by Eloisa James
“You don’t know where she is,” Sébastien protested. “What route she took to London. You can’t take a curricle all the way to London.”
“I’ll ask my father for the route. And if she dies because he allowed her to travel alone, I’ll come back here and kill him.”
“Piers!”
He ignored Sébastien’s shout, running down the castle steps, watching his cane carefully to make sure that he didn’t misstep.
The duke came out of the guardhouse and turned white when he heard Piers’s explanation. “The road to the Swansea,” he said. “I told the servants to wait for her in Llanddowll.”
“Llanddowll or Llanddowrr?” Piers demanded.
The duke grew even paler. “I think I said Llanddowll. I’m not sure.”
“Llanddowrr makes more sense; it’s on the road north to Carmarthen.” Piers pivoted on his heel and thrust himself back up the path to the castle. It was his nightmare, all over again. Trying to get down the path, up the path, it was all the same, and too slow because of his bloody leg, unable to save her.
The carriage was ready and waiting in front of the castle, four fresh horses attached.
“That’s not a curricle,” Piers snarled at Prufrock, who was standing at the coach’s door.
Sébastien ran down the castle steps. “You don’t know where she is. If she’s caught scarlet fever from Bitts—and there’s a good chance she hasn’t, as your mother seems perfectly well—still, if she has contracted it, she’d have had the first symptoms within a day’s journey. Two days at the most. But you’re not going to find her so close, Piers.”
“Why not?” he snapped.
“Because she’s not ill. If she were, the duke’s servants would have brought her back directly. They would have sent someone here on horseback, if she were too ill to be moved. It’s been six days. Even if she hadn’t fallen ill until the second day, someone would have brought us news by now. They’re not all sick. None of them danced with Bitts.”
Piers stopped, one foot on the carriage’s step. “Seven days since she left, not six. They could have gone a long way before she felt symptoms. Some patients are—Oh. I see. No curricle as I might have to go all the way to London. I understand.”
Sébastien put a hand on his shoulder. “She’s not ill, Piers. They continued on to London, and she’s there, safe and sound, waiting for you.”
“You can’t know for sure.” Piers swung up into the carriage.
“You will never know for sure if she’s dead or alive unless you keep her near you all the time,” Sébastien said with perfect, if maddening, accuracy.
Piers threw himself into a seat. His cousin handed a satchel through the coach door. “Take this. Just in case . . . all the salves the orderlies have been using, though I’ve no idea if they work. A bit of frothing mash, even a jar of Penders’s acidulated rose water. Do you want footmen?”
“You can’t spare them,” Piers said. “Neythen is still in bed. I’ll be fine with Buller.” He put the satchel on the seat beside him.
“I’m convinced she’s fine, and you won’t need that, but do go fetch her.” Sébastien was grinning. “We’ll be all right here.”
“I’m not going for that reason,” Piers snapped. “She might be ill, you fool.”
“You’re going for her, no matter how much you protest you aren’t,” his cousin asserted. “I knew you would. You can’t catch her on the way; she’s had too much of a head start. You’ll have to do your groveling in London.”
“I’m not . . .” Piers said.
Sébastien reached in, and gave him a slug to the shoulder, the kind of friendly blow they exchanged as boys. “I like her too. We all want her in the family. And . . . she’s yours. There’s just something about her. She’s yours.”
“She’s mine,” Piers said, tasting the words on his tongue. They fit, they fit in his heart. “She’s mine.” It wasn’t really a question.
“So, go and fetch her back,” Sébastien said, laughing.
Piers reached up and whacked the carriage’s ceiling. “Out of the way, Seb. I have—” The door swung shut before he finished the sentence.
“A wife to find,” he said into the empty carriage. “I have Linnet to find, to bring home, to marry.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Llanddowrr was a small village, dreaming in the afternoon sun. Piers stamped through the door of the inn that sat squarely on its high street, wielding his cane like a maniac. He saw no signs of sick travelers . . . in fact, no signs of scarlatina at all. No warning crimson cloths draped from windows, no apparent distress.
“We heard about it, of course,” the innkeeper said, his eyes fearful at the thought. “A great crew of people came through here, a duke’s household. They stayed for a meal and then rushed on, getting away.”
“The Duke of Windebank’s servants,” Piers said. “They were here for some time?”
“Until early evening.”
“Were they joined by a young lady in another of the duke’s carriages?”
The innkeeper blinked. “Well, I couldn’t really say as to that. There were three carriages, and the wife and I were getting a meal for all of them. Fourteen it were, all at once, piling into the common rooms, see?”
“All at once,” Piers repeated. “But the young lady? She would have arrived in the late afternoon.”
“That I don’t know about, unless she didn’t want a meal.”
Piers thought of Linnet as he last saw her, of the bruised look in her eyes. “She might not have wished for a meal.”
“We’ll ask the hostler,” the innkeeper said, coming out from behind the counter. “He’s the one to know if a fourth carriage came along after the others. They were terribly nervous, that I do know. Kept saying that the duke told them to keep going if he didn’t come by twilight.”
“But surely they did wait for the duke,” Piers said, controlling his voice.
He must not have done a good job, because the innkeeper glanced nervously over his shoulder before bustling out the door shouting. “Daw! Daw, where in the blazes are you?”
Daw was inspecting Piers’s horses, wiping them down and having a good gossip with Buller. He jerked upright at the innkeeper’s roar.
“Did a young lady come along in another carriage and join them three carriages as belonged to the duke?” the innkeeper demanded.
Daw shook his head. “They waited, ’til ’round about eight. Which was a mad time to take off down the north road, but they were all tetchy-like and afraid of getting sick. They meant to drive through the night, I think.”
“She never came,” Piers said, his heart sinking. She had left the castle around three that afternoon. She should have arrived with time to spare before the caravan departed.
“They talked about the duke coming,” Daw put in. “But nobody came, so they left.”
She must have gone to the wrong village. Piers tossed a guinea to the innkeeper and turned to shout at Buller. “We’ve got to turn around. Go to Llanddowll.”
“Llanddowll,” Daw said. “That’s not better than a privy, it’s that small.”
“It’s smaller now,” Piers said. “The village was badly hit by the fever.”
The hostler moved back, and the horses were off. Piers sat in the carriage, his fingers drumming against the windowsill. She never came to Llanddowrr. That meant . . . that meant what? She must have driven to Llanddowll.
Why hadn’t she returned to the castle, once she couldn’t find the duke’s servants? She couldn’t have proceeded to London by herself.
Impossible. She had no belongings, no maid. It was all in trunks, gone with the duke’s servants. She couldn’t even unbutton her gown by herself.
What he said to her wasn’t that terrible, that she should run away without a stitch of clothing.
Forest, acres of forest, spun by the window. Llanddowll was in the opposite direction from the castle as Llanddowrr. Finally, he saw the turrets of his castle in the near distance. The
horses slowed, then stopped.
“We can’t stop, damn it!” Piers said, swinging open the door and shouting up at his coachman.
“The horses are blown,” the man said apologetically. “If we don’t change them, I’ll have to slow down, and I reckon it will take less time if we just put on a new team.”
What Piers said to this was unprintable, unsayable. It didn’t help. The tired horses ambled home. The sun was drawing in now. Time, time was running through his fingers, and he was still running down that ocean path. He was going to be too late.
Prufrock emerged. “My lord?”
“She never made it to Llanddowrr,” Piers said. “We’re off to Llanddowll.”
“Damn,” the butler said succinctly.
Piers swallowed. “She might have set off for London herself, when the servants weren’t there to be met.”
Prufrock nodded. “That’s probably it. Miss Thrynne wouldn’t have wanted to—” He stopped.
“She wouldn’t have wanted to return here,” Piers said, his heart beating in his rib cage like a trapped bird.
“Then that’s what she did,” the butler said, though he clearly didn’t believe it.
“Any new patients?”
“No,” Prufrock said. “And one of the ones that looked dead for sure, Barris Connah, seems to be pulling through.”
Fresh horses were ready, and Piers climbed back into the carriage, stumbling, almost falling through the door. They were off again.
If Llanddowrr was small, Llanddowll was a speck, hardly carved out of the forest. A weather-beaten inn, a cobbler, a cluster of houses. No mill, which put it squarely on the original patient’s flour delivery route. Fifty souls in all, if that.
It was getting toward dark as they pulled up to the inn. The innkeeper emerged as the carriage drew to a halt. He had a thin nose and hollow cheeks, with a grubby beard and an even grubbier red handkerchief around his neck. He was rubbing his hands, looking guarded but welcoming.
“Good evening to you, sir,” he called, as soon as Piers had his feet on the ground. “And welcome to the Gambling Fool. I’m Mr. Sordido, your host, but I should mabbe tell you now that we’ve had a spot of bother in the village—”
“Scarlatina,” Piers cut him short. “I’m the Earl of Marchant, and we admitted four patients from this village.”
“We’ve done our best,” the innkeeper said, sensing criticism. “Isolated them just as soon—”
“Did a young lady arrive here in a carriage bearing the crest of the Duke of Windebank?”
Piers saw it in Sordido’s eyes before he spoke, the way they avoided his own, the way his weight shifted from foot to foot. In an instant Piers had him by the grimy neck cloth. “Where is she? Is she dead?”
“We done nothing!” the innkeeper squealed, his face turning persimmon red. “We’re taking care of her, good care. And we done so for the coachman too, afore he died.”
She was still alive. Piers let go of the red cloth, stepped back. “Where is she?”
Sordido’s eyes shifted again. “We isolated her, same as the minister said we should. If you’ll just step into the common room, me lord, I’ll get my wife to check on the young woman and make sure that she’s able to take visitors.”
“Young woman?”
The innkeeper actually fell back a step. “We thought—the doctor said—we thought she must be a maid in service to his dukeship.”
“A maid? You thought a future countess was a maid?”
Where there had been persimmon red, now there was just sallow yellow. “We had no call to think she was a lady, me lord. No maid, and no trunks.”
“The coachman would have told you, before he died.” Piers took one precise step forward.
Sordido’s eyes flickered to Piers’s cane and back to his face. “He didn’t say nothing. The man was sick, mortal sick. He raved some, but none of it made sense that we heard. Then he died quick.”
Piers closed his eyes for a second. What was he doing, bickering with the innkeeper when Linnet . . . “Take me to her.” It was not a request; it was a demand.
The man looked behind him desperately. Then he bawled, “Moll!”
His wife was a trifle cleaner than her husband, but her eyes were small and close-set, like a ferret’s. There was a rising panic in Piers’s throat. His coachman had been attending silently from his seat; now he stepped down, tossed the horses’ lead rein over a hitching post, and moved to Piers’s shoulder.
“His lordship has come here a-looking for that woman”—the innkeeper corrected himself—“the lady who’s been lying sick. At our own expense, we’ve been caring for her,” he said, jutting his chin. “On account of how she had no money with her.”
Piers frowned. It was entirely possible that Linnet had not carried a reticule with her, or had left it in the drawing room when she escaped through the window. The duke’s coachman would have been equipped by his master for ready expenses, but if, when they’d arrived, he succumbed immediately as the innkeeper claimed . . .
The innkeeper’s wife dropped a curtsy. “She’s been terrible sick, I’m sorry to say. I had the doctor to her just yesterday, and he said that we’d done all a mortal body could do.”
Piers jaw was clenched so hard that he could barely say the words. “Take me to her.”
“Like I said, if you just wait in my common room for a moment, the wife here, Mrs. Sordido, she’ll make sure the young lady is acceptable for visitors.”
“Take me to her.”
Mrs. Sordido dropped another curtsy. “Begging your pardon, me lord, but I couldn’t do that of a right conscience. The young lady is of a tender age, and not married. I’ll just go and make sure that she’s—”
Piers’s voice cracked like a whip in the quiet innyard. “Take me to her now.” He was walking toward the door, his cane thwacking the rough cobble stones, when his coachman said, “My lord.”
The innkeeper’s wife was trotting around the corner of the inn, her husband standing rather helplessly where he was.
Piers altered his path. Of course they hadn’t put her in the inn. He had ensured that himself, when he sent out the orders for quarantine. They rounded the corner, Mrs. Sordido hastening ahead. Piers looked over his shoulder.
His coachman, Buller, had her elbow in a moment. “We’ll all walk together, shall we?” he said. Buller was a large man, and his voice, though soft, seemed to frighten her.
“It isn’t proper!” she squeaked. “She’s not properly attired.”
Piers just concentrated on picking his way across the stones in the falling dark. He was aware of the innkeeper trailing behind, of the gathering shadows fingering out from the woods surrounding them. But fear filled his mind. Fear pounded in his head and his heart.
It took two or three minutes to walk there; it felt like an hour. Mrs. Sordido protested the whole way, but Buller kept a firm grip on her elbow. “There,” she said finally, spitting it out defiantly.
Piers looked, but Buller spoke first. “That’s for chickens. That’s a chicken coop.”
“It’s a good coop,” she said. “Tall enough to walk in. And there haven’t been any chickens in there for months, six months probably. We put her in there, and I had my girl visiting her morning and night of my own good Christian will, let me tell you. And I had the doctor to her two times, and had him try everything in his power, the leeches and all, though there was no one to pay him.”
Piers was frozen to the spot. The chicken coop had no windows, and the door was hanging from one leather hinge. It was made of rough boards that had apparently started falling apart at some point, as random pieces of wood had been nailed this way and that.
“What is that smell?” Buller said, his voice dropping an octave. His hand on Mrs. Sordido’s arm must have tightened, because she squeaked in protest.
“It’s the chickens,” she said. “That is, chickens do smell, and we didn’t have time to clean it.”
Piers had shaken free of his paralysis a
nd was going as fast as he could through the little clearing before the coop. One part of his mind was screaming silently in panic, the other was grimly aware that he was reliving his nightmare, trying to reach Linnet . . . too late.
Behind him he could hear Mrs. Sordido’s protests and Buller growling back at her. He reached the door, flung it open. The hinge snapped, and the door fell with a crash onto the ground.
Once inside, Piers couldn’t see anything in the gloom, and his eyes immediately started watering from the foul air. Carefully he inched his cane forward, pulling himself a step, waiting for his eyes to adjust.
“Linnet,” he said, quietly. Quietly, because in his heart he knew the truth. She was dead, and it was his fault.
No answer. He walked forward another step and finally his eyes began to adjust. There was no bed. He looked down to find he was about to step on her.
The woman at his feet had no resemblance to his laughing, beautiful Linnet. But the doctor in him came to the fore, pushing aside his grief, dropping his cane so he could kneel beside her and take up her wrist.
For a moment he despaired of finding a pulse, and then he felt it: thready and weak, but there. “Linnet,” he said, hand on her cheek, seeing not her ravaged skin or tangled hair, but the shape of her dear face, the way she curled slightly to the side as she always did in sleep. He loved her; he loved her so much that his heart was breaking.
There was no answer. A cloud of chicken effluvia rose around his knees as he shifted. She was burning up, of course. Numbly he catalogued such symptoms as he could see in the half-light—and couldn’t bring himself to add them up to the obvious conclusion.
Instead he reached for his cane, got himself to his feet, and then bent to get out the entrance.
“It weren’t our fault,” Mrs. Sordido yelped, the moment he exited. Buller still gripped her arm.
“I assume you have no guests in the inn,” Piers stated.
“No,” she said, half panting. “Not at the moment, but—”
“I’m taking over your inn. You and your husband will have to get out.”
