Trial by Desire (Carhart #2)

“Gone?” Ned asked, his shoulders drawing together, his head snapping up.

“Do you mean she’s passed on?” Kate echoed in perfidious concern.

“I mean,” Lady Blakely clarified, “she is missing. She was last seen yesterday shortly before noon, and we are absolutely frantic trying to locate her.”

“Was she taken by ruffians?” Kate asked. “Have you received some sort of a demand letter from abductors?”

Ned turned to Harcroft. “Harcroft. You used to find misplaced books in the Bodleian Library for amusement. How could you be so careless as to misplace your own wife?”

Harcroft scrubbed his hands through his hair. He made a fine picture of a distraught husband, Kate thought bitterly. “You know,” Harcroft said softly, “about the illness she’s suffered. The problems she had conceiving. Well, after she got with child… The physician said some women don’t take to childbirth. Something about too much excitement laid upon the feminine sensibility. She wasn’t herself afterward. The female mind is delicate as it is, you know. She changed during her confinement. She was less biddable, more excitable. More given to hysterics.”

Harcroft shrugged. The gesture conveyed helplessness, and Kate’s lip curled. Helpless, Harcroft was not. Kate suppressed the urge to lift the nearby oil lamp with her delicate, female hands. She felt excited and unbiddable right now; why, she might slip and use her own delicate, female sensibility to bash all that heavy brass into his head.

However satisfying that exercise might prove, it wouldn’t help Louisa.

“And no,” Harcroft continued, turning to Kate, “we’ve had no notes of ransom. Whoever it was that took her—” his voice took on a sour note, and he tilted his head to look Kate directly in the eyes “—whoever it was, packed a valise for Louisa and clothes for the child. They took my son, without his uttering a cry to alert the nursemaid.”

“Oh, no,” Kate said. She froze her face into a mask of perfect sympathy and met Harcroft’s eyes. “Not little Jeremy. What sort of wicked, depraved, awful person would hurt that little angel?”

Her words might have been half lies, but the emotion that crept out during that speech was all real. She only hoped that everyone understood it as sympathy for Harcroft instead of the painful accusation that it was.

He couldn’t know what was in her mind, but his own thoughts could not have been comfortable. The skin around his mouth crinkled and he looked away.

“As I said,” he muttered, “there have been neither threats nor demands.”

“How can I help?” Ned asked. “I assume that’s why you came, right? As soon as you heard I’d arrived? Because—” He stopped and looked at the carefully schooled faces surrounding him. “But no. None of you even knew I’d returned here.”

“They’ve come to speak with me,” Kate said into the intervening silence. “To see if Louisa divulged anything of importance.”

The Marquess of Blakely stepped closer. He was tall, and Kate had never seen him flinch at anything. He was damnably intimidating, and she leaned away despite herself. “And has she?”

Kate shook her head as if trying to recall. “We had planned to see each other again at the Hathaway’s house party in November, if the roads were passable. She made no mention to me of any other plans.”

True enough; Kate had been the one to coax her into action. Kate had laid the plans; Louisa had only agreed.

Kate continued, “She had not spoken of any desire to see anything else. Or—excuse my plain speaking on the subject, but under the circumstances, it seems necessary—anyone else. Louisa isn’t the sort to stray.”

A disappointed silence followed this.

“Perhaps,” Harcroft offered, “you might trouble yourself to recall anything she might have said about Berkswift’s environs. Yesterday evening, a woman alone, answering Louisa’s description, alighted from a hack in Haverton, just five miles from here. The hack had been hired in London, and so the occurrence was much talked about.”

“A woman alone? She didn’t have a child? Where did she go?”

“No child. But an auburn-haired woman with deep blue eyes—it couldn’t have been anyone else.”

“It must be.” Kate shook her head. “Louisa would never leave Jeremy, not for any reason.” It had, in fact, been a sticking point of their plan—convincing Louisa to allow Kate to take her child in London, so that when Louisa traveled she would not be so easily identified. A red-haired woman with a newborn was too memorable, and looking as Louisa did would only have made her shine, like a lighthouse set on the shore.

“Perhaps,” Kate ventured, “you might tell me if there is anything that happened that might have precipitated her flight. It might help my memory.”

She didn’t want to be the only one telling lies here. Let Harcroft announce that he’d hit her in the stomach, and promised to break her infant son’s arm if she told anyone.