Scandal in the Night (41 page)

“Yes.” It was only a partial relief to know he wasn’t the only one who felt it. “He’s here, close, our shooter. Blond man, about so tall”—Thomas held up his hand in measurement—“twelve to thirteen-odd stone. Handsome fellow, once, with yellow curls. Broken nose now. And maybe worse.”

“I got lots with broken noses—but worse, you say, like mebbe useless arm?”

“Where?” was all Thomas could ask.

“Stable. One of the lads I was telling you about. Veteran. Barrington, that’d be. But buggered off he has, and good riddance. Useless piece of loose baggage.”

Thomas let off a pungent Punjabi oath and followed that with a rather more Anglo-Saxon one for good measure, which made Broad Ham’s bushy eyebrows fly up toward his hairline.

“Fuck
all.
” Thomas’s eyes instantly shifted toward the stables, and he damned himself for a blind, single-minded fool. He had been so sure that he knew better than anyone else. He thought he alone had eyes and ears that saw what needed to be seen. He could have saved himself—and all of them—immeasurable injury if he had only listened to James and sought out the wisdom of his men. But no. He had been too preoccupied with thoughts of Cat to think of checking with Broad Ham or Stable Master Farrell. He should have bloody well known better. “How long’s he been gone?”

“Didn’t come back after his turn at night patrol this morning. I had my lads on guard with your brother the viscount’s men. Good with their pistols, my men are. Trained to be. And your fellow Barrington had army training as well. Veteran, like I said, though he’s only the one good arm.”

Birkstead, too, seemed to have learned well the efficacy of hiding in plain sight, and obscuring his past by taking a new name. “Damn him to hell. He’s armed then. He’s the one, Broad Ham.”

“The shooter?” Broad Ham scoffed. “Out on the lawn? Oh, I don’t know ’bout that, young sir. Not likely, really. The man’s good enough with a carriage pistol, but that’s near all he can handle. He’s only got the one good arm. Charity to keep such a man in a stable when he can’t even shovel shite. But a marksman with a long gun? Not likely. Couldn’t even hold it, could he?”

But that would explain why the shots seemed to come from the hedge itself. Birkstead would have had to brace the barrel of any rifle on a limb of some sort. But the reload time was problematic. More likely he had two guns, and took the second shot at them with a carriage pistol, designed to be lethal at close range, but much less effective at a longer distance. Which would also explain why, out on the length of the lawn, the shots went wide. “Which arm, Ham?”

“His left is the one as hangs down limp at his side. Took a ball he said, in the army. Broke the bone, it did.”

It had been Thomas who had broken the bone, that night in the garden. Good. For the briefest of moments, Thomas was glad it was he who had maimed the bastard, if it had kept Birkstead from being able to kill Cat. But a useless arm was another reason for Birkstead to have nursed his grudge into hatred, and turned his thoughts toward this sort of violent revenge. Another reason Thomas should have done things differently that night.

But the past couldn’t be changed—only the future.

“But where in the bloody the hell is he now?”

And that was when the church bell began to clang.

Chapter Twenty-three

Thomas wasn’t going to find her in time. He had left, and she was entirely on her own, just as she had always been. She would have to find a way to stop Birkstead by herself. The thought did little to calm her terror, but it did steel her resolve.

“How will they know? How will they know I’ve hanged myself in shame? They already know I didn’t do it—kill Lord and Lady Summers in Saharanpur. Mr. Jellicoe told them so. They’ll never believe you.”

“Never say never, mousie.” He laughed at the repetition of the adage, but she heard something else—a familiar inflection, a rolling
r
and a roundness to the
o.
There was a faint Scots ring to his accent she’d never heard before. Was he doing it on purpose, to make fun of her? To remind her of his threat?

“They’ll believe me when the only one to say otherwise dies as well. They’ll know you both lied.”

Thomas, he meant. He meant to kill Thomas after he had killed her.

Catriona scrambled to try and come up with something else to stall for time—something else to delay what Birkstead wanted to make inevitable. “Hadn’t I better confess, then? Hadn’t I better leave a proper suicide note, expressing my shame and regret?”

“Oh, no. You’re not distracting me like that, mousie. And who’d believe an ambitious little thing like
you
had anythin’ of shame?”

There it was again, the Scots brogue, sliding into his voice every time he said “mousie.”

“Then at least tell me how you did it.” She grasped at the shortest of straws. “If I’m to have your sins on my soul for all eternity, at least tell me what happened.”

He stilled slightly, and she felt him turn his head toward her. “Don’t be coy now, mousie.”

“No. I wasn’t there. You know that.”

“Of course you were. Someone was. I heard you,” he insisted.

Alice. But she would rather die than have him know that. So what she said was, “Maybe you did hear me. I was looking for my aunt, but I never found her. And I never so much as saw you that night. I have no idea how you even knew I was there.”

It was a garble of lies, but it did the trick. The arm lashed across her neck relaxed a fraction.

“Your lover.” The gloat floated back into his tone, but at least he was talking. And while he was talking, he wasn’t trying to wrench her off the railing, or throw her down the height of the bell tower. “Tanvir Singh put the idea in my head, didn’t he? That’s what you’d call ironic, isn’t it? He came lookin’ for you—touchin’, that, your heathen, native lover being so devoted—askin’ if I’d seen you. And then he turns out not to be a heathen native at all, but the Earl Sanderson’s get—his bloody third son—and everyone defers to his opinion. But he was the one who told me you were inside. And when everyone thought you’d died in the bloody fire as you ought, it was simple, really, to turn the blame upon you. You made it so easy with your clandestine ways—sneakin’ around to see yer dark-skinned lover. But I would have had you anyway, you know. It would have worked, and we would have been happy together.”

His malice was exceeded only by his self-delusion. But Catriona made a noncommittal sound of sympathy. Anything to keep the man talking. Anything to keep him listening to the sound of his own voice resonating up the tower walls instead of thinking about killing her. “But?” she prompted.

“But Lettice ruined it all. She was the jealous one. She was the one who didn’t want to let me marry you.”

Poor, doomed Lettice. “She was in love with you.”

“Love.” Birkstead spat out his contempt. “No reason to ruin everything.”

“Yes.” Catriona sighed out the lie. “I couldn’t agree more.”

“I’m sure you do, mousie. Think you’ll bag an earl’s son, now. Or did you know then? You must have with yer ambitious, high nose-in-the-air ways.”

Catriona didn’t disabuse him of this notion. “You’re Scots,” she said instead, letting the old inflection slide into her voice. “You had the nerve to call me a dirty, ambitious savage when you were no better yourself.”

“Aye, I’m better. I’m better, because I made myself better. I earned everythin’ I ever got. Not like you, with your rich relations, and your lord for protection.”

She had no response that would suffice, nothing to contradict the truth that she had quite purposely allied herself with her rich relations. “Not much protection now they’re dead.” She had no idea what prompted that particular piece of idiocy, only she felt she needed to say something, anything, to keep him occupied and allay his antagonism.

But as a conversational sally, the mention of death was an abject failure.

“So now you know why, mousie. So we’ll move right along to the how.”

“It’s all so stupid. You’re so stupid. I never even saw you that night. I never saw anything. So killing me will do nothing but add another murder to your soul.”

But her words were falling on deafened ears. She could feel him behind her, gathering his strength again. She stopped fighting Birkstead and grappled one arm, and then her legs, around the post of the stair railing, while she kept tight hold of the gun at her throat.

Birkstead gave a sharp tug against the gun, and when she didn’t budge, he snarled, “Let go, or I’ll kick your head in.”

“Go ahead,” she muttered. If she didn’t let go, he couldn’t kick her head in without letting go of the gun himself. They were at a stalemate. Except that Birkstead was mostly bigger, and mostly stronger, and certainly meaner. Or at least more willing to impose pain. But she was through with appeasement. “Kill me, and bring him running. He won’t rest until he’s brought you to justice. Thomas Jellicoe has tracked you this far, and won’t rest until he’s sent you straight back to hell.”

“I’m already in hell,” he ground out. “Crippled and workin’ like a bloody servant. And Thomas Jellicoe? I have plans for him. I’ve had plans for him for quite some time.
I’m
the one that found him, that tracked
him
. He was easy enough to find.”

“Did it ever occur to you, you filthy jackal, that he wanted to be found? That he came here to find you? That he wanted the opportunity to punish you for wrecking his happiness as much as you wanted to punish him?” It didn’t matter if her statement were true. It only mattered that the thought might wedge itself in that devious, whirling brain of his, and foul up the gears for even a moment. All she needed was a moment.

And there it was a foot away—the slack cord of the bell rope hanging like an afterthought down the middle of the tower.

She cast her fate to the winds and let go of the railing, throwing out her arm, reaching blindly for the rope as Birkstead reacted, instinctively wrenching her back toward him as her weight pulled him toward the void. But she had just enough momentum to grasp the rough hempen fiber and hold on while Birkstead pulled her back with enough force so they both crashed into the stone wall of the stairwell, as the bell clanged out its alarm above.

Pain cleaved through her skull, but she didn’t care. If there were any justice left in this world, pain should be slicing along Birkstead’s jaw like the sharp end of a razor, and his mouth would be filling with the briny tang of blood from the collision with the jagged-faced stone.

Let him feel one eighth of her pain. Let him.

Her own head was on fire with the punishing heat of the blow. But it felt good. It felt
real
. At last, they were no longer fencing.

And the bell had sounded—the clapper had clanged dully against the bell at least once. But it was enough. It had to be enough.

But for the moment, nothing changed. Except that her legs were no longer clutched around the post railing, and Birkstead was refilled with deadly ire. Birkstead was as fast as he was slippery, and he gave in to his basest instinct and kicked at her knee with enough force to hobble her before he resumed dragging her upward by the simple expediency of ramming the barrels of his gun up into the soft skin under her chin.

The pressure tipped her back, off balance, and forced her head up again, so that she couldn’t see anything but the blindingly bright sun streaming into her eyes through the deep arches of the belfry. But she held on to the rope with one hand as she groped instinctively against the pressure of the gun with the other. She clawed at his wrist, and her right hand blindly and stupidly grappled into the volatile, hairpin firing mechanism of the gun.

Against her fingers, the flintlock fell, crashing toward the firing pan.

Catriona flinched away from the imminent concussion and shock that she was sure would blow her jaw off. But one second lengthened into two, and two into three. And nothing happened—Birkstead held firm against her pull, and the point of the barrel still ground into her flesh. She was still alive and whole. Her breath was still sawing in and out of her chest as if she had run all the way across Wimbourne’s fields.

She had not set the gun off with her clumsy grappling. The gun had not fired. Or rather, it had misfired. One of the two flintlocks—the left barrel—was pressing down upon her fingers, the sharp edge of the flint cutting into her knuckles, which were jammed between the hammer and the frisson. Her fingers, it seemed, had prevented the flint from striking.

And because Birkstead had only his one hand with which to hold the full weight of the pistol, he hadn’t been able or hadn’t thought to cock both barrels. From what she could feel with the tips of her fingers, the hammer on the right barrel remained at half cock.

She made an involuntary sound of relief and fear and frustration. She had no idea what to do. No plan for how to take advantage of the situation.

And then Thomas’s deep voice echoed up the stairwell. “Let her go, Birkstead, and there’s no harm done.”

“Son of a bitch,” Birkstead snarled in her ear. “How in all hell did he get—”

“He was a spy, for God’s sake, man. He picks locks. He has any number of insidious talents you can’t even imagine.”

Catriona still couldn’t see Thomas, but neither could Birkstead, because he was tense and twisting for a vantage point from which to locate his nemesis. But Birkstead did have his response at the ready. He raised his voice to carry down the length of the bell tower.

“I have a vivid imagination. And at the moment it’s occupied with all the ideas about how I’m going to kill you both. But it must be gratifying, mousie,” Birkstead continued in an overloud aside. “All that show of devotion. And does he know what he’s so devoted to? Does Singh, or Jellicoe, or whoever the bloody hell he is, know that all this time he’s been pantin’ after a criminal? At least I knew what you really were, and was smart enough to only be in it for the money.”

“You’re the criminal, Birkstead.” Thomas’s voice gained strength, sounding nearer as it echoed off the stone walls. “You’re a murderer. All the evidence is against you.”