“Twenty, maybe thirty feet.”
“And you heard him cock his pistol? That’s damned impressive.”
“I have good hearing.”
“I’ll say.” Archie swung away from the window, his features tightening as his gaze fell, again, on the man in the bed. “You think Higginbottom’s right? That he’s dying?”
“Yes.”
He swallowed hard. “I was planning to ride into Ludlow in the morning. See if anyone at the Feathers can tell me more about Emma Chance.”
“Let’s hope you have some success.”
“But . . . what about him? Whom do we notify if—when—he dies?”
The two men watched, together, waiting for Hannibal Pierce to draw another breath.
He didn’t. And as the minutes passed and stretched out, it was as if they could see the life seeping out of him, his body shrinking until it became no more than an empty husk.
“I’ll take care of it,” said Sebastian, and reached out to draw the sheet over the dead man’s face.
Later, Sebastian stripped off his clothes stained with the dead man’s blood and sat on the side of the bed in the darkness beside his sleeping wife. The growing wind swirled the fog outside the window and rattled the branches of the ancient chestnut out on the green. He could smell the fecund odor of the fields surrounding the village, hear a lamb bleating in the night. He rested his hands on his thighs, opened and closed his fists. And still the tension hummed inside him, a stoked furnace of anger and alertness and rising urgency.
He felt the mattress shift as Hero rolled toward him to rest her hand flat against the small of his back. She had spoken to him earlier, while Higginbottom was tending his patient and grumbling that it was all a waste of his time since the man was certain to die anyway.
“Is Pierce dead?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She was silent a moment. “You think that bullet was actually meant for you?”
“I wish I knew. If Pierce was indeed the target, it might help make sense of what’s happening in this village. Otherwise . . . it could be damnably misleading.”
“Or not.”
“Or not.”
She shifted to slip her arms around his waist and press her face against his side.
She was one of the most rational and levelheaded people he had ever known; calm and fiercely brave and utterly unflappable. Yet love makes us all vulnerable, and he felt the faint tremor that shivered through her as she let her breath ease out in a sigh.
“You will be more careful,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
He saw her smile at him in the darkness, felt her hand slide across his back to his hip. He stretched out beside her, her body long and supple as she pressed against him. He buried his face in the dark, sleep-warmed tumble of her hair; breathed in the familiar scent of her, of lavender and musk and the lingering milky sweetness left by his infant son. And he felt the day’s concerns begin to ease out of him.
He traced his lips along her cheek, captured her mouth, heard her breath catch as his hand closed over her breast. She wrapped her love and her body around him, and he lost himself in the wonder that was this woman and the all-consuming intensity of their union.
They had first come together just fifteen months before, in a desperate affirmation of life in the face of looming death. But death had not come. Instead, from those raw, tentative, unexpected beginnings had come Simon and a love so powerful and uplifting that it still filled him with a shaky wonder.
He kissed her forehead, her ear, her cheek; watched her face as he moved above her in the darkness. Once, he had faced danger with a recklessness born of a careless attitude toward living. But those days were in the past. And as he held her close, felt her heart pounding against his, heard the keening of her breath, he knew a deep and all-consuming thankfulness that he was here, now, alive and in this woman’s arms.
Chapter 15
Wednesday, 4 August
The next morning, Hero worked at coaxing Simon to eat some porridge while Sebastian sat at the table beside her and wrote a note to inform Lord Jarvis of Hannibal Pierce’s death. He and Archie had combed through the dead man’s effects, but they’d found nothing to shed any light on the two recent murders.
He was affixing a seal to the letter when Martin McBroom appeared at the parlor doorway. “Begging your ladyship’s pardon for disturbing you so early,” said the innkeeper with a jerky bow, “but I’m thinking your lordship will be wanting to see this.” He held out a folded sheet of what looked like writing parchment, of the sort a lady might use for her correspondence.
“Where did this come from?” asked Sebastian, taking it.
“Mary Beth—the chambermaid—came across it while she was cleaning Mrs. Chance’s room this morning. She said it’d fallen down behind the washstand.”
Unfolding the sheet, Sebastian found himself staring at a list of numbered names written in what he recognized as Emma Chance’s neat, flowing hand.
1. Squire Rawlins
2. Lord Seaton