Primrose was still thinking of how nice it would be to travel for a while without having to fear her aunt was close on their heels when they gave everyone a final wave and rode off. It was a pleasant day for riding, cool yet with a bright sky and a lot of sun. Unfortunately, it meant it was a good day for her aunt to travel as well. If the woman caught scent of their trail, there would only be Bened’s family and whatever interference they might be able to cause to slow Augusta down.
How had her aunt hidden this monster for so long? she wondered. Worse, how had she, her father and brother who were both very smart men, missed seeing it? There had to have been signs. No one could contain so much anger, envy, and murderous jealousy without there being some hint of it bubbling beneath the surface of their smile or hidden beneath their polite chatter.
The other thing that puzzled her was why her aunt had waited so long to act. They had all been so blissfully ignorant of who she really was, so why had the woman not taken advantage of that years ago and just killed them off one by one? She thought of her father and then her mother and shuddered. There was the strong chance the woman had been trying to, had just been far more cautious than she was now. Since the baron was dead and few in society had ever met her or her brother, Simeon, Primrose suspected the woman believed there would be no real outcry into their abrupt disappearance.
The fear and anger churning inside her suddenly began to ease and Primrose glanced over at Bened. His face was free of any real expression and his gaze was fixed too intently upon the ground in front of him. Primrose frowned as she thought about all the times he had been near her when she had grown calm, very reasonable fears or concerns fading away to just a thought.
“It is you!” she said, and pointed at him.
“What is me?” he asked, sensing her fear and anger were gone enough so that his gift backed away.
“You are doing something. When I start to get all tied up and twisted with a very reasonable fear or anger or even when a memory hurts so bad I wish it gone, you do something to soothe it all. How do you do that?”
He studied her closely and saw no fear or even anger over the fact that he might have actually done something. “I do not make it happen. There is something inside me that just does it. The moment I am around someone caught up in some strong, and bad, emotion like fear or anger or the like, it wakes up, reaches out, and calms the person, or people, down.” He shrugged. “It can be helpful. It just does not allow me to ask the person if they actually want to calm down.”
“Well, I certainly do not mind. Such emotions are very uncomfortable. Yet they do have their uses. Fear can be very useful when one is in actual danger.”
“I know and I do fight to tamp it down but it is as if it has a mind of its own.”
Primrose frowned. “You might wish to find a different way to explain that. It makes it sound a bit too much as if you have some creature inside you.”
He laughed. “It can feel that way at times when it just starts to stir to life as if it was called.”
“But it was. That emotion it was created to soothe called to it.”
“I think I like that explanation a lot better than the ones I try to explain it with.”
She laughed softly and looked around. “How long to get to your cousin’s?”
“We go to your uncle George’s first.”
“Well, that is very near your cousin’s so much the same time to get there. I was just curious as to how long your cousins had to try to divert Augusta. It will not be easily done.”
“No, but even an hour will be a blessing. That would put her a farther distance back and she might miss finding us today.”
He just grunted in reply and Primrose sighed. She did not have all that much hope either.
“We are being followed, m’lady. Watched.”
Augusta looked up from her breakfast and frowned at Carl, a man she knew she should never turn her back on. He had cold, dead eyes. Since she had used him and his two men to kill one of her previous employees, the original intention having been to kill all of three of them and start anew, he had to know how she dispensed of any of the men she hired when they were no longer of use. It would not surprise her to find out he was watching for her to obtain her goal or draw near to doing so before he killed her. She would have to kill him first. For the first time since she had made use of the criminal class to claw her way into society, after looking into Carl’s eyes, Augusta had doubts about her ability to come out the winner in a fight for power.
That added a little thrill to the game and she smiled. Out of the corner of her eyes, she watched Carl frown and step back. It pleased her that she could frighten any of the men who worked for her. That was what she craved. Power. The money she would gain would be nice but what she really wanted was power. She ached to hold the lives of the workers of Willow Hill in her hand. She wanted people in society to accept that she was their equal if not more.