Ashley sat on the side of the bed and took Emily’s good hand in his own. She opened her eyes and looked at him.
“You are in pain?” he asked. “I shall have some laudanum brought up.”
She shook her head.
“But you will stay here and sleep?” he asked her.
She nodded, but her hand tightened about his.
“You must not fear,” he said. “I shall see that someone is always with you, night and day. I shall have a maid sent to sit with you.” He would have stayed himself, but there were proprieties to be observed. He wondered what Anna and Luke had made of his lying on the bed with her when he had carried her in. And had he not been calling her his love? For Emmy’s sake, he did not wish to arouse their suspicions. Perhaps she would still refuse to marry him when he next offered.
“I shall stay with her, of course,” Anna said. “I intended to do so even before I was informed that ’tis my function in life.” There was a definite edge to her voice. “Harry will not need me for a few hours.”
“I have a strong premonition,” Luke said, sounding both bored and haughty, “that I have just fashioned a scourge with which I am to be whipped mercilessly for the next eternity or two.”
“Anna will stay with you,” Ashley told Emily. “Both Luke and I will be in the house—and Roderick too, I daresay. He will be waiting to hear what happened. He is a military officer, well experienced at defending people in danger. And there are many servants here. You are quite safe. Do you believe that?” If she did not, then he would stay himself and to hell with propriety.
She nodded.
He raised her hand to his lips. “Try to sleep,” he said. “Later we will talk and get to the bottom of what has been happening here. I will put everything right for you so that you will never have to fear again.” It was perhaps a rash promise, he mused. “I swear it, little fawn. On my honor.”
She smiled—a mere ghost of a smile—for the first time since he had picked her up downstairs in the hall and carried her up here to her room. And she closed her eyes.
Luke, looking somewhat grim about the mouth and eyes, was holding the door open for him. He closed it behind them after they had left the room.
Roderick Cunningham was pacing back and forth in the corridor outside, a look of deep concern on his face.
24
ANNAwas suckling Harry, who had been crying lustily when she arrived in the main room of the nursery. He had been playing happily with his sister until his stomach suddenly told him that his mama was late and he was hungry. He was now contentedly sucking. The housekeeper was sitting with a sleeping Emily, who had been persuaded after all to take a small dose of laudanum to ease the pain in her hand.
Anna did not look up when the door opened and closed or when her husband seated himself in a chair close to hers. She was quite out of charity with him—especially over the fact that he had had to point out to her in his usual oblique way the distasteful nature of quarreling in public.
“Your only function in life is not to care for my children, Anna,” he said after several minutes had passed in silence. “Or even to bear them. Nor is it to give pleasure to my bed. Though you perform all of those functions superlatively. You are the joy of my heart and half of my soul. Yet your function is not even to be those things. ’Tis merely tobe,as a person worthy of my respect, regardless of your gender or your relationship to me.”
“Oh.” She still refused to look up. She watched Harry pull on one of his ears as he sucked. “You were always magnificently clever with words. And you haverehearsedthis speech. ’Tis not fair.”
“Rehearsals take time and effort,” he said. “And commitment and conviction. I belittled you and I hurt you and I beg your pardon.”
She looked at him and her lips quirked. “I wish your Paris acquaintances could hear you apologize to a woman,” she said. “To your own wife.”
“They would assume that I had been corrupted by English beef and English ale,” he said. “They would be immensely saddened. Forgive me?”
She smiled, but she sobered instantly. “Someone is trying to kill Emmy,” she said. “Who could possibly wish to do such a thing?”
“Perhaps,” he said, his elbows on the chair arms, his fingers steepled, “someone who knows that she is precious to Ashley.”
She frowned and lifted Harry against one shoulder so that she could rub his back and pat it to dislodge the wind he never failed to swallow. “But who would wish to hurt Ashley?” she asked. “No one here has even known him for long.”
“He was Alice’s husband,” he said. “Ashley tells me that Alice dismissed Mr. Binchley as steward here before she left for India. Mr. Binchley and his daughter now live in near poverty outside the gates of Penshurst. Someone appears to have shot Alice’s brother. The verdict was that ’twas an accident, though no one ever admitted to doing the shooting. Ashley believes ’twas murder. And now soon after Ashley has returned, someone has been frightening the woman he loves.”
“Trying to kill her,” she said.
“I doubt it.” Luke considered for a moment. “It was misty this morning. Whoever did the shooting must have been close. Emily’s deafness would enable him to draw quite close without much fear of detection. Unless he was a very poor shot, ’tis surprising that he hit so far from his mark, assuming that he was close and that his mark was her heart. I believe the intention was merely to frighten her. If so, then ’twas brilliantly successful.”
Anna shuddered. She set Harry to her other breast, the wind having been quite audibly dislodged. “But who?” she said. “And why? What does Emmy—or Ashley—have to do with what happened here before he even met Alice?”
“We will have to hope, my dear,” he said, “that Emily can enlighten us as to the nature of the first frightening experience she had. If she saw someone and can tell us his identity—orheridentity, for that matter—then perhaps we can proceed further.”
