The fruit and cheese were offered at the end of the meal, along with glasses of Madeira. Kendra finally understood the purpose of the extra ladies when several of the young men approached for permission to walk with the young ladies around the area.
Chaperones. This was an era where ladies were practically kept under glass until they could be wed off.
Shaking her head—if she’d been dropped in the middle of Mars, she couldn’t have felt more alienated—Kendra turned her attention to the mundane task of scraping off remnants of food from the china plates, and stacking them in the wicker baskets so they could be carted back to the castle for washing.
The scream that cut through the idyllic atmosphere was so shocking that, for the second time, Kendra nearly dropped the plate she held. Everyone froze. Then instinct and training kicked in. Kendra put the plate down and began running in the direction of the screams. She made an instinctive movement for her service weapon, her fingers brushing her skirt.
Goddamnit!
“Get back!” she shouted as she rounded the rocks and shrubbery. She saw a girl—Georgina, she recognized—shaking and crying in the arms of an ashen-faced man.
“What is it?” she demanded, scanning the area. What kind of wildlife did they have in these parts? “What’s wrong?”
The man gave her a blank stare. Georgina continued wailing, hysterical. Kendra considered slapping her, but thought she’d enjoy it too much. Instead, she reached out and shook the arm of the man. “What happened?”
“T-there! Over there!” he gasped and pointed to the water.
Warily, she inched toward the edge of the lake, and caught the pale glimmer in the dark water. It could’ve been a dead fish, but she knew it wasn’t. She knew what it was even before she saw the hair floating like flotsam on the surface of the water, the cameo blur below, the wide, dark eyes. Most likely, the girl had been pretty. Yet nature, as brutal as it was beautiful, had taken its toll. Now she was just dead.
12
Kendra studied the nude body that had been caught and anchored in the cattails and weeds along the shore.
“My God!” The Duke of Aldridge’s voice came from behind her, sounding shaken. “My God. Is that . . . ? We need to get her out of there. We need to help her!”
“She’s beyond help,” Kendra stated matter-of-factly, and shifted her gaze to the surrounding area. It was as idyllic from this angle as it was from where they’d set up the nuncheon. Green trees, lush shrubbery, slate-gray rocks, and the waterfall created a private oasis of which Georgina and the young man no doubt had wished to take advantage. Instead, they’d found death—and, she could see, not an easy or a natural death. Her practiced eye scanned the body, noting the dark bruises circling her throat, the ligature marks at her wrists, and the lacerations running across the torso. Something tightened inside her as her gaze fell on what she considered the most damning of all—the injury on her left breast.
Alec crouched down beside her, his face grim as he stared at the figure under the water. “We still need to get her out of there.”
“No. We need to . . .” Preserve the crime scene. It hit her like a two-ton brick that those words had no meaning here. What the hell was she going to do? Call the coroner, the cops, the CSI team? She’d never studied this particular time period, but she sure as hell knew that the tools she was so familiar with in the twenty-first century were either rudimentary now, or nonexistent.
Alec eyed her curiously. “We need to . . . what?”
“Nothing,” she mumbled and rubbed her hands over her face, trying to organize her thoughts.
“What happened? Did she fall in?” A man stepped to the edge of the lake so he could get a better look.
“Most likely she was bathing, slipped, and drowned,” suggested another man.
Kendra shot him an incredulous look. Would they write this off as a drowning? She couldn’t let that happen. “Not unless she walked naked through the forest to get here. You don’t see any clothes, do you?”
Alec frowned as he did a narrow-eyed scan. “This area is a watershed, with a network of tributaries, one of which feeds this lake. The main river flows toward the ocean, but her body could’ve been swept downstream and carried here.”
“That may be how her body got here, but that’s not how she died.” Kendra stood up abruptly. “She was murdered.”
For the space of about three seconds, there was a shocked silence.
Then someone denounced shrilly, “That’s outrageous!”
Kendra glanced around. The rebuke had come from the woman in the vivid blue dress who the Duke had escorted to the nuncheon. She glared at Kendra like she was responsible for the dead woman. “Who is this creature, Bertie?”
That seemed to rouse Aldridge. He still looked deathly pale, and his hands shook visibly as he brought up a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow. But he made an effort to pull himself together. “Caro, you and the other ladies must return to the castle. Harding? Mrs. Danbury? Please be so good as to escort the ladies home.”