A Marquess, a Miss and a Mystery Page 21

  Since he had not the faintest idea where to procure sal volatile, he looked about the room for a jug of water and a glass, and spotted them on a table next to Lady Tewkesbury’s bed.

  He let go of Horatia, reluctantly, to go and fetch the glass that Lady Elizabeth had swiftly poured and was now holding out to him. At which moment, Dr Cochrane finally arrived. His eyes flicked from the tableau round the bed, to where Horatia was lying propped up against the dressing table, her bloodied hand limp at her side.

  ‘What has happened?’

  Lady Elizabeth darted Nick a glance that was half-despair, half-pleading, over the rim of the glass.

  ‘There has been the most stupid accident,’ said Nick, taking his cue from Lady Elizabeth. ‘Miss Carmichael cut her hand and Lady Tewkesbury apparently dislikes the sight of blood so much she is near to swooning. And then Miss Carmichael really did swoon. Only for a moment or two,’ he added, at the sound of a faint protest from Horatia.

  Dr Cochrane, far from going over to attend to her, stalked over to the bed. ‘Is that true?’ he enquired of Lady Tewkesbury, coldly.

  ‘No!’ Lady Tewkesbury sat up and threw out one hand in a beseeching manner. ‘I did my best. But he—’ she indicated Nick ‘—was hiding nearby, somewhere, and got the knife from me.’

  ‘Oh, Mother,’ groaned Lady Elizabeth. ‘Please, don’t listen to her, Doctor. She doesn’t know what she is saying. She hasn’t been in her right mind since Father’s demise...’

  ‘That,’ said the doctor with a strange smile, ‘is a story we could put about to explain this, yes.’

  ‘What?’ Lady Elizabeth stared at him as though he’d just sprouted horns and a tail.

  And Nick suddenly saw why the man hadn’t gone to bind up Horatia’s wound right away. Why he was always attending to Lady Tewkesbury for her headaches and why she never seemed to get any better. Why she’d burst in on him and Horatia in the library, looking as though she’d flung her clothes on haphazardly, shortly after the doctor had confronted them in the portrait gallery after they’d been discussing how they planned to hunt down Herbert’s killer. He’d heard it all. He must have been skulking in the servants’ corridor. Because, now Nick came to think of it, he’d appeared right about at the spot where the children had just shown him the location of the hidden door.

  ‘It is you,’ snarled Nick. ‘You are The Curé. You are the one leading the group of traitors who are passing secrets to the French and who had my friend murdered.’

  ‘What?’ Lady Elizabeth was now looking at Nick as though he’d sprouted horns and a tail.

  But Dr Cochrane was smiling at him, in a way that sent a shiver down Nick’s spine.

  And then he saw the pistol in the doctor’s hand, which he was pointing at Horatia.

  ‘No,’ cried Lady Elizabeth, clinging to the bedpost as though her legs were no longer strong enough to hold her up. ‘You cannot mean to shoot Horatia!’

  ‘Not only shall I do so, but you,’ sneered the doctor, ‘will tell everyone that it was an accident.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Lady Elizabeth tartly. ‘Why should I say any such thing?’

  ‘Because if you don’t,’ said the doctor with a soft laugh, ‘your mother will pay the price. And so will you. You might have been able to hold up your head after your father gambled away his fortune, but you won’t survive the scandal of having a mother who is a traitor to her country. And a murderess besides.’

  ‘I didn’t kill anyone,’ protested Lady Tewkesbury feebly.

  ‘I will tell everyone that you killed her brother,’ said the doctor. ‘And that I have been shielding you from the consequences of that act ever since.’

  ‘But it was you,’ she protested. And then, when Horatia gasped, turned to her daughter and added, ‘He wanted to kill your friend then. But I said there was no need, that she couldn’t possibly be any threat to us.’

  ‘This cannot be true,’ said Lady Elizabeth faintly, clinging even more tightly to the bedpost.

  Nick had heard enough. ‘Don’t worry, my lady,’ he said, taking up a position directly in front of the doctor. ‘I won’t let him hurt Horatia. He will have to kill me first.’

  ‘What a splendid idea,’ said the doctor, turning the pistol on Nick. ‘And then we can say she shot you...oh, perhaps because she caught you making advances to Lady Elizabeth. And she will hang for it.’ He grinned. ‘Two birds with one stone.’

  ‘No,’ cried Lady Elizabeth and flung the glass of water in the doctor’s face. As he flinched, and blinked his eyes, Nick seized the opening she’d given him to lunge at the doctor’s gun hand, hoping to wrest it from him the way he’d parted Lady Tewkesbury from her knife. As he leapt, the gun went off. He felt no pain, only heard some glass shattering somewhere behind him and a piercing scream. By God, if the villain had hurt Horatia, Nick would kill him with his bare hands. The force with which he then fastened them round the older man’s neck sent them both tumbling to the floor.

  Nick had never been much of a one for this sort of dirty, rolling-on-the-floor fighting. Boxing in Jackson’s saloon was much more his style. And he soon discovered that in spite of his advancing years, the doctor had plenty of the meaner sort of fighting moves.

  But then, all of a sudden, the room seemed to be full of boots and fists, and he was being pulled away from the doctor and held round his chest with his arms pinned to his sides.

  ‘Enough,’ came the voice of his half-brother. ‘Stop fighting my man, Nick. It’s over now. It’s over.’

  Sure enough, the Duke’s secretary was kneeling beside the doctor, who seized the moment by affecting a most piteous groan. The Duke himself was standing in the doorway.

  ‘Would you care to explain how you came to be mixed up in...’ the Duke waved his hand at the trio of terrified women, the groaning doctor ‘...this?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,’ said Nick, attempting, and failing, to throw off the hold of one of his half-brother’s footmen.

  ‘Try me. And, Peter, do let go of my brother, there’s a good fellow,’ he added. ‘He won’t be going anywhere until we have got to the bottom of this.’

  ‘I won’t be going anywhere,’ Nick corrected him, ‘until Miss Carmichael has been properly attended to. She has lost a lot of blood, I think,’ he said, going over and dropping to his knees at her side.

  She reached out for him and flung her arms round his neck. ‘He was going to shoot me,’ she said. ‘You saved me.’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t let anything happen to you, could I?’ he said, sliding his own arms round her waist. ‘You are far too important.’

  ‘I’m not,’ she protested. ‘I’m nobody.’

  ‘No.’ He lowered his head and whispered into her ear, ‘You are a valuable asset to the Crown. Or you could be.’

  She seemed to slump against him, then removed her arms from about his neck. ‘I do beg your pardon,’ she said stiffly. ‘I seem to have got blood upon your coat.’

  ‘Peter,’ said the Duke meanwhile to the footman who’d been holding Nick in arms that had felt like a vice, ‘run and fetch Miss Underwood. She will know what to do. Now, Devizes,’ he said as the footman hurried from the room. ‘The truth, if you please.’

  ‘He was trying to ravish that poor young woman...’ Dr Cochrane began to bleat. But before he could get any further, Perceval balled his hand into a fist and struck him so hard that his skull bounced off the floor.

  ‘Begging your pardon, Your Grace,’ said the portly young man, shaking his hand as though it hurt him a great deal. ‘But I’ve been wanting to do something of the sort for some considerable time.’

  ‘Naturally,’ said the Duke. ‘And he was clearly about to tell us a pack of lies, anyway. But you, Devizes,’ he said, turning to Nick again, ‘I should very much like to hear your statement.’

  Nick glanced up at Lady El
izabeth. ‘Go ahead,’ she said wearily. ‘I’ve had enough of trying to keep up appearances. Let’s all admit to the truth, for once. No matter the cost.’

  Nick looked at Perceval, then at his brother. He really didn’t want to admit to the role he’d taken up with Herbert. Nor mention the men who had been employing them. Nor expose Horatia’s part in it. As it stood, she could well be England’s secret weapon against spies, with her remarkable ability to decode even the trickiest of ciphers. But only if her ability remained a secret.

  ‘We heard most of it from the doorway,’ said the Duke. ‘I am only curious as to how you came to be on the trail of the same...’ his nostrils flared with distaste ‘...criminal as myself.’

  ‘If you were listening at the doorway,’ said Nick, rapidly reviewing exactly what had been said during the past few minutes, ‘then you must have heard him confess to having murdered Miss Carmichael’s brother. My good friend, Herbert.’

  ‘Ah. You and Miss Carmichael were trying to see if you could discover who was behind it, were you? Was her brother by any chance working for...the government?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nick, relieved that the man had given him a slant to it that he could work upon, without giving too much away. ‘And Miss Carmichael came into possession of a note which led her to believe the...traitors were going to meet here...’

  ‘Ah. Now it makes sense. Nothing less than the hunt for a murderer could have induced you to put aside the enmity you have nursed against me for so many years and attend my wedding.’

  Nick hung his head. It had been nothing so noble. He’d been at a loose end without Herbert and, consumed with thwarted rage, had decided he might as well turn it on this man.

  Who had never deliberately done him any harm.

  ‘No wonder you spent so much time with each other,’ observed the Duke. ‘While pretending to organise that treasure hunt, were you in fact searching all over the property for evidence of some kind? Which led you to sneak into Lady Tewkesbury’s room while you thought she was safely outside on the terrace with me?’

  ‘No,’ said Lady Tewkesbury, suddenly sitting up. ‘Doctor Cochrane was telling the truth. Lord Devizes was attempting to ravish my daughter...’

  ‘Oh, spare me that tale,’ said the Duke impatiently. ‘Aside from the fact I was standing there listening to you and your accomplice concocting that catalogue of lies, do you seriously think I would ever...’ he strode to the bed where he stood glowering down at her ‘...believe that he would attempt rapine upon a damsel of good birth, not even to cause me maximum embarrassment. He is many things, but an out-and-out villain is not one of them.’

  It wasn’t exactly a glowing encomium, but even so, the faint praise reached a place deep inside Nick that Horatia had already started to thaw.

  ‘Besides,’ put in Perceval, still rubbing his knuckles ruefully, ‘we have been watching Dr Cochrane’s movements for some time.’

  ‘You knew he was a traitor?’ All his animosity for his brother flared up again. ‘You knew about him and did nothing? He almost killed Horatia!’

  ‘We did not know,’ said the Duke testily. ‘Not for certain, until just now, that it was him. We only knew that someone from Theakstone Court had such strong sympathy for the French that they have been stirring up trouble. They arranged for saboteurs to wreck a fireworks display put on to celebrate the Peace with France, among other things. Although, to start with we suspected Mrs Stuyvesant. The governess,’ he explained to the room at large, ‘since the incidents tailed off after we dismissed her from her post.’

  ‘But the woman was recommended for that post by Dr Cochrane,’ put in Perceval indignantly. ‘A woman who we later discovered had no experience with children at all. A woman who spent so much time whipping up local people with her revolutionary notions that His Grace’s little girl ended up running wild round the estate, with nobody knowing where she was. And anything might have befallen her.’

  Ah, well, that explained why the secretary had been so distracted he’d forgotten a message from his employer. He was on the hunt for whoever had infiltrated the Duke’s household, right under what he’d thought was his efficient nose. And, now he’d discovered it was the doctor, a man he’d trusted, it explained why the normally placid young man had been driven to punch him in the face.

  ‘Revolutionaries?’ Lady Elizabeth was looking from one to the other of them in astonishment. ‘Saboteurs? Murderers? Good grief, and I was told this was going to be an elegant, sophisticated gathering, not a...’ She looked down at Nick and Horatia. ‘But I still don’t understand why on earth anyone would want to kill Miss Carmichael.’

  ‘Because her brother was investigating the ring of traitors,’ said Nick, ‘of which Dr Cochrane seems to have been the ringleader from the London end. And when he got too close to them and they killed him, Horatia vowed to track them down.’

  ‘Yes, but...how was Mother mixed up in it?’

  Lady Tewkesbury burst into noisy sobs. ‘Your father left us in such a mess! N-no m-money, n-no h-home, n-no p-provision at all! And there were papers...l-lying ab-bout his d-desk. And then h-he said I c-could get good money for them.’

  ‘He? The doctor?’ the Duke barked at Lady Tewkesbury, causing her to put her hands over her face.

  ‘Yes! He said my husband had already sold him valuable information. And that he would only keep quiet about him being a traitor as well as a bankrupt if I handed over some outstanding papers he’d already bought. And it was only a handful of documents, which he’d left out on his desk. Not even in a drawer!’ She lifted her head then and waved her arms wide, as if in appeal to the whole room. ‘But then, once I’d done that, he contacted me again and said he would expose me, for what I’d done was treason. And then I had to k-keep w-working for them...’

  This time when she broke down the tears looked more genuine than before. Even Lady Elizabeth seemed moved by them, for she went to sit on the bed next to her mother and tentatively patted her knee.

  This was the moment the footman returned, with a rather flustered-looking Miss Underwood in tow.

  To her credit, she neither screamed nor began asking foolish questions. She just came straight over to where Nick was kneeling, gently took hold of Horatia’s hand and began examining the blood-soaked makeshift bandage.

  ‘Shut the door now, Peter,’ said the Duke. ‘And make sure nobody comes in. We have,’ he said grimly to those remaining in the room, ‘some decisions to make.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ‘Can you deal with Miss Carmichael’s injury?’ the Duke asked Miss Underwood. ‘If possible, I would rather not bring anyone else in until we have decided how to account for this...episode.’

  Miss Underwood nodded. ‘I will do what I can. It doesn’t look all that deep.’

  ‘She lost so much blood she fainted,’ said Nick angrily. At which point, realising she was still lying slumped in Nick’s arms, she made a half-hearted attempt to sit up. His arms tightened round her. And she gave up even attempting to look as if she wasn’t exactly where she wanted to be. Even though she would rather he valued her as a woman and not an asset to the Crown.

  ‘We did it, Horatia,’ he said, hugging her a bit harder. ‘Together we found the traitor. The murderer.’

  ‘I’m not a traitor,’ wailed Lady Tewkesbury, drawing attention back to herself as though her concerns far outweighed anyone else’s. ‘Nor did I kill anyone. I couldn’t!’

  Horatia was tempted to remind everyone that wasn’t strictly true. That Lady Tewkesbury had just flown at her with a surprisingly sharp letter-opener and, but for her quick reflexes and the sturdiness of that Bible, would have plunged it into her throat.

  ‘He made me come here,’ she declared, pointing at the prone figure of Dr Cochrane. ‘He wanted me to take the place of that Mrs Stuyvesant person, passing messages and information on to his minions as though I am some kind of errand
boy,’ she said indignantly.

  ‘Would you be prepared to testify to this?’ said Nick.

  ‘I can’t go to court. I cannot face the shame,’ wailed Lady Tewkesbury. ‘I would never be able to show my face in society again!’

  ‘No, it would be a private hearing. Just a few men who are involved in...’ Nick darted a look at the Duke, who was frowning down at them both.

  ‘I take it,’ said the Duke, his expression changing into something bordering on respect, ‘it wasn’t just your friend who has been working for the Crown.’ Nick’s mouth firmed, as though debating what line to take. But the Duke spared him the bother of admitting it, by swiftly moving on.

  ‘What do you suggest we do about the pair of them?’ he said, indicating the sobbing Lady Tewkesbury and the unconscious Dr Cochrane.

  ‘You are willing to let me concoct the cover story?’

  ‘Let us say I am willing to listen to your suggestion.’

  Nick’s mouth quirked up on one side. ‘I suggest we pack them off to London in the care of a few of your burly footmen. To those men I, ah, happen to know. Through Herbert. They will be very interested in hearing Lady Tewkesbury’s account of things.’

  ‘And what do you suggest we tell my guests? They will have heard the gunshot, even if they do not know exactly how many people were present when the weapon was fired. And they will be agog when both Lady Tewkesbury and my own physician depart without witnessing the wedding,’ said the Duke, folding his arms across his chest and propping himself against one of the bedposts, reminding Horatia so much of Nick that it was uncanny.

  ‘Well, we could say that the doctor attacked Lady Tewkesbury. That Horatia leapt to her defence and that he shot her. That the shot attracted our notice and we all came rushing in and subdued him.’

  ‘He didn’t shoot me,’ Horatia pointed out. ‘He missed. The bullet went through the window.’

  ‘Yes, but we don’t need to let anybody see your hand without the bandage. So nobody will ever know that you were stabbed, rather than shot. And as for Lady Tewkesbury,’ said Nick without taking a breath, ‘she is so overcome by the horror of the attack that she will have to retire to some quiet spot, where her nerves may recover.’