by Maia Chance
“Poison,” Ophelia said. “I’m talking about poison.”
Bernadette was frozen on her saddle.
“Go on, eat the cheese,” Ophelia said.
“You have injured my feelings beyond measure,” Bernadette said in a small, cold voice. “And the answer is, no, there is nothing at all wrong with the cheese in this basket.”
“Prove it, then,” Ophelia said. “Eat some.”
“I am not hungry.”
“Surely you can manage one bite.”
Bernadette turned beseechingly to the men.
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Larsen said. “Miss Stonewall’s head has gone as runny as cheese. Give me the cheese, and I shall eat some. I have worked up an appetite.” Still on horseback, Larsen reached over, pushed aside the cloth on the basket, and took a lump of cheese. He lifted it to his lips.
“Non!” Bernadette cried, slapping his hand so the cheese flew into the air. One of the dogs opened its chops, caught the cheese, and gulped it.
“It’s poisoned,” Ophelia said. “I’m sure of it—and that dog will prove it in a little while when he drops dead.” She looked at Bernadette. “You didn’t quite manage it the first time, did you? The cheese meant for—who, your brother?—ended up in the bellies of the dogs that day. So you meant to take another stab at it today. Why? Is it to do with the family fortune?”
“Look what I’ve found!” Abel yelled from the edge of the trees. He’d pulled up a mossy fallen log.
“Not now,” Ophelia called back.
“What does Mademoiselle Stonewall speak of, sister?” Griffe said, face red. “Answer me!”
“Mademoiselle Gavage?” Larsen said. “What is the meaning of this? Poisoning the hounds? Attempting to poison your brother?”
“Who is that up there?” Griffe shouted up the slope, into the thicket.
A gunshot split the air. Larsen said, “Oog,” and crumpled off his horse like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
* * *
A gunshot cracked the cushiony silence of the cave. Gabriel froze, his pencil hovering above the rubbing he was making of a carved bear.
Larsen was out hunting, he knew. Had he finally bagged his beast?
On another wall of the cave, the dancing boar-man flickered secretly in the shadows.
Curiosity overcame Gabriel. He rolled up the paper and stuffed it with the pencil in his satchel, next to the handkerchief-wrapped jawbone. Taking up his lantern, he headed towards daylight.
* * *
“Thorstein!” Bernadette leaped from her horse in a billow of velvet. She fell at Larsen’s side. “Thorstein! Oh, Thorstein!” She looked up blindly at Griffe and Ophelia. “He has been shot! Thorstein, you cannot be shot.” She threw herself over his body.
Griffe dismounted and charged up the slope, hacking through the thicket with the butt of his shotgun. “I will find you and hunt you down!” he yelled.
Ophelia checked on Abel. He was on his knees, peering under the fallen log, seemingly oblivious to the events around him. Ophelia dismounted and kneeled beside Larsen. “Where has he been shot?”
Bernadette didn’t even lift her head as she swung a fist and punched Ophelia in the arm.
“Ow!” Ophelia cried, clutching her arm. “I’ve got to see where he’s been shot—oh. Wait. Look—it’s only his shoulder, see the—”
“Get away, you little viper,” Bernadette snarled.
“We must go,” Ophelia said. “There is a shooter up there.” One of the horses whinnied. A dog barked, and others growled.
Bernadette wept into the crook of Larsen’s neck. “Thorstein, you cannot die!” she said in French. She said some more things that Ophelia struggled to understand, although she was pretty sure Bernadette said something like, “It cannot be that I loved you all these years for naught.” Ophelia most certainly picked out the words amour and trente ans.
Ophelia had already guessed that Bernadette harbored sentiments for Larsen, although thirty years really took the cake. Why wasn’t Larsen saying anything? That gunshot wound on his shoulder couldn’t have killed him. “Come on, get up,” Ophelia said. “It isn’t safe to stay here.”
“Thorstein, je t’aime!” Bernadette wailed.
Larsen stirred, and managed to hoist himself on his elbows even with Bernadette burrowing into his neck. “Précieux Bernadette, est-ce vrai?”
Ophelia understood that: “Precious Bernadette, is it true?” Larsen touched the hairwork brooch Bernadette always wore. The brooch must have been some sort of love token from him.
Larsen and Bernadette kissed.
Ophelia glanced away, embarrassed. Most of the dogs rambled around, snuffling the ground, twitching their tails, and growling . . . except for one. The one who had eaten the cheese. Its ears drooped and it lolled on its haunches, panting.
“Bernadette, you did poison that dog,” Ophelia said.
“Not to kill him, you twit. Only to slow him down. All I wished was for the hunting to cease, the heartless killing of the wild creatures—why?”
That made a sort of mad sense.
Griffe crashed out of the brush, panting, red scrapes crisscrossing his face. “I could find no one. The shooter has fled and—ah. I see that Larsen and my sister have at long last made amends.”
“Only his shoulder was shot,” Ophelia said. “We should go.”
“They have always loved each other,” Griffe said. “A grand love affair in the youth, oui? But Bernadette could not bear his hunting—she is so softhearted, you see. Cannot even eat the flesh of a trout. Larsen married another, but she never forgot her mistake. His wife died last year. Hope was born again. Oui, he told me in confidence that he came here to win her hand.” Griffe’s expression closed, as though he’d remembered that he was sore with Ophelia.
Larsen wished to win Bernadette’s hand? Then all those things Henrietta had fancied Larsen had been saying—hints about the sort of lady he esteemed—hadn’t even been directed at her. They had been compliments aimed at Bernadette. Bernadette wore flat boots and enjoyed being out of doors. Bernadette ate heartily and never skipped dessert.
And yet . . . if Bernadette and Larsen loved each other, could they not also be accomplices in murder?
“You are correct; we must go,” Griffe said gruffly. “The shooter may return. Perhaps it was an honest accident, and the shooter is too ashamed to show his face.”
Doubtful.
A man on horseback emerged from the bend in the path; they hadn’t heard him coming over the gush of the stream. Forthwith.
“Only my brother,” Ophelia said. Yet Forthwith carried a shotgun on his shoulder.
Forthwith’s face clouded when he saw Larsen and Bernadette on the ground. “What’s this? Has someone taken a tumble?” He brought up his horse beside Ophelia and Griffe. “Good God—is that Larsen? Has something dreadful occurred?”
Forthwith’s kindly act was about as convincing as a shark’s.
“No need to work yourself into a lather,” Ophelia snapped. “He’s going to be right as rain, and anyway, you only care about him so far as you can fleece him with your crooked soap business.” She gulped. How had that slipped out?
Griffe frowned. Forthwith, pale, shifted his eyes between Griffe and Ophelia like a wind-up toy.
“What did she say?” Bernadette asked, turning. “Crooked soap business?”
Larsen, his head in Bernadette’s lap, was laughing.
“What in the name of God is this all about?” Griffe said. “Soap business? Fleecing?”
“Nothing,” Ophelia and Forthwith said in unison.
“I will tell you what it is about,” Larsen said. “This young man here meant to trick me into investing a fortune in his fraudulent soap manufactory. Magic Buffalo Soap, he called it, with some tommyrot ingredient that does not even exist—what is it? Hare’s pa
w bark?”
“Gopher claw bush,” Forthwith said coldly. “How did you know?”
“I may be old, but I am not a fool, young man. I was alive to your tricks from the very beginning. You have an oily way about you—not, mind you, that that is an impediment in business.”
“Then why did you allow me to attempt to convince you?” Forthwith shouted. “The time I have wasted, all that blathering! And I’ve invested money, too, in those preposterous soap labels you had me print up! Damn you, man.”
“Turned the tables on you nicely, did I not?” Larsen said. “Made you understand the value of hard work. All of this effort and money you have invested in attempting to fool me, why, you could have used all of that to start a real soap manufactory.”
“There is no such thing as gopher claw bush, you stupid little man,” Forthwith said.
“It does not matter. It makes a good brand, and that is the important thing with manufactories.”
“Damn you!” Forthwith said. He swung on Ophelia. “And damn you, too, Ophelia Flax, for throwing me before the cart.”
“Ophelia Flax?” Griffe said with a frown.
Ophelia stopped breathing.
Griffe loomed closer. “What does he mean, Ophelia Flax?”
“Oh. I—”
“She’s an actress,” Forthwith said. “A variety hall actress, just like her longtime friend, Henrietta Bright. Actresses are a duplicitous breed, dear count. They never can tell when to stop acting and start behaving like honest women.”
Ophelia’s hands shook. “That’s funny, because I’ve always found that conjurers of the stage have the same sort of problem—Forthwith Golden.”
“Conjurer of the stage?” Griffe said slowly. “Variety hall actress? Tell me there is some mistake. You are not siblings from Cleveland?”
“I am very sorry, Count,” Ophelia said softly. “Things seemed to take on a life of their own—but I meant to come clean, to break off our engagement, just as soon as I got Henrietta out of jail—”
“You came into my home, my family, under false pretenses?” Griffe sounded dazed, but his eyes were flinty. “Break off the engagement, you say? This, then, is the meaning of your reticence, your aloof ways. No coy bride, you, but a slatternly trickster!”
“I—”
“Go,” Griffe said. “Collect your things from my house and be gone.”
“I’m sorry,” Ophelia said.
“Sorry? Meaningless! And you as well—whoever you are,” Griffe yelled at Forthwith, “leave at once!”
“Master Christy,” Ophelia called to Abel.
“I wish to stay here,” Abel yelled back, digging under the fallen log. “I’ve made the most spectacular discovery!”
In silence, Ophelia and Forthwith mounted their horses and set off towards the château.
“Report your lodgings to the Sarlat police,” Griffe shouted after them, “or I shall do it myself and recommend your arrest!”
“Leave my mother’s ruby ring behind!” Bernadette screamed.
Ophelia nodded without turning. All around in the long-shadowed trees, the chopping echoed on and on.
* * *
When Gabriel at last reached the bottom of the slope, it was to find Griffe and Bernadette helping a bleeding Larsen onto his horse.
“A sniper?” Gabriel said once they’d described how Larsen had been shot. “One of the woodsmen?”
“God only knows,” Griffe said.
For the first time, Gabriel noticed Abel digging in the dirt. “Master Christy, come along. It isn’t safe here.”
Abel looked up, dazed. “Where is Miss Stonewall?”
“Miss Stonewall is here?” Gabriel asked.
“Was here,” Griffe said. “And it seems her name is, in truth, Miss Flax. An actress. That supposed brother of hers is some sort of charlatan conjurer.”
Oh no. They’d been discovered.
Griffe went on, “What a fool am I! I might have known with him performing tricks night after night. How blind we all are.”
“Where have they gone?” Gabriel asked.
“To hell, I hope.”
“Oh, let us hurry,” Bernadette cried. “Thorstein is bleeding ever so much.”
Bernadette, Griffe, and Larsen rode in the direction of the château.
“Be careful,” Gabriel called after them.
A stallion as large as a knight’s charger nibbled dead grass at the trail’s edge. “Is that your horse?” Gabriel asked Abel.
“What? Oh. Well, in a sense. I rode it here, if that’s what you mean.”
“It’ll carry the both of us. Come on.”
“Now?” Abel stared down at his pile of dirt. “But I’ve found something simply amazing, a lucanus cervus, only it’s got—”
“There is a sniper in the woods. On the horse now.”
Abel folded something in a handkerchief and went—inexplicably, in a nightshirt and boots—to the horse. Gabriel helped him up, got onto the saddle behind him, and pressed the horse’s flanks.
25
An orange sun was melting into the hills when Ophelia and Forthwith set off down the slushy château drive. On foot.
Cold wind rattled the trees. Ophelia lugged her battered carpetbag in one hand and Meringue in the other, folded under a flap of her cloak. She’d left the trunks of Artemis’s finery behind, and she’d packed at breakneck speed. She had no wish to be in the château when the others returned. She had carried the parakeet in its cage up to Abel’s garret and left it there with the jar of sunflower seeds and a note: Don’t feed it too many grubs.
Forthwith walked a pace ahead of Ophelia. He carried only one smallish valise. “Damn it, Ophelia, what were you thinking, mucking everything up like that? I despise you.”
“I told you, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry doesn’t help much, does it?”
“We’ll go to Sarlat. I haven’t any money but—have you?”
“A bit. But Sarlat is three miles away, and it is growing dark. The days are so blasted short. It’s like a nightmare. Walking three miles? We should’ve stolen some horses.”
“And risk arrest? We’ve no choice but to walk. Beggars can’t be choosers, Forthwith.”
“My God, you sound like my aunt Gertrude. How I loathed her. She used to lock me in a trunk when I was naughty. Do you know, that’s how I became a magician?”
* * *
As soon as Gabriel dismounted the stallion outside the château, he went to where he believed Miss Flax’s chamber was.
She was already gone. Forthwith was, too. Had they managed to hire a carriage so quickly?
“Why are you peering into this bedchamber?” Ivy asked, making Gabriel jump. When he turned, she was only inches away. Why hadn’t he heard her?
Gabriel raked a hand through his hair. “Miss Stonewall, and her brother—”
“Haven’t you heard the news, Lord Harrington? They weren’t siblings at all. They were impostors, just like that Henrietta creature. They’ve been turned out.” Ivy’s eyes were shadowed. She must have been exhausted, with her father ill. . . . “Now it’s only us. To be perfectly honest, those Americans didn’t quite fit in, anyway.”
“Where did they go?”
“They left on foot. I saw them from the window.”
“On foot! To the village?”
“Why do you wish to know?”
Gabriel let out a breath. He hadn’t reasoned it through, but he realized he’d been about to get back on a horse to search for Miss Flax. But here, this vision of beauty standing before him, was his future wife. He would stay. He must stay. Mustn’t he? He could send for word of Miss Flax tomorrow.
“Has the doctor come?” Gabriel asked Ivy.
“Yes. He said there is something the matter with Papa’s stomach, and that he must continue to rest.
Why don’t you go change, and then we could play chess downstairs in the salon.” Ivy had not seemed to notice the welt on Gabriel’s cheekbone. But of course, she was preoccupied. “It is a pity that Papa is not well enough to watch. He does so enjoy it when I make a checkmate.”
* * *
At dinner, Griffe floundered in a drunken rage, railing against the deceiving Americans and the trickery of women in general. All the kitchen servants had fled out of anger regarding the tree felling. The meal—cured meat, cheese, stale bread, and wine—was served by Clémence. She stood behind Griffe’s chair and refilled his wine goblet each time it grew low, an almost maternal expression on her face.
Larsen and Bernadette were oblivious to Griffe, gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes across the table. Larsen’s gunshot wound had proved to be superficial, and Bernadette had bandaged it with care.
And Tolbert? Nowhere to be seen. In fact, Gabriel hadn’t seen Tolbert since he had struck him with his revolver in the servants’ quarters that morning. Perhaps he had finally gone on to Bordeaux to collect his mysterious parcel.
How their numbers had diminished. Yet still, the murderer had not been caught. Gabriel eyed Griffe. He was mad enough to kill, at least tonight. No one spoke of the sniper in the wood, but one might’ve cut the anxiety in the dining room with a butter knife.
Young Master Christy dined with them, since it was not fitting to leave the lad alone in the kitchen without any company. He shoveled food into his mouth steadily, staring, wordless.
Ivy seemed spent. “Lord Harrington,” she said after the dessert of stale preserved fig cake, “I think I will go to bed—could we play chess tomorrow, instead?”
“Of course,” Gabriel said, suppressing a sigh of relief. He would not be good company tonight. He rather loathed himself at the moment, actually. He had been taught from the cradle to believe that he was a gentleman. Yet what would a gentleman do in this circumstance? Remain loyal to his betrothed or throw it all off and go chasing after a confidence trickster of an actress? Clearly, a gentleman would remain loyal to his betrothed. So why did it feel so bloody awful?
