Sea of Secrets: A Novel of Victorian Romantic Suspense (36 page)

“Pillion, I think. Best let him go with Mr. Reginald; he is the strongest.”

I watched in disbelief as the duchess assented. As a compress was hastily bound against Herron’s wound for the journey, I plucked at her sleeve. “How can you let him ride with Charles?” I hissed at her. “For the love of heaven, he just tried to kill Herron.”

She barely glanced at me. “Charles will take good care of him. The important thing is to get him home.”

I stared at her open-mouthed. I could not believe she would entrust her own son to the care of the man who had shot him. Lord Claude had returned with the horses now, and after Charles mounted, Herron was lifted up to sit crosswise on the saddle before him, held securely in Charles’s arm. No one else seemed concerned about the wisdom of this arrangement.

“Have you got his gun?” Charles called to his father, who held it up in answer. All the others were readying themselves for the ride back to Ellsmere. I tightened my lips and mounted, wondering what everyone else seemed to understand that I did not.

It was a silent, tense ride. The others rode at a jog-trot that seemed maddeningly slow, but the doctor warned against a faster pace that might jar Herron’s wound and set it bleeding more freely. Once I managed to maneuver my horse next to Charles. The duchess had ridden ahead to Ellsmere to make things ready, and the other two men had fallen back out of earshot.

“Is he conscious yet?” I asked shortly.

“No. Better for him; he’d be in considerable pain.” The ghost of a smile flickered over his face. “And distinctly unhappy at his escort.”

“You’ve given him good reason to be so,” I retorted. “How could you do such a thing?”

He looked at me over the top of Herron’s head. The brilliant eyes were dimmed with what might have been sadness or simple physical weariness. “I had to,” he said quietly. “He was aiming at Father, he was going to kill him. It was the only way to stop him.”

“You didn’t have to shoot him.”

“There was no time for anything else, Oriel, even had he not been past listening to argument. It wasn’t exactly easy, either, shooting to incapacitate him but no more. Do you think I wasn’t frightened that I would kill him?”

I gnawed at my lip as I struggled with disbelief. I could not dismiss the horror of the sight that had faced me as I ran across the field: Charles holding a smoking pistol, standing over the man he had shot down. “You did not have to duel with him at all.”

“Perhaps not. At the time it seemed the only solution.” He sighed, and the movement of his chest brought a faint groan from Herron. “We’ll talk later, Oriel. After Herron is safe. Just tell me one thing. Why does your father want Herron dead?”

* * *

It was many hours later before we spoke again. Herron was put to bed in the room next to his mother’s, which teemed with bustling, frantic activity: an army of servants hurried to provide everything the doctor and the duchess thought he needed, and my father shoved his way into the room to pelt us with questions as to his condition. We all crowded around as the doctor worked over him. At length the doctor professed himself satisfied enough with his patient’s condition to leave him.

“He’s very lucky the wound was not worse,” he said, and I thought of Charles’s words. Had it really been design, rather than luck? “Dueling is a dangerous business, Your Grace, and it could easily have cost him his life.”

The duchess was almost as pale as her son, but she was the most composed of all of us. “Thank you for your care of him, Doctor. I assure you that this will not happen again.”

The doctor looked skeptical. “I should hope not,” he said sternly. “I trust I do not need to remind Your Grace of the laws against dueling. Next time perhaps the young men can find a less dangerous way to settle their quarrel.” But he let himself be shown out of the room.

No one said a word until the door shut behind him. Then the duchess whirled, not on Charles, but on my father.

“This is your doing, Hugo,” she accused.

My father’s hand flew to his heart in a show of shock and injured feelings. “My doing! My dear Gwendolyn, it cannot have escaped you that it was your nephew who put the bullet in your son. How can you possibly blame me for that hotheaded young man’s doings?”

“You were the one to introduce the idea of a duel; if not for you, there might have been some fisticuffs, but nothing more serious. It was you who goaded the others on and did everything in your power to ensure that someone would be killed. Don’t trouble to deny it; I heard everything. I don’t know why you would be so malicious, Hugo, but you will not subject my family to your vicious sense of humor any longer. You will leave this house today, and you will not return.”

Lord Claude’s face had gone ashen. “Gwendolyn, do you not think you are being harsh?” he began, but my father smiled gently and bowed his head.

“Very well, madam. I am sorry to have caused you inconvenience. I will not darken your door again. I wonder, though, if I might have a few more hours’ grace in which to prepare for my departure? You will not deny me that scant favor, I hope, since it will be the last.”

His graceful capitulation was unexpected and, I think to all of us, a distinct relief. I was not surprised when the duchess said grudgingly, “Until tomorrow noon then.”

“Thank you.” He bowed himself out of the room with his usual touch of insolent exaggeration. The rest of us gazed at each other with surprise, but a lightening of the heart. Perhaps now we would have a chance to mend what had passed.

Finally there came a moment when the room had emptied of people and I was alone at Herron’s bedside. The duchess had ordered the room cleared so that he could rest, and had herself gone to oversee the preparation of a hot drink for him. He was asleep or unconscious, pale and small in the vast expanse of white linens, the bedclothes turned back to reveal the taut fragile lines of his throat. His eyelashes lay on his cheeks in two startlingly black crescents. I touched his forehead, smoothed his hair back; there was no fever, at least. Not yet. I let my hand linger, feeling the sweet familiarity of the shape of his brow under my palm. He looked younger and more defenseless than I had ever seen him. I could not help but recall the night he had first come to me for comfort, how his vulnerability had wrung at my heart, making me want to protect and soothe him.

“Here now, don’t cry,” came a voice, and I half turned to find Charles behind me, watching Herron too. “He should be all right; you heard the doctor.”

“But he also said he’s very weak.” I fumbled for my handkerchief and wiped my eyes. “He hasn’t been eating or sleeping enough. What if he doesn’t recover?”

His hands closed around my arms and lifted me from my place by the bed. “Come and get some air,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do for him just now, and you aren’t doing yourself any good, hovering over him.”

Still sniffling faintly, I let him shepherd me into the morning room and ring for tea. “I don’t want any,” I told him, but when the tray came, the fragrance of hot buttered toast and muffins reminded me that I had not eaten since the night before, and I fell to without shame.

“Aren’t you eating?” I asked. Charles had taken a cup of tea, but nothing else; he sat back in his chair regarding me as he drank.

“I had something earlier. I don’t believe in dueling on an empty stomach.”

I felt better after I had eaten: stronger, more calm. At last I sat back with a sigh, my fingers curled around the comforting warmth of a full teacup, and looked at him. In the bustle over Herron, no one had thought of Charles; he looked as if he would have been the better for a hot posset and a long rest himself. He had not even taken time to find another coat to replace the one he had given up to Herron; he was still in his shirt sleeves. I was glad the fire had been lit in the morning room.

“Well,” he said finally, “you haven’t fled my presence yet. Does that mean you have decided to trust me?”

I looked into my teacup and considered this. “I think so,” I said. “I suppose you had to challenge Herron to prevent my father from calling him out. But I still believe Herron would have refused to meet him.”

“Possibly. But he was certainly ready to kill someone, and it seemed very likely that it would be Father. If I hadn’t goaded Herron into a duel, he wouldn’t have rested until he had the chance to point a gun at my father’s head. As indeed he proved this morning.”

“Did you know he would do that?”

“I thought he might. That was why I had to be the one facing him; Father would never have shot Herron, even to save his own life.”

“But once Herron recovers he will try again to kill Lord Claude.” I put aside my tea and propped my chin on my fist, gazing out the windows at the bleak grey day that was so exactly a mirror of my mood.

“Possibly,” said Charles again. “But the situation may have changed by then; I hope so. Why do you think your father was trying so hard to stir him up?”

“I’ve no idea,” I said wearily. “He delights in causing trouble, and for some reason he seems to dislike Herron. And there is something peculiar between him and your father. He seems to have some hold over Lord Claude, but I don’t know what it is.”

“I’ve noticed that too.” After a moment he said, slowly, “Then there’s the poisoned wine.”

“Do you think—who do you think did it?” I asked, hesitant to delve into what seemed the most dire of recent events. Poison had a deliberate, an irrefutable quality to it: this was not a spontaneous crime of temper, but something coldly planned and plotted. And it looked as if the plotter had to be Lord Claude. My heart constricted again as I thought of poor little Zeus—Felicity would be inconsolable—and realized that Herron had been using him as a taster at dinner. Even then he had been suspicious… and with good cause.

Charles had not answered. When I looked at him, he had shut his eyes and was rubbing his temples. There was so much defeat in the gesture, and it was so unlike him to give in to such an emotion, that I almost rose to go to him. “It was Father,” he said without opening his eyes. “It must have been. But I can’t understand why he would do it. Even if Herron believes him to have killed the duke, there’s no proof, nothing that would make him a threat to Father. I can’t understand it.”

It was painful to see him struggle with the idea that his own father was capable of such an act. It seemed that all of us were being forced to realize that, after all, we could never truly know the people dearest to us. “Perhaps he did it under duress, at my father’s behest. He had something to do with it, I’m certain.”

But he seemed to find nothing in my words to ameliorate the conclusions that were forcing themselves on us. “There’s too much death around here,” he said, opening his eyes to stare into the fire. “This house is becoming steeped in it. I thought it would be a haven after war, but it isn’t after all.”

This time I did go to him, and sat on the arm of his chair. I took his hand and held it, and we sat without moving or speaking for a long time.

* * *

By bedtime it had started to rain. The sky that had threatened all day was finally fulfilling that threat, and that night I brushed my hair to the rushing, pattering accompaniment of the storm.

Herron had slept the greater part of the day, and by evening had shown signs of improvement. He had eaten a hearty dinner and grew restless as night fell; I knew he was eager to keep his futile nightly tryst, but he was still too weak to do so. Perhaps getting shot will be good for him, I thought; at least it will keep him in bed for a few days so that he can get the rest he so badly needs.

We did not take the evening meal in the dining room. Although two of the gardeners had removed poor Zeus’s body and buried him that afternoon, the awful scene of the night before was still so vivid in all our minds that the duchess decided we should dine in the breakfast room. There were so few of us that the smaller room would have been more appropriate in any case: Herron was confined to his bed, and my father had pointedly informed us that he would be too busy overseeing the packing of his belongings to join us. I doubt his absence caused any of us grief.

None of us spoke aloud about the strange events that had passed since last we had dined together, but I know all of us were thinking of them. It was a strained, silent meal, and afterwards we all dispersed to our rooms without even the pretense of lingering in the drawing room. Now, alone, I tried again to make sense of what I knew.

I could not construct a theory that accounted for everything. My father’s involvement still troubled me. He had been ready, even eager, to fight Herron. But poison was not consistent with his character. Like Herron, he would have been more direct: fingers around his throat, or a knife in the ribs…

It must after all have been Lord Claude who had tried to poison his stepson. Yet he would not duel him. Was he a coward, or so unwilling to commit this murder that he could only make use of the most indirect means? This made sense; by all accounts he was genuinely fond of Herron. But why, if he was so reluctant to kill Herron, would he do so at all? Again I thought of my father. If Lord Claude had murdered the duke, I thought recklessly, perhaps Father had proof, and used that power over Lord Claude… to force him to murder Herron? It still made no sense. What possible good could come to my father from Herron’s death?

I frowned in concentration, trying to recall more of that dialogue I had overheard. It had not been the conversation of a blackmailer and a victim, I had decided; there was a sense that both were entangled in something equally, but my father was the only one willing to use that situation against the other. There had been such a sense of urgency, too; my father had berated Lord Claude for delaying in executing his mission. What could they both be involved in that required such immediate attention?

And then I knew. The solution came to me whole and complete. It was so logical, with what I knew of Lord Claude and my father; it was so perfect that I wondered why Charles had not thought of it. I would have pieced the truth together sooner had I known as much as he surely did about the settlement of the estate; but then, he had not been privy to the conversation I had overheard, which rendered everything so clear.