Scandal in the Night (40 page)

She did want to live well beyond the next five seconds. She wanted to live well beyond the next five years.

But she couldn’t manage to agree with him, not with his boot crushing her windpipe, so she closed her eyes to blot out the glint of the metal barrel in front of her eyes, and obliterate the sight of him standing over her, full of malicious triumph.

But she couldn’t keep them closed for long. She had to look. She had to reconcile the stunning man she had known with the strangeness of this diminished ghost. He looked so ordinary in his livery—there was no leering smile. No brutally handsome face. No scarlet officer’s coat to make him stand out. No helpful sign that proclaimed one of the most dangerous, murderous men in all her world had found his way amongst them.

Up close to him in the shadowed sun of an English summer day, she could see—and smell—the ravages the years had wrought. The good looks that had given him the face of a fallen angel had faded since she had last seen him in Saharanpur. His face was worn, hollowed out and coarsened, perhaps by pain. His left arm now hung limp and useless by his side. The strong scent of toilet water that had clung to his spotless uniforms had now been replaced by the reeking odor of fried onions and stale sweat.

He looked as if the depravity that had always lived within him had finally worked its way up to the surface, as if the darkness within now colored his once fair skin.

Her thoughts must have been apparent in her face, because he smiled and shook his head chidingly. “Come now, and just behave yourself. I’m not a monster, mousie.”

Oh, but he was a monster. She knew it better than she knew anything else. Just being near enough to hear his voice had her pulse slamming against her skin, and her belly wrenching into a panicked knot. Every contrary instinct in her body was screaming at her to run.

The comments the coachman, Broad Ham, had made in the stables blazed into her brain. “Veterans,” he had said, but, “Not what they need to be.” He’d been talking about Birkstead. It must be difficult, if not nigh on impossible, to be a one-armed groomsman. No wonder Birkstead looked ground down. Good.

If she were to survive, she would have to take advantage of that. It would be impossible for him to hold on to her and a gun at the same time. It would have to be one or the other.

The thought calmed her somewhat—“somewhat” being a relative term when a man was pressing that same gun into one’s forehead—by giving her something to concentrate on. She dragged her hands through the grass, searching vainly for anything she might use as a weapon—a stick, or a stout rock. Anything.

Nothing came to hand.

And then the pressure of the barrel against her skull eased, but he was already hauling her up by her hair. Sharp, stabbing pain seared across her scalp, and then was gone, replaced just as quickly with the return of the pistol barrel digging and cutting into the soft skin under her chin from the weight of his jagged rage.

His voice panted into her ear as he pulled her back against his chest. “Move it along, now, shall we? Nice and quiet as a mouse.” He flicked his head in the direction of the hedgerow to the east. “Quickly. Before I’m tempted to take my revenge prematurely.”

Revenge. As if
she
had done him a wrong. As if he really thought she were the one who had ruined his hopes and dreams in Saharanpur, and not the other way round. As if
he
had nothing to do with the deaths of Lord and Lady Summers.

With her head tipped back from the relentless force of the gun, it was hard to see much, but she could tell he was moving her slowly, step by quiet step, out of the orchard and through the tall lines of hedges, taking her farther and farther from the sanctuary of the manor house.

The world became only the swath of blank gray sky above her head, the pain of the sharp end of the barrel cutting into her skin, the sound of his breathing—or was it hers?—labored and tight, and the smell of his coat against her, stale with tobacco smoke and horse and sweat.

But Birkstead’s employment at Downpark begged another question—had Birkstead known all along who Tanvir Singh had been underneath his turban and beard? Had the lieutenant been playing with them all the while, through banquets and rides and charged, intimidating encounters? Had he out-spied the spy?

“Have you figured it all out yet, my little gray mouse?” His breathing was labored and tight from their exertions, but she could hear the sneaky triumph in his voice. “I’ll be disappointed if you haven’t.”

Catriona swallowed around the pressure against her neck. “You’ve been waiting for him at Downpark.”

“Very good. Sharp as always, our intelligent, ambitious Miss Rowan.” He let out a tight, panting bark of a laugh. “Imagine my surprise and delight”—he huffed the words in her ear—“when I was rewarded for my troubles, in the bloody trip to Wimbourne, on the back of that bloody carriage, only to find next day that peculiarly distinctive mare of yours being brought into the stable. Imagine that.” He paused for a moment, looking around the hedge with sharp, jerky movements, before compelling her to move on.

“You’re much cleverer than I. I never knew … he was…” She let the sentence trail off, out of breath from trying to breathe against the incessant pressure across her windpipe.

“Didn’t you?” He made a grunt of derision. “He made it sound as if you’d known all along, in Saharanpur, when he gave his evidence.”

“Did he?” She echoed his question, to buy herself time, to keep him talking. “Hummed us all, didn’t he?” Catriona had no idea what she hoped to accomplish, other than to keep herself calm and distracted from the insistent hammering of her heart in her throat. And to keep Birkstead busy talking, so he was too busy to shoot her. To give her more time.

“And I knew my luck had turned.” Birkstead ground out another harsh laugh. “And sure enough, not only do I finally find Thomas bloody Jellicoe—speak of the devil and up he pops—but I find him in the middle of his reunion with the long-lost Catriona Rowan. I always did have all the luck.”

“Not that lucky,” she gritted out. “You missed.”

His indignation leached out of his chest in a thin growl. “Unfortunate that. But now I’ve got another shot, haven’t I? And this one’s already too close to miss.”

The rising pleasure in his voice, the malicious calm with which he stated it, chilled her until she began to lose feeling—began to lose track of her fingers and toes. Parts of her were going numb—with shock or fear, she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of anything except Birkstead’s virulent malice, as potent as it had ever been in Saharanpur.

And even one-handed, he was just as strong. He manhandled her around to the back side of the churchyard, and she had a ghastly thought that he meant to kill her there, and bury her there in the deep shade beneath the towering yews.

But Birkstead apparently had other plans. He pushed her up against the cool stone of the church, and then he shouldered open the small side door and hauled her into the dim interior.

Wimbourne’s parish church was dedicated to Saints Mary and Bartholomew—and how those two had ever gotten together was a mystery known only to the early church builders—and served as the parish church for the village of Wimbourne, even though it was situated within the manor grounds. Last Sunday the service had been packed with parishioners craning their necks to look at the latest arrivals of the viscount’s family, especially the Earl Sanderson and his elegant, Belgian-lace-clad countess. Now it was as empty as a grave.

It took a few long moments for her eyes to adjust to the dimness of the church after looking up into the morning sunlight outside, but she had a fairly good view of the empty vestry as he pulled her inexorably backward, down the long line of tidy pews, and past the baptismal font where baby Annabel was to be christened after the Sunday service later in the morning, toward the small door that separated the vestibule from the bell tower.

Something about the cramped, hunchbacked little door, and the scaffolding of the stairs beyond, leading steeply upward, panicked her anew, and as Birkstead made to shove her through before him, she abandoned her hold on the pistol levered into her jaw.

Catriona shot her left arm out, and kicked out her opposite leg to jam straight against the door frame. She could feel the panic edging in—her heart was slamming against the wall of her chest and her breath was coming in audibly shallow gasps. She tried to breathe through her nose, tried to think. “Where are we going?”

She sounded weak and breathless. Desperate. Mousy.

“We’re going up.” His voice was a heavy hiss at her ear, as he tried to exert pressure against her braced arm—long enough and hard enough for her to feel a searing ache in her elbow joint as he tried to force her to break. And then just a bit longer, until her arm began to tremble under the strain.

Catriona felt her teeth sink into her lips as she gritted her jaw, and willed herself to endure. As long as she possibly could. She had to be stronger somehow than Birkstead. She had to find a way to prevail. She had to be smarter—she had survived fire, and desert and desertion. She couldn’t crumble now.

But Birkstead was as strong as he was clever, and even meaner than he was clever. Just when she thought she could almost endure no more, he suddenly relented and jerked back from the door, enough so that she lost purchase against the door frame. And as he reared back, he shifted violently sideways, and cracked the side of her head against the stout oaken planks of the door.

Pain cleaved through her like a scythe. Everything went round-shaped and curious and darkly strange for a long moment, and all she could register was a ringing silence so deep and profound it deafened her for a stunning moment before everything—every individual sense in her body—came roaring back with a viciousness so overwhelming, it consumed her whole.

And when the volcanic spurt of pain relented enough for her to regain a portion of her wits, she heard the heavy fall of a metal bolt—the sound of the door being locked behind them—and she was being once more dragged by the neck up the narrow maze of the rickety wooden staircase toward the belfry.

The hard, hot heat of panic ripped open her chest—it was something of a wonder that she wasn’t leaking blood onto the stone floor below. She could taste the salty metallic tang of blood in her mouth where she had bitten through her cheek.

She immediately resumed fighting, wrestling with the arm against her throat, kicking and stomping with her legs and feet, trying anything and everything to impede their progress above. Because absolutely nothing good could come to her above. Because it was a long, long way down from the top of Wimbourne Church’s bell tower.

Birkstead grunted and hissed as the blows found some small purchase. “It won’t make any difference, mousie. You’re going over the edge. You’re going to hang yourself in shame.”

*   *   *

Something was desperately wrong. Thomas could feel it in the air. He could practically smell the sulfurous stink of hidden evil wafting across the fields.

Thomas drew the mare to a halt in the middle of the peaceful lane. He had sent himself on a fool’s errand. The tracks that he was following—the same tracks that the groundskeeper and his men had laboriously tracked yesterday—were Thomas’s own. It was he who had ridden the mare, with her small hooves and distinctive horseshoes, down this lane from Sixpenny Handley, and paused just there, to look at the manor house he had read of in James’s letters, but never seen before. It was he who had stood and admired the view of the tall, crenellated manor house while the meadows had whispered their strange green welcome around him.

This morning the hedgerows were silent, as if beast and birds were hiding—as if the land itself were withholding something, some knowledge that he could not yet discern.

But Birkstead was here somewhere, close by. Thomas could feel it as if it were a hand at his neck.

What was he missing? He stared up the track heading back to the lone inn at Sixpenny Handley, mentally retracing his steps, forcing himself to consider James’s theory—that Birkstead had followed him to Wimbourne. Because Miss Anne Cates
had
been living quietly within the neighborhood for almost a year before Thomas had arrived. And the shooting had occurred immediately after his arrival. Maybe his brother was right. Maybe
he was
the bad penny.

But he would find no evidence between the hedgerows—last night’s rain had obliterated most of the tracks. So Thomas set the mare back toward the east, where the village sheltered against Wimbourne Manor’s flank. It was a small village—one main thoroughfare, with smaller lanes branching off it, and only one small public house. Thomas rode slowly, up the main street, in the same way Tanvir Singh had been used to riding by palaces and
havelis
alike—watching carefully, but with an outer ease and nonchalance that belied the alertness with which he scanned the fence line and the rooftops of the outbuildings, and with which he listened intently for every sound or footfall.

But nothing seemed out of place. Nothing was off.

And something was pulling him back to Wimbourne Manor—the intense quiet, perhaps. His ears had been attuning themselves to the strange sounds of the English countryside—the hum of bees and dragonflies, the lyrical racket of sparrows in flight above the fields, the industrious thrum of the working village. But there was no cheerful racket, no sound but the eerie sweep of the rising breeze through the tops of the trees.

It was Sunday—early, before services that would come later in the morning. That could account for some of the lack of activity, but there was more—a fraught watchfulness in both the village and the manor.

Or it could just be his overactive imagination that saw perfidy everywhere. It could be the years of ingrained suspicion that had him chasing ghosts when there were none.

He looped through the village and headed back onto the manor grounds, where he found Broad Ham prowling like an overlarge bear toward the paddocks.

“Ham?”

Broad Ham caught the edge in Thomas’s tone without any further elaboration. “Sommat’s amiss. The animals are as jumpy as flies.”