The Anatomist's Wife (28 page)

I tried to ignore the throbbing between my shoulder blades and the pistol aimed at
me, and focus on my surroundings. There was no sound beyond the rustle of the wind
through the trees and the shuffle of our footsteps against the musky earth. The snap
in the breeze and the brine on my tongue told me we were nearing the sea loch. My
surroundings were not completely foreign, but I had not traveled this path many times
in the last sixteen months, so I could not say whether we had already passed the tiny
side trail that looped back toward the front drive or not. Everything looked so different
in the dark, and if I darted off into the woods anywhere but that trail, I wasn’t
certain I would be able to navigate without tripping over a root or becoming entangled
in a bramble bush.

Stratford prodded me in the back and snarled at his wife again, who picked up speed
as we crested a hill. My stomach sank as the thick bramble of trees and scrub around
us parted, allowing me to see the dark, steely waves of the loch glimmer faintly in
the light of a stray moonbeam breaking through the clouds. I had missed the side trail,
and soon enough we would arrive at the shore.

The trail twisted, and we were out of the forest, descending down a grassy hill toward
the beach. A small rowboat was pulled up on the shore. I faltered, and Lord Stratford’s
hand shot out to squeeze my upper arm in a punishing grip.

“Yes, Lady Darby. We’re taking the boat,” he hummed into my hair. “Does that bother
you?”

Of course, it bothered me. My hands were bound, and he was planning to take me out
onto the open waters of the loch. If I fell overboard, I would never be able to swim.
The thought terrified me. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. “Where are you taking
us?” I demanded.

“Oh, I don’t think you want to know that yet, love.”

The icy bands around my chest tightened. “Then why?” I gasped, suddenly desperate
to keep him talking. “You went to so much trouble to place the blame on your wife
and her maid . . .”

“And you.”

I stilled, remembering the bloody apron in my studio.

“I don’t know whether you lied about where you found the apron or Gage finally realized
how foolish he was to consider you a suspect, but I was rather impressed you managed
to avoid being implicated.”

Anger cleaved through my fear. “You knew the others were blaming me.”

“And I would have been a fool not to use that hysteria to my advantage,” he stated
matter-of-factly. “Just in case Gage never found the scissors or the shawls so that
he could accuse my wife of the murder.”

“You were going to kill her,” I spat. “You were going to kill your wife and then marry
Lady Godwin’s sister.” I was furious he had been playing us all against each other.
“Except Lady Godwin found out. She sent a letter to her sister, you know. And then
she confronted you about it in the maze.”

“The bitch threatened to tell my wife,” he snarled, squeezing my arm even tighter.
“Like she told her about our affair and the bastard growing in her belly.” He sighed
heavily, as if his display of anger had disappointed him. “I never intended to kill
Lady Godwin or her child, but she simply had to be stopped.”

The extreme changes in his tone unsettled me. He said the last so lightly, as if he
were telling me he had to stop the viscountess from painting her parlor pink, not
warning her friend of his treachery. I worried what a man with such quicksilver alterations
in mood could be capable of. He was thoroughly unpredictable.

“So you decided to implicate your wife,” I asked, leading him on, needing to understand
as much as I needed to keep him talking.

“Yes. The murder of both my former mistress and my wife would have thrown too much
suspicion on me.”

Lady Stratford stumbled ahead of us as she stepped onto the loose sand of the beach
and righted herself.

“Careful, darling,” her husband called up to her. “We wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.
Not yet,” he hissed under his breath.

Shaken by his comment, I tried to pull from his grasp, but he yanked me closer. I
knew if he took us out in that boat, things could not end well. There would be nowhere
to run, no way to escape. As we drew nearer, I realized this might be my last chance.
I couldn’t climb into that boat. Not without knowing I had done everything in my power,
short of dying, to avoid it.

I waited until we reached the point where the ground leveled to give myself the best
footing and then whirled around to drive my knee into Stratford’s groin. My brother
had told me, once upon a time, that it was the most vulnerable spot on a man’s body,
and should I ever get into trouble, that was the place to aim.

Regrettably, my aim seemed to be off. That, or Stratford was quicker than I gave him
credit for. My knee collided with his thigh, and though he dropped his grip on my
arm when he flinched, he did not go down as I’d anticipated. He snarled and grabbed
me around the waist before I took two steps. Spinning me around, he struck me across
the face.

I landed hard on my side in the sand, and it knocked the wind out of me. I gasped
for air, and my eyes filled with tears from the sting of the blow. My left cheek throbbed,
and I was having difficulty focusing on what was going on around me.

Before I could right myself, Stratford yanked me to my feet and lifted me into the
boat. I plopped down on the bench with all the grace of a falling rock and would have
tumbled over backward into the bottom of the boat if Celeste had not reached out to
steady me. The boat swayed beneath me. Then Stratford hoisted himself over the side
and finished maneuvering the tiny vessel out into the water with an oar. Before I
could understand what was happening, we were too far away from the shallows to risk
jumping out of the boat.

“Now,” Stratford declared, standing over me. “I would like you to row, Lady Darby.”

He held an oar out to me with one hand while pointing the gun at my chest with the
other. I glanced down at my bound hands and he
tsked
. “It doesn’t take free hands to row. Though I’m sure Celeste will have a much easier
time of it.” He glared pointedly at the other oar, and the maid immediately picked
it up. He forced the oar between my hands. “No sudden movements,” he told us as he
backed up to sit down in the stern of the boat. His eyes settled on his wife at the
prow of the vessel behind me. “And you, my dear, need only look pretty. As that is
all you seem capable of.”

I tried to ignore the sting of my cheek and the panic surging through my blood, but
the distance growing between the shoreline and me was not helping. The wind whipped
across the water, stirring up foamy whitecaps on the waves below my oar. The sky had
steadily begun to clear, offering lengthier gaps between cloud banks so that the moon
could shine bright and nearly full upon the choppy waters of the sea loch. To the
north I could see the hills of the Isle of Ewe rising up out of the middle of the
loch. I knew the waters were shallower near its southern tip. I pulled hard on my
oar, trying to turn us toward the isle, but Stratford was ever conscious of our direction.

“Straighten out,” he ordered, almost shouting to be heard above the wind. “We’re heading
west, Lady Darby.”

Into the deepest part of the loch.

Fear and frustration bubbled up inside me, threatening to overcome my thin veneer
of composure. I wanted to cry, and I wanted to scream, and I knew none of this was
going to stop Stratford from killing us.

“I don’t understand any of this,” I exclaimed. “You de-cided to kill your wife simply
because she has not been able to conceive a child?”

“I need an heir, Lady Darby.” He spoke slowly and carefully, as if I were stupid.
“It’s the only reason I wed in the first place. But my wife has been unable to provide
me with one.” He glared over my shoulder at the countess. “When I discovered Lady
Godwin was carrying my child, I finally knew for certain just who was at fault for
my wife’s lack of conception. She neglected to tell me how worthless she was before
we married. She tricked me.”

I glanced back at Lady Stratford. Her eyes were icy in the moonlight. “I never knew
I was barren. How could I? I was a virgin when I married you.”

“You knew.” His voice was laced with contempt. “You had to. It was no wonder your
family was so eager to see you wed to me.”

“You’re an earl! That’s why they wanted me to marry you.”

My hands cramped from trying to hold the oar in such an awkward manner, and my muscles
ached from the exertion. Even with her hands free, Celeste seemed to be having just
as much difficulty. While Stratford argued with his wife, our progress across the
lake had slowed considerably, and I consciously allowed our speed to drop even more.
I hoped that by doing so, there would be time for someone to notice we’d gone missing
and come searching for us.

“It doesn’t matter!” Stratford slammed his fist down on the bench below him, making
the boat sway and all of us jump. “You were useless to me. I should have recognized
that sooner. I needed an heir, and you couldn’t provide one. So you needed to die
so that I could remarry.”

“And how did you intend to do that?” Lady Stratford replied with an amazing amount
of daring. I feared her emotions were making her reckless. “Were you planning to slit
my throat like you did Lady Godwin’s?”

Stratford’s eyes gleamed with relish. “Of course not, my sweet.
Your
death needed to look like a suicide.”

His wife stiffened.

“A little bit of laudanum and two slits to the wrists seemed more ladylike.”

“With my embroidery shears? You never would have gotten away with it.” Her voice was
still clipped, but it was fading.

“Ah, but if everyone discovered that Lady Godwin was expecting my child and that you
knew about it, it would be all too easy to understand how you could be so distraught.”
The feigned sorrow in his voice was far more chilling than his anger. “Especially
when I told them how I blamed myself for not being more sensitive to your distress
over your barrenness.”

“You never loved me at all,” she accused, heartbreak and disillusionment stretching
her voice. “Not even on our wedding trip. When we . . .” She broke off, unable to
complete the sentence.

Stratford’s jaw hardened as he watched his wife struggle with her emotions.

“All I was to you was a . . . a broodmare,” she spat accusingly. The boat shifted
as if she intended to rise from her seat.

He swung the pistol around to point it at his wife. “Ah, ah!” he warned her in mockery.
“Let’s not be too hasty.”

Lady Stratford
thunked
back into her seat.

“It matters not to me now how soon you die, so long as your body washes up on shore.
But I assume you would rather prolong the matter.”

“You said you needed an heir, but why?” I blurted, trying to distract him before his
wife provoked him into firing his gun. I still didn’t understand his obsession with
having a boy child. “Why does it matter who inherits the title after you die?”

“Because the earldom would go to a bloody Frenchman,” he snarled, leaning toward me.
His dark eyes glittered almost feverishly in the moonlight, sending a chill down my
spine. “I spent five years fighting the sons of bitches in Spain and Portugal and
then at Waterloo. I took a bullet in the shoulder and another one grazed my scalp.
I nearly died at the Battle of Salamanca. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let one of
those frogs hold the title to one of the most ancient and venerable earldoms in all
of England.”

The man was crazy. He was willing to murder four women and a child just so he could
remarry and father an heir. I could understand his continued animosity toward the
French, but not his willingness to go to such extreme measures to keep his title out
of their hands. Perhaps the bullet that grazed his scalp had damaged his brain somehow,
for I could not believe that a man who was right in the head would do such a thing.

My body went cold at the realization that we were in a boat in the middle of a storm-tossed
loch with a madman. A murderer was dangerous enough, but as long as he was sane, there
was at least some chance of rationalizing with him. A madman was unreasonable and
unpredictable. We had no hope. He was going to kill us and dump us over the side.

A whimper caught in my throat, and I felt tears of despair begin to flood my eyes.
I blinked them back, determined not to show my panic to this lunatic. I would not
give him the satisfaction of watching me fall apart.

I allowed the wind that had picked up almost to a howl to whip the loose strands of
my hair across my face, shielding my struggle as I turned to stare out over the loch.
The glint of something on the water caught my eye. At first, I thought it might be
the way the moonlight was striking the waves, or a seal venturing into the shelter
of the loch from the sea, but then I realized that it was a ship. My heart leapt in
my chest.
Please let them be searching for us
, I prayed.
Please let it be Gage.

I studied Stratford through the tendrils of my hair, knowing I had to distract him.
I had to give that boat enough time to slip as close to us as possible without the
earl noticing. Otherwise, he might panic and shove us all overboard before the others
were near enough to help us.

“But why kill the baby?” I asked, drawing Stratford from whatever dark thoughts he
was contemplating. He glared at me. “I understand why you killed Lady Godwin. You
had to keep her quiet so that she wouldn’t warn your wife.”

Lady Stratford gasped, having not been privy to our earlier conversation on the beach.

“But I don’t understand why you took the child from her womb. Why would you do such
a thing? What purpose did it serve?”

Celeste made a gagging sound. I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye, wondering
if she was going to be sick.

“It didn’t serve a purpose,” Lord Stratford replied. “Other than to tell me whether
the bitch was telling the truth.”