“Oh, aye.” Mrs. Pierson blew her nose. “He killed her. He killed her and . . . and b-butchered her face, he did. He’s a murderer, but he’ll never hang. He’s Quality. They’re treated different than the rest of us lot.” She gave Sam an accusing look, as if he were to blame for England’s class system. “You know they are.”
Sam flicked a look at William, now understanding his odd behavior. The fiend responsible for this heinous crime was a gentleman. Again, he remembered the investigation he’d been involved in last month at Aldridge Castle. Those crimes, too, had been committed by a gentleman. Had all the nobility in England gone mad?
“Gentry or not, he’ll hang,” Sam promised grimly, catching the housekeeper’s eye. “But first you’ve got ter speak his name. Who was your mistress waiting for tonight, Mrs. Pierson? Who is the fiend who done that ter her?”
She gave him a doubtful look, but whatever she saw in Sam’s eyes made her firm her chin with resolve. “He’s a marquis, he is,” she whispered. “A duke’s nephew. The Marquis of Sutcliffe—he’s the murderer.”
2
I believe I have a solution to your dilemma, my dear.”
Kendra Donovan was sitting in the Duke of Aldridge’s study. The early-morning sunlight that slanted into the room from the windows hurt her eyes, which were gritty from lack of sleep. She wondered if that had also affected her hearing.
“You’ve figured out how I can go home?” she asked, incredulous.
Aldridge frowned. He was a man in his mid-fifties with a longish face and rather bold nose. His pale blue-gray eyes stared out at the world with the kind of gentle regard that Kendra had rarely seen in her lifetime. Yet she knew that gentleness should never be mistaken for weakness. In his own way, Albert Rutherford, the seventh Duke of Aldridge, was one of the strongest men Kendra had ever known.
He admitted, “Well, no . . .”
Kendra wasn’t surprised. The Duke was a brilliant man, but she seriously doubted that he’d found a solution to her problem. After all, her dilemma was being here at Aldridge Castle, in the early nineteenth century.
Which wouldn’t be a problem at all if I’d been born in the freaking nineteenth century. Or, more accurately, since she was twenty-six years old and it was currently 1815, in the latter half of the eighteenth century. But since she’d been born a couple of centuries later . . . well, it was hard to imagine a dilemma that would be harder to solve.
Kendra shifted her gaze to the ancient tapestry that decorated the wall behind the Duke’s desk. The heavy material concealed a secret panel that opened to reveal the stairwell that led to the room that Aldridge used as his laboratory. In the castle’s long and bloody history, the passage had been used by the fortress’s occupants to flee from religious prosecution and invading armies. A month ago, she’d made use of those stairs, fleeing from an assassin in the twenty-first century. She didn’t know exactly what had happened then, except, physically, it had been a nightmare. Later, she could only assume she’d gone through some sort of wormhole or closed time-like curve, which had essentially transported her from her own era to this one.
And how crazy is that?
Of course, that’s what she’d thought initially: that she’d gone insane. Even now, she had to suppress a shudder at the memory of the icy terror that her mind had somehow shattered.
It hadn’t been easy for her to accept the truth, but she’d finally adjusted to her bizarre circumstance. Adjusted, but not fit in. She didn’t belong here. Her one hope of returning to her own time line had been entering the passageway during the next full moon—a month from the time she’d entered the stairwell and arrived in the early nineteenth century. She’d wanted to believe that there was a link between the full moon and its gravitational pull on the wormhole, similar to the effect that the moon had on the earth’s tides, and that the vortex would open again.
It had been a long shot. But she hadn’t been willing to accept what the fates, the universe, or God had thrown at her.
So last night, she’d tried.
She’d taken the spiral stairs to the halfway point and sat down to wait. She’d waited for the unnatural darkness to wrap itself around her like wet wool, for the temperature to plunge and the nauseating vertigo to hit. She’d braced herself for all that, as well as the pain—excruciating, unimaginable, like she was being dissolved in a vat of acid, shot through an endless tube, and then reformed in another location.
She’d waited. And waited. And . . .
Nothing.
There’d been no vortex. No wormhole. No paranormal activity. She’d sat on the clammy stone steps until her ass had grown cold and numb. She’d sat for hours, until the Duke had finally come and coaxed her back down to the study. He’d pushed her gently down on the sofa and pressed a glass of brandy in her hands. His blue-gray eyes had been alight with sympathy. Much like now.
She wanted to scream.
“Your explanation of a space-time vortex is fascinating, but I am at a loss as to how to create one,” the Duke continued.
“Damn it. I have to go home.” Frustration knotted her stomach and drove her to her feet. She crossed her arms and paced the room.
Aldridge gave her a helpless look. “My dear, you do not appear to have any choice in the matter. You have no recourse but to accept this as your home—at least for the foreseeable future.”
For how long? Kendra wondered. How long will I be forced to stay here?
That was followed instantly by the question every human being has probably asked themselves during a dark time in their lives: Why me?
A month ago, she thought she’d known the answer to that question, when a young girl had been found floating in a nearby lake, butchered by a serial killer. In the twenty-first century, she was the youngest FBI criminal profiler at Quantico, so it had seemed that fate—or whatever—had brought her here to apply those skills. When the murderer had eventually perished at her hand, she’d believed that she’d done her job.
I should be able to go home.
Kendra met the Duke’s sympathetic gaze. He understood, she knew. She’d finally confessed her unusual situation to him, and though the Duke considered himself a Man of Science, she hadn’t been entirely sure how he’d handle such a revelation. He could’ve easily considered her insane and had her locked up in a mental hospital, a thought that made her shudder. It had been a risk to tell him, but given her status at the castle as neither servant nor nobility, she really had no choice.