the moment.

“I’m come from Clare,” she said, hoping in this way to limit his wrath, and her own danger.

“What does she want?”

“Some proof that you are Rutley,” Rorie said. She couldn’t have said where this idea came from, but the words were suddenly being said, and as she heard them, they sounded not only plausible but downright clever. His reaction soon undeceived her.

“You’re lying,” he said. “Kenelm sent you.” This dangerous villain was uppermost in his thoughts. He had assumed gargantuan proportions, till it seemed even the trees and bushes were spying for him.

“No,” she said quickly, but already the man’s hand was taking a tighter grip on the bridle, making her quick bolt impossible.

“You’re lying. He sent you. I know he wants to kill me,” Rutley said, his voice rising and becoming almost insane-sounding. He pulled roughly at Aurora’s skirts, and she half fell from the animal’s back, landing in a heap at Rutley’s feet. Under her pelisse she still held the knife, and had fallen without quite putting it through herself, which seemed little short of a miracle. It must have cut her gown.

“He doesn’t want to kill you. He only wants to find you,” Rorie told him. “Why should he want to kill you?”

“Clare told me everything. I know what he’s up to. You won’t go running to him, telling him where I am.” Oh, but how was he to stop her? Clare wouldn’t want him to take a woman to the shepherd’s hut. He wasn’t supposed to let
anyone
see him, or know where he was. And he did not dare let her run to Kenelm and say she had seen him. It was an impossible puzzle, and he didn’t have clever Clare there to solve it for him, as she had done in his other dilemma. He stood watching the girl, who had made no move to arise. He wished she would just stay there, quiet, but she suddenly arose.

“Don’t move,” he said, trying to think. Should he go back to Raiker Hall and tell Clare? But what if Kenelm was there? Clare had told him to leave at once, and not come back.