An Heir of Uncertainty

by Everett, Alyssa

  “Come on, come on,” Win muttered, breathing hard, willing the footman to hurry. That scream had sounded like Lina...

  They waited on the doorstep. Seconds passed.

  “This is taking too long.” Win looked at Freddie. “You stay here, in case someone answers. I’ll try the rear door.”

  Lina’s note had said I will leave the back entrance unlocked. Win dashed around the house to the kitchens. He knocked and, when there was no sound from within, pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  He expected to find the room empty but, to his surprise, two servants were sleeping. A middle-aged woman wearing an apron over a plain cotton gown lolled in a cane-backed chair by the hearth, her chin on her breast, while one of the footmen he’d sent over from the abbey sat slumped over the servants’ dining table, his head on his folded arms, snoring softly.

  “Hullo?” Win said.

  Neither stirred. Win crossed to the cook and quickly checked her pulse. It was strong, and she was breathing, but she didn’t even stir at his touch.

  In a flash, he recalled the day after Beauty’s death, when he’d thought something seemed different about his bedchamber. Now he realized what it was. Someone had taken the laudanum Dr. Strickland had left for him.

  No, not someone. Miss Douglass had taken the laudanum.

  He darted through the kitchen and raced to the front stairs, checking the dining room and the drawing room along the way. Both were empty, but in the entrance hall, the second of the footmen from the abbey sprawled on a bench beside a guttering candle, fast asleep.

  Win threw open the front door to find Freddie waiting on the doorstep. “The servants have been drugged,” he told his brother. “Go to Malton and fetch Dr. Strickland.”

  Freddie nodded and started away. Closing the door, Win turned and headed directly for Lina’s room. There was no sense worrying about the impropriety of meeting her in her bedroom now. He took the stairs two at a time.

  The door was closed. He knocked, but no one answered.

  He pushed the door open. “Lina?”

  She was in bed, dressed only in her chemise, lying on her back with her eyes closed peacefully. But there was definitely something off about the scene—a candle burned on the other side of the room, and Lina wasn’t under the bedcovers, but atop them. Was she drugged, or something worse?

  He crossed to the bed in two swift strides.

  “You weren’t supposed to come until midnight,” said a voice behind him.

  Win wheeled around. Miss Douglass stood in the shadows near the door.

  She cocked the pistol leveled at his heart.

  Chapter Twenty

  There is a pleasure in being mad which none but madmen know.

  —John Dryden

  He’d walked into an ambush. Well, he could kick himself for that later. Right now, he had to know whether Lina was all right.

  He glanced at Miss Douglass and said as coolly as he could, “You wrote that note, telling me to meet Lina in her room?”

  “My penmanship looks a great deal like my sister’s. I knew you wouldn’t suspect.” She smiled coldly. “How did you figure out I was responsible?”

  She wasn’t going to shoot him until she learned the answer to that question, of that much he was confident. He leaned down and set two fingers on Lina’s wrist. Thank God. Her pulse was slow and weak, but she was alive.

  He faced her sister. Perhaps he could keep her talking until he could find an opening to take the pistol away. “I didn’t, actually, at least not until a quarter of an hour ago. At the time I sent your sister my message, I was under the mistaken impression Freddie was the poisoner.”

  She raised one eyebrow. “Your brother? Why would you think that?”

  “That bottle of hydrocyanic acid? You put it in the wrong Vaughan’s greatcoat pocket.”

  The look of cool confidence Miss Douglass was wearing slipped for a moment. “You know about that?”

  “Yes. I’ve no doubt you meant for someone else to find it—Mr. Channing or Dr. Strickland, in all likelihood—but I stumbled on it by accident.”

  “Ah, well.” Her finger tightened slightly on the trigger. “Too bad you won’t be around to tell anyone about my mistake.”

  “How do you know I haven’t already told someone?”

  She hesitated, and then her air of assurance returned. “I’m quite sure you didn’t, if you believed your brother was guilty. No, you were willing to confide in Lina, but no one else.” Her voice held an oddly self-satisfied note.

  “I take it you mean to tell Mr. Channing I was attacking your sister, and you were forced to shoot me in an effort to protect her?”

  “Very good, Colonel. Yes, I invited Dr. Strickland to dinner this evening expressly to make sure he knew I was in mortal fear of you, and I’d be sleeping with this pistol under my pillow. I’ll be most convincingly distraught after I’ve killed you, believe me, and even more distraught that I was too late to save Lina.”

  “And Mr. Niven? I suppose you were his accomplice in the embezzlement scheme?”

  “Yes, we were...friends, shall we say? Extremely close friends. He was paying me—not much, but it was something—to report back to him in case Radbourne became suspicious. Of course, after Radbourne died he didn’t count on your being so eager to go through the books that you would break into a locked library case almost the instant you arrived. I would’ve warned him you were on to his little swindle, but he’d gone back to York, so I took matters into my own hands.”

  “You poisoned Beauty so you could come and go at will, and then slipped prussic acid in the brandy I’d left in the study.”

  “I intended to get rid of you eventually anyway, so it was merely a matter of adjusting my plan.” She spoke so coolly, they might have been discussing the weather. “I expected you to drink the brandy at some point in the days leading up to the dinner with the trustees. When you didn’t, I was on tenterhooks for most of the evening, but it was a stroke of fortune for me that Arthur helped himself to the poisoned brandy before he could give me away.” Her hand had to be tiring, but she kept the pistol pointed at his heart.

  “The arsenic obviously came from the tack room in the abbey stables. I assume you were also the mysterious doctor who had prussic acid delivered to Pickering?”

  “You know about that too? Yes, thanks to my asthma, I knew it had a medical use even before Dr. Strickland mentioned it. I saw a lung specialist in York in October, and he suggested hydrocyanic acid as a possible treatment. Last month I wrote to London pretending to be a physician, then I paid a peddler’s boy to go into the receiving office to collect it for me.”

  “And in case anyone might make inquiries, ‘Dr. V. Hamble’ was supposed to point them in my direction?”

  “Of course. I doubted even Mr. Channing would be stupid enough to believe you’d buy prussic acid using your real name.”

  “What about the pennyroyal tea? How did you obtain that?”

  She shrugged. “Arthur—that would be Mr. Niven—brought it from York the week before you came, though at the time he believed it was for my personal use. I knew before he did that Lina was expecting, you see, so all I had to do was tell him I was worried I might be carrying his child.” She smiled. “He was quite put out when he learned it was my sister who had a baby on the way, but he didn’t believe I’d really give Lina the tea. People are always underestimating me that way.”

  My God. She was positively diabolical. “This isn’t going to play out the way you planned it, Miss Douglass. You’ve made a critical mistake.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about the servants. Eli has the night off, and the others won’t realize they’ve been drugged. Sarah never sits by the fire without nodding off, and Jem and Daniel managed very little sleep last night, thanks to the lung attack I contrived. I’d hoped they’
d sleep just long enough for me to deal with Lina, and then come to my aid at midnight once I shot you, but this will still work. In another hour or two, they’ll all be apologizing to me for failing me in my hour of need and leaving me to deal alone with the horror of your attack on my sister.”

  “I wasn’t referring to the servants. You’re wrong about my not mentioning the bottle of poison in Freddie’s greatcoat pocket to anyone. Not only does Freddie know I found it, he knows you put it there. In fact, I have him to thank for solving the mystery. He saw you letting yourself into the stillroom with Lina’s key.”

  She paled. “He saw me? How? I made sure there was no one about.”

  “He was painting the window in the top story of his dovecote, and had a clear view of the abbey from his vantage point.” Ah, she hadn’t bargained on that. She’d gone as white as alabaster. Win pressed his advantage. “There’s no point in any more killing, Miss Douglass. You can’t possibly get away with it, and even if you could, Freddie has no intention of marrying you.”

  As shaken as the news had left her, she quickly recovered. “On the contrary, now you’ve guaranteed I have to kill you. You know too much, and so does Lina. And I will get away with it. Whom do you think Mr. Channing will find more credible, a tearful young lady who’s lived here blamelessly all her life, or a newly arrived moonling who has no interest in anything but pigeons? Especially since I have nothing obvious to gain, eliminating you and Lina.”

  “Freddie’s no moonling,” Win said angrily, “and even if you kill me, you won’t get what you’re after. My brother isn’t interested in marrying you, and that’s not going to change. Even if you manage to convince Mr. Channing that I was the poisoner and you killed me in self-defense, Freddie will know better. You’ll never be Countess of Radbourne.”

  “I’ll find some way to change your brother’s mind. It’s not a strong mind, that much is obvious, and I’ll have Dr. Strickland on my side, together with the outpouring of sympathy that’s sure to follow your robbing me of the only family I had left. In time, even your brother will come to believe that you were the killer all along, and that any evidence to the contrary was simply your way of throwing him off the scent.”

  “You don’t know Freddie.”

  “And you don’t know me. I can be most convincing. I’m young and pretty and I know how to appear harmless and a little silly, yet still get what I want. I’ve had years of practice.” She smiled coldly. “I got away with pushing Lina in Malton, didn’t I? It’s funny—the guard on the Mail was practically looking right at me, but just because he didn’t see a big strong man standing behind my sister, he was convinced she’d merely been clumsy.”

  Win’s eyes narrowed. “But why go to such lengths? You are young and pretty, and obviously intelligent and determined. Why would any young lady with your gifts commit such desperate crimes, especially when it means turning on a sister who loves you?”

  “Loves me? Lina?” Miss Douglass gave an ugly laugh. “Oh, yes, she loves me so much she stole the husband and position that should have been mine. Radbourne noticed me first. I saw him in Malton on the very day he returned home from Oxford. He nearly broke his neck, watching me cross the street while he tried not to be obvious about looking.” Her fair brows came down in a furious scowl. “But then Lina spent half our weekly grocery money to buy a subscription ticket to the assembly in Malton—a single ticket for herself, though Fiona and I were every bit as deserving—and stole him out from under my nose.”

  “He was free to choose you anyway, wasn’t he?”

  “No, he was not free to choose me!” It was the first time she’d shown any real heat. “Not after Lina elbowed her way into his good graces. I could have been a countess. I could have been the mistress of Belryth Abbey. Even Lina knew she was too old for him.” The pistol trembled slightly. Was she agitated, or was her hand tiring? “And I will be the Countess of Radbourne. I’ve spent too many years knowing that everything from the food I eat to the clothes on my back comes at the charity of my sister. I’ve never had anything I could truly call my own—certainly not a husband or a title. I’ve been pitied, but never respected.”

  “And why Freddie?”

  “You mean, why not you?” She looked down her nose at him. “Forgive me if I wounded your vanity, Colonel, but you’re too old and too much like my sister—tiresomely conscientious, and used to having your way. It was welcome news when I learned that the next heirs after Lina’s baby were both single gentlemen, but when I realized your brother was feeble-minded, I knew this was all meant to be. Once you’re gone, he’ll have no one to look after him, and I’ll step in. I’ll finally have everything Lina took from me.”

  “Freddie isn’t feeble-minded, and you’re not going to trap him into marriage.”

  “What a pity you won’t live to see you’re wrong.” With a thin, superior smile, Miss Douglass pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  Lina couldn’t move, couldn’t open her eyes. Was this what it was like to die? No, surely she wasn’t dead. Familiar voices ebbed and flowed around her.

  “...But then Lina spent half our weekly grocery money to buy a subscription ticket to the assembly in Malton...”

  Was she only dreaming? She’d never heard Cassie sound so bitter or so resentful before.

  And that was Win’s voice, answering her. Her heart lurched. Win was here, in her bedroom?

  Lina fought to claw her way back to consciousness, struggling against the laudanum that held her in its grip.

  “...I will be the Countess of Radbourne...”

  Oh, God. Something was wrong with Cassie. She’d turned into a murderer, a monster. With an effort, Lina opened her eyes.

  Her bleary vision refused to focus. What was Cassie holding?

  “What a pity you won’t live to see you’re wrong...”

  A surge of fear broke the grip of the laudanum. “No!”

  Lina cried out at the same moment Win sprang toward Cassie, the same moment Cassie fired. Her scream, Cassie’s start of alarm, and the deafening report of the pistol all came and went in a single instant, as sudden and as jolting as a flash of lightning.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  So mourn’d the dame of Ephesus her love,

  And thus the soldier arm’d with resolution

  Told his soft tale, and was a thriving wooer.

  —Colley Cibber

  The lead ball seared a path across his arm—his broken arm—but Win barely felt it. He wrenched the pistol from Miss Douglass’s hand and threw it aside.

  She hadn’t bargained on missing at point-blank range. She stared at him for a moment in shock and dismay, her mouth agape, then turned and fled.

  On the bed, Lina had managed to sit up, her head bowed dizzily.

  “Are you all right?” If her cry hadn’t distracted Miss Douglass at the crucial moment...

  “Yes, only dazed.” Raising her eyes, she caught sight of his torn coat and the blood on his sleeve. “Your arm!”

  “It’s nothing—just a flesh wound.” He picked up the pistol. “Is this the only firearm in the house?”

  “As far as I know, though I’m not sure what to believe anymore.”

  “Damn. I wish I’d thought to bring my own pistol, but I left the abbey in too great a hurry.” Though he’d worried that Miss Douglass might strike again with poison, he hadn’t expected she’d be armed.

  “It’s a mercy you arrived when you did.”

  “Any idea where your sister left the powder horn and shot?”

  She shook her head.

  He cocked the hammer and handed her the gun. “Here. I’m going after her. If she comes back before I do, tell her I loaded that for you, and keep it pointed in her direction.”

  He raced out and down the stairs. In the entrance hall Jem was still slumped over, snoring, but
the front door stood open. Win charged out, taking a chance it was no trick and Miss Douglass really had bolted from the house.

  It was still sleeting. He stopped a few yards from the house and looked in either direction. Where would she run, at this hour and in this weather?

  Then he spotted a light through the trees. A lantern? Win started toward it.

  He discovered Miss Douglass all right, and she was with two men—Freddie and Dr. Strickland. Freddie was holding the lantern aloft, while Miss Douglass had thrown herself into the doctor’s arms and was sobbing brokenly.

  “Stay where you are, Miss Douglass,” Win called.

  Three heads turned in his direction.

  “Don’t let him hurt me!” Miss Douglass cried hysterically, for all the world as if he were the killer and she was in terror of her life. Wide-eyed, she clung to the doctor. “Please—he tried to strangle Lina, and now he’s after me!”

  The doctor’s face registered uncertainty, and for a moment Win feared he was about to side with Cassandra Douglass.

  Freddie lowered the lantern. “Win’s not going to harm a woman,” he said in his flat, unexcitable way.

  Win had never been more grateful for his brother’s stubbornly incongruous reactions.

  Freddie’s mild response appeared to affect the doctor, too, for he took Miss Douglass by the wrists. “Calm yourself. No one’s going to hurt anyone here. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  “I overtook Dr. Strickland on his way to Malton. We came as quickly as we could.” Freddie frowned at Win. “You’re bleeding.”

  Win glanced down at his arm. “Yes, that’s where Miss Douglass shot me.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him, on her face a look of such bitter hatred, he scarcely recognized her. “I shot you because you were trying to kill Lina!”

  He smiled grimly. “Let’s go and ask her what she has to say about that.”