Page 60 of Death at Fournier Downs
“Audrey? Where are you? Audrey!”
She jerked backward, her eyes blazing with numbed astonishment. Hugh dropped his arms as the duke’s panicked voice called out again, shouting for her.
“I…I am here!” Audrey called back, her voice cracking.
Hugh stiffened his jaw and jerked his head. “Up. Carefully.”
Audrey clambered up the rocky path ahead of him, Hugh climbing behind her. How bloody stupid could he have possibly been? He forced himself to focus, especially with Fournier waiting for them at the top. When they reached the crest and the duke pulled Audrey up and into his arms, Hugh gritted his molars and cut his attention toward the doctor. He had loaded Andrea into his phaeton. The maid’s coloring was waxy and pale, but she was still alive, her arm bound.
“I must perform an operation to remove the ball,” Millbury said.
That he and his sister might instead ride fast out of town immediately crossed Hugh’s mind. He wouldn’t take the chance. “I’ll come with you.” Putting distance between himself and the duchess also appealed.
Millbury nodded tightly, as if disappointed, and he directed his phaeton back toward the quarry road. Hugh mounted his horse as four footmen came through the trees on horseback. Blood streaked the duke’s temple, and with Fournier likely concussed and Audrey’s injured ankle, he was glad not to be leaving them on their own.
“See them safely back to Fournier House,” he instructed the footmen. “The magistrate should be arriving soon. Have him send a bailiff to the doctor’s home in Low Heath. The duchess will inform his lordship and Dr. Wilkes what has occurred here.”
Though she filled his peripheral vision, Hugh could not bring himself to look at her. His chest burned and his throat constricted as he tugged the reins and followed the doctor’s phaeton back toward Low Heath, feeling like a coward and a fool.
* * *
The bailiff arrived shortlyafter Millbury pulled the lead ball from his sister’s right arm. Hugh spent the length of the operation pacing the front hall of the doctor’s home, contemplating the last time he had shot a person in the arm. When his half-brother, Lord Neatham, the new Viscount Neatham, had challenged Hugh to a duel five years ago, he had not wanted to participate. Bartholomew was his brother by all accounts and yet, he knew without a doubt that Barty would shoot to kill, not just wound. Allowing Hugh to live—allowing him to talk and divulge secrets—would only put the family’s reputation in danger.
Though he despised Barty, he had not wanted him dead, so he’d aimed for his arm. At twenty paces, Hugh knew he could hit his target—the late viscount had taught Hugh to shoot, though he would often say Hugh was a natural and needed little instruction. Barty had always hated that, especially because their father would not heap the same praise upon him.
Thornton had been Hugh’s second and after inspecting the pistol and walking the first ten paces with him, he’d frantically pleaded that he aim for the bastard’s heart. Instead, he’d ruined the viscount’s arm, shattering the bone, and rendering it useless forevermore. Hugh escaped without a scratch, though in many ways he’d been ruined too.
He had not seen or spoken to Barty, or Eloisa or Thomas, since. Eloisa was no longer in London. She’d disappeared after the scandal, and Thomas had bought a commission into the Royal Army as an officer of some sort. He didn’t care enough to keep up.
All that felt like another life, though one that still followed him like a shadow. Audrey knew the gossip—that Hugh had ruined his own half-sister and had been called out for the atrocious offense—and yet she did not believe it. He didn’t want to think about his behavior on the quarry ledge, so instead, he went over how Andrea Millbury had planned to make all their deaths look like some romantic tryst gone wrong. Bainbury had known Audrey had not been on the Continent and then at her aunt’s home in Scotland for two years. He’d insinuated that it was something shocking and disgraceful, and it indeed was.
An asylum. She’d been committed to an insane asylum.
In the minutes after seeing Audrey fall from the quarry edge and his rush to bring her to safety, and then of course, after the rash and reckless near kiss, the memory of which formed a tight ache in the pit of his stomach, he had not given much thought to the maid’s frenzied mention of the asylum. But he had seen Audrey’s frightened reaction and knew it was true.
Fury simmered alongside the tight ache in his stomach as Hugh entrusted the bailiff to collect the wounded Miss Millbury and then left for the inn. He needed to inform Basil that they would be leaving first thing in the morning. His valet’s pleasure tempered when Hugh also instructed him to hire a carriage and fetch Sir from Bainbury Park.
“Are you certain? The boy seems to be taken with country life, not to mention the cook’s food at the manor.”
“Go get him,” Hugh had growled, his valet’s show of dislike for the lad irritating rather than amusing, as it usually was. Hugh suspected it was artificial and that Basil simply did not wish to admit that he’d taken a liking to the boy, as Hugh had.
Though he was not eager to see the duchess, he could not put it off. He rode out to Fournier House, where he found Wilkes overseeing the removal of both Lady Bainbury and Ida Smith from the icehouse.
Wilkes stepped away from the footmen, carrying the carefully shrouded victims toward two carts. “Well done, Officer Marsden. From what the duchess has explained, it appears the two murders have been solved.”
“Three,” Hugh said. Wilkes grimaced.
“I stand corrected. Three, indeed. Would you like me to inform Lord and Lady Finborough, or shall you?”
The marquess and marchioness would not care who came to deliver the news that they had been correct in their theory. Their daughter had not taken her own life, but she was still dead. Hugh invited the coroner to visit Kilton House.
“I am leaving for London as soon as possible,” he explained to Wilkes.
He needed to return, to get back to Bow Street and put all this behind him. There was plenty of work there. In the past few months, he’d been doing well, his focus clear. Until the duchess’s letter arrived, beckoning him to Hertfordshire. Now, that same tangled and irritable feeling he’d grappled with in the spring had once again settled into his bones.
“Very well,” Wilkes said. “It has been, if not a pleasure, then at least fruitful working with you.”
Hugh accepted the stiff praise from the fastidious coroner and extended his hand. “If you ever come to London, Bow Street could put you to use.”
